skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, I'm not a particle physicist, but I've read a bunch of books by people who think the universe is a computer. (Three Scientists and Their Gods, A New Kind Of Science, and The Recursive Universe (this last is out of print and much better than Wolfram's newer but more turgid ANKOS.)

I don't think the universe is a computer either, but I don't think this guy understands what that would mean anyway.

From the article: "I just find it obvious that pretty much by definition, discrete objects are always less fundamental and less complete than the continuous ones. A discrete description of some object or phenomenon is always an approximation."

Now the whole thrust of the "computer-universe-ism" people's argument, if I read them correctly, is that the universe is really a discrete structure, in which case a discrete model of said structure would not be ANY kind of approximation. I.e. to what are the integers (a discrete structure) a (supposedly poor) approximation? What about the two-element set {0,1} or (say) groups? (The group theory bit is a trick for the author.)

We'd better leave these questions to be answered by empirical data---or if we need philosophers to chime in, better ones than this.
> You're absolutely right. I don't contest that we are infringing.

In the future, don't say things like this in writing. Not trying to be hard on you, or to encourage you to be dishonest.

It's just that statements like this can really come back to bite you when they come up out of context in a legal context.
I don't really understand your point; any amount of money that they make from search or gmail or docs is just because someone is on that page and sees ads. The exact same situation applies with GChat assuming you use it through the gmail interface rather than through an alternate client (which most people do).
Nokia X7 Is In Pre-orders In UK, First Taste Of Symbian Anna
This is beyond foolish and even with the worthwhile points in the article (I read it, "stopped reading was only a figure of speech) it renders it amateur and not serious.
Wendy’s providing unlimited baked potatoes and Frosties, in exchange for a 5 percent equity stake.

I'd take that deal.
2006 called, it wants it's flame war back.
How don't they contradict each other? They said one thing, the reality is another thing.
The Currency That's Up 200,000 Percent
Thanks. I'll think hard about doing this and see what happens.
I didn't know that I was infringing until he notified me. But after doing the research, I am quite certain that I am. I definitely plan on making the necessary adjustments.
This debate always reminds me of an older debate, about how the universe must have a maximum speed, and how the universe can not have a maximum speed, as outlined in [1]. The resolution was ultimately that yes, both were actually true, and the failure of understanding was somewhere else entirely: Galilean transforms are the wrong way to add two velocities, you need Lorentz transforms, and both of Zeno's arguments are thus satisfied.

Similarly, while you don't get it from this source as he has made his decision, there are some reasons why everyone has gone to discrete models. But I suspect the ultimate resolution will have both elements, which the essay does mention at the end, and that contra what the author says, there won't be an "ultimate" to either of them; I bet the universe can not be discrete and it can not be continuous, and the truth is some weird combo of the two in which ultimately the question is simply sidestepped, not resolved, much like the resolution to Zeno's paradoxes.

[1]: http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s3-07/3-07.htm
Have a Plan B
Sorry to hear of your trouble. Bootstrapping is very difficult and you should not expect 1 or 2 months is enough time to gain traction and be profitable. I would not say you have "failed". Your product may be the best thing no one has heard of. Keep your day job and keep working on your bootstrap. I started out writing code on a thinkpad I bought used on ebay for 200 usd. Talent without endurance is likely to lead to little. Good luck.
I see your point. But segregation can also occur by entire schools. In CA (where I live), budget constrains and therefore class sizes makes it very difficult for public schools to cater to the individual needs of students. For this reason, our son is going to a private school (partly an economic decision for us - the cost of a house in a town with great public schools was $500,000-$600,000 greater than the house we actually purchased).

We checked out many public and private schools to find the best fit for him. Given the kinds of math he was doing before entering Kindergarten and his inquisitive nature, we could see that he would be bored and not challenged going through any of the public schools we checked out. His private school does a great job of exactly what you say - different flavors, different emphasis, different difficultly in homework among essentially same-subject classes.
Also, making a polite agreement with the other business owner doesn't cost him anything. Potentially having to sue you does. This means that provided you can convince him of your good faith, giving you long enough to rebrand is probably in his best interests.

And, hell, it requires ... a phone call. No harm trying.
Earning $1 per day is a very low income yet it is still higher than earning $0.5 per day.
Operation Cupcake: MI6 Did it for the Lulz
Honestly, I think it's pretty likely that Facebook will tend towards with people having "Professional" profiles offsetting LinkedIn and they will offset email.

Obviously at this point it is largely just offsetting personal email, but I don't think it's reasonable to dismiss that as insignificant.
I disagreed strongly with this post and was about to post a rebuttal, but then I realized there actually is a situation where untyped languages enjoy a concrete, practical advantage because of the lack of compilation dependencies. That situation is when you are writing a module (something that would be a compilation unit in a typed language) that calls missing or nonexistent library interfaces, and you want to test parts of the module that do not depend on the missing APIs. In a typed language, you can't do it. You would have to satisfy the dependencies first so your code would compile, or you would have to copy snippets of your code out of the compilation unit into a REPL or another file so they could be compiled separately. In an untyped language, you can experiment with parts of the module and even start writing tests without having to make sure all of the module's dependencies are satisfied.

Aside from that one advantage, though, it's the same with types or without them. For a module as a whole, the compilation dependencies that exist in a typed language are the same as the runtime dependencies that exist in an untyped language. Whether you're using a typed or untyped language, you can write whatever code you want, but you can't do anything with it until you satisfy its dependencies. With that one exception, of course: in an untyped language, you can run code that doesn't depend on the missing APIs but happens to be in the same module as code that does depend on them.

Overall, I don't think that amounts to much, especially compared to a typed language like Scala where you can copy snippets into a REPL. Or even better, Ensime is an Emacs mode that is supposed to let you work with Scala the way Slime lets you work with Common Lisp. (I haven't tried it myself yet, but it exists, and people are using it for real work.)
I'd visit a lawyer who specializes in trademark law. Most lawyers will give you an initial hour at no charge. At bare minimum you will learn your options.

I faced the same problem as you ten years ago. I received a cease and desist letter from a large multinational. I handed over the domain name, rebranded the business and I'm still here. So it doesn't have to mean the end of your business.
Good point. One way to address your point is to try to understand what is appropriate for each kid at the age of 5-6 and slot them in the right school before it's too late. See my reply below.
At minimum, doing your data fetching in parallel / asynchronously is a huge boost. Likewise flushing to the client in concurrent / out-of-order chunks, possibly in parallel with other work.
It doesn't compare to rails migrations. The lack of integration is crippling as well.
How popular is Angry birds
No it's not easy, but removing distractions helps keep you on track.

A lot of people on HN I've heard say they use a web filter on themselves. Only allowing most web sites for certain times of day, otherwise they're locked down to "productive" web sites.

Also, when you're looking for something new to learn instead of picking a new breadth topic, pick a depth topic you don't know about and learn about in one of your hand picked languages. Like if you're learning about networking or machine learning, use a language that you want to know better, but have "lost interest" in instead of one you already know well.
What's the cost of living for a foreigner in Singapore like? Obviously there can be a big range, but I'm curious what your experiences are?

More generally, is there some resource for comparing costs of living of various places?
Carbonless Invoice Printing
Great post - the SEO and traffic benefits alone can be huge, although there is a large time commitment involved. The more you put in, the more you'll get out.

I've just registered on one of the sites, up until now I've been just emailing people in the space. It is hard when you have something that is targeted towards a specific region, but regardless the SEO benefits are huge.
The nostalgia that this makes me feel is unbelievable. Some things about old Usenet are probably lost forever:

1. The feeling that "this matters". Usenet wasn't just one discussion forum among millions, it was The One.
2. The life of the mind - the all-text nature of the old Usenet was somehow incredibly conductive to treating people as pure intellects. "On Usenet, it doesn't matter if you're a dog." Somehow even forums like HN don't capture that feeling today.

Also, a decent newsreader is still ahead of all modern browser-based software by a mile when it comes to following many discussion threads. For me, nothing today compares with trn.

Yeah, I know Usenet is still out there, and I can even be found there sometimes, but it's not the same feeling anymore, not of intellectual wonder and horizons and of being a pioneer. Probably, that's hard to explain to the youngsters who weren't there - wow, the internet has produced its crop of old-timers.
Atlanta Graphic Design Company
I signed up, I love being an early adopter, because I'm on the lookout for things that well give our company an edge. No emails as of yet, though. Keep in mind I am looking to quickly dart through companies, not tirelessly research a database for something that might be useful.
Early Days of Linux
Mixergy has an interview this week with James Altucher who coincidentally provided some of the same advice. When his company crashed after the bubble he started an exercise routine and forced himself to start getting up at 6:30 am every day as he started a new business.

He also spoke of making himself uncomfortable as he reached out daily to people he didn't know in search of customers.
I have always wondered, why is it so difficult to predict the properties of an element?
Ok, but what kept you going? Was it the thrill of getting customers or the thrill of solving that particular problem or...?

I'd love to work with someone who has done it before so if I can motivate you, that would be awesome :D
A history lesson for those either too young to know, or not from the UK. This will explain a few gaps.

Back in the day (i.e. around the late 80's) we used to have PROPER computers in schools in the UK that everyone had free access to. My particular school had a large network of BBC Master[1] and Acorn Archimedes[2] machines - all proprietary platforms but OPEN with respect to documentation and doing what the hell you liked with them. In fact, Acorn, the manufacturer would tend to shove all the hardware reference and programmers guides in the box with the machines (you could not break the software on them). They ALL had BBC BASIC (very advanced variant of structured BASIC) with an inline 6502 or ARM assembler and most of the earlier machines had analogue and digital IO you could just stuff things into. They were all networked together as well and could talk to each other.

We were ACTIVELY ENCOURAGED to build stuff that plugged into these (rather than the recent policies and AUPs that students have to live with) and write software to control things and even modify the operating system at will. We built a massive transit shuttle system based on Lego, we build automated cranes, we build light sequencers, we built anything we damn wanted and were applauded for it.

Most of the software devs I know in the UK (other than the young and really old ones) tend to have cut their teeth on this kit.

Then there was the introduction of the PC which destroyed all this in favour of "security", "acceptable use policies", "black boxes", "no documentation" and "vendor lock in".

Mr Braben was a pioneer of these machines [3] [4] and is held close to the heart of many people. He wants the education sector to go back to these days (rather than the utter corruption that Research Machines, BECTA and Microsoft have destroyed everything with recently) because he truly KNOWS what is good for the industry i.e. people who know how stuff works and are free to understand.

Ironically, on a slight tangent, my children have Linux machines in their school these days rather than Windows, which is used for administrative functions only. It'll only be a few years before my eldest discovers gcc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Master

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
Doesn't sound so outlandish to me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHjjF55M8JQ
You can always buy a premium domain name via Sedo.com or a similar domain marketplace. Then sell it if you don't want it and the money is yours.
The quantum N-body problem is a 3N dimensional problem. If your element has 100 electrons then you need to model a 300 dimensional space. If you took a very coarse discretization of 10 cells per dimension, you'd need a computer with at least O(10^300) bits of memory.
Arguably (this will result in an argument - sorry), BBC BASIC on the BBC Micros is much more productive and has a lower learning curve than all the disparate technologies these days.

I mean I haven't written anything in it for 15 years but I can still remember ALL of it intimately including the memory maps of the machines.

Hibernate for example is more complicated than the operating system and programming language combined on those machines.
If I were going to start a project to map elements of a musical score to HTML5 custom attributes, I would probably start with something like Lilypond, which has a convenient formal specification:

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/in...
It is sad that the current status quo on software development consider vendor lookup as a good thing. For example, people feel that it is good to use only one processor architecture (x86), and even think that a corporation-sponsored virtual machine (JVM) is a "good thing". No wonder why systems research is basically dead, only trying to improve over the clumsiness of existing architectures.
Users of the BBC website outside the UK get served ads.
Or you could use Gödel's incompleteness theorems and say the universe cannot be a computer (as we understand it) because computers (as we understand them) are part of the universe and therefore cannot describe the universe.

Then the discussion could go on and you could reach a definition of "computer" vague enough to be able to say "the universe is a computer".
Indeed. The smart folks were protecting against SQL injection and similar exploits 10 and 15 years ago. Today, there's absolutely zero excuse.
Rather than working top down approach, how about a greasemonkey script that hides the comments you dont like?
I would call you, because I am a human being and not a lawyer zombie.

If you don't care or mis-interpret my "being friendly" as "I don't really care", well then its your own fault (and cost).

But claiming that anybody serious would immediately run for a lawyer is... well, a really pessimistic view on society.

>> "We will take such steps as the law requires."

Yikes! How about "thanks for telling me, I'll check and get back to you, maybe we can find some level of agreement."
> Also, a decent newsreader is still ahead of all modern browser-based software by a mile when it comes to following many discussion threads. For me, nothing today compares with trn.

You're far from the only one who feels this way. I'm not quite sure why it is, but I think it's because trn's tree is basically drawn "orthogonally" (if I might use that word), with siblings stacked vertically, and children moving off to the right.

A "normal" newsreader uses the standard indented list, which gives the whole thread a "meandering set of diagonals" shape, and has a less strong visual connection between siblings (which is an important connection, because they're all replying to the same parent.)

So I was just looking for a screenshot of trn for people who didn't know what it looked like, and I found this blog entry talking about exactly this (with screenshot):

http://cafbit.com/entry/the_lost_art_of_threaded
We don't need "modern" UI frameworks we need well designed UI frameworks. HTML isn't designed for stateful UIs. I'm hoping that Cocoa will eventually move away from Objective-C and towards a more dynamic (expressive) language (Javascript would be great).
3d Printed Rocket Engine Takes Flight
Show HN: Google Charts done in Canvas, side project
Agreed entirely. It's one of the things that has been annoying me for years. The x86 ISA is an utter mess - totally non-orthogonal. Why we keep worshipping it I don't know.

The last innovation was Forth on a Chip if you ask me.
What's sad is that there is no serious replacement for usenet in the internet of today. Usenet was a place where top talents of the world used to talk together with amateurs on the more disparate topics. Back then the internet was for an elite, and that sucked as universal access to the net is really important, but at the same time it is sad to see most of the internet reflecting the fact that today it is a "mass" thing.
Adding lots of GPUs and CPUs doesn't make that not true. Those processing units still work by executing a series of instructions, they just do some fancy things with regards to the order of instructions and communication between units.

It may be more productive to think of things in terms of a more abstract, functional model of computing, but in the end, for anything to actually happen, that abstract model must be translated in to some series of instructions. I think that's what the quote was trying to get at.
It makes perfect sense that HTML5/JS would overtake traditional UI frameworks on the client side. Doing Win32, Java Swing, etc. was a horrible experience compared to the relative niceness of HTML/JS.

Adobe Flex/AIR was probably the best client UI dev experience I've had. MXML and Actionscript 3 is VERY similar to HTML/JS. Given the benefits of so many platforms moving towards HTML/JS as a kind of common language for UI development, these are exciting times.
With Duke Nukem going gold, it can only be a little longer.

for values of little not exceeding Braben's lifetime.
Have you looked at this?

http://cappuccino.org/

It's basically Cocoa on javascript using Objective-J
By "dynamic" do you mean "interpreted"? Because Objective-C is a pretty dynamic and flexible language, otherwise.
We would likely have no way of knowing if the hackers were going after the IP. Sony just may have that security right.
It doesn't work on an iPad yet. It's our first web Office release, it's still a little rough, but it's definitely something we're putting a lot of engineering work behind to improve.

However, you don't actually need Silverlight to use it (I'm not sure what they're using it for), I've used it on Chrome in Ubuntu and it worked just as well. Any new'ish browser should work.
I see you've never been to Baltimore
Not sure, but totally agree - I'll try to file a bug.
Objective-C is already a dynamic language. Its ability to drop to low-level C at will makes it too flexible and powerful to abandon for something slow and cumbersome like Javascript.
Sure. Its not genetic or anything. Critical views towards authority have developed in the West in the past 500 years, with the rise of protestantism (as in "you talk to God yourself and not through some father figure mediator") and later through Enlightenment (as in "use your brain, goddamit!"). It took us quite a while and quite a bit of luck, too, to get where we are today.

Most of those things did not happen elsewhere. Hence my comment above.
Nice ideas, but I feel that the examples are a little too basic: speaking and exercising are what I consider to be indispensable for everyone, almost something like brushing your teeth in the morning.
Ketosis talks about converting fatty acids to energy (when your body runs out of glucose/glycogen). It says nothing about creating vitamins and minerals out fat+sugar+salt.

If your body could get all the essential nutrients out of nothing but carbs and/or fats, then malnutrition would be a fictitious condition, as would be scurvy (Vitamin C deficiency).
I like this idea. Are there any Hacker News admins looking at this post?
How can you make daily deals algorithm based?

Simply ask to click a box if they agree to discount a sale price by 50%, and share the remaining 50% with Google.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of REST APIs
Here's my announcement post, which is, I hope, worth reading
for some context of what's going on in 1981 "now":

http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/announcing_olduse.net/

Also, if you see a blank box where the newsreader should be, yeah, inviting the whole web in to run tin on my server is not a completely scalable thing. nntp.olduse.net is where it's at.
I was reading another day about the PDP 11, and it is incredible how it looked much easier to program than an x86. Maybe we should go back in time and try to learn some of the forgotten tricks.
> Life is far too grand, far too complex, to be spent just coding.

Much wisdom here.

The workaholic personality type can be prone to overworking in order to compensate for other areas of life that aren't quite going their way. I've been that person, but I don't plan on returning to it. In these cases, its much more fruitful to fix the problem than it is to mask it. It just happens that working too much is socially-approved escapism.
Its very good to have an alternative to google charts. Your license should cover commercial use.
...that is not what the incompleteness theorem says.
Didn't know that. Interesting! Thanks for pointing it out.
Maybe you got me closer to the answer, and you certainly seem to have more experience on this subject than I do. I am still missing some part of the picture, so let me ask:

Types: You think about the problem up-front to the best you can. Most likely you later change the interface. The compiler now breaks the code and forces you to fix it.

Dynamic: You are flexible, which means you can start your work without having to think up-front (Q1: How is this good?). Later when you change the interface (which may exist only in your mind, but it does as far as the modules are to interact with each other in some way at all), the code still breaks but the compiler won't tell you.

In either case, as you said "you have to fix them anyway". So Q2: How is compiler not being able to complain about broken code (and possibly unit tests finding it) helping?

One comment here cited an example where one can get away without introducing errors while still changing the type ("f(g(x)"). But that is readily achieved with statically typed languages like C++ as well.