skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have had some thoughts on why mathematics is so fundamental to nature, but am not sure if these make any sense, or if they are ultimately cyclic.

I use words "stuff" and "things" to refer to not specifically matter but just any concept that may exist in the universe, maybe even just space or time.

1. The universe may comprise stuff that does not interact with other stuff in any meaningful way. (One issue here is that by merely talking about stuff, and more stuff, at least some aspects of set theory have already been assumed. More on this below.) (Such stuff would be unobservable to lifeforms within the universe so thinking about such stuff is meaningless for us.)

2. I then invoke something like Plenitude principle to conclude that there are things in the universe that interact with each other.

3. Interaction between any two things in the universe, is fundamentally same as transfer of some information between the two. In other words, these two things appear different to us only because our language has two different ways of referring to this.

4. Information is meaningless if it is completely random. So there must be some pattern to it, or else #3 above is meaningless. (In other words, it must be possible to describe the information transferred with less "bits" than the amount of "bits" transferred. Or the Kolmogorov complexity must be less than the amount of information transferred.) (While I use mathematical terms to convey the message, it is just because I need a language to say this.)

5. Existence of any pattern whatsoever in information transferred leads to mathematics that we then define to describe the pattern.

Note that this model readily allows for:

A. Laws of physics that are probabilistic in nature. The information transfer must not be completely random, but this of course does not require it to be fully deterministic.

B. Stuff that is unobservable or very weakly observable. Dark matter, neutrinos, etc. would be examples of such stuff.

The biggest issue I know of that remains is assumption of at least some axioms of set theory, which also is a foundation of mathematics.

There could be universe(s) where there is either none or at most one of anything/everything. Such a universe again would not have anything observable and is thus meaningless to us. Again invoking Plenitude principle, I assume existence of a universe where there are more than one of something/anything. But the moment one thinks of two things (say two particles, or even two values of a scalar variable like time or position), aspects of set theory or number theory have already come in.

On the other hand, and I believe for the same reason, mathematicians are unable to define what is meant by a set or a membership to a set. (Everything I have read on set theory starts by assuming some meaning for these two terms and then follows with the rest.)

Would love to get feedback from others on if this makes sense, or if this is fundamentally wrong or cyclic.

Reason for edits: Fixed some typos.
It's barely priced higher than the equivalent iPad model. $729 for the 3G/32GB iPad vs. $799 for the 3G/32GB Xoom.

IMHO, Honeycomb is far beyond the current iOS iteration for iPad. Granted I'm a Google services oriented person and Apple will most likely be releasing a new version of iOS for the iPad 2 in March, but apples to apples comparison: I've owned both now and I prefer Android. Not for "openness", or because I don't like Apple, but because the functionality is just more intuitive and convenient. Google really did good with Honeycomb. Most specifically is the tabbed browsing (though apps like Google Reader still don't work correctly).

I realize there's no WiFi model at the moment to compete with the iPad's lower end choices but I would imagine that's coming. Obviously there's a serious lack of apps for Android tablets as the Xoom is the first major tablet to be put out. I think these problems will be solved in time and only be a concern to early adopters.

tldr; Android is serious competition for Apple and without some serious innovation they're at serious risk of falling behind. I purposely purchased my Xoom so that the 14-day return window include the March 2nd iPad2 announcement, so I'm definitely not staying with the Xoom if Apple pulls a rabbit out of their hat.
Interesting idea, but all use cases above suggest you have to be there in-person to "pass the iPad". Seems like that requirement creates extra friction in the process.
Input doesn't seem to be working with Firefox 4 beta 12 on Linux...I tried the shortcuts listed under "Instructions" on http://www.grantgalitz.org/gameboy/ to no avail.
A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education
Good points. I guess there are some of us who would prefer a different balance. In the end, I think node.js will continue to be a great project, just maybe not ideal for everything we might want. I'm pretty sure I'll continue using node.js either way.
Uh. What happened to evoke this response?

You can email jzawodn@craigslist if you don't want to say so in public, but we're not anti-developer. We are anti-abuse (which we see A LOT of) and anti-TOS violations.

So I'm curious to understand your position.
Zend Framework for PHP also CodeIgnighter
Agreed - ideally, in the "kitchen of the future":

1. You'd go online, find a recepie for the upcoming meals you'd want to make.

2. Your network connected fridge and pantry would take inventory of what you have, and automatically make a grocery list, or contact somewhere to have the raw ingredients delivered. Also, it could let you know when things need to be used by, are expired/etc.

3. Based on the above, generate a description of caloric intake, etc.

The hardware/software integration to make this happen would take a lot of work...
TED Talk: Alan Kay shares a powerful idea about ideas
Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs
The point is Redis is beginning to move away from being just an in-memory database. See my other comment for a more detailed answer as to the use case.

Persistent caches are an important commodity for many websites. For some services trying to handle standard traffic patterns with an empty cache is suicide and can cause cascading failures across the board. Without a strong persistence solution Redis can't be used here. antirez mentioned he considered it a strange move for Reddit to use to Cassandra and not Redis as a persistent cache[1] and I think the issues with Redis persistence may well have caused that.

Additionally I still think there's reasonable ground for a database that's primarily in-memory but drops least used data off to disk. The vast majority of the web follows a Zipfian/long tail distribution so although your "working dataset" can be far larger than RAM your actual "active working dataset" can fit in there. Why trade away the advantages of an in-memory data structure driven database when almost all your queries can be satisfied in this manner?

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bcqhi/reddits_n...
Disclaimer: I work for Google. I do not work in search quality (or on search at all). Below are strictly my personal views.

I can't (and won't) comment on the specifics of this change. In fact, my knowledge of them is pretty much what everyone else's is.

What I will say is that in the last few months there have been several stories about the quality of Google search results in the last few months (eg scraper sites rating higher than the original).

The problem I see with such criticism as leveled with those episodes (and this one too) is that there is the implicit premise that Google's search results and algorithm are static. This most recent change should be evidence of that.

So while Google's search is algorithmic the people who are in charge of it are not. To put it another way: if you try and game Google's system, it will possibly work for a time but at some point, when the problem is viewed as being of sufficient severity to warrant attention, that algorithm will change.

Search, as I see it, is an arms race. SEO, particularly black hat SEO, is on the other side of that. But this isn't as simple as SEO. The world changes over time too. New business models form. New memes come into existence (eg the idea of social search).

So let's assume for a second the OP's argument is sound and that Google has merely killed off Demand Media's competition. If true, there are now a lot less content farms on highly ranked pages than there used to be. Sounds like a win to me. Is it a perfect solution? No. But is it better? Absolutely.

Google's mission is to deliver quality content to it's users. The more people use our properties, the more money we make. We are very focused on the user experience. Gaming our system is, at best, a short term proposition as there are an awful lot of bright and talented people here constantly striving to defeat such attempts.
I especially liked the GNOME member's response. Classy and dignified.
Where Microsoft failed with tablets was trying to shoehorn desktop Windows onto a device with a touch interface. I'm planning to ditch my iPhone soon but I still consider it to be the biggest disruptive event in mobile history since middle class people started carrying cell phones. It really did set the standard, and also proved that there was room for a brand new ecosystem of applications that was done correctly (who else would use Obj-C otherwise?). They just naturally followed their success into the tablet market.
Submitting to the App Store as a minor
Hi everybody,
Does anybody have any experience with publishing an application to the App Store while being a minor? I would publish the app under one of my parent's names, except I would not want to pay taxes under their tax bracket. Is there a way I could publish the app and be taxed in my own bracket (which is much lower than my parents').

Thanks!
Ugh, I accidentally upvoted this. At least it made me remember how to find the flag button on comments.
Try turning admin mode off. :)
not having a wifi only version is just boneheaded.
I think it is just the standard "hey look at this nifty but completely impractical thing we can do".

For me, behind my monitor is a window because I want to be in an area with lots of natural lighting (I've worked in rooms with no windows, and its no fun, after a while it just gets you down). So a see-through LCD would be a total disaster for me.

Apple used to have a Cinema Display monitor with a see through bezel, the see through LCD would look gorgeous in combo with that, if a little impractical.

Maybe the use case is what it looks like not when it is on, but when it is off? I imagine in this scenario it would be something that you wouldn't use as your day to day computer that you spend hours on.

You could build your LCD into the window, then when you're not using it it doesn't impair the view? Or maybe it is useful for HUDs in cars or other vehicles? Build it right into the windscreen?

(But wait - aren't there cars that already have this? Isn't there a merc with nightvision built into it or something like that?)
Regardless of whether or not life's necessities are provided for the CEO(s) outside of their salary, the fact that he is taking a relatively massive, honorable paycut remains... which frees up a hefty sum of money every year, allowing workers to keep their jobs and support their families. Even if it's a small handful of workers or just one... it is a very honorable thing to do and should not be cheapened in any way. I wish every other CEO or person in a position of power/wealth would follow suit.
I'd like to see this paired with an e-ink screen on the next Kindle. Turn on only the e-ink for reading, only the LCD for UI, or both to show highlighting and notes overlaid onto the text. They could use the touch screen to get rid of all those buttons, too.
Mainly CodeIgniter for PHP and some Node.
Doesn't show number of lives...
That's just making the text bigger, thanks but I already know how to do this.

The other guys were talking about "scaling the DPI". Are they really the same thing? In which case, why on earth wouldn't they just say "make the text bigger"?
All I am saying is that if investors are willing to invest $1 billion, the company should be pulling in pretty high revenues, regardless of the time they raised the money. Jeez.
For extra context, here's a podcast where Jeremy describes the rest of the craigslist cluster architecture:

http://perseus.franklins.net/hanselminutes_0199.mp3

Thank you for taking the effort to share this stuff, I've learned so much from you.
Can't wait until I get the fix through Ubuntu's update manager so that I can tell the story behind the "Copy image" menu item to my family and friends!
I agree. My school (UMass Boston) went with Windows Live for students. Usually, I would commend outsourcing this sort of thing (especially at the crossroads of government and academia), but now I can get a list of every student's email by just clicking address book. It's a joke. Staff/faculty email is managed locally with Exchange 2003.
Why there are no serious WP7 apps
You can definitely send a presentation to someone else, there are email/linkedin share features.

Your home page will display all publicly available presentations, but we see an essential chicken-and-egg problem that is solved by positioning first as a presentation tool. Thats the immediate value, it helps an entrepreneur present to the people you already know, as well as collect information for prospective investors.

eg. hallway / booth conversations at a tradeshow, quickly walk through a hand held presentation that is tactile and interactive, if they're interested, take their email down, send them a copy of the presentation and have the email on hand for follow up. You can also use it to pitch your product, rather than providing information about the company.

Once the network of entrepreneurs is in place we can start attracting investors via internet means. Once both are in place we'll evaluate the next steps. What we don't want is prospective investors going to an empty site.
Great work. Can you expand on the FB oauth_id comment, how are you storing the ids now?
» I'm deleting my Facebook page today Calacanis.com
it took Google how many years to slap down content farms? And they let the biggest offender off the hook...I guess it's just a coincidence that eHow is the biggest content farm and generates quite a bit of money for Google.
A tablet where you touch the back of the device? Getting the hands out of the way seems a good achievement.
With CORS (http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/) is JSONP even needed?
Now we store them as big ints. It has really helped us. What other details would be helpful to you? My email is dan at danshipper.com if you have more questions
Once a hacker, always a hacker. What an amazing story! And to think he was coding raw GTK, which is a nightmare even with vim+autocomplete. Sample from his patch:

image = eog_thumb_view_get_first_selected_image(EOG_THUMB_VIEW (priv->thumbview));
g_return_if_fail (EOG_IS_IMAGE (image));
file = eog_image_get_file (image);
filename = g_file_get_path (file);
Android has a large ecosystem that is getting bigger and bigger, and will continue to get bigger, and is destined to overshadow Apple in the not-so-distant future. Can you tell me what makes the iOS ecosystem so much better?
If it's presented as an archival project (like Project Gutenberg), it seems like it's performing a public service. It's when people are less clear about it that it seems spammy: you're republishing a 1903 cookbook, but not being very clear about the fact that that's what you're doing.

Even worse, and not really performing a public service, is when it's republishing old content that someone else has already digitized, like the dozens of sites republishing Project Gutenberg books with no real value-add.
This advice was thanks to the fabulous support at Rackspace (specifically Paul, ask for him). We had been fiddling with changing big queries to little queries, processing upfront vs behind the scenes, and nothing worked!

All we did was add a couple intval() calls into our php script and changed the column to big int AND add an index and we had one 30s query go down to 0.6s.

So:

Use ints whenever possible.
Index.
Running Iceweasel 4 beta 12 here and it is running fine on my Debian system.
> I believe that many older newspaper articles on their site are not republished anywhere else on the Web.

I'd hope those particular articles should surface then. Their other content though is of low value.
My thoughts exactly. This whole proposal induces a serious bout of eye rolling.
Maybe you're right, but you completely ignored his point that the IPad isn't really the first product of its kind.
Work from Home BBB approved check it out
> Demand Media further benefited from flagrant spammy guideline violations, like 301 redirecting expired domains into deep eHow pages. People I know who have done similar have seen their sites torched in Google. But eHow is different!

Hearing this is what makes my blood boil as a small startup. Small and new brands are walking on eggshells trying to balance self-promotion without pissing off Google. Meanwhile larger brands regularly practice black- or gray-hat SEO and survive because Google can't as easily remove a larger brand from their results. But if you're small, Google can and will kill you in an instant without recourse. The ramifications of this are bad for the internet -- it means higher barriers to entry for startups.
Almost all the non-techies I know have the WiFi iPad, not the 3G version. I'm not sure of the exact sales figures, but I would expect the WiFi iPad is much more popular. Effectively the XOOM is competing against something that costs $500, not $729 + recurring fee.
Not the app store in specific, but I remember as a minor the whole "not being able to enter into a contract" causing me a few problems.

It may be a long shot, but I'd look into having someone help you set up an LLC that might help you get around some of the issues of being "just a kid".

I know, it's damn annoying being not quite a person, but fight the good fight and don't be discouraged.
Wouldn't Amazon be able to tell if existing customers are avid readers or not by their purchase history?

Sure, if they buy their books from Amazon. I tend to buy from brick-and-mortar stores (a habit I should perhaps get out of, since there doesn't seem to be a store with a decent selection within 100 miles).
Checkout http://www.uberflock.com. I have worked with them for some of the mobile apps we developed and they are awesome. My contact is in my profile, I can make an intro if you need one.
Everyone likes to vilify the content farms and scrapers (and they deserve it) but the real villain behind all of this is CPC/CPM based advertising.

Can you imagine a world where your attention was sold off based on how long you stayed on a page rather then how often you switched pages? If google wants to fix their search results, they should focus on fixing adsense. The technology to more accurately measure a viewer's exposure to an ad are there, it just needs a trustworthy player to bring it to market. Someone trusted by both users and advertisers.

Google made click/impression-based advertising appealing to both groups and it made them what they are now. It's time to get away from it.
>>Human potential is far from exhausted

At no point did Buffett say American Human potential.

And yes - the system that worked is the system Americans chose to implement, sure - it's ok to be proud of that.

>> there is nothing special about you.

Your post comes across as spiteful - almost resentful. I am sorry for whatever hardships you've had to deal with - if that motivates you, great. But the inferiority complex jumps out astonishingly in your writing.
Stupid Unix Tricks: Workflow Control with GNU Make
The issue is that high speed passenger rail requires trainsets that are built basically like aircraft, and really do not do well in a collision with a freight train built and loaded like...a freight train.

It is definitely reasonable to use improved signaling to increase capacity, but rails for HSR need to be smoother, different grade limits, possibly banked, etc. They can often but not always share right of way with existing freight lines. Still, designing them to be grade separated, protected from incursions by malfunctioning freight, etc. is a hard problem.

I think the low hanging fruit is increasing investment in conventional freight, metro area rail for passengers, and limited investment in dedicated HSR only on routes where air travel faces capacity limits -- northeast corridor, los Angeles to las Vegas, and probably unfortunately not sf to la (as much as I would personally enjoy it).
Just a few steps until I can have my holodeck.
I imagine most would. Even here (US), "professor of _ at Harvard" sounds more respectable than "top executive," including "top executive of Toyota" in certain circles (like to most of the public).

One commands respect, while the other sounds powerful and possibly evokes stereotypes of evil, rich guys.

I mean, there's no hiding it if you're a top executive at a big company, but putting the other title first gives off a certain impression to most normal folk. No?
It’s a brand-name on the consumer’s end. Meaning that the lay person will not only be searching their content library, they’ll also be more familiar and trusting for buying if it’s through Amazon.

By creating a reader for their content library, they’re actually providing a different service than just books: ease of use. The consumer doesn’t have to worry about seeking out the book, trying to figure out if it’ll run on their device (Yes, this can be screwed up), trying to buy it, and then trying to locate the file to install it.
There's some double-counting here: life expectancy at birth includes infant mortality. (Taking your figures, 1.35 years of the 8-year life-expectancy difference comes from the infant-mortality difference.)
FWIW, I totally agree with what you said. Honeycomb is looking really good - to the point where using iOS feels restricted to me. (Bought mine yesterday and not changing it for anything - to me the stock Google ROM and unlockable bootloader have huge potential for development and trying out custom ROMs.)
Sounds cool, tried it on my Droid, but unfortunately it runs at something like 0.25 frames per second.
"Feels good, man."

It does. I keep an eye out for when make will work well for me. When it works out it saved a lot of time and trouble.
Chrome is Fastest Browser for WebGL... According to Facebook
Why not just return NULL on failure and the data object on success? in most cases that will work, in some cases it will not be enough, but why add redundant data to all responses?
I think part of the surprise is not that the need is being fulfilled, but the fact it is a need at all.
I agree. There seems to be a lot going on in DC. Kevin and Patrick are doing a great job running the DC Lean Startup Group.
Weaponizing the Nokia N900 – Part 3.6 – Portable Rogue AP Point
Fantastic! Is there a way to follow all of these accounts at once?
Thanks for the response.

I think if you are an entrepreneur and you skip angel list that you are stupid. Not sure how you make the logic jump from that statement over to "taking money from OATV makes you stupid."

I should have clarified: some entrepreneurs may fail to raise money from AngelList but that doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't try to raise money elsewhere and it also doesn't mean they won't ultimately succeed.

Also, a startup may have an awesome team or product but without social proof they will likely fare better applying to YC/TechStars/incubator than AL.
Another big winner for me (on any Android 2.2+ device): tethering via portable WiFi hotspot. Although it's much more satisfying when I run my Nexus One on my AT&T unlimited data plan than when I get molested by Verizon for my data usage on the Xoom 3GB plan.

Theoretically this feature will be coming to iOS soon (it's already present in the Verizon iPhone 4 refresh), depending on how badly AT&T decides to continue to gouge their customers.