skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The quote is not hogwash, in fact it looks to me like you do not oppose the thesis of the quote.

Godel's incompleteness theorems are only applicable to a very specific type of mathematical system: formal axiomatic systems of a specific power (allow (+), (-), succ, ( * ), = , and a few more axioms relating these). Gödel says:

a) Within your formal system some statements simply cannot be proven nor disproven. Kinda like junk dna of your formal system. Very, very roughly, imagine a bunch of islands connected by bridges. Some bridges lead nowhere. Getting from A -> B, is a proof of something's truth. The set of bridges and islands is your deductive system. Godel 1st ICT says there are some islands of legend where you cannot show that no bridges lead to them nor can you find a path to get to them. They are effectively unreachable, "independent". You need a boat or plane to prove that the islands are even real instead of just a trick of fog.

b) GIT2 follows from 1 and says you cannot prove the consistency of your full formal system within your formal system.

Notice that our scientific theories thus far have been neither formal, consistent or complete. But what about nature? For Gödel to apply to nature the question basically is, does a sufficiently powerful formal system underlie nature? That is, is the universe a Turing machine? Buckminster Fuller looks to say yes or less. Buckminster Fuller is basically saying that nature does not compute with arbitrary reals (well what he is saying is actually stronger since he disallows computable reals). That is, hypercomputers do not exist in reality. A very reasonable stance I agree with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation

-----------

The next lines of musing leave the realms of fact and edge into philosophy.

If nature is Turing equivalent and hence axiomatically encodable by a formal system or as a computable function then is it complete and consistent? Is a mind + universe a subset or superset of the universe? A system can be complete and consistent without us having access to a stronger system to prove it. So it is possible that the universe is complete. It could also be incomplete, we may never know. Something interesting is that Heisenberg's original terminology translates to indeterminacy not uncertainty. Work's attempting to bridge to Godel typically do so via leveraging Kolmogorov randomness.
This article misses the interesting commentary, at least on Zuckerberg. The reality is that the capital dynamics in Boston for companies like Facebook were just nothing like those in SV when Zuck moved. They are now arguably worse, I'd say, (although I'm a bit removed, having moved west a few years ago).

It's doubtful Facebook would exist in its current form without Silicon Valley; it was and is something special in the startup eco-system; a small angel fund at Harvard won't change that, even a little bit.
Developers Make a Difference at CleanWeb Hackathon
Ask HN: What is going on in the L.A. startup scene tonight?
I am from SF. Engineer at a startup. Looking for anyone in the local startup scene that wants to hang out tonight? Any startup parties or events tonight?
I agree with you that they can, but I think the point of this essay is that startups can't solve these problems on their own, using only technology and chutzpah. In order to solve "health care recordkeeping" you have to get governments and large companies on board with the process. You can lead a horse to water, and all that. There are going to need to be a lot of people at the table, and for the most part a startup isn't going to have the political juice to make it happen.
Doing Y Combinator a second time
Suirely the correct answer is "it's impossible to tell with the information given me".
s/radius/arc length/
So is the idea here that the next Zuckerberg or Gates would contribute heavily to the Harvard Endowment Fund if they had graduated instead of dropping out?
Michael, this is great and incredible stuff. I think your work goes unmatched and that there is no introduction (paid or free) that is as comprehensive or welcoming. I have passed on (even forced) this onto all my friends. Even those who know Rails so that if someone may ask them in the future, they will point them in your direction.

Putting that behind us, I hope you're not planning to post on HN every week or two when a new chapter is released. I think your last post and perhaps one when the book is completed would be sufficient.
I don't think it's just analysis, unless your definition of "analysis" is impossibly broad. The other big problem is, once you've built your wondrous technical solution to medical records, or income tax, how do you break into the market?

Normally you would partner with some hip new entrant to (or at least, small player in) the medical or governance market, who isn't too invested in the status quo, and persuade them to use your solution via a combination of favourable pricing and the promise of a competitive advantage. But these fields are so far from being competitive that you just can't find such a partner.
Part of the point here is that you don't know you daily caloric burn. It's not even possible to measure the calories in the food you eat precisely enough so that you could actually maintain weight homeostasis by literally counting calories. And if you get it wrong by even 20 calories a day? In 20 years you will gain over 40 pounds, by the calories in/calories out way of thinking. Clearly there must be some homeostatic mechanism controlling the weight in humans and other animals in the same way that homeostatic mechanisms control your body temperature. The Taubes argument in a nutshell is that excess carb consumption, especially fructose because of how it causes fatty liver issues, throws that homeostasis out of whack.
Note: this reply is on the wrong level, I cannot reply correctly.

I don't think I'm highly dismissive about numpy/scipy/cython community. I wouldn't be implementing all this stuff if I didn't think those APIs are good and they're the future of scientific computing, they just lack a reasonable replacement for C. If Python is to surpress Fortran on the scientific field, it really does need a way to express fast algorithms in Python and I don't think CPython can provide that.

Personally, I don't like Cython as a way to speed up Python, because it sacrifices the beauty of the language in favor of performance. I think investing time in the Python VM is a much better spent time, but this is a very personal opinion and I won't blame people who thing otherwise. I think Cython is a better way to call to C than all other options that exist right now (like using CPython C API or ctypes), but this is yet entirely different than using it for speedups.

The proposed way so far has been "everything must be 100% backwards compatible, otherwise it won't work". This is all well and good, but I'm not aware about a way to make things both 100% compatible and fast, so we decided to break with some compatibility like CPython C API or reusing most of what's implemented in C in numpy. I argued many times for those decisions, but in short -- there has to be a bit of breakage before we can make a leap. This is not based on dismissal of other people's opinions, especially those that spent tons of time with the scientific community, it's just that I don't see a way forward that does not introduce some breakage.
Why? What exactly does ip bring to the table that ifconfig doesn't have? Why am I required to learn YET another tool to do something that ifconfig has no problems doing.

On linux to configure a wireless device you have iwconfig and ifconfig. And you have to use each in a different order to get it work. Whereas in FreeBSD I have ifconfig and it does all of it.
OS X isn't just "unixy", Snow Leopard is UNIX certified...
I was on a project where a friend had a stroke and I had to have my heart restarted because of super ventricular tachocardia brought on by sleep deprivation. It was on Christmas eve, so I know the sentiment well.
The makeup of your diet, among other factors, determined how the body reacts to the extra calories and decides whether to store it more as fat and/or lean muscle mass.
Because MS subsidizes the Kinect for XBox and makes back that money whenever the buyer buys Kinect games. MS gets no such cut of Windows programs that's why the real hardware cost is reflected.
I think you're on to something. When musical students are learning to be accompanists, a very common question is "how do I know what chords to play?" and there's no real answer. There's nothing more than the intuition and taste that evolves after trying many many chords many many times, to different melodies, and it somehow - mysteriously - "clicking" eventually. Eventually you just get to know.

Similarly, when learning to be a Jazz soloist, students are encouraged to practice the great solos from Jazz legends of history over and over, by rote - just keep doing it. Eventually an aptitude develops and the student just gets to reach in and feel for why a particular set of notes might be chosen, or a certain ornament here, a pause there. Somehow, this can then develop into their own particular style and personality too, and evolve beyond mere emulation.

As musicians progress, they begin to develop higher and higher level abstractions for music; being able to use subtle nuance to relate complicated lines of melody, harmony and counterpoint is one example. Another practical example is how musicians over time develop better models for music itself. There's a natural progression; a novice will struggle to play even a familiar melody on their one instrument, an experienced musician will be able to play it with ease on more than one instrument - even if they have never played it before on that instrument, a master musician will be able to transpose the melody into a different key, rework it, add nuance ... and so on. At the beginning the novice can only model the ordered movement of fingers, but the master is modeling relative pitch changes, fluid timings, potential note substitutions and so on.

I find programming to be similar. With a range that goes from being able to type in a hello world program in a procedural language, to higher-orders of thinking required to model concurrent functional systems and have a see that a tiny defmacro might be the best way to re-work a whole piece. There is a progression, and it's intrinsically mysterious how the mental models work, but it's clear that they come with practice.

Through this lens, "Talent" might best be thought of as "An innate willfulness for practicing" rather than some genetically encoded aptitude for the task at hand. There are many communities where musical education is essentially mandatory, and near enough to anybody can become a good musician if they are required to practice. Some militaries arbitrarily assign soldiers to pipe regiments, treat it as a learnable task, and make them get on with it - and it works.

It may be well worth looking at how music is thought, and seeing if there are any dividends for the educating of programming.
Ask HN: Time to drop a client?
I have a client who I first picked up over four years ago. As it was one of my first consulting gigs, the hourly was low, $25 an hour. Since then I have gained many higher paying customers. I brought up the idea of raising the price and it was quietly swept under the rug. They are now nitpicking at a minimum of one hour billed for one-off projects. They also are expecting unrealistic lead times (i.e. requesting work to be done within the next two hours at 7pm)

Should I drop them? Any advice would be appreciated.
Did you track caloric intake (accurately) on a daily basis? Do you have a base line estimate of how much you burn?

Eating as much as you want can be different things for different people. I know if you gave me a rib eye and eggs cooked in butter or eggs and bacon I could more than eat my fair share of calories burned for the day in that single sitting. No problem. I've done it, multiple times.

I found I got fatter on a too high fat diet. The amount of food, in quantity/volume, not calories, was less since fat has double the calories of carbs and proteins and I always could fit in more.
man hier

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier&apropos=0&...
Okay, having put Bellbot on one of my sites today I can see that the sound I chose can get irritating. So I just changed it.

Old sound:
http://bellbot.com/sounds/up.mp3

New sound:
http://bellbot.com/sounds/bell.mp3
By the Numbers: Life and Death at Foxconn
As far as I remember the WSJ does some referrer magic that if you have the right referrer it will let you read the whole article. Otherwise you are greeted with a subscribe link. This has been my experience in the past.
25 Websites with Beautiful Typography
The typography choices of a design can make or break the final piece. Whether for posters, banners, or websites, designers take typography seriously for good reason
I can't help but notice that you failed to respond to what I wrote. I already agreed that he might be an excellent painter. For the fourth time now, I'm not in a position to judge that, so I'll take your word for it.

> It's cinematic. 500 years before the camera.

I never considered da Vinci to be a particularly realistic painter -- his faces look like they're made of wax and his perspective drawing is off -- I thought that was why people find his paintings special. But thanks for the explanation.

The point is that da Vinci is deified as "renaissance man", that is, a genius in science, engineering and mathematics as well as art, not just as a painter. For this I see no evidence whatsoever. I provided a concrete list of the contributions of Newton. I could do the same for Gauss and Euler and Euclid and Galilei and many others. What are da Vinci's supposed contributions to science, engineering and mathematics that are in any way comparable to those of Newton, Gauss, Galilei, Einstein or Euler? Concrete ones, please.

If you can't, then consider why that is. Why can I give great concrete contributions of all those people, yet you can't do the same for da Vinci? Might the reason be that there are none?

Da Vinci: great painter? Yes. Drew the occasional doubtful machine? Yes. Great mathematician? No. Great scientist? No. Great engineer? No.
Declarative syntax for which attributes the model designer is comfortable exposing to mass assignment seems like a perfectly legitimate model concern. In what sense is attr_accessible different from, say, "validate"?
I would include this information on your How Glider Works page, as well as a "Stay Notified" option for visitors who don't use GMail but are interested in Glider. Making this addition will allow you to build targeted lists of potential users for future versions of Glider.
Thus ensuring we will never do business with Curebit. That's lazy and unprofessional at best, even if you're A/B testing. Use Optimizely and host your own assets.
Google's market cap is 188B, and they are changing everything to compete with Facebook.
Google is based on information that people want. Facebook is based on the social interactions of people themselves. That's one giant leap closer to where the money comes from (people).

As for what need Facebook meets... it's communication (and communing): people connecting with people. This is the basis of many technological innovations (telegraph, phone, internet; some would include trains, planes and automobiles as "communication" technologies). There is plenty of need left unsatisfied. The question is, has Facebook perfected what can be gotten out of the internet yet? If not, that means they have room to grow. (one day they'll be blindsided by a new technology that better satisfies that need; but that's a different issue). And, if there is room to grow, are they going to retain leadership? e.g., will Google overtake them? (google serves a different need of customers, so I think google will win there, yet not beat facebook at the need it serves).

Big issue: some people thought myspace would be long-lasting, yet facebook toppled it. Facebook is very aware of this fact. They have some idea about what would make them vulnerable, and, like Microsoft being very aware that they won out over IBM, they won't be complacent.

That said, IPOing before google+ hits its stride is good timing...
Every study I have ever seen that put low carb diets head to head with other diets result in at worst, equivalent weight loss and usually more weight loss, with better other bioindicaters. Unfortunately many of these studies are brain dead in that they only weight body weight and not body composition, but given that other studies have shown that high protein diets lead to better muscle preservation, and a low-carb diet is generally higher protein than a low-calorie diet, I would bet money that even in studies where low-carb diets produce equivalent weight loss they have produced superior fat loss and superior muscle preservation.
Hey James, very inspiring read. I've been following your story and progress on the fastlane forum and glad to see that you had a successful launch! I've also been learning to program myself but my language of choice was python and django for framework. You are right that it takes some time to get through that initial learning curve but once you reach that first stage and figure out how to get past everytime you get stuck, it gets pretty exciting and fun. Congrats and best of luck to you!!
How lame is that. Jesus it's not hard to come up with your own design. Crackers.
Veneers Santa Monica
Our Santa Monica dentist offers all kinds of treatments for her patients. To learn more about these treatments call us at (310) 829-0808 or visit our website http://www.smilessantamonica.com or visit us at 2915 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 3 in Santa Monica, CA 90404.
A rebuttal:

http://www.thepimanifesto.com/
How to tell if your computer is hacked
It's interesting that this gets highlighted as an example that baffles the 'non-programmers':

int a = 10;
int b = 20;
a = b;

This looks obvious to an experienced developer, but it is a clear-cut case of horrible notation. The first two uses of '=' are mere variable bindings, whereas the third is a mutation. Using '=' for bindings is dubious but defensible, since

int a = 10

does indeed guarantee that a = 10 in a mathematical sense. Using '=' for mutation is crazy, though, since assignment isn't commutative:

a = b

and

b = a

are not equivalent. The pinnacle of confusion can be seen in the following abomination:

x = x + 1

This looks like an algebraic equation with no solution. So, you take people who have been taught to use '=' for mathematical equality their whole lives, and now they're supposed to swallow these absurdities? No wonder people are confused.

What we're seeing here is essentially a pun: the use of '=' for at least three different things (binding, mutation, and mathematical equality). To my knowledge, only Lisp gets this right (although there must be others). For example, in Scheme we would have

(let ((a 10)
(b 20)))

for bindings,

(set! a b)

for mutation, and

(= a b)

for equality comparison—three ideas, three different notations.

I'm certainly prepared to believe the hypothesis that some people will just never 'get' programming, but we should consider the possibility that bad notation is part of the problem. Given how entrenched it is, changing notation might be unwise, but at the least we can acknowledge and explain ambiguous notation rather than treating it as self-explanatory.
I did a bit of programming a few years back on HtMl but with all the new stuff out now should I really go back to re-learning Html - I have to start learning before I start hacking - I have created 2 freebie websites - but I didn't need my own code - ok so I copied some radio station free code and put it on my crappy site - but now I want to write it all myself just the best way to start?
"Fructose" in Lustig's case is HFCS. HFCS is (depending on the formulation) ~45% - 85% fructose, with the remainder being glucose, and a typical formulation being close enough to 50-50 that it's a wash. Sucrose is a bound molecule, HFCS is free fructose + glucose molecules.

So, while there are some differences (and I suspect there actually are significant differences between HFCS and table sugar), for the most part, eating a lot of foods formulated with HFCS is very, very similar, metabolically, to eating a lot of foods formulated with table sugar.
No. You're not the only one and, contrary to what detractors will say, it's far from paranoid. As an example- a friend of mine was wondering why it would occasionally catch his webcam light flash. I dug around and found Prey installed, clearly taking shots at regular intervals.
Male, 25-34. I am actually male and 31.
home directories iirc, lived in /u (/usr these days)
they are asking to get those switched out with something horrible
Yep! Type in haste, repent at leisure.

10/80/10 would be how I would break it down.
JQuery Bacon
Align text to a bezier curve with style and precision.
So, these guys get YCombinator and other investors to give them $1.2M and they still have to rip off 37 signals' design.

I wonder which startup got rejected in their place.
This sounds similar to OIB (http://otherinbox.com). How does it compare? I'm a long time OIB user, so I'm interested in finding out more.
Link to the original article: http://zeroturnaround.com/blog/java-is-dead-9-million-devs-d...

BTW, I recommend reading not only the article,but also the comments (on the original article page). Personally, I really loved Peter Ashford's and Mateo Bengualid's responses to Florian Boesch's comment.
OP did, and by inference (with my pedant bit set) you were supporting his statements.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3520178
>and also due to other nice touches like its ability to open PDFs without launching Acrobat.

Just as a side note- Mozilla has a cool project called pdf.js [1] which opens PDF docs in browser using HTML5 and javascript.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js
In re the previous sub-comment about switching out the assets: I think some Ocean Marketing images are in order.
Congratulations. When did you launch? What channels have you tried to attract people?
From a comment I made 2 years ago when this paper was brought up:

I've been fairly skeptical of this paper ever since reading Alan Kay's rebuttal: http://www.secretgeek.net/camel_kay.asp

I trust Kay much more than these authors on matters of computer science, teaching, or ideas in general.

To expand a bit, I've since mentored over a dozen students and I've found that in most cases of students who couldn't program well, the issue was "further upstream." That is, there was some misunderstanding at a more fundamental level that was preventing them from continuing forward. Once that issue was fixed, they rapidly catch up to where they should be.
While Fat may not make you fat, all fats are not alike and some fats may be responsible for heart disease and cancer while others may actually be beneficial. This post by Kurt Harris does a good job of explaining why lumping together all fats is not a good idea: http://www.archevore.com/panu-weblog/2011/1/29/there-is-no-s... (PS: Unfortunately, he doesn't cite studies, but with some googling you can find most of the studies).

Obesity itself is a complex topic and blaming it all on carbohydrates seems too simplistic. Over at whole health source, Stephen Guyenet has written a series of articles on the current state of research on insulin resistance - http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/11/what-causes-in...
Worth a read if you're interested in this topic.
Pressure Release Valves
>I brought up the idea of raising the price and it was quietly swept under the rug.

You don't "bring up" the new rates, you "inform them" of the new rates so they can plan accordingly. Cheap clients are just not worth it.
Me: 20, male.
Google Infers: 65+, male.

not sure how to take that...
The Smartphone Wars: Mystery of the Android tablets
yeah, it only popped up half the time for me when I first saw the news, so I figured I'd post a decent "rewrite" that everyone could access. cheers!