skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't want to jump to conclusions, but the way you throw around the term "CPU speeds," (how do you even measure that?) you sound to me like a programmer for whom computation is a magical process composed of functions, arguments, processes and files.

Moore's Law is only indirectly related to CPU speed. Instead, it predicts the MOST ECONOMICALLY PROFITABLE minimum feature size of a semiconductor manufacturing process.

To a lot of people, those two things are one and the same, but in reality, computing power tends to grow because of innovations in processor architecture. In other words, material and device engineers will wring lots of improvements out of a given process, giving the architecture guys more transistors to implement bigger caches, longer pipelines, branch prediction, and the like.

So while "Moore's Law" continues apace, "CPU speeds" (however you measure those) have stalled a bit. This is because the current slate of architectural improvements has been exhausted, and there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding how to implement the Next Big Thing (core-level parallelism). This shouldn't be terribly worrisome to us, as it's happened before.

From the 1970s to the early 1990s, CPU manufacturers focused on "bit-level" parallelism, basically throwing in bigger registers and more instructions to burn through growing hardware budgets. When it became obvious that this approach wasn't improving performance any more, we got tghe RISC processors that enabled pipelining, upclocking, and caching.

If you didn't already know all of this -- and a lot more background besides -- your opinions about "programming an AI" are worse than useless. You're contributing zero information, and adding a little more noise (in the form of unsubstantiated certainty) to a field that's already debated too hotly.
No problem. You're welcome to email me.
We're building a big new office at the moment and this is the ideas we like so far.

* go for the BEST chairs you can. Buy them first and buy plenty (I'd say the number you want plus 10% more :)).

* lots and lots and lots of desk space. encourage people to move about (laptops and plenty of desktops).

* white board walls are a must (we have one glass wall and the facing wall will be one huge WB)

* if you have servers and suchlike pop up some big screens with "monitors" of their status on them (this is stolen from last.fm :)). We are having 3 52" monitors with open casework and urgent notices etc. on them.

* coffeee bar are - is essential. A proper area not just a ktichen. Make it off to one side of the main space with comfy chairs and an actual bar to seperate it

* make a meeting space out of bean bags and a low japanese style table

* make a collaboration area. slightly closed in with a smart projector and surrounded in white boards. It does wonders for group work!

I agree with the others - nerfball and such like is neat (and if you have an outdoor area then you should put something in) but often has a reverse impact. One better option could be to install a gym of some description. Just a few bits and pieces. Gym is good exercise (which is always good for us programmers to get a break :D) and will help make your staff more active. But it is not something they can spend all day every day doing - and also somethign they would tend to do at the end (or start of the day). Oh and you'd need a shower too probably.
The Gentleman Grafter
We do distributed ruby systems. We were working with DRb for awhile but now we actually do everything over Beanstalkd queues. Making little distributed systems in Ruby is a pleasure, but trying to deal with all error cases and failure scenarios gets pretty tricky quite fast.
Study Shows Brand Building Online Works
The referrer information disclosure is a very good point. In general, I kind of wish that browsers did not include Referrer headers when going from https page to a page on a different domain (e.g. https://wiki.yourcompany.com/competitors/Plan_To_Squash_Foob... -> http://www.foobar.com/pricing)
which university was that?
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Its like Christmas but without the gift-giving. Spending time with those you love while enjoying amazing food and each others company--just the way a holiday should be. Seems to me Christmas would be a lot better without the gifts.
ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Algorithm Innovation
Sounds like my first lecture in Fluid Dynamics. 2 hours later, we all agreed that yes, fluids flow :-) It's very important before undertaking advanced study to know not only how to do something (which is just cranking through the machinery by rote) but why it works and what that implies.
GMail's Report Spam Button is Worthless
Let me guess: You don't own an iPod.

iPods play MP3 files just fine. Most iPods also play nice with non-Apple tools (I used one with Linux for a long time). It's incorrect to say they play only proprietary formats - while they won't play certain open formats, they do play common formats. Also, AAC is not closed, so, any computer can play it. And many standalone music players do.

As for the laptops, they have astonishingly beautiful cases - Apple pretty much dictates what Sony will be building the next year. You really can't compare the feel of a unibody Macbook with that of a Dell, regardless of what's inside. One is solid, well built and impressive. The other is... well... "inexpensive" could describe it.

A Volkswagen may have four wheels and an engine, but it's no Maybach. There is a world of difference, even if not everyone can tell before experiencing it.

The fact their hardware-software combination cripples their stuff for a great many users (me included, don't get me wrong) do not imply their gadgets are not cool. They are.
Most of my clients come from shaking the right hands. I get referrals from people I know and people I meet at events.

Hackers underestimate the importance of dressing fashionably, speaking eloquently, and writing well. All of these soft skills ease the pain, stress, and pressure from the client's perspective. This is what the client is paying for: to feel better.

I live in Vancouver.

I usually do projects for Fortune 500 type companies. I'll work on projects for friends that I personally know too.
What is the entropy of the singularity that produced the big bang? If all the matter and energy in the universe recondensed to that point, what would it's entropy be?
This defines the phrase "a good argument until you think about it."

I mean, you really can't think up a good use for enough computing power to compute a Mersenne prime every few seconds?

Let me give it a shot:

Discretize a space about the size of a big protein plus a ribosome plus a few hundred nucleotides. Run the time-dependent Schrödinger Equation. It might be necessary to approximate, say with ion cores and valence electrons. The fact that, on some level, biochemistry "works" suggests that the problem is tractable. Enumerate space of final states, pruning the boring or repetitious cases as needed. Congratulations, you've just solved Protein Folding. Have fun scanning your new Database of All Possible Proteins for drug applications, or as the prerequisite for simulating a full-sized human body down to the protein level.

And let's not even start talking about building abstract neural networks the size of human brains...

I do agree that a lot of talk about the singuarity is irrational hype -- rapture for the geeks, and all that -- but unless I've missed your point somewhere, this strikes me as only slightly less irrational hype-aversion.
Hmm, very interesting. It sounds like a miniature remake of the SCO vs. Linux case.

The last bit, that the defendant needs to spend millions to refute an attack, is actually scary. Hadn't he had free layers, he'd be in deep trouble by now even after winning the case. All that, by giving away your work under a free license!
This is his number five:

"5. Watch Small Expenses: Buffett invests in businesses run by managers who obsess over the tiniest costs. He one acquired a company whose owner counted the sheets in rolls of 500-sheet toilet paper to see if he was being cheated (he was)."

Do you believe in this? I totally don't. I think it's bullcrap. Anyone cares to prove me wrong?
This kind of article would be appropriate for newmogul.com also. Which is run by nickb.
Here's the guy in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGOjFhKeLiU
Is it just me, or this "REST is not always the right choice" a pretty random conclusion to draw from that? The article appears to be mentioning the advantages of REST and how to implement them, and then completely out of the blue he pulls out that it's not always right and doesn't qualify that.

I've seen this type of random conclusion several times. It's really distracting.
I agree with your summary - but why have they even survived this long with such shoddy workmanship?

GM's have been poorly built for at least 10 years. Same with Ford.

My father owned an auto repair shop, and there seemed to be a big gap in quality between the old vehicles and the new starting in the early 80s. The old cars were tanks - built simply and reliably. The new cars much cheaper and poorly constructed, focusing on form over function.

Back then Toyotas and Hondas seemed to be in their own class. The same old reliability, but built cheaper. They were ugly and didn't have many bells and whistles, but they ran forever. Since then the quality gap has remained, but Toyota/Honda have also overtaken the rest in style too.
On long days at work, sometimes my pinky will start to ache from holding down control while typing. It's definitely better than leaving Ctrl at the bottom left, but I'm considering remapping the left Alt to Ctrl so I can type it with my thumb. (No other RSI symptoms, and I'd like to keep it that way.)

I don't have a Kinesis keyboard, but I read that their modifier keys (along with space, Enter, and backspace) are all at the thumbs, and that seems like a really good idea.
Finally, µTorrent Releases A Mac Version
Looking at YouTube it seems to be he sells the "Star Swiss Peeler" .. Can anyone verify this?

I really want one after looking at him use it. Godamn he's even good across the tubes :)
Digital camera with built-in printer launched
The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics was actually founded in 1999 by Mike Lazaridis, co-ceo of Research in Motion, the makers of Blackberry.

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/
IMO this is only a big change for vultures who would ignore licenses (of which there seem to be very few). Most people were already treating open source licenses as if they were enforceable, so nothing has changed for them.
I had a job where (among other things) I was teaching Python (and the VPython package) to high schoolers. That made me comfortable with it. Combined with PyLab and a need to wean myself from matlab before graduation, I worked on a few homework projects for other science classes. And most recently, I've been doing project euler.
JQuery.popeye - an inline lightbox alternative
Sounds like you didn't read all of the rest of the article! (Unless you mean you'd have won against the mathematically naive people he mentions at the start who wrote down things like long sequences of 9s.) Aaronson goes on to describe short names for big numbers that get much bigger with fewer symbols than things like your iterated Ackermann.

Specifically, by defining a sequence of numbers in terms of how much a program of given length can do, given that it halts, it turns out that you get a sequence that provably grows faster than any computable sequence. (It's actually traditional to do this with Turing machines rather than conventional programs.) This is in fact rather closely related to Chaitin's stuff at the start of this discussion.
#11: Listen to your own advice and not speculate in derivatives

(re: http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/topstocks/archive/2008/11/...)
I don't think you realize just how big the earth it.
Interesting: Ruby+LLVM
steve jobs is a psycho-grade control freak whose "singular vision" of tech implies pointless upgrades on a regular schedule. apparently i can't mount my ipod in linux because his OCD control issues can't grasp someone using a computer that doesn't have a glowing fruit on it. but when you put all this in a tony mall with minimalist blonde-finished tables, its cool. but it isn't. monocultures always die and apple will be no different.
Twitter! </Arrington>
there's a new book out called, 'expert python programming'... check it out if you're beyond 'Learning python'
Indian authorities: Terrorists monitoring twitter for strategic information
It's too bad that a company with such prominence as 37 Signals doesn't know more about why IE is doing exactly what it should be doing in this case and that Safari is actually a problem. If IE was stricter in a lot more cases, we'd have fewer "Well, it works in IE, it must be good" problems overall.

Caching issues aside, few people know that the protocol is actually optional and is inherited from the base url (just like the origin/server name portion is). So if your entire site can be served by HTTPS, you can still use relative paths anchored at different server names. On

https://www.example.com/something

the following relative paths will also be requested via HTTPS:

/somethingelse
//www.example.com/media/styles.css
//media.example.com/images/buybutton.gif

Wildcard certs come in handy here. Then it's up to your app code to make absolute _individual_ links and/or redirect (with or without https) when you want a page to be requested securely. Building URLs for internal resources is much more straight forward.

As for the referrer, let's just remember that if you're using a SSN as a primary key AND exposing that primary key in links, you've got more serious issues than "mixed content warning".

I actually sent a bug report one time to some search engine that they were building URLs wrong and not properly inheriting the protocol and they fixed it.
It's not an unusual amount of money, honestly.

If you're making $100k/year full time your hourly rate is $50/hour. When contracting you should charge double your fulltime rate for long-term gigs and triple for short-term gigs. Which takes us to $100-$150/hour.
I don't own an ipod touch, but I view the it as an iphone that can't make phone calls and doesn't have a $70/month fee. It can surf (802.11), run apps from the app store, and play movies and music. It costs $70 more than the same sized ipod nano. I think it is a reasonable addition to the product line.
I just tried it myself and uTorrent does give me better transfer speeds than Transmission (~80kb/s vs. ~60kb/s). It's not much and I tend to like Transmission more because it's Open Source but I wonder why there is such a difference.
I am hacking on stuff. Alone, with Glenn Gould playing "The Well Tempered Clavier" in my headphones.
Websites, of course. The real question is "What is supposed to replace advertising" because web advertising doesn't work very well. My guess: Rich non-media people like George Soros will bankroll news organizations. This already happens with some small political magazines.
This would be a lot easier if EVERYTHING that you've ever done is stored in your home directory because you can't write anywhere else (and neither can apps you're running) as your own user. On Windows this is a problem because sometimes apps write to the application folder in Program Files, then there are registry changes, sometimes stuff is stored in Application Data, and some stuff is stored in hidden directories that are, by default, invisible.

I've moved the entire home directory between installs of different versions of linux distributions and between entirely different distributions with only minor issues (related mostly to an old format of a config file not being recognized by the newer application). I've had the same .opera directory for years.

Running applications in their own VM is a good idea for security. It's a good idea to work around system and file management deficiencies in the operating system and the application itself also.
"I've found three ways to combine any proprietary work with GPL and other Free Software, without a need to give away any source code, even when the Free part is under the new and most rigorous GPL3 license."

What on Earth is he talking about? I this was true, wouldn't it be completely subverting all the copyleft licenses? This is dropped completely as a side-thought, but isn't it rather disquieting and completely against everything else he stands for in this article? Have I misunderstood something?
Where did the "Stupid" come from?
When we're done with this we need to reclaim "organic" too. Non-organic vegetables indeed!
OpenStreetMap grows, spawns ecosystem
Ask HN: Email Software for the Enterprise
Email overload is a nightmare. Corporate email software (e.g. MS Exchange-Outlook) does a mediocre job of organizing large volumes of email. I have an idea for creating an email server-client suite that would automatically organize your email. But even if I create something that beats Exchange-Outlook hands down, most large companies probably won't buy their email software from a young startup. And a small company won't have much of an email overload problem.

My current plan is to sell to startups, and hope that some of these will grow to be large companies, and thus large customers. Once I have a few major customers, my startup will have the legitimacy to be able to sell software to the likes of GE. Any thoughts on this plan?

Has anyone here been successful in selling software to enterprise customers? If yes, how did you overcome the 'startup legitimacy' issue?

Is there anyone here who works in the IT department for a medium or large sized company, and has bought software from a startup? What would be your major concerns about buying software from a startup?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

PS: I have already thought about creating email software for the consumer market, but my ideas about self-organizing email would work much better in the context of corporate email.
The ImJustCreative Branding Story - Part 2 - Logo Design
Now the tricky part. Not to say that coming up with a decent relevant name isn’t tricky, because it most certainly is. But as a designer, creating your own logo design can be a challenging task, it’s a precious challenge.
the guys at kluster.com have started something like this up, named unsuprisingly http://namethis.com/name_this/
I'm not sure you're aware of just how much fraud is perpetrated on the Internet.

You're also probably completely underestimating how common these attacks are - believe me, phishers use these attacks. They also use attacks many times more sophisticated. No attack is ever 1 in a million. If there is a loophole then a whole network of phishers will just on it very quickly.

The cost of this fraud is massive and it costs individuals and economies a lot of money.
Communicating to erlang from Ruby
"study commissioned by __The Internet Advertising Bureau__ and completed by Internet market research firm __Nielsen Online__ has demonstrated the strength of brand building online."

So basically two companies which rely upon the value of online branding have published a study which says online branding works ?
Its interesting to me that he's not making eye contact. Does that project confidence ("I don't need to look at you to know that I've got your attention"), or am I overthinking this?
Its out on DVD.
> Most people were already treating open source licenses as if they were enforceable, so nothing has changed for them.

If they're aware of it. There are lots of companies out there using GPL in their code not realising what the implications are.
I read a ton of different things including everything mentioned thus far and found the online tutorial written by Guido to be the most beneficial.
Worth noting this is a Front End for LLVM in Ruby - not a Ruby interpreter... Still interesting though.
Isn't that how it worked before the modern advertising industry?
I think "10. Know What Success Really Means" is awesome. Truly shows what a man he is.
So "the rock solid foundation" of math is not the real world, but rather sets of self-consistent axioms.

You're mostly right, but there's a fun twist. The self-consistency of e.g. Peano arithmetic (natural numbers) ultimately rests on our intuitions about the real world - it can't be proven starting from nothingness.
I'll be waiting in line for Best Buy in San Jose. I'm looking forward for some sales online too.
You heard it here first, folks: the iPod is not that great if you want your music player to play music. Sure, plenty of people enjoy it for just that, it plays the most common music formats, and has excellent integration with the largest music retailer including (in new models) the ability to purchase music from the device itself, but really, as a music player, it's half-baked. What it really needs is digital output, because when you're on the go, analog headphones just don't cut it. And they should ditch the database, because having a computer automatically manage your music is an unreasonable compromise of the absolute control the user must have over everything, always.

Sheesh, just say "I don't like it" next time instead of trumping up this pretentious garbage. You are not superior to anyone just because they had the gall to buy something that meets their needs instead of yours. If the functionality of the iPod is so unappealing to you that you see it as little more than a fashion accessory then chances are good that you're part of a niche market. Get over it instead of casting aspersions on everyone that isn't as picky as you. In other words: stop acting like a fanboy.
seconding Dive into Python.

(I'll have to check out the first one)
I couldn't help thinking some more about what you wrote.

The things I want to do, like reading a specific book, only make sense if I am alive. If I die, my desire to read the book disappears. I would not say I want to live in order to read this book. I would say I want to read this book if I am alive.

But I agree with you that people can sometimes have a sense of purpose, of things that should be accomplished in their life. I remember I had this a long time ago. I'm still working on what I then thought I should do. In the meantime I have lost the feeling I must absolutely live so that my work can be accomplished. But the fact this feeling exists does make me think there is something wrong with my argument.

You are right it is rational to pursue things you like or avoid things you dislike and following your instincts. At the same time your different instincts are often in contradiction, and you rationally chose which one to repress. So the fact you have an instinct doesn't mean you should never repress it, and having an instinct of survival doesn't necessarily mean it would be good to live forever.
Think Anatomy
I wish I could find where, but I remember Don Knuth saying that he didn't think that the multicore was really the only answer, only that its almost lazyness or hubris that has stopped innovation in other areas (he used nicer wording then that). Perhaps as a result of there being really no competition in architectures anymore?

Or maybe I dreamed it all up, and multicore it is !
Reminds me of http://str8.to/lock-stock-opening-scene
http://www.pythonchallenge.com/

Really fun and challenging projects from image and audio processing to network programming. Each level is a computing puzzle which you must solve to progress to the next level. Very helpful forum too, which you will be needing since you'd have no idea about the techniques (the relevant python libraries and such) involved at the start.
What I Would Miss if I Gave up the Mac
"How to think like a computer scientist" is a text for teaching you programming concepts using python as a framework.. From what I've seen of it, it's pretty good.
http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html

If you know all the programming concepts well - then go with Dive Into Python
Mike L has donated over 200 million to Waterloo, very impressive.

David R. Cheriton has made some large donations lately too.

Hopefully the funding can continue to help improve facilities and attract great people.