skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Surfing the HyperNet -Will There be a Quantum Computer in Your Future
Quantum computers are so sought after they make the Holy Grail look like an IKEA wineglass. The list of things people expect a quantum computer to do starts with "crack unbreakable codes" and goes up from there, so every small advance on the way gets a lot of attention. The latest such headline comes from Northwestern University, where researchers have built a quantum CNOT gate that can be linked to fiber optics.
The most ridiculous argument the RIAA makes is that if things continue, there won't be any more pop stars. Whether or not that's true, saying it like that's a bad thing is ridiculous.
Designing games with a purpose" by Luis von Ahn and Laura Dabbish
Testing vs. Type Systems
Living Things
Summary: "Here are five JavaScript libraries that looked interesting. I kind of putzed around with three of them, then got bored and decided the first one I looked at was the best for 'purely emotional reasons.'"

I'm not really sure this needs to be that far up the front page.
Edit: Some people seem to have missed my point; in summary: x86 is ugly (and below is why I think so) but we don't care because compilers enable us to just forget about what ISA we're using. This is a good thing. This is the way it should be. But it's also an example of what the OP was talking about -- bad hardware design (in this case the x86 ISA; the actual hardware is quite good) not mattering because software is sufficiently good

Sure. Some of these I'm not 100% sure of, so I hope I don't make myself look too stupid (sorry, don't have access to the docs right now) but here goes:

- Too few registers
Mostly fixed in x86_64, but still an issue if you
want to support 99% of the machines out there still
on 32 bits

- Overlapping register classes
This makes the register allocator's job much more
difficult, since not only do registers interfere with
other registers which hold the same mode of varible,
they sometimes -- but not always -- interfere with
other registers of the same class.

- Irregular instructions
If you use some registers, they're encoded
in less bytes than others, so the optimizer/allocator
has yet another parameter to take into account.

- Fixed registers for integer multiplication/division
You're forced to clobber %eax/%edx and one other reg of
your choice. This causes more spills than it should,
and makes the job of the register allocator harder.

- Way too many jump variants
I think I counted 63 variants of the instructions,
and you can encode the same one multiple times, which
gives you hundreds of ways of encoding a jump.

- Complicated encoding
First, it's a variable length encoding. You can have
one, two, or 3 byte instruction opcodes, with various
prefixes and suffixes.

- Ambiguity in some cases
Instructions can sometimes take the same initial byte
sequences as a prefix, despite not actually having
that prefix switched on; when decoding you have to
figure out the rest of the instruction before you
decide if you've got a prefix.

- Useless Instructions (minor annoyance)
x86 has lots (and lots) of instructions that are
unused by compilers, are slower than simply doing
the smaller instructions that they are composed of,
but are still around for compatibility. Sure, it's
needed, but do I have to like it?

Really, x86 implementations these days are quite good, but the instruction set is not pretty. x86 has more cruft than most other architectures out there. It's certainly not impossible to write a good compiler for it, it's just a whole lot harder, especially when it comes to doing register allocation. (x86 isn't even too painful to write by hand!)
There are more than 20 of those in any major metro area.
job syndicate is great - but jobalchemist.com could use a bit of SEO :p
Yes, but you're not just paying for the parts, remember. You're paying for someone having written and debugged all the drivers to make all those fancy components play nicely together. It's frustrating as Hell (if you get my meaning) when there's nothing wrong with any individual component but your box randomly panics deep in the guts of something... You get what you pay for.
Those very people who want to collaborate with you are the ones who will send you customers. Use your university to drive customers to your product - when you go to silicon valley, you will be just another no-name with a big idea and some code. You have the name and rep right now, create your business out of that, and when your business is big enough, go to silicon valley.
>Crappy article, probably not HN worthy.

Sorry. I found it quite interesting.

BTW, about the singularity, I do not think it means what you think it means.
I don't think it's testable -- that's why I'd call it an interpretation rather than a theory.
Fortunately (?) the market is large enough that nearly infinite resources can be thrown at the problem of making halfway decent compilers. The cost - that those programmer's time could have been used to advance the state of the art - is unquantified.
Why is this making the rounds again? And on HN? It hasn't even been a month since the first time...

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1165-space-shuttle-launch...

http://www.reddit.com/comments/6tnti/space_shuttle_launch_vi...
I think you're overstating things. Generating x86 output from an intermediate language really isn't that bad. Is it what you would come up with if you were designing an ISA from scratch, but it's hardly rocket science either.

More to the point: the real determining factor for "CPU uberness" isn't the ISA at all, it's the process technologies. Modern x86 CPUs aren't exactly handicapped; in fact they're pretty much the best parts you can buy in almost all major market areas. Other architectures at this point are increasingly niche parts: very low power (the ARM family, although Intel is moving into this market as we speak), or very high parallelism (Sun's Niagra, IBM's Cell), etc... If any of the stuff you're complaining about really mattered, it ought to be a competitive advantage to someone, no? But it's verifiably not.
And now the VCs come calling.
I played the trial on my Xbox this morning. It's a very well designed game. It's like Shrek in the way that it takes old archetypes and applies in a new and interesting way.

The score and visuals are what sold me though.
And copywriting.
I increased 100 points on my SAT by studying. There's some degree you can learn how they ask questions and such.
I sincerely hope they do another demonstration of the HDR enhancement to simulate images like this - just in video

http://flickr.com/photos/kuwaiti_muwali/479096944/
http://flickr.com/photos/mapgoblin/142350388/
http://flickr.com/photos/uncommon/489820147/

I'm still very impressed - but I would love to see if they could do it :)
Personalized Homepage Industry: Netvibes vs. Pageflakes
Hey! It's great you are following the threads and responding. That's awesome.

I know a number of people who taught Java by starting teaching the basics of programming within a class (e.g primitives, functions, etc) but neglecting the class wrappings. This teaches people procedural programming. They then have to unlearn in order to do OO.

Teaching them the basics while asking them to put up with the "framework" means that they aren't unlearning, they gain knowledge of the "stuff" they were putting up with.
The other thing to note is that geographic topology doesn't equate to network topology.

E.g.: my last mile broadband provider is ISP A, the content I would like to download is in ISP B. A & B are in the same city BUT don't peer well with each other; meaning a packet destined for ISP A from ISP B might go halfway around the world via multiple networks before reaching you, and hence you would be looking at an order of magnitude more in terms of latency than you would actually expect.

In such cases, it depends more on who you buy last mile bandwidth from, and what peering relationships they have in place, rather than the physical distance.
I fully agree, but I was asked for why I don't like the x86 architecture, so I gave an answer.

Current x86 CPUs are pretty awesome when it comes down to it. the ISA is quite hairy, and that makes writing tools for them quite a bit more painful than for, eg, mips, but because compilers are good you don't feel the pain from using x86 anymore, so nobody cares -- or should care -- that they're actually using x86.
* there is a "window scale" option to IPv4 that allows for larger windows that is reaching common deployment*

I am curious to know how common this deployment is? In most cases you are still OS bound in terms of TCP window sizes, that being 2 in Windows and 3 in Linux to start with. How many people do you know that really tweak this setting?
MediaSixDegrees targets ads using social graph information, raises $9 million
I can't without violating copyright, but I emailed Terry and asked him to.
>> Once you measure it, it is no longer entangled.

I was struggling to figure out how this wouldn't be useful for communication. That was the piece I was missing. Thank-you.
i nominate this site to recieve the record for the largest amount of scripts being run concurrently.
This Cell paper was discussed previously on HN. I commented in detail on the paper in that thread:-

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256355
They have those at most grocery stores now. Or, at least the ones I go to. "Was your cashier friendly today?" "Was your store clean today?"
I said the same thing to my folks when growing up, and I heard it from my kids.

These were the same kids who not only climbed trees, but built model rockets, swam in the pond, got their ham radio license, learned to ride in the bed of a pickup truck without falling out, went hiking every week, learned to write their own programs because they were "so bored", built dams in the creek, cleared brush and built huge bonfires on the weekends, went on field trips all over the eastern seaboard with various community groups, etc.

Yep. Nothing to do.
I think this is a really important idea, but I was dismayed to find this link to be nothing more than an ad for some conference.
School is one of the few times when it's okay to just learn without also producing something of value.

That is so weird to me. When I was in school, I spent about eight hours a day, five days a week learning stuff that had little practical application. And now that I work, I spend, oh, six hours a day seven days a week learning stuff with little practical application. Bizarrely, the fact that I'm neither paid nor graded for learning has not stopped me.

Maybe school is good for people who are unable to learn without those incentives, but I'm not sure how much of the population shares that problem. After all, for schools to have something useless to teach, they needed someone to get the ball rolling by learning that stuff before schools existed. So it's been possible in the past.
"These kids have the same dreams as all middle-class kids: to go to college, to get white-collar jobs, to own their own home, to have Nikes and name brands,"

Wanting white-collar jobs and their own homes, I understand, but name brands? Well, that's the problem. The whole purpose of name brands are to create artificial scarcity. if the goal is to have a good life, that is definitely achievable, but if the goal is to be better than everyone else, only some will meet that goal.
What Apple gets about Design
> We're talking about liability insurance, not health insurance. The root problem here is tort law, not accident statistics.

Which is why I wrote

>> If you want an insurance company to charge less to insure an activity, make that activity cheaper.

Tort law is part of the cost of an activity.
"Recursing" and "recurse" aren't words. Recursion comes from the word recur. A function recurs, not recurses. Got taught that during the infamous CS1321 Scheme course at Georgia Tech in 2001.
Control Parental 2008 de Bluesoft Ingenieros Asociados
It seems to me that what China needs is more entrepreneurial spirit, not more rote memorization.
Empowering the software auteurs
In any case, I'm fairly sure that the Chinese test is not much like the SAT, and does indeed test for a bunch of memorized knowledge. Every part of the Chinese educational system has a huge emphasis on memorized knowledge.
A nice list of web services offered by Amazon.
Debugger drivers worth money? Yes. Worth 10x? No. You get the same benefit by carefully selecting the best-supported hardware for your platform.
Are you crazy? How has it not worked out for Microsoft? As of 2000 it was estimated that Microsoft had produced 10,000 millionaires. Sure, they've produced tons of crappy software too, but as long as we're measuring success in terms of money then I'd say the strategy has worked perfectly. They've been by far the most successful software company to date. They could care less about the quality of software as long as it's the best selling software. Google is no different. They see a revenue opportunity and they grab it.
What an awesome comment!

Isn't the (notoriously restrictive) X86 register file a tradeoff, though? Didn't this get PPC in trouble? Every extra register winds up getting represented in the calling conventions.

Accessing dwords off the top of the stack is what, a 2 cycle penalty? That's what the spill is costing you, for an instruction sequence that isn't happening all that often.

When you say "there are 63 variants of the instructions" --- you mean a plain JMP, right? You're not complaining about how many Jcc variants there are?

The X86 instruction set is definitely not pretty, but current X86 hardware does a really excellent job of executing it.
Just a follow-up, the author should check his source. Little League actually requires sliding.
Alexa RIP 1996-2008
Yes, it was CO2Stats.
Better T9 Predictive Typing
How the Large Hadron Collider proton beam is turned off
Whoops, sorry.

Suppose we try to explain quantum correlations by postulating that as soon as one member of an entangled pair of particles is measured, a very fast signal travels to its partner, updating its state. If the signal is instantaneous, then such a model is indistinguishable from quantum theory. But what if the signal is fast, but not infinitely fast?

Salart and collaborators establish a lower bound on the speed of any such signal (it must be > 10,000 times the speed of light). But we have to be careful about which reference frame is used to define the velocity. Natural choices, such as the rest frame of the experiment or the rest frame of the cosmic microwave background, were ruled out by an earlier experiment, also by Gisin's group [1]. The new experiment makes use of the rotation of the Earth to establish a lower bound that holds for any reference frame.

1. http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0002031
anyone tired of people using ninja for everything? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=255587
The problem with Google is it has very, very little focus as a whole. This is a good thing internally, they seem to develop and release so much stuff without much bother, but in my opinion, joining Google would FEEL like a black hole. Your working on your own project but also have to concern Google about everything, as well as moving your app to Google technologies (in most cases). How can you continue to innovate in that situation?

The same goes for Delicious too I think, they were doing fine, brought by Yahoo, and then went back to being a stealth app while they rewrote everything in C++/PHP. Would they have done that without Yahoo input? Nope, I dont think so...
How Web Technology is Boosting Productivity in Organizations
I don't get Co2Stats. It's a very cool idea, with a caveat.

If I were to have an online business, I would gladly pay for clean energy (perhaps even at a small premium) rather than buy energy from an old-style fossil fuel burning energy company. However, with Co2Stats I have to pay twice - once to buy energy for my site, and once to put renewable energy into the grid so that someone else can use it. As much as I want to support renewable energy companies, I'm not willing to buy energy for someone else.

It seems that the real business problem here is that there are a lot of companies that do want to buy renewable energy, but can't. How do I power my home with energy generated by a clean company? If Co2Stats would let me do that, it could easily become huge. But simply paying a Co2Stats to calculate my footprint and redirect my money to someone else? I'd rather just donate that money, or invest it into clean energy.
I still use Feedburner. I love it.
Yeah, I was hoping that the small note in itself would spark interesting discussion.
Can't this experiment just be reduced to a succession of observations that are extraordinarily improbable? Why sex it up with the suicide attempts?
Windows Vista supports automatic window scaling adjustments, supposedly. That probably counts as "common deployment," but I don't know if that's what he meant.

I used to use the freeware "Dr. TCP" program to adjust the TCP receive window scaling on Windows computers, probably as long as seven years ago. I'm sure that was common among professionals, enthusiasts, and on-line gamers. Less common for Joe Six-Pack, I'm sure.
IBM, University of Toronto To Build Canada's Most Powerful Supercomputer
ASP.NET Gets No Respect
Social Ad Networks: Win, Lose, or Draw?
Ask HN: why do some non-trollish articles get [dead]ed?
I've been seeing more and more [dead]ed stories recently, which don't seem to be spamish or trollish, example:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=276452

Seems strange, what's up?
The key is to link up observer with the experiment outcomes so you can only observe unlikely possibilities (and be dead in the rest).
The Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate: when titanic minds clash
I don't know why this is being upmodded. These kids are NOT wasting their energy. In China you can't drop out and move to the valley and start a company with your computer savvy.

The system in China is simple: To even have a CHANCE of successful, professional, middle class (by Chinese standards) life, you MUST get a university degree. To get a university degree, you MUST score in the top Nth percentile of the college entrance exam.

Students get sent to top schools because top schools produce results on this exam, as absurd as the actual exam may be. You have to consider that despite the fact that for the country as a whole these things may not be ideal, for any individual student you would be stupid not to put everything you can towards that test.

And if you don't get a degree, you end up as a laborer of some sort. And in China these people work their asses off and are poorer than a homeless jobless American. It's a different world.

The country has so many people there is far more competition for jobs and resources, and because of the government the current rules are the only way up through the system. Obviously there is a problem with the system, but it should be abundantly clear that it would not be in your best interests to rebel against it before getting through it--you would only hurt yourself turning down the best schools and the entrance exam, and you would not be in any position to effect any changes.
Scary stuff.
The problem is these large standards bodies are always controlled by the players with the most amount of money making their "standards" useless to IMO. A public specification and an open source reference implementation is good enough for me.
academic pressure almost the same in Korea and Japan; except for the 1 child policy part
Engineering Windows 7
The big payback. Selling your soul..er your company to the MAN
At a previous job, I was tasked with automating an industry that had not seen much automation at all. I was told that we had someone in-house who "knew the industry" and "could be used as a resource", but this person was only ever on one side of the transaction, and that side wasn't the majority of the process we were trying to automate (it was like trying to computerize a retail checkout process and your "expert" was someone who had only ever waited in line to pay).

When I said I'd like at least a month to actually go and do the jobs of the people and companies in the target demographic, I was told we didn't have time for that.
I meant Job Alchemist's product homepages: startuply.com and jobsyndicate.com :)
I know there is some automatic [dead]ing - I occasionally see [dead] spam submissions that are just a minute old, for example. It's possible that one submission triggered some rule in the filter? (maybe the "crm" in the domain name?)
Ben Ling Lands (Back) at Google-This Time, at YouTube
Netflix may lose $1.8M to $3.6M in revenue per day over outage
If you messed with Actionscript in the past, but haven't played with Actionscript 3, you'll be impressed. It is no longer a toy language.
Reddit was also borderline crazy when they came out - I remember thinking "Interesting idea, but why the hell would anyone use this?" Now a social news site is about as cliche as you can get.

Being borderline crazy actually seems to be a good indicator of success, as long as you're a.) not completely crazy and b.) stick around in the game long enough for other people to come around. I think Tony Wright said as much in one of his posts here...
Or just get someone on comp.lang.lisp to design a logo, merely by suggestion, as I did in 2006 - for Lisp.
Interesting, but I would think that scanning to a PDF file would better preserve the work for future readers and researchers. That way you're looking at the original, not a text copy of it. Or have the text copy available. Seems it would be a lot less work. And for me, digital is too transient, too fragile. For photography, I still feel that a piece of film can last longer than a digital file. We have film from more than a hundred years ago but I highly doubt in one hundred years that any digital files created today will still exist. I work for Corbis, and we bought the Otto Bettmann archive, which at the time of purchase, was the most significant archive of images in the world. We began something called "The Keystone Project" which would have digitized the bulk of the archive. Soon though the need to move the archive from the building in Manhattan (which was not air conditioned and had a leaky roof, among other problems) became a very high priority, and the archive now rests deep underground at Iron Mountain in Virginia. The originals are stored at below zero and the original card catalogs are still there for research purposes (though there are numerous portable versions for researchers around the world). Hopefully this preservation will last hundreds of years.
Crockford was one of the many reasons Microsoft wanted Yahoo. ES4 is a really fun language implemented in AS3. I think ES4 was a bit bloated for javascript (getters and setters) but I am saddened a bit that such a fun event model and language will not be avail in the browser. This just delays things longer and longer. I feel a little let down by Mozilla and Adobe.
Sorry, investors: the online video pie just shrank by 65%
Colorful programs for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows
Understood, but you could also set up an apparatus that simply observes a large region for a long period of time without killing anyone, watching for highly improbable events. Since each observer also lives their total lifespan, you get a much higher probability of a given observer observing a succession of improbable occurences.
Shoes is a really impressive exercise in simplicity. I've found it great for prototyping tasks.
I wonder if Microsoft did some backdoor maneuvering because Flash + ES4 Browser support could give it an unfair advantage over Silverlight.
He left a lot of money on the table by not waiting until now to pen his autobiography. He might have gotten and advance similar to Bill Clinton's if he auctioned it off right after Beijing.