skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
if someone can do it for free, then it will be inevitably free.

I agree. It's similar to reversion to normal profits through commoditization, but where the costs (labour and capital) can be donated or supported by advertising.

But "inevitable" means one day it will be free. It doesn't mean "today", just that your window of opportunity is time-limited.

People serious about business should then move to areas where people can’t replicated it easily, for instance by having unique technology [...]

Unique technology can be protection by patent law (especially if it really is original and non-trivial). But how effective are they against well-heeled corporations - in practice? How effective are they against open source - in practice? (they are not 100% effective, but I'm not saying they are 0% effective - just asking how effective)

Unique technology can also be protected by confidentiality, but usually it's not hard to reverse engineer, if competitors want to. Saas hides your tech better than software products (that competitors can access), but both can be reverse engineered. Secret tech does buy you time (how long?). You can keep ahead indefinitely if you can keep coming up with additional unique technology Assumptions: there are additional techniques to be found... and it is you who finds them.

I think unique technology protects against free only to an extent. It can give you a head-start, during which you can establish other protection - which will also eventually crumble.

Maybe the best thing is to make something that can't be made for free - like chewing gum, chocolates, soda, bricks, CPUs - and then use all these protections to fractionally improve your profits?
I love Hacker News. Even the credibility police hang out here.
> Do you honestly think Harvard's math department would not want the person who manages to prove the Riemann hypothesis if that person also only had two other published papers?

Doesn't "want" depend somewhat on what they expect him to do in the future? Suppose, for example, that he'd decided to devote the rest of his life to beating video games while blindfolded. Would they still want him?
Glad that they are not passing the hat :) Title is so misleading.

Recommendations that are backed by something tangible is the future of the social news sites. That not only eliminates all kinds of cheating, but aligns your stated interests with with what is really valuable. The site that is making recommendations can also take a cut from the tip, so there's no need to spam everybody with irrelevant ads.
He was repeating an argument made by hydrogen proponents.
Did he spend his energy being critical of them, or on working on a dialect that he found valuable?
Sun dropping out of OpenOffice.org development wouldn't be an entirely negative thing
In your experience, is criticizing yourself for not doing anything as effective as focusing on what encourages and inspires, and energizes you?
I'm not entirely keen on the hubbub refered to(the articles on Lisi from about this time last year?)

Here is another article I read the other day, probably pretty similar, but it wasn't bad

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_...
[...] the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

source: last sentence in this article from Nicholas Carr: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
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Yeah, it was sensible until the part where we're supposed to believe that corn ethanol can save us. Aside from the fact that the net energy gain is almost zero or less once you account for the fuel, fertilizers, and the fact that its susceptible to drought, flood, and pests it really starts to make OPEC not look so bad. The future is electric, hydrogen and ethanol are just more problems looking for a solution.
Hm, re-reading the thing, you might be right -- though I'm still not sure. Anyway, the whole piece seems to be setting up a straw man just to tear it down. Is anyone really that naive about hydrogen?
It's really cool to build a community around your product and even cooler that they build things for you e.g. plugins.

Just goes to show if you make things people want, they will make things you want too. :)
Too many envious eyes? ...people often think an idea sucks until they see how much money it makes, then suddenly it looks good and the competitors begin to mushroom up. Hence, sometimes it is not good to give out too much information?
What is Web 2.0 and does it advance Democratic ideals?
Did you get any equity?
Nuclear Breeder reactors are still, by a huge margin, the cheapest, safest, and most sustainable energy solution that the world knows.

I've often heard this, but is it really the safest? I haven't heard of anything like Inside Chernobyl, a strange new lifeform is blooming (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257454) for any other power source (oil spills aren't in the same league).
No, he has not. http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/001505.htm...
Some services (in context of web), these days, are not only free: they offer their users (and eventual contributors) a piece of their cake, too. Random examples are google (search + adsense), and scour (search + annotation).

I wonder where this is going to get: how strong will the "make money too" factor prove over "it gives me what I want" motivation?
Yes, many people really are that naïve about hydrogen. My university works closely with General Motors, and every time there's an event a GM fuel cell car shows up. People go nuts over the things, and the GM people are right there with their whole spiel.
How Comet Brings Instant Messaging to Meebo
if someone can do it for free, then it will be inevitably free.

While this is a trend, it might not always be true.

In France, Mediapart (mediapart.fr) is a website with a focus on investigation-journalism, built on principles such as independence from political/media groups.

Subscription fee: 9 euros (14 usd)/month. The project founders are hopeful to reach a sustainable number of subscribers (which is 65 000, 3 years from launch; they currently have 8000 subscribers after 4 months).

Conclusion: a high-quality customized product for a niche, although online, could justify the price - directly paid by the users - for that product.
Why does the world have no bugs?
Pro tip: Watch the clip with the audio off so you don't have to hear the guy in the background saying the same three phrases over and over again
Some Facebook apps are making a killing. There are a number of ways to monetize other than low paying cpc ads.
Will the future need "managers?"
Can enterprise web apps eliminate or at least severely reduce small businesses' dependence on mid-level managers?
Brazilian Rails Websites
Software as a Service Trust and Confidence
Apparently nobody could fix it for free.
Getting Things Done When You're Only a Grunt
Rumored Apple tablet vs. traditional Tablet PC: dual-sided screen panel?
The last section is especially important, IMHO:

> Strategy 6 Become Invaluable

> None of these strategies work if you're not really an excellent contributor. If you don't write good code, and lots of it, you're just going to be resented for messing around with bug databases when you "should be" writing code. There's nothing more deadly to your career than having a reputation of being so concerned with process that you don't accomplish anything.

It took me a few years to learn this lesson. Every so often I have to re-learn it, when starting in a new environment.
Has Apple Bitten Off More Than It Can Chew?
Have a pleasure of knowing Garrett, his foot once helped bring traffic to my site: http://joe.jaanix.com/22679-nuke-cerenkov-glow :)

You might also soon hear about his friend mentioned in the article, Brandyn. He's working on a problem that is just as important as ToE. They had a running joke: who would find ToE first, Garrent by math and thinking or Brandyn by inventing AI that would do it for him.
This is a simple failure to understand economics. Most things cannot be done for free. It might be possible to code them for free, but hosting on an ongoing basis, not so much. There are plenty of businesses where ad revenue just won't cut it.

"For instance, that’s why content-based businesses (say newspapers) are doomed because there’s always people like Mark, me or even the average guy willing to spend one hour in their day writing articles and take pictures of what’s up."

It's sad that newspapers let it get to this. It used to be that their journalism was a cut above. They spent the (relatively) big bucks on the good reporters, gave them the leeway to chase stories, many of which never amounted to anything, in order to provide hard hitting analysis. Now they just farm it out to AP or Reuters, until some clown bloggers think their hour a day is a solid substitute.

Newspapers that actually do quality reporting (NYT, WSJ) are struggling with the new economy but will come out ahead in the end.
Oh. That made perfect sense. Can you summarize?
From the link: "the overlap between the set of people who know some group theory and those who are (still) interested in giving Lisi’s “Theory of Everything” a passing thought is empty."
If the average distance on the social graph between any two people is on the other of 6, 8 or even something larger like 20, is social graph distance a good predictor? Additionally, the prediction quality is lessened when people are not very discriminating in who they link up with, or all edges on the graph have the same weight or can not be tagged with useful, meaningful metadata. Who's going to spend the time to provide that metadata anyway?

Wasn't there some research a while ago that showed that six-degrees of separation is more true than is intuitively not?
> The future is electric,

We'll that's a nice idea, but you didn't explain where we get electricity from.
I'd love that to be true, but I don't think it is in this instance.
Unless something is making millions, a lot of people may see it as a failure, even if it's still growing and adapting etc.

I seem to remember some blog or comment jumping on tipjoy a bit for only getting a few thousand dollars in tips since starting or something... Maybe that's why.
I really don't know enough to say one way or the other, but for those who care, here is some skepticism about Lisi's paper: http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/exceptionally-simple-theor...
"This is an engineering textbook, about 300 pages long, OK? Hard-bound. This costs, anybody guess? How much would it cost in a bookstore? OK, this cost $22 to the students. Why does it cost $22? Because it's published on-demand, and it's developed from this repository of open material. If this book was to be published by a regular publisher, it would cost at least $122 dollars."

-- Richard Baraniuk, 2006 -- http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_...

So it's a bit more complex than that. It may be "economy of scale" in that a professor isn't going to take the time to write a solid textbook without being able to make back at least his expenses. But if we had some way for people to collaborate more easily and cheaply to write a textbook...
At Chernobyl they messed up big time... The incident actually occured while performing an ill-planned test with some safety measures disabled.
Affiliate Business - Short or Long Term?
I think that you might really struggle trying to pick up Django without really understanding programming or Python. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't try, I'm just suggesting that you might struggle. A lot of people approach web frameworks from scratch and think that they can learn it in a couple of weeks and be proficient at them. It takes a lot of time. I'm thinking a good 6 months before becoming proficient.

Sure you can cut and paste the code from the tutorials and have a simple blog application and running in a week, but you won't really have a clue as to what's going on inside the framework.

There are a lot of parts of Python that Django uses that can be a little overwhelming to a noob programmer. For instance, URL's are crafted by using Regular expressions. Regexes might take you a couple of weeks to get your head around if you've never used them before. Django also tends to pass dictionaries around as arguments, which can be confusing and overwhelming if you've never seen them before. Same thing with it's use of list comprehensions under the hood. The use of args, kwargs or variable length arguments can be a bit confusing as well.

So, be patient with yourself. Django is certainly a great framework and well worth the time investment to learn. Python is also a great language, but again, these things take time to learn well.
Don't be so demanding. :) The library has a couple of debugger hooks, though. Not as good as a REPL, but way better than what you normally have to deal with in C++ and gdb.

Check out the sample code in the source distribution. The 'let' type hack the author uses makes this some of the most readable C++ I've seen. The same thing with templates would've been either a forest of angle brackets or required a boatload of typedefs which the reader would have had to constantly refer back to.
I think it's a matter of preference. My Emacs is set up with an off-white font and a fairly dark background, and, under most sources of light, it tires me out less than the glow of white backgrounds.

In any case, that page is just text. Copy and paste it into a text editor and read it. It's a pretty clever idea, and I'll definitely keep it in the back of my mind for those times that I spend hacking C++.
Bush: "The sources of hydrogen are abundant. The more you have of something relative to demand for that, the cheaper it’s going to be, the less expensive it’ll be for the consumer.... Hydrogen power is also clean to use. Cars that will run on hydrogen fuel produce only water, not exhaust fumes.... One of the greatest results of using hydrogen power, of course, will be energy independence for this nation.... If we develop hydrogen power to its full potential, we can reduce our demand for oil by over 11 million barrels per day by the year 2040."

I didn't know political policies could be adopted based on theoretical, unproven, futuristic techniques such as generation of power from hydrogen.

It's a bit like saying: "With flying cars we could reduce the costs of road maintenance by 90% by 2040!"
Because all man made objects attempt, but fail, to recreate nature. Nature is the original, technology the impure clone.

But uh, there are "errors" in nature. http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2941186.html
You have suddenly taken my argument to the absurd. Under my assumption, this mathematician is likely to continue to pursue mathematics. Why would he have worked on the Riemann hypothesis if he had no true interest in math? In addition to that, he has shown that he is willing to tackle some of the greatest problems in mathematics. So, therefore, I assume that he will continue to publish and that the ideas published are likely to be very deep. Therefore, he is likely to continue publishing few papers, but very deep papers.
I'm not sure if this applies to all majors, but one great thing about Math/CS at Waterloo was that the majority of reading material used was written by profs there. The little math dept. printing office latex/dvips/lpr'd and spiral bound it, and you just paid the cost of reproduction (more or less).

That's (yikes!) 10 years ago now, but I hope it hasn't changed.
I can't see anything in that quote that would cause anyone to think Bush is talking about political policies. The words "demand", "consumer", "energy independence" sounds more like economics to me.
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expensive.
Mountain unicyclists put an extreme twist on the most whimsical of devices.
But it's SO COOL!

Wish I'd read you're tip before seeing the clip.
I have heard of lots of problems with Armadillo since DR bought them.
A job ad: "Senior Lisp Developer"
This Lubos Motl guy seems to be a sort of Erik Naggum of physics. Yikes.
I don't remember where I read it, nor the exact wording, but there is a quote that is perfect for this. It went something like this, "Godel proved incompleteness. Anyone who thinks there is a theory of everything laughs in the face of Godel."

My point is that physics does not exist in a vacuum. It is built up from observational data found in nature and taken from experiments. If mathematics can't come to complete truth (Godel has proven this), then there is no hope for a theory of everything in something that uses mathematics as its language.
From the article, Lee Smolin (http://www.leesmolin.com/) has already put out a paper building on Lisi's approach.
Trevor does this. In fact, you can see his mountain-uni hanging on the wall in the background of a couple of the pictures in the slideshow on the YC frontpage.

(Hmm. A naturally occurring 6-deep prepositional phrase.)
We're losing the ability to think
Not sure where you got the idea the article advocates corn-based ethanol. The emphasis is on methanol, which would use the existing infrastructure, cost about the same as gasoline, and be made from any biomass. Could be a viable "transitional fuel" to get us off gasoline.
History of Computer Music
I think what they mean by "free" is "no charge to the user"; it still costs money to run Web 2.0. Maybe a better tagline would be anything that can be subsidized will inevitably be subsidized.
It's really nice to see other married couples pursue the startup life together.
I'm with you about 80% of the way here.

Godel showed (and guys tell me if I mess this up) that formal self-consistent systems have both statements that are true that cannot be proven and false statements that cannot disproved. In other words, complete systems are incomplete.

This does not mean that complete systems cannot model reality to a high degree -- there's no reason why a ToE could pop out from some rotation or transmutation of mathematics. It just means there would be parts of it that would be incomplete -- the model itself could have a very high degree of fidelity.

When applied to higher math and physics, this is another way of saying "you don't know what you don't know" ie, the models can work perfectly across all observation space and still be true to Godel.
That's complete nonsense. There's nothing about Godel's theorem that says the physical rules of the universe can't be described. You're babbling religiously.
I think building a framework is an important rite of passage for serious developers, but not at the point that the poster seems to be at. I think you have to know what you don't like in existing frameworks, and have ... I hesitate to use the phrase ... a vision ... for it to be a meaningful experience.
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Ah yes, signing in fixed it
Here is a nice observation from Lee Smolin about this theory,

"I don't see it as a finished theory," he says of Lisi's formulation. "I see it as some mathematical observations and then a proposal."
Check out the following entry on Wikipedia related to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and the Theory of Everything

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything
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Does he do it with the Segway-type version he built!?
http://lispjobs.wordpress.com/ for more.
I don't mean mental reaction time in the sense of quickly weighing possible courses of action -- I mean literally the time it takes for you to register a change. The simple reaction-time experiment is to hold a ruler in front of someone, so it hangs down; they have a hand wrapped around (but not touching) the end of the ruler. You let go, they grab it, you measure how far it fell to see how fast they reacted.

The thing is, some people will start to grab it fast (high mental reaction time) and other people will actually touch it sooner (slow mental reaction time, faster physical reaction time). If you're running in a zig-zag pattern, this would mean that you would start turning faster, though other people might be able to execute a complete turn (start to finish) faster despite lower IQ.
All safety measures had been disabled.

Let's also remember a couple of other facts:

Chernobyl was in an office building, with no additional containment built around the reactor core.

Chernobyl was an outdated, graphite-modulated reactor. Several years prior to the disaster, German nuclear engineers had found that this reactor design would go uncontrollably critical if certain conditions were met. The Chernobyl engineers didn't know about this, thanks to the Soviet government.
Not surprising given the source, but that's a much better version. Thanks.
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Does anyone know of a good way of converting MS OpenXML (docx, pptx etc) and old Word (doc, ppt etc) files to txt through command line Linux?
What about it? All Godel's incompleteness theorem says is that there will be open questions about a universe describable by finitely many rules. The laws of physics don't need to provide answers to questions about whether computers in its universe will halt or whether planetary systems are stable.
Well leaving aside Godel, I think one can have a theory of everything that has, as Rumsfeld would say, "known unknowns", i.e., a theory of everything which "manages" in some way unknown parameters. Like infinities in quantum field theory go away by the nature of string theory's elimination of arbitrarily small distances. Anyway. I think I'm keeping my money on string theory, but an interesting thought nonetheless!
"Assuming again that said student is excellent"

That's a pretty big assumption. Realistically, they'll be about average. If you have significant numbers of immigrants, many of them will be below average (and many will be above)

Besides, that's still a year in which the teacher has to repeat parts of the lesson for the student, clarify words, and generally move somewhat more slowly to help the new student comprehend what's going on.
What do you mean "the laws of physics don't need to provide answers to whether planetary systems are stable"? Since when are planetary systems outside of physics?

Your sentence "All Godel's incompleteness theorems says is that there will be open questions about a universe describable by finitely many rules" shows right there that there cannot be a theory of everything. How can you have a theory of everything yet still have open questions? That means that you have not answered everything.
I know ruby has a method of extracting text from word docs through an api: http://rubyonwindows.blogspot.com/2007/06/automating-word-wi...

I don't know about openxml though.

[edit: Sorry, not portable to linux]