skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I suggested the group meeting thing, it was because the social aspect of college is very desired. I think it is also not as good at today's universities as we would wish. The students seem very perceptive to social status, and a lot of energy seems to go into reassuring people about social status, and preparing for job searches.

I would suspect it is easier to find a group of like-minded people than you think. If you do this right, you will start with some subject and 5 or 6 interested people, maybe half of whom make it to the weekly meeting in a coffee shop or somewhere. You will pick up a few more interested people who happen to listen in to the group's discussions. Keep careful track of eveyone's emails, and at some point pick a new subject and send an email around to everyone, and see who shows up. This is can be done even in small, out of the way, non-college towns.

It's kind of like running a "salon" in ancient Greece or 1700s Paris, or a coffee shop in 1600s/1700s London. Someone has to keep track of the social network, so that people who drift out of the meeting group are eventually brought back in when a more interesting topic comes up.

You might occasionally pick a topic just to bring in more people. I think I good one would be to read a chapter of Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle every week, google / wikipedia every character so you know all the inside historical jokes, and then meet and discuss.

On campus, the students are too busy to do the type of social interaction that supposedly makes college valuable -- we think of getting tossed at random into a roommate situation with someone from a different culture and social class, meeting life long friends at random in the library and future business partners in lab groups, etc. But a lot of the college social scene seems to be devoted to making sure you don't accidently meet up with anyone of a different social class, or at least assuring the parents that the student won't; clubs are strongly tied to a student affairs bureaucracy and create positions like secretary and treasurer for people to put on their resumes, as much as do stuff; and the students are busier than those of us that work full time, and have even fewer independent activities and hobbies.
I find it impossibly lame that internet broadcasters have to pay where airwave broadcasters don't. They provide, to the button, the same service, just over a different transmission medium. They both have ads, one being auditory, one being visual.
I agree about the size. Especially for a sailboat, I would say smaller is better. I have more fun sailing a 12' Laser dingy than a 40' sailboat, simply because it is more responsive and you feel like you have more control.

And for sail and power boats alike, I don't think I would want to own a boat that I couldn't pilot myself or fit into most harbors. Otherwise it's basically a glorified floating luxury hotel and expensive status symbol.
They have these everywhere in Europe. And yes, they're as gross as they sound. Apparently Europeans love tasteless sandwiches made up of mostly bread, with a single slice of meat or cheese between the slices. They serve them everywhere, in restaurants, on trains, and in the automats.
Considering that the backpropagation and variants thereof gained significant commercial/industrial adoption while "monkey and banana" type problem solving systems mostly failed, I think his criticism of artificial neural networks is quite unwarranted.

The entire change has been that people aren't trying to go for 'general intelligence'. They approach it purely as a statistics problem. We have some data, what can we do with the data, how accurately can we do that?
Ask HN: Best, Simple, Free Web-based Bookkeeping/Accounting
Hey,

Just looking for a simple free web-app for basic bookkeeping/accounting - revenues, expenses, etc..

Anyone know of any?

Thanks
Anyway, this pales in comparison to the awesome power of the Twat-O-Tron, an automatic comment generator for the BBC's news website: http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/the-twat-o...

Also works on YouTube.
I have always wondered why these died out. I have never seen one myself, but they seem the most efficient and streamlined way to run a restaurant. It would possible to provide high-quality food for fast food prices via the this system.

I would make the dining area wrap around the kitchen, and have big windows allowing the diners to see the kitchen, and be assured the food was prepared cleanly.
What's wrong with that Linux kernel? And all the BSDs?
Despite Richard.
Free and OSS Advertising Network
How does this compare to the concept of "self-actualization"? Is this more cocky/elitist?
What does "help build a url that was actually available" mean?
Did you read the OP? A direct quote:

"For a long time, I just went on thinking that, even though Torvalds doesn't agree with the free software movement, at least we have a free kernel. But then I found that proprietary firmware was being put into the source code of Linux. So, in fact, Linux as released by Torvalds is not free software."
I just grabbed it and played around. I don't really know Smalltalk very well, but it's kind of neat, I guess. If it wasn't running in vmware I couldn't actually use it a real computer for how much you give up. Maybe as a deployment method along with VMWare ThinApp I could see it being practical?

I'm almost scared to ask, but is there projects that I don't know about to do SBCLNOS (EmacsNOS?), or PyNOS, or RubiNOS?
It is a C-like language, based on something called wiring:

http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/HomePage

http://wiring.org.co/learning/index.html
Why do we keep comparing Apple with analogies? What if the iPhone was like a car? What if iTunes was like a fork? What if iPods were like cats? What if what Apple is doing is unique on its own and you examine their situation and determine whether you want to buy into it or not, instead of applying them to a standard in how they should behave?
Damn, when I thought that I spend more time tweaking knobs than playing music, something like Chuck appears... no! go away! I don't want to play with you and get hooked!

I'm terribly unproductive with music, and this is just one more way of procrastination :). Very cool, though. I can see why writing programs for a standard language makes sense.

Imagine that you want to write some music that can be reproduced anywhere with any hardware. Kind of like sheet music for orchestral works. This may be the only way. Right now, we have problems to reproduce analog synthesizers from the 50's-70's. For example, Bernard Hermann 'It's alive II" soundtrack has a great synth lead (together with an orchestral arrangement). If some orchestra wanted to play that work live in say 100 years, good luck finding a working synth to reproduce that sound exactly. Of course, software replicates anything, but it may never be the same thing. On the other hand, a violin is the same as a violin 100 years ago (I hope).

Things like Chuck fix this problem. You can write electronic music that is 100% reproductible 100 years from now.
Sorry didn't see this, I pay $650
Cool this is the one I have heard the most about. I guess I will have to pick up a copy of it.
Believe it or not, there is actually a Lisp implementation that runs on bare metal. It's called Movitz:

http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/
You're always in a box, but it's not necessarily a cubic box, and it usually has more odd nooks and crannies than you'd expect. Most people restrict themselves to a certain well-explored subset of your problem space. The trick is to explore the rest of it.

And this analogy is overextended and cliché. Let's move on and find better analogies.
This is a stupid joke. Nobody uses this type of software for real blog posting. You might say it really doesn't even pollute the web because content generated with these things probably aren't going to rank very well and most people won't see them. The real purpose is to create a massive number of links which can be used for supporting the rank of a more legit site. So this is Google's problem to deal with.
That's a definite step in the right direction, but I think it's inadequate. As it is, I know what my assignments are without entering anything, ever. What exactly would compel me to start entering all my assignments manually? Other than the fact that I can do it with a very shiny app?
"caveman who prefers michael crichton"

That's a damn-bigoted remark.

I like chrichton. And what the hell is wrong with cavemen?
Ahem: "In Science and Math, formulas are typically one-liners."

really? at what level of maths? I am not entirely sure that programming should move further away from mathematics (when the benefits of functional programming a clearly from moving closer to mathematics).
Came across gobootstrap.com - pretty nice
> Is there a way to use Smalltalk as an ordinary programming language?

Try: http://smalltalk.gnu.org/
Google backs gay marriage
um, are you talking about http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com ?
Digg Valued At $175 Million In Latest Funding
http://lessaccounting.com/

http://blinksale.com/

http://www.freshbooks.com/
In CL, I find it natural to program functionally most of the time, but use side effects whenever it suits me. That leads to a different mentality than pure functional programming. I like it because it's pragmatic. But if functional purity appeals to you, you may want to go with Haskell (or Scheme).

p.s. "It compiles to native code" is true of CL as well.
Tired? The importance of letting ideas marinate and percolate through sleep
I use Freshbooks for my freelance work. It's definitely worth checking out.
A Multicultural Generation, Poised to Reinvent
This reminds me of SCIgen: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
These guys entered their auto-generated research paper to a conference and actually got invited to present it at a seminar.
I share the opinion that a lot of things that should be automated are not. For instance - fast food. If fast food places are going to exist, I do not think that they should be part of what some people have to do to keep a roof over their (and their kids) heads, and food in their stomachs. They are repetitive, soul-sucking jobs that don't require a human.

For an old school baby step towards this idea, see this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317028 where people are wondering why the hell I thought to submit the article. :)
What if the iPhone was like a product, and we subjected it to the same standards as any other product out on the market?

Just a thought, you know.
I was inspired by this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=316820

Plus, I think it's a cool, old idea that could inspire some new business ideas. Obviously some people found it interesting . . . they upmodded it.
What’s Free About Free Enterprise?
Why don't they move the service to UK is beyond me.
And I'd say courage has a lot to do with a sense of aliveness, besides just intelligence. I've met a number of pretty dead seeming very intelligent people.
not this guy again

/not a fan of this author
http://www.makewords.com/

Like that?
I've been taking grad school courses in AI, and I'd say it's all rule based...stochasticity doesn't change that.
Nokia 6210 Navigator Red Unlocked
Nokia has really thought of everything that could make a travelers life easier and packed it inside this phone. There’s a built-in GPS receiver so you will never get lost. With the Nokia Maps 2.0 application you have a whole list of maps under your fingertips.
I'm sorry but I didn't understand any of that.

Can some one translate?
The peak of humanities's "do everything from the car" mentality.
Will plug my UK-based app:

http://www.pipelineworks.com

Although it's more tailored to time tracking and invoice generation, we are writing hooks into some accounting packages...
Since when did the cloud mean non-relational data stores? For that matter, since when did the cloud mean anything concrete * ? I've heard cloud computing describe more ideas (all of them ancient) than almost any other term in computing. Yes, the cloud is yet another instance of "What's old is new again."

* other than "it's running on someone else's machine"
oops. I meant "functioning without recourse"
Why can't everyone love me? Why, why, why?
In his prescient 1972 speech "The Android and the Human"
http://www.instantdomainsearch.com

http://www.bustaname.com
There was an article in the NY Times sometime this year about the last one in the US closing down in NYC. You could contact the owner.
I wonder how well moon dust sandpaper would work.
less accounting by far.
Poll YC: Mandatory Replies.
I think that every vote for downgrade must have a reply.

I would like to know your comments!
Of course! Proof:

Let A = [ ... ]

A is a one-line formula.
I don't see what the problem is. If you don't want proprietary firmware, don't include drivers for those devices in your configuration...
"Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2P-1, or two to the power of "P" minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609."

I think the last sentence is a mistake. If Mersenne primes are expressed as 2^P - 1, then the Mersenne prime is 2^43,112,609 - 1. as it's bigger than P.
This is popcorn. I detect calories, but no nutritional content.
Ask PG: How do you tell a VC you're not ready for them yet?
This is something we've hit a few times recently. We've had a couple of full-on VCs approach us asking for more info. German VCs tend to want to see a business plan, or at least that's what they always ask for. We're writing one, but for some of our long term goals we've still got some research to do.

So, we're a bit up in the air. The options seem to be:

- Divert resources away from development so that we can finish the business plan faster

- Divert resources away from rounding up customers so that we can finish the business plan faster

- Get a quick and dirty business plan together that ignores a lot of details for things more than a year out

- Tell VCs we're not ready to present to them yet

We're good on money for the next while, so there's no immediate need to start raising money, but this is a point that we debate internally, so I'd be interested in what Paul or others that have been down the fundraising route have to say here. From Paul's essays he emphasizes "keep working on your product", but that seems to be an alternative to proactive fundraising. It's a bit of a conundrum when they've come to us.
You know, our box is made of billions of tiny vibrating geometric figures. The box is weirder than we thought.
Track House And Senate Votes On Twitter
It sounds good in principle but in practice I think it'd add a lot of noise to threads.
Peter Norvig is wrong. He claims that "Any technology that surpasses 50% penetration will never double again (in any number of months)," but the raw foodism reached 100% penetration millions of years ago, fell off sharply after the discovery of fire, and has doubled several times in the past couple of decades.
True. The kind of things you want to accomplish if the money problem is solved should be things you are already working on; solving the money problem should just make accomplishing it faster.
Newsflash  Telecommuting actually works... sort of
Wow! One generally doesn't expect that out of a corporation, much less from google. I'm very much impressed, and at the same time pleased with their stance.

I do wonder if I would be similarly impressed with it if their stance were the opposite, and whether I would feel comfortable supporting them by using their products and services afterward. Very gutsy decision to come out on a divisive issue like this.
Yeah, you are always in the box. But, you dont know its boundaries, thats when it gets intersting and challenging
I would advise against anything free in this sector.

In fact.

We had Quickbooks, it was great, it was Windows only, it was one system only unless we paid an absolute fortune to upgrade to a network version (which was windows only, which wasn't workable due to our IT policy which allowed people to use non-Windows OSes).

We don't use Quickbooks anymore, nor do we recommend it. I would say we'd quite happily pay for a web service providing we can get the data out in a format we can use...
http://www.simpleinvoices.org for your free/open-source web-based invoicing needs, soon there will be an accounting extension avilable for it

Cheers

Justin Kelly
- http://www.simpleinvoices.org
So, you don't need the money but people might want to give you some anyway? That sounds like a great problem to have :)

The worst thing you can do with a VC, or with any potential client or partner, is to give them a bad experience. "Sorry, we don't need any money right now, but we'll keep you in mind," is a great answer. "Here's a half-baked business plan (or product) that even we don't like yet," is always a terrible answer. "Here's a good business plan, but we don't need any money so we're not really excited about proceeding," is pretty bad too.

Just brush them off nicely. Take them to lunch for a chat if you want. Make it clear you're not looking for funding right now, but you might be eventually, and you'd like to get their input right away. Wouldn't you think it was great if a VC did that to you?
While I agree with the message of the article -- sleep can be really productive, the assumption with the connection to entrepreneurship seems to be that creativity is the key to success. At least at the point we're at, while creativity is not to be underrated, mostly it's just a mountain of stuff to get done and most of it less than brainiac work.
No. If people want to downgrade, don't vote up.
Adobe cites bad blood for closed Flash
Flash 10 and the bad news for JavaScript interaction
Creating Valid Records with Populator and Faker
Best, Simple, Free: Pick any two. ;-)
World's electrical grids open to attack
Reminds me of the "ticket" restaurants in Japan.
Wall Street's Blowup Shrinks The Tech Market By Billions. Could Be Worse
I wonder how much shit Sergey is going to take for this. Will it be enough to stop him from doing similar things in the future? The day Google stops being able to do surprisingly/crazy things like this is the beginning of the end.
At the end of the day, you can write an app that runs on the iPhone and is installed however you want. So long as you don't write it with the dev kit, or want to deliver it via the AppStore and install it with iTunes, the sky's the limit. Apple has the stranglehold on the platform/framework and the delivery mechanism. They can use it however they want.

Now .. a nice startup idea might be an alternate delivery method from scratch. But who has that kind of time?

Besides, I have a hard enough time keeping my iPhone connected on a call.
http://mint.com
Right - well I am not sure what he meant, although if he did mean that it makes no sense. From the context I interpreted it to mean mathematical solutions/proofs (maybe I misunderstood).
I'm calling BS on that claim. If the software could do anything more advanced than replacing random words from a thesaurus, there would be a lot of applications for it more lucrative than populating spamblogs.
Personally, I have some concerns over this approach.

Google is a mediator between users and information. As such, it's really important to have and appear to have as little bias as possible - otherwise it taints the information that is coming through. To be effective as a tool, Google really needs to be transparent and impartial as possible. (See Google in China as a counterexample).

Also, I question how effective this approach would be. I'm not sure many people that oppose gay marriage would be swayed by Google's statement... I mean, Google has a strong brand, but I really doubt people will vote no because "Google says so" in the same way as they would with say, Oprah.

I think there are other advocacy paths that are more effective, and don't spend Google's brand/position in this way.
Yeah could be a real shit storm. I see a massive uprising in the valley while the SFPD sends an invading army into mountain view... courageous.
What hope do they actually have of making any money? Do they even have revenue?
I just started reading 'Founders at Work' and find it kind of funny that they cite Steve Jobs in this article, when during his interview, Woz said that some of their best ideas (when building Apple) came after several days of not sleeping.
Study suggests learning from mistakes only kicks in at Age 12
If I were a shareholder, I wouldn't want my company to be running around taking stands on social issues unrelated to the business of the company. Let Sergey advocate against proposition 8 in his private life if he feels that strongly about it.
I hadn't seen CushyCMS. Just checked it out. The way it works seems entirely different from what I'm talking about. I want to be able to add a page designer to my site for my many thousands (or millions) of users. Or whatever I want. CushyCMS wants FTP/SFTP information for single site and it's not at all clear whether I can integrate it into my own site.
Yep, being brave is hard and has risks. Personally I'm glad Google is still willing to take them.
Agreed. I even removed my political affiliation from my Facebook profile since I'm "friends" with a number of business contacts there and I'd rather their opinion of our business not be formed by my personal political views.
This is intriguing, but it sidesteps so much detail.
> much less from google

Why?
Why the hate?

It seems that you make up stories about term sheets just to hate on the ship.

It isn't his fault that the financial system is a mess. Turn to politicians and voters for that.

That he builds a big ship doesn't mean that someone has been "stepped on" once per foot of ship. That's zero sum thinking and/or jealousy.

Personally, I don't hope your dads boat sinks.
TechCrunch releases entire TechCrunch50 video files on BitTorrent
I think Jim Clark wins the Big Dick contest with Giant Yacht + Supermodel.
Just tell them you're not ready to start raising money. Start when you're ready. A professional VC or investor will never fault you for postponing your fundraising process. It's prudent and the right thing to do.
Sidestepping the details is the whole point of the argument.
Do I Hear 4%? On This Site, Banks Bid for Your Cash
Yeah, it would be needlessly noisy in public form. However, it can be helpful for people to get feedback directly.

Would a private reply that only the submitter can see be valuable? It would help the community give direct feedback to the submitter or commenter without adding noise.
He's done quite a bit of work on compilers, so presumably he's familiar with the details that allow him to reasonably make sweeping generalizations like this.
Bloggers force extended investigation into underage Chinese Athelete scandal
By "simplistic rule...", I implied something deterministic. If you define a rule as something that can include stochasticity, then how is a neural network something more than a stochastic graph with rules for communication?
This idea that neutrality is something to strive for ends up marginalizing the correct point of view by giving equal time to the opposing point of view. In this case, the correct answer is obvious, that gay marraige should be permitted at the federal level. Being neutral about gay marriage is like being neutral about evolution -- it only ends up making the creationists look more legitimate. They don't deserve any attention or neutrality. In this case, Google has no bias because they are right.
The textual definition of everything is correct. There's just an error in the formatting of 2^p - 1.

A Mersenne prime is a prime of the form 2^n - 1 for some n. The new biggest Mersenne prime is 2^(43,112,609) - 1. An interesting coincidence is that the power itself, 43,112,609, is also prime.

The definition given by the improper formatting of numbers in the article: (2 * 43,112,609) - 1 = 86225217 = 3 * 13 * 2210903 and so is not prime.
But isn't it the population that's 100%, not how much food each gets?