skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see 'what is computation?' and 'what is information?' are not listed there. I'm curious what HN thinks of these questions. Do you think they should be on there or not, and why?

I think they should.

What makes something computation? What is it about a physical process that means it is performing computation? We do not have good answers to this question. (Turing Machines are a model of a computational device, not an account of what computation is).

We often characterise computation as information processing, but precisely what does this mean? What is information? There is such a lack of clarity surrounding this notion which seems so fundamental to CS. People often think that Information Theory provides an answer, but it doesn't really enlighten us about what information is and what its nature is.

I think part of the thing here is that theoretical computer science gets equated with maths, whereas these are not mathematical problems (or at least I do not think they are).
I suppose it could. But i think the power of Ctrl-Alt-Del is that it switches to a different desktop (and context), as long as your graphics driver isn't borked, it should work.

Its basically the same idea as Ctrl-Alt-F2 dumping you to a different tty on a linux box even if X crashes. To my knowledge windows doesn't support that type of "multiple tty/desktop" sessions per user so rather than switching ttys within a single user context they have to switch to the system context.

Not saying its ideal, but rather just that access to the task manager is in there for this reason primarily, at least as far I can figure out.
It's somewhat amusing that the filesystem of the future was developed by SGI in 1994 ;)

I've had little to complain about when I've used XFS. It seems like a very good file system, and has handled the large datasets I've thrown at it without any problems.
No problem. It's lists all the way down.
Why is that a NEWS?

It seems quite old to me.
I think the difference is, you don't need the java applet to view, only to share.
I disagree. I'm definitely an adult and I don't think copyrighte infringement is stealing. We can have an intelligent discussion about the morality of copyright infringement, but calling it stealing is spinning.
Every Ad Tells Your Brand Story
http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html
Found this ages back. It suggests options and not just one result. Works better.
Tucows launches Ting: "a whole different type of carrier relationship"
Works only for single symbols, but not for complex formulas.
4th quarter, and December in particular, are usually huge in advertising cause of the holiday shopping season.
This is good to know, thanks!

The open productivity suite space needed some meaty corporate backing after Oracle's abandonment of OpenOffice.org, and it would've been disappointing to see a biggie like IBM further fragment the OpenOffice/LibreOffice scene. Instead they're picking a side to back with their considerable resources. This can only be a good thing (unless of course they go down the "embrace, extend, extinguish" path..)
There is currently no network transparency (thus no xdmcp either) in Wayland. Although the primary developer has left the possibility open that in the future some remote display support could be added.

Of course it is something that could be shimmed into another part of the stack by (NX, VNC, etc) as it has been on Windows for instance.

Until either of those happen, X will still happily coexist with Wayland.
I've been using vi for 10 years and i didn't know about the '.' command.
I've been writing macros whenever i needed to do stuff like that.
E-Cigarette helps you quite smoking
For those that wish to quit smoking and prepare for higher health, one among the ways in which besides using nicotine patches is to smoke e-cigarettes or inexperienced cigarettes. These styles of merchandise are quite safe and other people don't develop any form of health risk if they smoke them. they'll additionally not be a health hazard to folks around such a smoker.
Technically, just cause you file doesn't necessarily mean you IPO. Depends how their roadshow goes. But yeah - prolly May
Smart Cards and SSH Authentication
U.S. No-Fly List Doubles in One Year
Alternatively, just use Cloudflare.
It depends on how memorable you are to the celebrities. I a hundred people are talking to him and you manage to get a minute in, it's still unlikely he'll remember you.

Cold e-mails get a pretty good response rate depending on a) who you're trying to contact and b) how you write the e-mail. E-mail non-celebrity types, compliment them on their work, and offer to help them in some way. It works more than you might think.

As for follow-up e-mails, I find only a small percentage of them convert into a meaningful relationship. That's why I believe it pays more to only talk to a few people for a longer period of time and following up with them via e-mail.

Unless you have a unique way of standing out, the best way to get remember as an introvert is having a longer conversation with someone.
So what if I have a company that sells information and Wikipedia ruins my business by offering information for free?

Edit: even if Wikipedia is non-profit, what if their secret main sponsor is some news outlet, for example?
Seems to work very well. I wonder about the technics they use.

I asked about exactly this a while ago here: http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/2097/ocr-lib-for-math-f...

The answers at that point were quite limited. The Tesseract OCR engine was just not made to recognize such structure. There are some other closed solutions, though.
I expect most people don't know how to wipe and reinstall. They may not even know it's possible. Information on what to do if your PC is infected would be useful to have on this website, no?

Some ISPs (e.g. BT I think) already redirect you if they think your system is infected. But permitting ISPs to redirect your web browsing is different from requiring ISPs to do so. We need a solution for customers of ISPs who take network neutrality seriously as well.
Awesome. I definitely think there are some situations where introverts can "fake" being extroverts, but it's really more about putting yourself in situations where you're more likely to be successful.
I've had good experiences with XFS on my home file server. The only things to keep in mind are that once you cannot shrink the filesystem once it's created, and that fsck doesn't run when booted (you can write an init script to run xfs_repair if you like).

Also, my fragmentation often gets quite high - over 90% - but it doesn't seem to really affect performance.
I'm surprised it doesn't yet include this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolen...

I guess this is a list of lists of things who do not belong to the Emperor.

EDIT: now realized it's a list of lists of lists. Somebody should create a list of Borges' lists, then, including the aforementioned.
But that's how all of Google works. It subsidizes everything it does with it's advertising business.
he made a website used by 800 million people?

You might not necessarily agree with the extent the word "hacker" is applied to nowadays, but considering you are in a site called "hacker news" you probably should
!FINALLY! I'm very happy with this. The recognition is much better than the other similar things I've tried. By my limited testing, it seems to be accounting for the image as a whole and not the order of strokes, so should work for uploads.

A couple desired improvements:

-Allow uploading of images

-add an eraser/undo

-some Greek/Hebrew letters (aleph, beth, xi... ) aren't being recognized despite my tries... they've very similar to X's, equivilant, and ='s. Beth really should work, but isn't.
Oh. Good point. Yeah Web Equation does better in that regard. But I think its good to give some alternatives as well. Just in case it gets it wrong sometimes.
So Google is only made to pay because they have a paid version of Maps? If Maps were completely free, they would be good?

Who guarantees that Wikipedia never starts charging, as soon as all other information services have been pushed out of the market?

Sorry but yes maybe I missed some tidbit in the article?
Yeah, they could easily create a separate pastebin-like business for equations. It would do miracles for homework assistance and teletutoring. Especially if they let people embed the code.

EDIT: You could even add a business model that made the posts auto-delete after a month where premium users could keep their pastes up forever and embed them. Infinite possibilities.
Lists, yes, but what about categories?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Chefs_who_committed_su...
Surely dynamic updates are "republished" not "first published" after the first time the page is created.
Anti-Patterns for Technical Leaders
Amazing. So much fun, so useful. Will be using this in future homework assignments!
Analysis of the case where an "original" photo was found to breach copyright
MIT creates solar cell from grass clippings
Sadly the internet community has already spent all their protest capital on the SOPA blackout. ACTA will be lucky to be a footnote in the mainstream news.
I launched my weekend project with one thing in mind:

SHIP IT!

Most projects are just that, projects. They very rarely turn in to a business or even make a penny of profit. I tend to build something that either a) I will use or b) Something that will teach me. But, you need to make sure you don't go down the rabbit hole of development. Have a goal in mind to ship by the end of the weekend, even if it doesn't look great, work exactly right or behave just the way you want it to. It never will, there will always be something that you want to change. That's a good thing. Iterative design and development works.

I'm not advocating the release of useless MVPs with poor design or webapps that frankly don't work. What I am saying is that when you give yourself a deadline and stick by it, you can learn a huge amount about yourself. Try it.

I built http://www.livelystocks.com last weekend because I already used a very basic version of it on my local machine. I thought I would give a little back to the HN community. So, I published it. It hasn't gained much traction, I didn't expect it to, but it still got a few hundred people interested and many people use it every day. I managed to learn a new programming language, get to grips with Twitter Bootstrap and I'm pleased about that. More importantly, it taught me how to properly ship, in a very short timescale. And I enjoyed it.
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I want to meet a dvorak keyboard user who is passionate about vi.
I think a lot of people are missing the point. The document clearly states "Related to Internet Cafe".

Now, I agree that I would still want my privacy in an Internet cafe, as well as paying cash, and using multiple phones. But some of the other stuff doesn't make much sense in an Internet cafe.
Django Social Auth
They are different. Detexify is really useful, since it matches against a vry large symbol set, and is trained against a pretty large sample set. For symbol recognition, this app is pretty crude.

It's still cool, but I struggle to think of a use case for it. It's too unreliable to be of use for scanning maths notes.
Thanks for replying, good luck with the product!
There is a difference. Wikipedia and many open source projects cannot forcibly switch to paid model, because they are currently giving their content away under CC-BY or GPL and you can keep a copy of it. If they started charging, you can fork the project and continue charge-free.

Google maps API is a service controlled by Google. You cannot replicate it and keep using it if Google changes its mind about the licensing.
There is an 'undo' button at the top-left. Though sometimes it didn't register touches on my iPad.
IP address + User-Agent + Referer is a potent combination for tracking, even without cookies, and is available to all CDNs.
I don't think the people saying Google Maps is too expensive, and the people saying it's too cheap having anything at all to do with each other.
+1

This works amazingly well. Brilliant !
A Wake UP Call To Save Environment
30 million empty toner cartridges are pitched in landfill as waste each year in United Kingdom.
As it is now, you don't even need to match the numbers. Just find the form and submit it. $("#right form").submit()
I don't think you can answer these questions with theorems or experiments about models of computation (which is how TCS answers questions), so I don't think they are TCS questions.

They are, however, central questions in the philosophy of computing.
Or Fastly.
"We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven."

I don't think it will be a problem if management is aware of it and is taking measures to correct it. Also, smarthphones evolving will also help them. Good for them to have identified their main risks and weaknesses.

I also disagree that relying on advertising revenue is such a bad risk for Facebook: so does Television and their business model has been succesful for a loong time. Not to mention their largest rival Google also relies on ad revenue.
DMSL A Markup Language featuring html outlining via css-selectors
To that point, I'd venture so far to say that 80% of the points on this list are sound security practices that good businesses and freelancers should be doing.
ITC judge dismisses BN's patent misuse claims against Microsoft
In any collaborative endeavor, there will always be times that it's necessary for the Decider to pick between competing options. Compromise is a powerful tool but beware of the ATM (1) compromise where 53 bytes were chosen because 48 is the midpoint between 32 and 64 (plus 5 header).

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_transfer_mode
Very nice. Always thought the stylus interface had a lot of upsides and this is yet another one.

Looking forward to more devices supporting both fingers and stylus, like the Flyer or the Galaxy Note.
Poll: Will you buy Facebook stock?
ah, sure enough. I limit my suggestion to an eraser then.
Thanks for sharing.
By the way that is a very well made application, I really like clear UI.
Keeping an Eye On (and In) Recycling Bins -- testing a monitoring system
Order of the Stick D&D webcomic breaking Kickstarter records
EU Appointee Resigns over EU-UK ACTA Signing
Your second point struck me as well. Not only does the grammar seem completely odd at times, but the whole thing seems a bit dodgy.

Is there any official download to this file on the FBI's website?
Mildly off-topic.

We've been using maxCDN since its not terribly expensive to use for the entire year, and since its being used with Wordpress site we've coupled that with a caching plugin and also incorporated CloudFlare. maxCDN seems to be very good for caching static content such as js and css files, but i dont believe it caches the html itself nor does Cloudflare. Thats only being done locally.

I do wonder if there is some other service out there, thats not terribly expensive that caches html too. Ive noticed even with a CDN and services like CloudFlare, if you dont have a dedicated server to handle the high html load requirement the setup is going to fail.

I'll be interested to learn if anyone has any further experience with things like nginx or varnish to cache their html and what services in their cloud they are using to achieve this.
It's called Glossi (http://www.glos.si) and is a way to take your data from the various social networks and create a streaming magazine-like layout out of it.
I'm a Colemak user and still really like Vim.
I have to do a bit of mapping to get things comfortable but still it works well for me.
We've been using CloudFlare for two weeks now for an image serving site. It saves us about 1.5tb in traffic per day.

I still don't understand how they can offer this for free; I'd be happy to pay them a few hundred USD per month - it would still be a lot cheaper than AWS or any other cloud hoster out there.
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It seems quite powerful, but overall vi still overwhelms me with all the options and functionality...

I'm trying to learn more about vi/m (and emacs) as I get more into Linux development, but I think a lifetime of Windows has damaged me, mentally
Can someone explain me the downvotes?

I mean the Microsoft/Google thing was a half serious, half joke question.
Ah, this is my error, sorry.

I went back and checked; it was actually the lack of any wrapping container that was bothering me; <label><input><label><input> etc.

(Unless you're very careful with the styling it gets to be a pain in the bum to include non-standard chunks of markup underneath some elements, particularly if you want to arrange the label on the left and everything else on the right.)
did you create the ads directly in the facebook interface?

FB traffic is not very good if you don't optimize and tweak your campaigns to find what works best, but 200k uniques and no conversions is insane and I'm sure you could make that work much, much better; and I have data to prove it

disclaimer: I work for one of the first fb ads API tool vendors, but I'm an engineer, not a salesperson :)
This is his reply when asked him when I asked him about this rip off:

> Hi

> First of all, all copyrigth rules were saved, the article was rewrited and has a link to the original. So I'm not seeing any problem with that.
As mentioned on the article's comments, when I used XFS
about 8 years ago, I found exceptionally prone to data
corruption.

It remains the only filesystem that I couldn't at least
partially recover.

For a good mix of speed, reliability and huge data capacity
on Linux, I stick to ReiserFS, at least until btrfs becomes
more stable.
Pleasure to meet you. Not sure how much passion you require. I'm not exactly head-over-heels with vim, but I have been using it for about 7 years and dvorak for about 3.

Anything in particular you want to ask?
This seems really fundamental in large-scale software engineering, and perhaps in information 'economics' generally.

It is about the right use of both design and evolution.

You can only design with/for information you have in front of you (that is what design means really). So you should put effort into design only for things you clearly know are wanted.

But on the other hand, distribution of designed software is practically free. That should obviously be done freely (ideally) because then the value of the software can be most fully realised. But there is something beside that. It also allows the unpredictable value of the software -- in reuse, adaptation, rewriting, etc. -- to be fully realised too. What design is unable to cover, evolution is given free range to take on.

( http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20111218T1151Z.html )
Google maps could easily be better. But screw it, why innovate when you can litigate!
I had an idea for a mobile app where you'd take a photo of a legal pad full of handwritten text and equations, and the app would generate a latex document or a PDF. Maybe this is possible now?
Why Urban, Educated Parents Are Turning to DIY Education
It looks like either we adapt a new habit of protesting against such threats, or 'they' make us to change our habits in the way 'they' see it.
Maybe they'll roll out a HUD like the next version of Ubuntu?
True, this is possible, and they could combine this information with IP + UA when you are visiting google properties that also have the google analytics code in it.

Though depending on the network you're on (how many people are NAT'd behind that IP), and how generic your User-Agent string is, this could be useless. Comparison from Urchin (owned by google): http://www.urchintools.com/urchin6/configuration/tracking-me...
SEEKING WORK, REMOTE or north central PA

I've been doing Ruby on Rails for the last 3 years/10 projects, on teams big (7 people), and small (just myself), green-field to rescue projects, from Rails 1.2.3 to Rails 3.1.

I've also done a bit of Django development (about 4 Django projects) - I've been using Python for 8 years now.

I also do iOS programming, or Mac desktop programming. I've been programming in Cocoa since 2001.

http://www.wilcoxd.com or http://www.github.com/rwilcox
Does a Successful B2B SEO Campaign Need PPC?
I'm know most people think this, but to me it seems narrow to construe TCS that way. There may be theoretical questions you can only answer once you understand clearly what computation is, especially by having a more physical notion of it.

Those questions may be considered philosophical now, while they are not understood, but what happens once they become understood (presuming that happens)? Say we had a precise understanding of what computation was - wouldn't that become a central theoretical part of computer science?
Restructuring Your SEO Link Building Budget
This appears to be some sort of phishing site. I first look at it using an iPad with the built-in Safari. Since the font size was too small (can't help it, I'm old!), I tried to pinch and enlarge and the text transformed into a blurry image with my email address (iPad/Safari security issue?) displayed and a button inviting me to have it sent to me by email.

Using Chrome on my laptop, I get a warning that there are too many redirects.
Actually, this kind of law does not make any sense. In the case of carrefour, since they are charging such high prices nowadays, what prevents a bunch of farmers to associate themselves and open their own mall to sell cheaper and regain market share?

Nothing, absolutely nothing. They just can't be bothered.

Lack of competition is not only about big brands killing small ones. It's also part of the culture. It's been a long time that entrepreneurship is dead in France. I know what I'm talking about, I AM french.
Funny how I made a couple of busy sites faster recently by taking them off CDN and just moving them to a faster, better configured server instead (that ironically was less expensive). All the CDN in the world would not have made them as fast as they are now.

Unless your site is heavily image based, I simply do not understand CDN for static content.

If you are trying to trick browsers into accepting more connections, first ask yourself why your site is so poorly designed that it needs so many connections - then if necessary use additional domains pointing to your own servers.
Firefox 10 Arrives With New Dev Tools and Full-Screen API
The simple answer is that pursuing an import ban at the ITC against down market chinese tablets would be an exercise in futility. Unlike major manufacturers that are tied to their brands any no name tablet that pulled a ban would just get a face lift and a new name.
Powers of Ten in words, an attempt to get some sense of the size of the internet
Graffiti Artist Took Stock For Painting Facebook's 1st HQ - Worth $200 Million