skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Going The Right Way For The Benefits Of Forum Posting
What do you think about forum posting? I mean how much do you think it has benefited you in getting backlinks? Are you one of those who feel that forum is a place just to drop links and then leave? Wait then!! I think someone has misled you and you need help!! Forums, more than for any other cause, are for sharing knowledge and share ideas about topics we all are willing to discuss. This does not necessarily mean that forum links are of no use. I am suggesting you the right way to go about forum participation, so that you do not earn a bad reputation. Believe me, it generally happens, when people just drop links to their website and leave. To achieve success you always need to walk the right path. Avoid participating in actions which are referred to as spamdexing.
The word generalize is meaningless and undefined, which is what led to your confusion as well as multiple interpretations (which is one of the things I was picking at).

To say you generalize an NP problem isn't even a statement that typechecks in the language of complexity.

Reduction on the other hand, is a formally defined term and is very specific in what it means exactly.
This is becoming ripe for parody.

Liberals regain power? "Global Warming".

Ice-cream melts when it's left on the counter? "Global Warming".

Bob Brown is asked to step down as leader of the Greens? "Global Warming".
The California budget has been cut every year for the last 4 years.
Yep. I should just stop posting today. :)
And the rules are both random and logical in a perverse way.

For example, the terms of a commercial lease can much more exploitative than of a residential lease because a commercial leaser is expected to be more savy about such things.

For example, you can have terms with fine print that allows the landlord to evict tennent without cause AND demand a substantial payment at any time.
Sport Cars | sport cars 2011
Research 2012 2011 Sports cars in the buyer's guide at Automobile Magazine. Select a new Sports car manufacturer to learn more about the various models, ...
I'm undecided on this rumor. If this is real it'll be heavenly. It'll also need an enormous amount of graphics horsepower, and a well managed battery.
> Normally, when something is placed firmly in P, improvements are quickly made and a spur of research firmly lowers the bounds of the algorithm.

This hasn't been the case in linear programming, at least: 30 years after it was proven to be in P, the old exponential algorithm (the simplex method) is still competitive with the best known polynomial algorithms (interior point methods). From a practical perspective, no real efficiency breakthrough. The fact that there are now two families of algorithms with good performance for the problem is an improvement, but the fact that one of them is theoretically polynomial doesn't seem to have led to dramatic speed gains.
"Jobs resignation sent Apple stock up"

Times, they are changing...
This really spooked me at first ... Just by reading the title, my first thought was that their servers got hacked maliciously and my financial data I just added today was compromised. I'm glad to see it was something more innocent :)

Talk about bad PR ... that'd be the worst they could get, if they got hacked on the day they're likely seeing their most signups ever!
Study: Google “Favors” Itself Only 19% Of The Time
That's more or less what I got out of it as well, though I came at it from the other direction...

If you skip the first part about pre-processing, and instead look at the graph that is generated, you can come up with following:

1. There exists a graph consisting of potential truth assignments on N unknowns in M clauses consisting of 7M nodes, and <48M2 edges.

2. Label each node uA,uB,uC,vA,vB,vC where u? is the unknown number, and v? is whether that unknown is true or false.

3. Edges exist between node I and node J if either nodes I and J share zero unknowns, OR both I and J share at least one variable AND all shared variables have the same value.

4. For there to be an assignment that causes the full statement to be correct, you must find an M-clique (a complete graph on M nodes within the 7M node graph).

Solving part 4 is NPC.

His claim is, basically, that if you permute/partition the input (to construct the tables), you can construct a disconnected graph with far fewer edges (get rid of the first part of #3 above), then add links graphs in such a way that if you can find a path from a tier-1 node to a tier-2 node, ..., to a tier-M node, examining the labels is sufficient to solve the problem. The two nasty parts are finding an efficient permutation/partition step, then managing to properly link the disconnected graphs. As you say, the two steps that the author hand-waves.
The Cost of Entrenchment: Why CEOs Are Rarely Fired
LivingSocial don't process the credit cards until after the deal is closed.

It wouldn't take 10 minutes to have an engineer interrogate the database to raise any orders that have a quantity greater than 1 and/or a total amount more than $10.

To claim that LivingSocial has been "hacked" is sensationalism. While I think it was a low blow, I can understand why a non-technical CEO would try this stunt but I'd have expected more sense from a technical person who should know how easy it would be to see this happening on LivingSocial's back end.
Would you recommend starting from HTML5 & CSS3 for beginners?
Hello,

I am a middle school student trying to dive into the world of web designing and developing.

I have been interested in (using) the web since I was little, but now I want to be in the "creating" side. After researching about web design and development, I believe it is better to start from markup languages before script languages. And I was wondering, should I start from learning the new HTML5/CSS3 or should I stick with current version of HTML/CSS first? Are HTMl5/CSS3 something that beginners should definitely avoid? Or it doesn't really matter which one I start with? And it would be also great if you can recommend me a good book on HTML(5)/CSS(3) or a website about them!

Thank you very much in advance :).
Their fault. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
It's actually pretty easy to construct hard problems. A random 3-SAT problem is hard when it has the right density ratio of clauses to Boolean variables. Too few, and it's (relatively) easy to find a satisfying assignment. Too many, and it's easy to find a contradiction. This ratio is around 4.26, and it can actually be viewed as "thermodynamic" phase transition. In the large n limit, almost all 3-sat problems with a lower ratio are solvable, and almost all above that are not.
Oh yeah, we won
No, it's a great plan. What California really needs is more taxes. (Please forget that Gov. Davis was recalled just a few years ago for raising vehicle registration taxes.) Not just that, but web retailers have it easy, and encoding ever-shifting tax laws for various localities from which orders might be placed is not onerous at all. (Remember, kids, some states apply sales tax to juice, and some only apply it if sugar is added!)

This totally won't harm business, and is easy to implement.

[To non-residents of our state: California's legislature is pretty disfuntional, and frequently gridlocked over even simple issues. For example, our budget is often months late, tax returns came back as IOUs one year, and the huge chunk of funding appropriated to build prisons due to severe overcrowding that has had us in trouble with the federal government for years hasn't resulted in one new prison.

So don't worry too much over every idea that floats through our Assembly. We're a somewhat pathological case.]
> * and it’s privacy message seemed to resonate with users*

> While... but...

Is there a copy editor at Wired?
I'd hardly call it "hacked". The post is oddly smug to claim that LivingSocial got gamed easily and their "design" is flawed and that their own solution is better.

Meh. I'll pass. Such a blog post about a competitor isn't the best way to brag about your own product.
Please, do not call people writing fine free software libraries "offenders". The "offenders" are the one who decided it was fine to phase out a more than 15 years old language without any respect for its user base. From a (professional) developer point of view, Python 3 is a new language and is treated as such. I don't think Python would have seen such adoption if developers were told up-front they would have to "migrate" all their code in ten years.
Sega Toylet games aim to please
How much are you able to post about the company you work with non-anonymously?
i thought maybe it was time to go to sleep because this guy's site looked blurry and was unreadable to me. after looking at his css, he's doing a text-shadow on all of the body text. don't do that, people.
"FIRST LEGO League" is affiliated with FIRST ( http://www.usfirst.org/ ), an organization founded by Dean Kamen which consists primarily of (US) national robotics competitions geared towards children.

Changing the title from "1st" back to "FIRST" would make things easier to parse.
Getting started with your own self-hosted XMPP server
I don't know what restrictions a seller can have on a sale, but I do know that some products cannot be sold to people who will use them illegally. For instance, in some places shop owners can get arrested for selling tobacco pipes to people who announce they plan on using them for weed.
> Parity is a property of numbers and sets only.

It's a property of _integers_, or any system with a natural homorphism into the integers mod 2 under addition. It's certainly not a property of numbers in general. Is pi even or odd? How about sqrt(2) + i*e?
Even though most banks will allow accounts for LLC companies from non-citizens, they all seem to require that you set them up in person.

You can find ones which are more flexible, particularly for ones which do business in Australia. All the bank has to do is satisfy Know Your Customer, and they have wide liberty in picking how stringent they are on doing that. Citibank, for example, has an Australian operation. They have historically been good to people of my acquaintance in Japan. (A few years ago, they would accept a typed request on letterhead and a faxed copy of a Japanese passport as sufficient documentation to open a US account from Japan.)

Also, after you have a toehold in America, broadening it is much easier. One way to get a toehold is to, e.g., open an investment account at eTrade or another firm which also happens to run a bank, fund it, and then ask for a checking account. They'll typically satisfy KYC by means of "pre-existing customer relationship."

I have no direct experience with merchant accounts.
The greater the market efficiency, the more this will be the case.
Depends on what "cut" means. It's been lower than projected, but still is higher than the previous year. The education budget, for example, is constitutionally prohibited from cuts; in fact, it's required to grow. The most recently decried "cut" that the teachers' union staged a strike over was really just their budget's growth being slower lower than they hoped.

If you have numbers on actual spending, year over year, then I'd love to be proven wrong on this, but I've not seen cuts anywhere in the sense of spending decreasing every year for four years.
I do not think they are considered retro. Interventional studies are widely considered the "golden" standard but they are not perfect and, in many cases, not feasible. Like you point out, in many cases, it would not be ethical to perform one ; for example, making people smoke on purpose and then try out smoking cessation interventions on them. "Luckily" though, people usually self-select their selves into these categories.
So you seriously want to give up your privacy (and ours as well) to save you typing one freaking word (python)? That's lazy to the point of being offensive.
Useful link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-complete#Common_misconceptio...
Dropping?
I was answering to the "Correlation is not causation" statement in the comment. Epidemiological studies usually have to satisfy most of the "Bradford Hill" criteria in order to claim a certain association.

More information: http://www.drabruzzi.com/hills_criteria_of_causation.htm
Transactional Email Improves Email Marketing Results
SpaceX proposes rocket-powered landing system
http://onsaas.net/2008/06/03/defining-saas-paas-iaas-etc/

It's PaaS.
Unfortunately innovation as measured by patents, is measured more easily on the scale of quantity than quality.
Today, patents are more like trapdoors -- the more of them you have, the higher the chance that your 'enemy' would fall into one. And this is where you let your sharks loose.
He spoke about a situation where the customer hasn't heard of you (DuckDuckGo in this case).
They weren't old crufty competitors, not fresh new ones trying to jump into a hot market...
What's wrong with JDBC? Slap a driver in, and then populate the parameters of your statement (basically a query string wrapped in an object that prevents SQL injection attacks) and BAM you're good to go. Iterate through the result set. If you want fast raw (but no food poisoning) SQL it doesn't get much better than that.

I hope your Querulous and Configgy are set up in such a way as to easily avoid SQL Injection?

Or since you're talking about database abstraction, at the other end of the scale JPA is an absolute dream. Very easy to get up and running fast with the right tools (Netbeans used to be good for this).

Just don't touch J2EE with a barge-pole (Java EE 5 is the nice one) and you'll be fine.
That the Constitution grants Congress a power (e.g., taxation) does not mean the states are forbidden from exercising similar power (see Amendment 10). Absent a Federal law prohibiting such taxes, the states would be acting within their sovereign power. Some even argue that eliminating such state-erected barriers to trade was the purpose of the Commerce Clause.

Of course modern legal thought would approach this issue by reasoning that interstate commerce can be reached by the states if it exerts a substantial economic effect on intrastate commerce.
Hi Matt. Is there any technical reason why that tool can't provide full information? Clearly Google isn't opposed to not sending referrer data, given the existence of https search, but doesn't DDG have a point about third parties having access to the referrer data? (Full disclosure: I wrote this article)
Towing Services Company North Hollywood Los Angeles.
OTOH, simplex is very efficient already. Average-case complexity for random matrices is polynomial, and there are some interesting results that extend beyond that (see http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0111050).
Yes, just the ones in San Luis Obispo right now. We have some venues in San Francisco, stop by and test it out: http://www.facebook.com/punchd?v=app_7146470109
That was a long beta test before going life.

They have a good tool and don't have problem paying a reasonable price for it.
Doesn't Incognito browsing, like present in Chrome, remedy all these worries?
Silicon Valley, Home Of The True Believers
And as you know, I made it clear that I thought Consumer Watchdog went way over the line and made unfair claims. I don't see this with DDG and its campaign. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/09/in-defense-of-google/
There's a really nice, and free, extension for chrome called StayFocusd that I use.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/laankejkbhbdhmip...

You can mark sites you visit as "time wasters" (e.g. news.google.com, hulu.com, HN, etc.) as well as how much time/day you should be allowed to waste during work hours (customizable). It then logs the time you spend on those sites and after you've reached your daily limit, it will redirect you whenever you try to visit them.

Of course, you can work around it, but I find their redirect page wakes me out of an almost knee-jerk reaction to waste time throughout certain times of the day.
Surveillance Self-Defence Project (Protect Yourself From Big Brother)
This is basically how things are done in Sweden, at least outside the major cities. A municipality builds and runs fiber to every home, residents choose from a number of different ISPs and each ISP pays a flat rate to the municipality for each active subscriber they have. ISPs can then offer any type of service within reasonable limits. This means that I can get for example 100 Mbps service and VoIP for ~25 dollars a month, or 10 Mbps for 15.
That would be fantastic. Drop me a line and let me know how it goes, even if it's just one sentence. Email is in my profile. Would hit you up first but you have no contact info.
Some people, when confronted with a coding problem, think "I know, I'll use an Eclipse plugin". Now they have three problems.
While Google is the principal developer for Android it would be totally grand to see an army of joint Android hardware makers unite and sue Oracle collectively for infringing their patents. And offer a settlement in the form that Oracle gives up all Android patent claims. They would certainly have the incentive and capability to do that, and it would probably make much economic sense should the Android situation turn sour.

On a sidenote: it seems that bullying and dominance is an inseparable human trait. We came up with the patent system to give power to the little man so that big bullies can't take his invention away. Then the patent system ends up the same: the bullies that are big can dominate over smaller players. Then there are even bigger bullies like IBM who have a massive patent portfolio. They could pull a stunt by simply asking Oracle to step off or find that they're infringing numerous IBM's patents. While IBM are not directly related to Android they do have some track record in the open source world; they're part of Open Invention Network, too.
Is any polynomial algorithm parallelizable?
>If Canada were your home instead of The United States you would...

experience 28.67% less of a class divide

use 27.2% more electricity

have 25.67% more fewer babies

...

25.67% more fewer babies? Awesome! But whoever let that phrase through wasn't exactly the quickest zergling in the control group... if you catch my meaning.
> "Maybe you dislike "Asian Asians" for being "too Asian"."

I don't have a problem with Asians-Asians (aka FOBs). It does seem that some of them have a problem with me.

My experience with "my own people" is somewhat colorful. In an attempt to have me keep more of my heritage, my folks saw fit to send me to Chinese school when I was younger. As one of the more westernized kids there we were subject to ridicule, condescension, and outright hostility - from teachers and students alike. It was the most emotionally fucked up thing I've experienced to-date, and that's after going through the wringer of shitty/abusive college profs and evil exes. Where I grew up, whites picking on Asians was rare, and certainly never systemic. Yet I found myself at the butt end of racism, from my own kind, on a regular basis. I've been through some tough shit, but this remains the only time in my life where I've ever contemplated suicide. It is also the only time of my life where I'd considered myself truly bullied.

And more galling, the teachers were complicit, encouraging, and sometimes even participatory in this sort of thing.

It's erased any sense of racial solidarity I ever had. Prior to that point I used to actually believe that a Chinese might look out for another Chinese - after all, we were all in another country, in the same rickety immigrant boat. So much for that.

Those years have basically soured my ability to approach "Asian Asians" with anything better than a vague distrust. I do not treat Asian-Asians with hostility, but I certainly cannot readily welcome them into my circles as I can anyone else.

FWIW, I'm a 1st-gen. I was born and raised in Asia, and have every claim to my heritage as any other Asian on this continent. Yet, I've been welcomed in every single community I've ever approached except my own.

There's a silver lining though - after I got myself the hell out of that place, I diversified my social circles greatly and became more or less color-blind. I no longer hung out with the "other Asians" - even the westernized ones. I'm happy to say that my social circles span the entire racial spectrum in a way that none of the more traditional Asians I know have done.

[edit] Curious note: I have a lot of very Asian-Asian Korean and Japanese friends, and we have no trouble getting along. So it's not the Asian-ness that seems to be the issue. If I had to take a wild poke at it, I'd say it's because there's not the constant insinuation that I'm a traitor to all Chinese-kind for daring to embrace Western culture. shrug
How would it put Apple at a competitive disadvantage? Safari uses Quicktime for video playback. If WebM becomes important, it will be easy for Mac users to get support for it.
I would have happily paid $10/month for Google Voice if that translated into a more reliable service. As it stands now I just don't trust it. I use it exclusively as a SPAM dump these days. In the last month or so I noticed voice mail transcription just stopped working (or are massively delayed?) even when the messages are perfectly clear. So that was the last useful feature for me and now it doesn't work anymore.
"Private hosting" in this case, can be as simple as a plain-jane Apache server with some tarballs in a directory with listing turned on. Use -f to point pip to the directory. Instant private hosting. This is more or less how we publish internal libraries at work.
Here's how I intuit this: 3-SAT is like "machine language" for other NP problems. Any other NP problem can be "compiled down" to 3-SAT statements.

Though it's probably inaccurate, that's how I intuit the matter.
American Idol Judges 2011
American Idol Judges 2011: Auditions American Idol 2011 premiere has begun on Wednesday night, American Idol episode 1 takes place in New Jersey, and we see anyone who managed to get a golden ticket to go to Hollywood. The next audition American Idol 2011 will take place in New Orleans.
Yep, that's the one! Thanks for finding that.
Ask HN: How to patent software?
If anyone has software patents to their credit, Could you please tell me how do you come up with ideas that can be patented and how do you verify if the idea is not already submitted ?
Chevy Volt to possibly have "car tones" to make engine sounds
The Drake equation is a lot like the Fermi paradox. They are not revelations of some truth about the nature of intelligent life in the Universe (or even our galaxy), they are merely reflections of our utter ignorance of the subject.

Where do these figures come from? For fully 5 out of the 7 parameters to the Drake equation we have extraordinarily limited data. How common are Earth-like planets? Call back in about 5-10 years when we'll have some solid data from the Kepler mission. How common is life on Earth-like planets? Who knows? We aren't even close to being able to get solid figures on that. If we can find life on Mars or rule life out of ever having existed there then we'll have a teeny tiny bit of data. But even then such an estimate will be biased by the anthropic principle and at best only accurate to perhaps a single order of magnitude (if that). Even then that leaves half of the parameters as wild ass guesses.

Not to mention that the parameters aren't independent. If we find life on Mars existed or still exists that would make f-sub-l higher, but it would probably make f-sub-i correspondingly lower.

Worse yet, the very premise of the Drake equation is at odds with the premise behind the Fermi paradox. If even a single, slow colonizing intelligent civilization ever existed in our galaxy it would make the number of possible communicative worlds differ by perhaps even 6 or 9 orders of magnitude.

The exercise is only worthwhile when it is not taken seriously, which is a bit of a catch-22.