skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's the nature of K-complexity. If you don't understand, I'd suggest (in all humility and seriousness) pondering the nature of TMs and K-complexity further.

Some time spent surfing through the Mandelbrot set can be enlightening, as a more concrete example. Remember, no matter what you see in Fractint (or your choice of fractal generator), the K-complexity of the Mandelbrot set is very, very low. (Not quite as small as the Mandelbrot-generation process alone because you also need to describe the coloring algorithm, but that's not that much either.) But, to uniquely identify the image you are looking at to someone else, you must transmit not just the Mandelbrot generation routines, but also the coordinates you are looking at, or a description of the routine you used to get there. This can easily be larger than the rather small Mandelbrot algorithm. (It's easy to lose track of how deep you are in the M-set, without realizing that your computer is chugging away on computations involving thousands of significant digits...)

This is exponentially (super-exponentially?) more true to pick out a particular piece of a particular universe from a TM simulating all possible string theory universes. String theory may be simple (or may not be), by the time you're done identifying which of the 10^120 vacuum states you want to deal with (~400 bits right there), which initial conditions you want to deal with (no idea what that would take), and where in space and time you wish to point at (many thousands of bits minimum, no known upper limit), you can easily exceed the size of the part of the TM that describes the physics itself.

It might be helpful to try to forget everything you know about "complexity"; the English meaning of the word misleads your mathematical intuition. K-complexity is really something completely different (as is part of Elizier's point), and, frankly, it's much less useful than it seems at first blush. It's part of the wild world of Turing Machines, which can not be tamed or understood by any finite being. (And it doesn't really help that you can't prove if you have the optimal TM for a given result.)

It may also help to intuitively consider the difficulty of "pointing" at something, as in the essay. It is easy to gesticulate wildly at the Earth, from where you sit now. It is far, far harder to unambiguously specify which protozoan you are talking about right now. The part of the description that filters through the near-infinite possibilities to uniquely identify the topic of interest can be very, very large, and can easily exceed the size of the specification of "all possible topics of interest".
ezmobius is awesome, but be careful with engineyard

I've known several startups that got burned but lots of downtime and performance issues. Many times their sites were taken down due to either system issues or other customers impacting their database (mysql cluster is shared), filesystem (shared gfs), or load balancer.

A couple friends' companies have left - after a week of downtime every day.

A couple are still there, and are still impacted regularly. On the plus side the people at EY are really smart - and they have made it so the companies have to know almost nothing about how to run a rails site. (capistrano, mysql cluster, mongrel setup, load balancing, shared filesystem is handled for you - that is what you are paying for)

They have a public status blog at:

http://engineyard.wordpress.com/

You can read through the issues that the clusters EY0# have had.

I think EY will improve in time, but they have issues currently that make it not quite the "sure bet" that it will be.
Hacker news + lolcats = Lol News
...but you will have needed to focus and raise your game to get one?
> "The freakonomics guys are proud of their non-technical background but I find this lack of understanding of a game theory in such an important topic absolutely unforgivably stupid."

The ad hominem attack is unnecessary here. While Dubner is not an economist, Steven Levitt (the other Freakonomics author) is not only an economics PhD, but also a winner of the John Bates Clark medal. In short, he's one of the best economists out there.
Yes, and every single one of them is a typical cliche "politics is so disgusting, I won't even vote" line that is so typical these days.

I do not encourage people to vote. If you do not feel strongly to vote, thank you for making my vote count for more.
Huh! I'd always hoped Drupal would make something like this. Best of luck.

I don't have many ideas regarding the newspaper world. NowPublic has that all nailed. Find whatever niche you can that they haven't taken.

Oh, and welcome to Hacker News. Do we do welcomes here? I'm not sure. Welcome anyway.
Why? You couldn't find a single person among the 8 or so that are running for president you agreed with? Who isn't represented by a 3rd party - there is everything from libertarian to communist running on the ballot. Look beyond the front 2 parties if you don't like them.
I always wondered what a government would look like if everyone could decide for theirselves where to go, say, 50% of their taxes.
1. I want to be seeing a screenshot(s) on the front page.

2. I want you to make it clear why I shouldn't use Wordpress.

3. The pages on the site are all samey. The general layout and theme are quite nice, but you need to make it flow better. Screenshots, etc.

On the monetization front.. skip all the technical jargon and sell your services as a company that can bring a newspaper on to the Web (or allow a newspaper stuck with antiquated Web software - and there are lots around - to enter the 21st century). There could be quite a few lucrative consultancy gigs in getting newspapers online or migrating their existing sites into working with your system.
Elves, definitely elves.
It's relatively common outside of the US. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Countries_usi...
Open source object store database for Java/Ruby/Python
I agree with Matt, if you could simplify the whole experience of publishing an online newspaper or magazine and make it a hosted solution, I think you could make a killing. I know for a fact several of my previous clients would have paid a nice premium for something like this.
Your site administration is very confusing.

What makes Wordpress so popular today is their intuitive admin interface. You can right away manage the content. I think they have it right, the people managing the content vs the people managing the design / layout are two entirely different sets of people.

There are tons of Wordpress themes that offer the Magazine/Newspaper layout. So what is your differentiation factor?
This mirrors my experience with XMPP implementations. It honest to god is a LOT more work than it's worth. If you need a scalable messaging system, hook up a mature JMS implementation (e.g. OpenMQ - search for the article where they got that running with linear speedup over 512 nodes on EC2), and put a STOMP connector at the front for non-java clients.
It isn't ready for prime-time yet, but unlike other object databases, the licensing is clear (though not ideal IMHO--AGPL3) and it's under active development.

Here's the Github repo:
http://github.com/10gen/mongo/tree/master

And the architecture:
http://www.10gen.com/wiki/db.guide.02_architecture
You obviously know nothing about economics, but if you're getting your ideas from the business section of a newspaper that's understandable.
Maybe you should look at the Colbert segment where he interviews the real Socialist candidate, ie the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America, and see if he thinks Obama's plan is socialist.
Wow, you somehow managed to discredit the Democrats' whole platform there. Which side are you on again?
Fines or jail time are merely the better alternative once one has decided to non-comply. If one nonviolently non-complies with the state's demands to pay taxes they will likely fine her. If she refuses to pay the fine they will likely come knocking with armed men. If she further refuses the authority of the armed men to arrest her then the only recourse that the state has is to perform an act of aggression against her. It is true that they might drag her to jail--subduing her, a non-violent person, in the process. This is hardly what I would call humane. Anyways now she is in jail and still believes the state to have no authority over her. What recourse does she have to get out without capitulating to the state's authority over her? If she attempts escape she will be severely punished or killed. It is easier for her to fall in line and listen to the state than disobey simply because the consequences of choosing alternatives are much, much worse.

Her death could actually happen a variety of ways but I only wanted to go off the example you mentioned. If you need further clarification I mention this topic and how it relates to voting here http://is.gd/3WIh

I don't want to go to jail. What is the alternative to spending years in jail? Paying 30% of my income? It is better than prison, but we ought to call this act of aggression what it really is--theft. Tax is simply a euphemism for theft, in my mind. And not to derail the topic you mentioned, but I would ask you to consider what good taxes have ever done besides making powerful people more powerful and financing wars where we justify the killing of innocents for some elusive greater good.

Thanks for your question.
+1

It's weird how ideas come up at the same time. I was reading the Santa Cruz Sentinel website, and thought how crappy their online offering was.

This is needed and is a nice niche market.
Bejeweled Creator Spills Secrets of Addictive Games
How do you test your web app in the various browsers?
Considering that most web apps need to be tested in many different browsers, each spanning multiple versions, how do you go about that? Do you have a particular workflow? Any tips that others might find useful?
-Because so much of society is regressive as it is. Considering that the guys who live around me who are stock brokers pay 28% capital gains tax for trading day in and day out rather than the 36% income tax that I have to pay, and they have to pay less for SS and Medicare as is than their secretaries.

-I have no fear of losing the 2nd amendment rights, after the supreme court ruling this year, and the NRA strength every year, it just isn't going to happen. This is FUD and even Obama himself hasn't said that in MONTHS.

-Does it seem like a bad idea? To me healthcare isn't a cost that is to be minimized, it is a beneifit to be maximized. That is really the difference between the two plans. Obama thinks everyone should have healthcare, McCain thinks we should spend less. Problem is, under McCain total cost of healthcare spending would be less, but per individual it would be higher.

And I really don't understand why anyone is allowed to NOT have insurance in this country. A lot of 20 y/o healthy adults have no insurance to avoid paying the premium. Fine, but when you are 50 they can get coverage? You not only have to spread the risk out among the people, but along their entire life. I'm not allowed to take car insurance out for only the rainy days, why are you allowed to take out health care insurance when you pick and choose, and the familes who plug along year after year with it get stuck with a higher bill each month?

-The state of alaska didn't buy that land from canada, the United States federal government did and gave it to alaska. Yet the state gets to charge a tax that raises the price for fuel for the rest of us. It was the lower 48's money that bought the oil, and it is the lower 48's money that is subsidizing the state today.
Plus jetting over to Europe and spending the money outside of our economy is a lot easier for the top 1% than the bottom 99.

It makes a lot more sense for anyone who owns a business to pay an extra 3% tax on a better economy, than save a little on taxes in exchange for a terrible economy. It seems like cutting your nose to spite your face.

The average guy making $300,000 a year and with a million dollars in the stock market saved $80,000 in taxes over the last 8 years, and lost $400,000 in the stock market in the last 2 months. Not a great trade.
The probability that your vote makes any difference is negligible.

On any given issue, my vote cancels out a vote on the other side.

There is no conflict between these two statements, but only one is relevant to a rational decision to vote. "Canceling" a vote is irrelevant unless the margin of victory is ~1 vote. When there are ~10^6-10^7 voters in a typical state, the probability that this is the case is, alas, << 1.
Yes. And Apple's made it a point to really nitpick at themselves.

I remember loving Tiger when I used it last year for a month. Now I have Leopard on my MacBook, and Tiger seems incredibly worse than it - largely because it is. I'd love to hope that the things Snow Leopard improves on are things that outdate Leopard similarly.
http://browsershots.org

An amazing and free tool. I also do manual testing in the common versions of major browsers. If I don't have a system to run that browser, I just find a friend to borrow from for an hour or so.
Roads, airports, the internet, at a minimum, not to mention many other technologies. Taxes bought the rest of this country after the initial settlement. Taxes save thousands of people who otherwise would not be able to pay for medical care.

Although if you want to save 30% on taxes, and let thousands of innocent people who do not have as much money as you die at the doors of a hospital they can't afford - you can definitely keep the righteous tone you have going without one hint of irony.

Taxes are a necessary evil, the only question is to what extend we should tax ourselves.
Then what does that make McCain's $5,000 health care tax credit?
It isn't an ad hominem. It may be an insult attached to an argument, but it isn't an argument by attacking a person. In the freakonomics book and the blog they do like to play the bumbling economist who doesn't understand all that maths role.
Yeah I'm not sure the last 2 elections actually went with the popular vote. Was voting in the last 2 elections worthwhile? I'm not convinced.
No because you are a leach off the state. Did you go to public school here? Have you ever been to a hospital? Driven on a road? Used our power grid? Used the internet?

Of course you have, so "living peacefully" in the country is about as OK as some guy I don't know "living peacefully" in my basement. Sure, he isn't hurting me, but that doesn't mean he isn't a thief. And while you try to call taxes theft, the idea that you would not pay taxes but still enjoy the services the government gives (no matter how hard you try, you can not escape present or past use), is definitely theft. The fact that you try to make yourself sound innocent by ensuring you won't kill anyone doing THEIR job is laughable. Is it ok to rob a bank as long as you do it peacefully?
"How McCain/Palin stole the presidency even though they lost"
I think you're more right here than you realize.

The Putnam competition, in spite of being six hours long, is severely time limited: Each year, there are probably hundreds of people who could solve all 12 questions if only they had enough time, but only six people who manage to answer more than 8 or 9 questions within the time limit.

If you're going to solve Putnam questions in an average of 30 minutes or less (including carefully writing out the solutions) the only way to do it is by having flashes of insight. Working hard doesn't help, because there isn't enough time to work hard. Putnam winners are people who successfully apply Feynman's algorithm for problem solving: 1. Write down the problem. 2. Think hard. 3. Write down the answer. (Feynman, incidentally, was one of the first Putnam fellows.)

For a competition which is theoretically about mathematics, a shockingly large number of Putnam Fellows end up moving to a different field. I think this is the reason why: Mathematics is a very old field, where it's very hard to do anything without working hard. Putnam fellows by their nature tend to seek the instant gratification of finding simple and beautiful solutions to problems -- and so we're drawn away from mathematics and into more immature fields like computing.

Yes, Putnam fellows are smart -- but we're no more disposed towards hard work than anyone else.
Additionally to not knowing anything about economics, you know nothing of the yacht tax. As some one in the yacht industry, I can tell you it was devestating. And if you think the CEO of a yacht building company rakes in money like the yacht buyers - well you just haven't seen many of their homes. Realize we are competing with China on a significantly slimmer profit margin than your average startup, on a boom or bust industry with fickle buyers.

And nearly all boat yards are sole proprietor private enterprises, so their is no board to pay out to.

And there is no loophole in the tax code. Go to another country, buy a boat flagged their. Keep it outside US waters. Fly to it when you want to go on vacation. People rarely cruise in the US anyway, it is Bahamas, the Med, etc. The loop hole you are referring to if anything is flagging yourself as commercial vs private, and it has to do with income tax on charters - not the initial purchase.
> The Yacht tax didn't work because yacht owners found loopholes in the tax code such as declaring their yacht as a second home, etc.

The yacht tax was collected from US manufacturer and importerss, not the buyers, so it didn't matter what the buyers claimed.

The boat-building industry in the US took a huge hit. It turns out that rich folks can keep their boats overseas and poorer folks can do without. That didn't happen before the tax.

Maybe you don't think much of building boats but feel free to explain how losing their jobs did the US workers was good for them. They sure didn't like it.

> They pay the workers barely enough to live on while the board gets 30 times that amount. Maximize profits.

If you really believe that the workers are getting screwed, it's easy enough to set up a company that doesn't screw workers. If you're right, you'll get better workers, they'll make more money, and the money that you save by not paying "the board" can be used to undercut the "evil companies", driving them out of biz.

It doesn't take much money to prove that you're correct, but it does take the courage to risk your money. I'm sure that you're doing that right now, right?

BTW - feel free to name three companies whose profit is 30x the employee expense. (I'm making it easy - the profit can go to stockholders not on the board.) Include cites where we can verify.

> That logic is completely asinine and you know it.

It's asinine that folks will try to avoid taxes? Wowsers. It's asinine that folks will do less of things that are taxed? Better tell Congress that the taxes to discourage (their intended goal) and benefits to encourage (again, their intent) don't work.

> Read the damn business section of a newspaper sometime.

I do. That's where I read about the boat companies laying off workers. That's where I read about tax effects.

The boat workers preferred building boats to being unemployed; we know that because they could have "unemployed" themselves before they were laid-off.

Are they wrong?
What if I want to simply secede from the government entirely?

To your final point, though, I find this talk of emigration strange. Many people ask me this question and I concede that it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility for me. However, am I not petitioning for the same thing a voting population is? The difference I see is that I do not want to affect change through the apparatus of the state because I find it illegitimate. Instead I will try to affect change through non-violent means. I'll speak with you and try to convince you that non-violence is the way toward a peaceful and sustainable society. I will not use the barrel of a gun personally or by proxy(the police) to tell you or anyone else what to do. I will not get together with my friends to vote on what you must and mustn't do.

Be peaceful.
Most? 35% is ok but 40% is not? 5% is the difference between "limited government" and marxism?

If McCain had a plan to realisticly bring federal taxes down to 15% without a big deficit, I'd be all for it. But the reality is the Bush tax cuts are tax cuts without spending cuts.

Obama takes money from the rich and refunds it to the poor. Some call this buying their votes. Bush took out loans and gave the cash to the rich. Isn't that basically the same thing?
Voting for the President can seem meaningless, but the local elections are really decided by small margins. Our town of 60,000 often has mayoral races that have margins of less than a thousand. And that often has more of an impact on your daily life. Property taxes, local roads, local schools, zoning, parks, green acres conservation etc.
If that's what he's talking about, then we'd need many less then 500 bits: we might as well run the machine that enumerates every Turing machine, and then runs one step for the first n machines, then the first n+1 machines, etc. This is as much a multiverse as any.
> A selfish pussy is a cheapskate that would rather watch a person starve than spend one penny on food to feed him.

Since McCain spent far more feeding (and housing) other people than Obama and Biden combined....

Then again, that's true of conservatives vs liberals in the US - US conservatives give a larger percentage of their income to charity.

> The amount of money given to a charity does not translate into number of problems fixed or alleviated and you know that.

Is the same true of money taken by govt?
Maybe AMQP is the answer?
Expect as a libertarian too, you guys are the ones who sink our chances to ever enact any meaningful progress. There is no society that has ever existed without some form of taxation. If you want no taxes, than you want no government. Then you are anarchists, not libertarians. I have no problem with that, but don't lump us in with you. Small government is a lot different than no government.
Re: 1 and 3

Oops, the site is still in "open source project" mode, but I'll take your recommendations on when it comes time to put up a more marketing-oriented site.

> 2. I want you to make it clear why I shouldn't use Wordpress.

The same reasons why people still use full blown content management systems instead of WP. I won't rehash those (often subjective) arguments here, suffice to say that some people don't consider WP suitable for publishing newspapers and magazines. For me, I just follow where the users are.

But yes, maybe I will think up an essay of pros and cons versus Wordpress.
Am I leeching off the state or is the state leeching off its citizens? I did not go to public school, but the state still told my school what they must teach to be considered legitimate. I have been to a hospital. I have driven on a road in a car, on a motorcycle, on a moped, on a bicycle and I have even walked on roads. I am using the PG&E power grid as I type this. And, of course, I am using the internet to respond to your post.

I replied to this kind of thinking in another post in this comment thread, but I do not have a choice in the matter as to whose roads I use if I wish to go from place to another because they are monopolized by government. I would like it if the government did not have monopoly control over things, but I do not deny that they have control. It may be of some consolation to you that I pay and have paid taxes in the past. The government, in my mind, is simply "a gang of thieves writ large" as Murray Rothbard once said. They provide services but they can only do so by monopolizing the service they provide and _taking_ other peoples money to finance the administration of that service.

If you can rob a bank peacefully I would very much like to see that for the sake of argument.
A parallels installation (win XP) dedicated to only IE6&7, opera, windows safari, and FF2&3. Opera, safari, FF2&3 in OS X.

I just do it all manually - FF2&3 and safari usually have very little differences (if any), but opera and obviously IE sometimes have strange quirks.