skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mine looks like <a href="http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/06/21/new-workspace/">this</a>. The important thing is the cleanliness of the desk: just a computer and a backup hard drive I can't see when I'm typing. The books were ones I was using when the picture was taken.

Mostly, the desk doesn't have a lot of visual distractions. It's there chiefly for thinking, and I think a clean space helps thinking. The only major features are books, and those 1) put me in the thinking mood and 2) are occasionally consulted. Other posters have commented on the value of a plaything; I often have a squeeze ball to relieve stress and keep my arm from cramping, as well as a fountain pen, but otherwise it's clear.
So what is to be done? Tolerate a degenerate system of government? How can you elect officials to represent the people, when the very men and women that run for office have absolutely nothing in common with the average citizen? According to your position, maybe our founding fathers should have been more cautious.
A couple of years ago, my setup looked like this. Since I've moved to LCD screens and a little nicer setup, but no picture as of yet.

http://badcheese.com/~steve/gallery/albums/userpics/10003/no...
Oh, joy.

Among other things, I guess this might be a big step on the way to proving a mechanism that relates bovine CJD to human CJD.

Nice article. I didn't know that there was a single "prion protein" that was causing all the trouble -- I had assumed there were different misfolded proteins causing different diseases. (Which, in a sense, there are -- the exact structure of the prion protein differs from species to species, which is what this article is about. And perhaps there are other, unrelated proteins that exhibit the same sort of problem, and this is just the first one we've found?)
data isn't solved, so search is not solved

web documents are not the end of data
When google says search is mostly solved it means that search engines are unlikely to have major user-visible improvements.
I found it hilarious that he had to mention the fact that he had a "baseline of 12 languages" twice.
My favorite Wikipedia article(and also a space-related article) is "Ultimate fate of the universe":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

It's the dramatic title that does it for me.
sounds like a waste of money...look how far we went with the automobile in 100 years...is innovation that dead? Will we not have any improvements to our space program in the next 100 years? I sure hope we do, because in the next 100 years the population problem will be huge
I too was thinking about what 'X is solved' means:
http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/49196712

In this context, when google says search is 90% solved, they mean:

a) Any enhancements we or our competitors can make are unlikely to impact more than 10% of the market.

b) Any enhancements that would impact more than 10% of the market are too hard to implement right now.

I'm not sure I agree with them, especially since I just figured out what they mean!
The standard of the comments in this thread is the best argument against politics.
The article doesn't seem to indicate why they'd want to hide the fact?

I'd expect the power vacuum following found be pretty difficult to hide.

More logical explanation would be that he's using his doubles for exactly the intent he devised - to stand in for him.
More or less, web applications will continue to suck as long as they have a browser jammed around them. The browser is a lame application platform; the internet itself is important; it means that your apps are up to date, it means that you can easily sync between machines, etc. The browser is ugly legacy baggage for writing applications. We can do better.
Critics leave Google's Andriod phone on hold
Can flash memory become the foundation for a new tier in the storage hierarchy?
That's just an example. The weird paradox of American food is that the healthier stuff is sometimes cheaper.

https://www.usaemergencysupply.com/food_storage/bulk_beans_l...

You can get excellent quality beef for 4 dollars a pound, chicken for 98 cents a pound, bananas at 50 cents a pound, milk at 3 dollars/gallon. And, if you have 1/8th of an acre and time to spare, you can grow whatever you need.

Flour is an ingrediant in almost all home-cooked foods, and it's practically free. People don't like to cook for themselves though...

ED: Better link:

https://www.usaemergencysupply.com/food_storage/year_supply_...

A full year of food (very diverse) for a laughable 1335 dollars.
One of the reasons why, looking back, I appreciate going to engineering at UofT, which is very academically focused. I was taken several notches down from being a 'smart kid' in HS to 'average' in Uni, which I noticed was due to my work ethic, since I wasn't significantly smarter or dumber than most people.

One of the things I remember from the very beginning of first year is professors saying how engineering was good because after 4 years you'd learn enough to get a junior position and actually start learning. I thought they were just screwing with us frosh, but after 4 tough years, I saw how right they were and I realized that I really learned two things:

1) how to learn

2) that I know nothing.

In addition to the work and learning over innate smarts mindset, it is also good to know what kind of environment you need to actually learn and excel. Some people might have enough curiosity and work ethic to learn and do a lot while left to their own devices, whereas other people might need to be an environment where they're being pushed.
I agree.
An analogy could be the motor vehicle business. 90% solved by the 50s or 60 or 80s or whatever you place it at. But obviously cars still get better with time.
Well someone here said it best " The last 10% of your project will take 90% of your time "
Or L'shot in this case
I must be one of the few that actually likes albums.

I don't like the industry acting like they have a right to sell them to me if I wanted a single. And if people don't generally like em they should die. But I'd prefer the album format stuck around.
Google is failing me now and I've got class in the morning, but you can find benchmarks comparing Lua-JIT and V8, and Lua-JIT beats V8. Lua-JIT is quite a bit slower than native code. Depending on what you're doing/benchmarking it seems to generally be between 5 to 10 times slower.
See the Wikipedia article on Kim Jong-il:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Jong-Il

Supposedly, schoolchildren there are taught that both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are superhuman beings that do not exercise the same bodily functions that conventional humans do.

Kim Il-sung was already fairly old when he died in 1994, so it was not a problem for the propagandists to acknowledge his death. Even so, he is still the president of the country, and is in many ways treated as though he were still alive.

Kim Jong-il would be either 66 or 67, depending on who you ask. In 2003, he would have been in his early 60s, so for him to die would be a crushing blow to the faith in his superpowers, and by extension, to the government.

Having body doubles impersonating a dead leader is certainly a strange practice, but it is most likely not the strangest thing to happen in North Korea.
I would think our space program more resembles locomotives of a long time ago. Certain fundamental physical constraints are standing in our way as far as very fast propulsion, but you've got a point -- who knows. However, I don't think it would be a waste of money. The costs are fairly minimal compared to what it will take to fix various social problems. :)

Also, worry about population won't help too much. Hopefully if the rest of the world gets industrialized the population will level off. Or we'll start eating each other. Either way...
Sure.

My point is that the major factor in the pricing of San Francisco housing is that it is one of the most desirable housing markets in the USA. With or without rent control, prices would be high because it is a relatively small city where a whole lot of people want to live.
Scaling and JavaScript performance are the issues that we're all working on. Usability is something that gets focused on sometimes from site to site. There is nobody focusing on providing a consistent experience across the web, and for regular users to use the web as their only platform, it will eventually have to be addressed.
Google differs from Microsoft in at least one very important way. The ends that Microsoft has pursued are commercial ends. It's been in it for the money. Google, by contrast, has a strong messianic bent. The Omnigoogle is not just out to make oodles of money; it's on a crusade - to liberate information for the masses - and is convinced of its righteousness in pursuing its cause.

What? How can he conclude that after spending several pages examining how liberating information is commercially beneficial to google? I'm sure I can look at early Microsoft in the same light, if I so choose. No, the difference isn't the perceived righteousness of their crusade, but their keen ability to stay righteous. They haven't fucked up in any big way yet. How long did it take Microsoft to start fucking up?
Well, I said "can have exactly the same expressive power", just meaning that a GUI is not more limited than a language just because it's a GUI. Perhaps misleadingly stated :-). Specific languages and specific GUIs naturally will vary in what they can express.

I was thinking mainly of buttons on a window that open instances of a window corresponding to the non-terminals on the RHS of a CFG production rule. That's the "nesting" (nesting can also represent iteration, or you can have explicit iteration in the form of lists). Extra constraints can be imposed on this CFG just as they are in a language.

Example of simple arithmetic expressions (a DSL): each window has a text field, and four buttons marked with the operators +,-,* and /. You can type in a number, or click a button which opens another window with the same format and labeled with the chosen operator.
Why not Python?

- CPython
- CPython
- did I mention the GIL and the sub-performing interpreter? guess I did.
- CPython
Come on... The point is valid. No need to be pedantic. Basic salary in the US (even though it is lower then in many countries with similar GDP p/c) covers basic nutritional needs. You could probably extend that.

Though I would say that it says nothing about how much/little they are struggling. Paris Hilton would struggle on $10k per month.
is it illegal to improperly render a website? if so, then, boy, are some browser vendors going to be sued out of business. and how.
BizEquity.com launches - it's like Zillow for small business valuations
We can design/grow some things that we cannot understand.

Does it follow that we can therefore design/grow all things that we cannot understand?
Huh? Anarcho-capitalism relies on cooperation, voluntarism, and humanism as much as any other anarchism. It just posits that respect for property, including giant consensual property constructs like capital/corporations, is the best basis for creative cooperation.
> http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3164/2831665151_83a0df503d.jp...

I love the tidy motif. If you're the kind of person to do basic electrical hacking it's trivial to modify that ikea lamp (top left corner) to run the power cord all the way to the bottom inside the frame tube. If you cut the wire at the switch, and disassemble it at the break above the wire hole, you can snake the cord end through the base of the lamp up to the top of the stem and repair the wire cleanly so it fits in the tube.

I did it to a pair of mine and was quite pleased with the results. Unfortunately I didn't bring the lamp with me when I moved across the country, so I can't show you pictures of what I did.
Instead we should have a call-in show like American Idol, where any talented young American could win?

Each of those 'finalists' you mention won many elections to lower offices before becoming credible presidential candidates. That process may be long and arcane and in many ways twisted/irrational, but it's definitely democratic as well.
I respect that. I think that the Ruby guys have bestowed upon me a healthy knee-jerk reaction to anything resembling fanboyism.
Next time I'm in a debate, I'll repeat my only point tersely and hope nobody notices.
A training algorithm selects a hypothesis from a hypothesis space.

What happens if the hypothesis space does not include the true hypothesis?

Defining the hypothesis space is tricky - though the training/search part is also tricky :-).
Unless you live in a condo with concrete floors and thin wooden floors which would make that quite difficult.

How did you snake it through the floor? Or are you suggesting to make a small hole directly behind the lamp in the wall?
Ask HN: Calculate Server Needs
Hi all,

I am newbie in HN, I need help about my own project. Any advice will be appreciated.

1. how many co-founder to start my own project? I knew some people tell me to find a partner, but some successful site has been created by a single creator. Well, any comment?

2. how to estimate the server needs to start my own project? any points I need to consider? like how many RAM, how powerful CPU and how to determine those? any reference?

Thanks all, any idea will be great. I really appreciated.
import humility
Interesting, although I wish there was a pro/con table somewhere, article is long and has lots to digest. Footer notes that author was one of three Sun engineers who wrote DTrace, so he obviously has chops.

Don't see any discussion of comparative throughput rates (its my understanding that flash has much shorter latency, but lower throughput, especially for large writes), but this may be because the article doesn't talk much about the replacing-for-disks approach taken in laptops.
SF has a land area of 121 km², and a population density of 6,324.4/km². (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_francisco)
Here is a list of cities with higher population densities:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population

Delhi 26,276
Kolkata 24,760
Chennai 24,418
Mumbai 22,658
Bangalore 22,426
Hyderabad 21,293
Ahmedabad 19,979
Seoul 17,213
Tokyo 13,682
Wuhan 12,868
Jakarta 12,738
New York City 10,452
Tehran 10,260
Moscow 9,644
Lima 8,544
Yokohama 8,182
Lagos 7,938
São Paulo 7,148

With or without rent control, prices would be high because

...Because the buildings have been built as high as physically possible? If not that, why are San Francisco buildings so short? New York City has 82 buildings over 600 feet high. San Francisco has 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Ne... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Sa...

If not because of rent-control laws, why does San Francisco supply not follow San Francisco demand? Did you read the William Tucker paper, linked above, that explains why?
I started reading the article and got to Dear chronically procrastinating young person,

I clicked my read it later button and closed the window - "I'll read it later" I said to myself, before I realised the irony.
Ask YC: Who are your favorite Amazon reviewers?
I've noticed that there are some Amazon users whose reviews are consistently fun to read, regardless of the book being reviewed. For example, Philip Greenspun's reviews are generally fun to read through: http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1TNG2A1GAG14B/ref=cm_pdp_rev_all?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview

Lots of times the reviews can be a great read even if the book itself isn't necessarily that good:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2OHUHIWFPAB12/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

I was wondering if any news.yc users knew of reviewers who are consistently interesting or insightful.
You refactor your product to need as little customization as possible, and make it easy to extend and modify. The more OSS you can build on, the more money you save. One IT employee is easily $100K/yr after benefits, so if you can eliminate that much custom work, that's what you can charge. I'm not saying that this is easy to do.
Demand curves are not democracy.
Ask YC: Email setup for multiple accounts
I've ended up with a lot of email accounts.

1. My public Yahoo one that I've used for years.

2. 2 or 3 Google Hosted (non-Gmail accounts).

3. A Gmail account that I don't use as a public account, but as a Google Account quite a bit.

4. A MobileMe account (for iPhone Push).

5. Couple of temporary accounts that I use/used when traveling.

I was using the Gmail account as the aggregator, picking up the other accounts via POP. There are a few problems with this: Number one by far is that Google do not poll the accounts often enough - it's up to an hour and I'm constantly manually refreshing to get the mails I want. There is also the lack of iPhone push.

I've tried forwarding, but it quickly ends up being a mess of mails everywhere - or I simply lack the system to keep it tidy.

In all cases I end up with multiple Junk mail folders that I need to manually check occasionally.

I won't even get onto Calendars, because that's even more of a mess. Integration is getting better, but it's a long way from being complete.

Is there any nifty solution out there for this? Do others out there hit the same issues?
1. Most articles around start-ups, including Y Combinator, suggest that having more than 1 founder greatly improves the chance of success.

2. It's impossible to answer that without a lot more information. Capacity estimation can be a black art... Unless you're using novel technologies, I'd focus on making sure you have scalable application first (you can always start out small).
In Spain, during the 1950's and even later, there were situations of semi-slavery that run like the following: landlord provided housing and food, and didn't charge the worker for anything until the end of the year, after the harvest. Then, the landlord would always find the worker living costs had totaled slightly more than what he had earned working for him, and thus the worker had to stay another year ... and the ghastly cycle would renew itself. The landlord would even have armed guards to "protect" the "village", and would not let anyone leave for their "protection", soviet style. Those bright enough had to run away in the middle of the night.

[EDIT: bottom line: don't lose track of what you really earn and what you really spend.]
Unique Gifts for Men & Women - High Roller Toys
I'm not pretending there's a good alternative. Assigning a head of state to 300 million people is necessarily undemocratic. 1/300,000,000th of a vote? I have more effect on public life by bitching about parking meter tickets.

The real solution is moving power to smaller bodies...states, then municipalities....
"When you develop a DSL, you lose the ability to leverage the checkers, IDEs, and other tools that exist for GPLs."

When I think of "other tools", I think of testing frameworks, remoting layers, threading, other language libraries, etc. Can anyone give me an example of a problem domain that is not well suited by a current major programming language, and yet simple enough that it doesn't require you to implement the other tools you get for free by using one?
I was thinking that understanding the problem (the business's "IT needs") is hard to commoditize, and can't be done with 100% automation (unless all businesses were cookie-cutter, automatically formally describable - perhaps almost true for some franchise-style businesses).

But much can be done without reaching perfection.
There is a Hackers and Founders Meetup in Sunnyvale on Thurs Sept 18. Would love to see you guys there: http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?eid=30045271371
You definitely don't want to see my room; it looks like a dirty clothes store threw up in there. However, here is a gallery of "TicketStumbler HQ" aka our apartment:

http://gallery.me.com/binjured#100016&view=grid&bgco...

The station with 4 screens is Dan's; the silver one is actually a TV so he can watch Foosball and other dumb sports. The one with the two mounted screens is mine; basically everything you see there I highly, highly recommend to all hackers.

We have two whiteboards that have been invaluable (go to Home Depot and have them cut some board for you, it's super cheap!). I recently got a desk upgrade, thank god, and actually have some empty space on it now... mmmmm, empty space!

The couch is for laptop-based hacking while watching pretty HD TV and movies. Photos care of my grainy iPhone camera, sorry :(
Bringing Sexy (Charts) Back
I really like this resource:
http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table...

Often use it when I need a visualization technique for a presentation.
I think this site is a good way to link people with similar interests. it's an online software for sharing time lines about basically anything (you make them yourself).
www.dipity.com
I just made an account, and I think that shring time lines is really a good way to talk and exchange a lot. I truly think people will meet through these things. it's a social network that's surely more meaninful than myspace or facebook, cause it's made to exacge information (in a pretty user friendly way). it's sharing information instead or pure fame or coolness (or throwing pies and presents).

add me I'm "smoothboom" and I just started a time line about memetics if you're interested.
Google:  Making TOS Clearer
Story of the Forest