skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good article. Except for the "qualia" asides. Really there is no such thing as qualia. There is nothing to explain, there is no "explandum", so to speak. There is no such thing as "redness", there is only the fact that a human subject will use the word "red" to refer to an electromagnetic pulse of wavelength 600nm. The subject will say "red" to relate the wavelength, that is, we can predict the subject will say "red" if asked for the "color" of a pulse shone at the subject of wavelength 600nm. There is simply nothing to explain in qualia, it does not exist.

To steal from Dennett, one might as well ask about gremlins that appear in the cylinders of a combustion engine. We can explain the fact that wheels move in a combustion engine via the action of the cylinders, or, we can say it is the action of the cylinders plus the gremlins. Thinking of qualia as something that needs explaining is like thinking that your car's movement is predicated upon the gremlins produced in its cylinders. The gremlins do not exist, neither does redness, nor any other type of qualia. Period.
This article is dated February 2009. It's still 2008. Print is so messed up...
Happy new year. May the new year bring you everything you hope for -- for yourself, your family and your startup!
The 5 trillionth bit of Pi is zero.

computing hex digits of pi is fairly trivial, but decimal digits are not

For some definition of "fairly trivial", yes.

The Nth hexadecimal (or binary) digit of Pi can be computed in O(log N) space and O(N (log N)^2 log log N) time, while the best known algorithm for computing the Nth decimal digit requires O(N) space and O(N (log N)^2) time. This is due to Pi being expressible as a polylogarithm ladder in base 1/2 but not in base 1/10 (as far as we know).
I couldn't read it all, it was too infuriating.
There are people who still to this day use Newton for taking notes at meetings.
Some guy on Reddit thinks he has a solution see http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7mnmo/zune_fix_g...
Google Reader API is Coming Soon
happy new year!!! lets try and do some really cool things for 2009
If the problem were "Given an ordered number of events (birth) what is the probability distribution of the last event". Then yes, it would be 50/50.

But you're looking for at least one boy. If you had 1000 children, intuitively, the probability of at least one being a boy is huge.
to the amazon people? Good luck, I don't think it's possible, but it's the only option I can think of.
Enjoyment is one of those consequences. One might still feel that something has been lost or wasted when a species becomes extinct, if only because humans can no longer interact with them. This is aside from any more practical concerns of ecological health and unintended consequences.

So, while I largely share this viewpoint, I'm disappointed that there aren't at least a few dinosaurs around to observe. OTOH, what would we have given up if our ancestors were competing with even a few dinosaurs?

Notice, I'm not taking the position that nothing is lost when we change the environment. But, I do think that we should use the environment to further human goals, including the lesser goal of retaining some truly wild space for us to enjoy.

In part this is a reaction to the casually anti-human stance of some people who say things like "the environment would be better off without humans." We're part of the environment. We wouldn't be better off without humans.

Call me a "speciest", but for now, I see no reason why we shouldn't dominate other species (remaining aware of a sliding scale of intelligence and suffering), as long as it's not likely to be suicidal.
Nope. It returns wordpress.com/tag/friendly-atheist/.

Note that if you delete your searchWiki changes, it will revert to the original order.
Or, in hopefully more common cases, they do the responsible thing and move out themselves at the end of the lease term, without going through the legal process of eviction.
Yup, 4 :) (for duckduckgo.com & gabrielweinberg.com)
How to figure out if a job candidate is a good fit for your startup
This is definitely the post to read if you want a good perspective of what's really going on. I don't have any firsthand knowledge, but around this time every year MSFT seems to do a reorg, which can cause a lot of people to have to find new roles internally (which most people do every 3-4 years anyway). I suspect that internal roles will be more difficult to find, and a percentage of the internal job seekers will eventually run out of time and will quietly leave the company. But I highly doubt they will come out and announce a blanket 17% cut on 1/15 - just doesn't make any sense.
Think Differently
How about: #7D9
I have no problem with a program designed to subsidize housing for people with tax dollars. If the democracy decides that people with attributes x, y, and z deserve a $2000/month housing subsidy, that's fine. It's no different than the subsidy given to mortgage debtors (tax breaks), parents (the child tax credit), electric car owners (tax credit), student loan debtors (student loan interest deduction), farmers (direct subsidy), etc., etc.

But consider how paternalistic any of these programs are compared to simply giving the person cash to spend on whatever he/she wants.

Also, the above programs are taxpayer subsidized so the burden is distributed across all taxpayers. Rent control, on the other hand, screws over the building owners only, effectively making a single building owner personally provide a $1000+ subsidy to a hundreds of people. Compared to a broad, taxpayer-subsidized program, this is equivalent to a 70% additional tax just on landlords, this is on top of that person's fair share of income and payroll tax already being paid!

The biggest problem, though, is the distortion caused by rent control... which causes all of the problems in my above post.

To make obvious the issue of price controls leading to shortages, consider this: During the 1970s when Nixon instituted price controls on gas at the pump, there were massive lines outside gas stations. This was not due to the "evil Arabs" withholding gas. It was due to the price controls: People who would have decided to carpool or walk if the price had been at market price decided to buy gas at Nixon's price. This led to huge lines.
F# News and Resources
A sure sign of dead wood is when people deny any dead wood exists.
AT AN early morning hour
On the last night of the year
The Zune did sit and cower
For it knew its end was near

The Zune was cold and tired
And although it was un-wired
It had no friends to squirt
No friends to be inspired
And it feared the end would hurt

But when the clock ticked "Two"
A byte did move; a bit was flipped
The program shuddered; then it tripped
The old brown Zune was through

Thirty gigabytes are soon made full
Thirty gigabytes are what it's got
Thirty gigabytes are quite a lot
Thirty gigabytes of cotton wool

The Zune has passed; it took a fall
The music's stopped
the stock has dropped
It never "Played for sure" at all

We wonder where is Balmer
And imagine that he's ranting
And raving at his crew
They wish he would be calmer
And stop his sweaty panting
Oh look! He's thrown his shoe!
Only unprofitable if you decide that everyone deserves the latest, greatest, cutting-edge medical care.

Healthcare prices have come way down in the past two decades, the issue is that nobody wants 1990 level care, which could be administered at a fraction of the price of delivering all of the latest advancements.

The "healthcare costs are rising" meme is false. It's like saying "the price of supercomputers is rising". In non-inflation-adjusted dollars, the top-end supercomputer from IBM costs more than the top-end supercomputer from IBM cost 10 years ago, but the price per unit of computation has gone way down.

Healthcare prices have done the same thing, but everyone wants the best possible at all times.

(I want this too, but at least I try to appreciate that what I'm getting today is significantly better than 10 years ago)
HNY HN!
Don't make the mistake Manhattan or NYC with the New York Metro area (used in your link).

Manhattan: 1.6M people, 23 sq mi, ~70K/sq mi (more than double #1 on the list)

NYC: 8.3M, 305 sq mi, ~27K/sq mi (would be #2 on that list)

NY Metro: 17.8M, 8700 sq mi, 2K/sq mi

So while NY Metro could definitely use more housing, you're talking about CT farmland, the Poconos, Hudson county, etc.
Sure. As long as you submit your version of our traditional song of "I'm a lumberjack" on YouTube, wear the funny hat, and learn Lisp, you're as welcome as anybody else. Oh yes, there's the monthly dues. You can just send them to me and I'll hook you up.

Just kidding. I think the only requirement is to be interesting, but judging by some of my posts, perhaps even that is not required.

Welcome aboard!
Do you happen to have a list of these?
I'd like to mention this is from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/toadeater. I forgot to show it was taken from there.
You would be, as long as you don't say "it's therefore unlikely the fifth child is a boy".
A thread full of Zune users? So that's why there are so few messages ;-)

Now, seriously, that's a sign of pretty bad QA to let the device almost brick itself (there is the hard reset fix) because of a buggy firmware update.
Gotta admit that's pretty much what "a product marketing executive for VeriSign's SSL business unit" should say in a damage control mode.
One HN-relevant Picasso quote. . .

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

and one that always cheers me up since I make more logic errors than anyone I know. . .

I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

--Pablo Picasso
people are motivated by the "reward" their efforts may reap them. For some people this "reward" is money or power, for others it may be acceptance from peers or loved ones,
for the plumber it was the ability to take care of his family.
US long-term treasuries are the ultimate bubble. When that one pops, history will be decided.
Ask HN: New Years Resolutions?
Got a resolution you want to share?
Steganography made simple
> Profit is the creation of value. If there's no profit, then there's no value added.

I hope you mean profit in the non monetary sense then. ie profit meaning to increase someones standard of living?

Charitable workers don't make any money and I'd say they add alot of value to other peoples lives.
http://s.naurunappula.com/0/244/425/459232.jpg
nice story.
My resolutions:

Start an OSS project.
Learn and use a new programming language in a project.
Keep up my current pace at the gym.
Write more.

No specific metrics and nothing too ambitious, I guess. :)
unprofitable to insure

It is not possible for someone to be unprofitable to insure. Why do you think it could be?

If you are finding your bets unprofitable, try changing the amounts that you are betting.
Where is the definitive place to assess ones pagerank?

edit:

http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

Looks like Mibbit is a 7 :)
Most people who fly a lot do so for work, so they tend to use that otherwise lost time to work rather than sit back and watch movies. Something that's good for typing is better for work, namely a laptop or blackberry.

I'm also very skeptical about the battery life lasting long enough. Every Apple portable device I've had has sucked battery much too fast to last on long trips.
This isn't comet at all and it is pretty inefficient. The script uses zero of YOUR server resources but some server somewhere is getting absolutely slammed. I made a chat application using this method thta allowd you to share photos as well. Worked reasonably well on a very small scale but it certainly is not comet.
Laptop with Three collapsible Screens.
I realize that; Dagney's railroad skillz are what give Rand's fantasy men a boner, and vice versa for Galt. I totally understand that, and have similar tastes. John Galt is the ideal, but Carmack comes pretty close, I'd expect. Even if his reasoning isn't perfect, I suspect the rest of his resume would make up for that.

Don't know Adi.
drop database <failed company>
Thank you. That's an excellent recipe. I just made the soup and it was very delicious. A lot of work, but it's worth it.
Yea. He's got around 2-3% of Tesco. He purchased shares back in 2006/2007 though.

Not sure what he's done since.
Does this mean they're renaming Windows 7 to Windows 5.81?

In all seriousness, that's a sign of the times. I'm actually interested to see what happens. Never before have so many programmers, developers, and IT people been in the job hunt at once. So with this flood of available staff, there is bound to be something interesting to come out of it. And I expect YC's next round of funding startups will have a record number of applicants.
No, it isn't. You're making the huge assumption that both parties are equal in the exchange and one party isn't using force on the other. Again, typical libertarian fantasy assumes everyone is nice, wake up, they aren't.
This sounds interesting. Where can I learn more?
"No more terrorist attacks" - I certainly wish that for everyone. India has seen a few this year, and hopefully next year will be a peaceful one.

Happy New Year to everyone here at HN. Thanks for all the submissions, the great reads, the intellectual conversations, and the camaraderie in general. Looking forward to a lot more of those next year.

My Wishes -

1. We all find a way to slow down and find ourselves

2. Everyone's wishes to come true, everyone's NY resolutions to be successful

3. Friends, and success to everyone

Cheers!
3rd Eye Blind's Semi-Charmed Life was the song of the summer; and while this doesn't classify as a tech project, it was making Asprin (acetylsalicylic acid) with a friend for my 12th grade chem project.
As Putin said to Sarkozy, you have a point there :)
That's just as bad as "never eat on an empty stomach."
Beyond the obvious issue of over-population, two problems occur to me:

1) The human brain can only record up to about 200 years or so worth of data, so, beyond that, it cannot really store memories, so people might live to be say, 500, but the continuity of the individual would disappear. (Frank Rosenblatt of the Rosenblatt perceptron estimated that 200 year number, by the way.) Living so long one cannot recall who one once was seems a dubious proposition at best.

2) Evolution works by successive generations. If people live so long that they do not have a need to reproduce very often, then interesting evolutionary consequences will arise that I can only dimly speculate on. Seems like while the humans are in a blissful state of ageless biological stasis, other species will still be evolving, say, dolphins evolving opposable thumbs, or the like, and ultimately, humans will become trapped in a time-warp, biologically speaking. They won't evolve, but other species will. They may be sentient (e.g. chimpanzees, dolphins, even highly evolved mollusks and the like perhaps), or, they may be non-sentient, like viruses and the like. If we stop evolving, we will eventually go extinct, simple as that. Oh, and, uh, sex, Yeah, if there is no more need to reproduce, we will lose our sex drive. We could still replicate ourselves via cloning, but that whole copulation bit, that will be over.

So, basically to sum up, I see an ageless society as vastly over-populated, in 'Soylent Green' proportions, with people not even having a sense of memories about who they are as individuals. People stop f*king, since there is no more evolutionary impetus for that, and eventually we are replaced by viruses, sentient mollusks, or both.

What the anti-aging people will have to come to realize is that only the gene is immortal, her carriers are not, and if they try to be, the gene will still win in the end.
Is consciousness important for artificial intelligence?
Eviction is the alternative to rent control in the cases where rent control matters - if the tenant can't afford market rates, then they get evicted.

If you "can't afford" a $1,000 computer, do you go without a computer?
Malcolm Gladwell on meaningful work and curiosity
Nope: http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp
Wikinvest Stock Charts Find Their Way Onto USAToday.com and Forbes.com
"Something I've always wondered about- is there no value in failed results?"

Peter Norvig has some great comments on the problem of NOT communicating failed results in his article on interpreting research.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
yep, my yet unmarketed shellshadow.com is from 2 to 3 now. 2009, the year of inflation ;)
This story maintains its value whether fact or fiction.
Over the past 2 years most of my durable goods purchases where though Amazon. With amazon prime it's free 2 day shipping on most things which is fast enough that I don't really care. With a low base price, zero shipping costs, and no sales tax makes buying brand names online a lot cheaper and I don't need to drive anywhere so it saves me a lot of time. On top of all of that I can research stuff online so I don't have to worry about buying junk with a nice package.

In the long run I think online shopping is going to win as long as shipping costs stay low enough. Delivery costs relate to the number of packages drooped off in the same area so they should drop as online delivery becomes more popular. Toss in all the people who use catalogs and I expect a significant portion of purchases don't require wondering though a physical store.
http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denne...

That is an amazon link to Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", where he deals with consciousness, qualia, and so forth. Dennet's personal website is at: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm

By the way, I myself am not a philosopher, I am a QA engineer, so it is not like I have a "stake" in this whole topic, but I just like Dennett's approach to it, which is more sane than some others.
Does the 360 really have a terrible reputation right now? I rarely hear about RRoD problems anymore in the sphere these days.
25C3: MD5 collisions crack CA certificate
What's with all the MSFT employees speculating about the companies private business on a public blog's comment forum? Maybe they should start by firing those folks.
Ask HN: Favorite Books or Articles about Economics?
I notice quite a few threads here with rather divergent opinions about economic theory, so I thought I'd ask the general question for all readers, what writings about economics do you recommend for a nonspecialist? I'm particularly eager to find readable basic expositions of economics that presuppose knowledge of calculus. One example I have found is

http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechBOOK:2005.002

and I would be happy to hear about more, as I haven't committed myself to any one approach to economics as I try to self-educate in that subject.
It's still 2008 here, you insensitive clod :)
2) Evolution works by successive generations. If people live so long that they do not have a need to reproduce very often, then interesting evolutionary consequences will arise that I can only dimly speculate on. Seems like while the humans are in a blissful state of ageless biological stasis, other species will still be evolving

Being immortal does not prevent an individual from reproducing. If they did breed, the future-evolved species spawned from them would simply have antique hardware hanging around.
Original title: The Mob Wars War Is Over
No changes for my wesite :(...I guess I need more link development and more updates to the site.
A Case Study of Scalability Related "Out of memory" Crash in Erlang
Everybody wants to live in the future.

IIRC when a magazine has "February 2009" on the cover, it really means "take this off the newsstand by March 2009".
I don't think that reason (males die younger) explains it.

Although women may live longer they lose their ability to reproduce earlier so I would expect more girls than boys.
From 3 to a 4 although another site I maintain stayed a 3 so it wasn't a universal jump.
An Introduction to Vergangenheitsbewältigung
Why would the investors of P.E. continue to give up 2% in a deflationary environment when it could be year before the markets rise again?
We're not trying to explain how wheels move in a combustion engine. A functioning brain is not predicated upon qualia, which is why it's so mysterious. (See: zombies.)

I think the problem is that qualia don't have any place in existing models of our world. And yet we experience them (at least, I do). That's bizarre, and suggests our models aren't quite right.
Hundreds of Israeli Websites Hacked in 'Propaganda War'
The issue isn't with the absence of mouse gestures; it's with the absence of link targets.
Don't be bashful; hacker mythology is more misunderstood than it has ever been, which is what makes it so interesting. We are all part of the elephant here and while many come and go the myth will remain ever-changing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Men_and_an_Elephant
Wikipedia's new plea for donations stirs skepticism
Oy Vey, Israeli VCs Exceptionally Gloomy on 2009
Worlds.com patent suit draws widespread anger, examples of earlier virtual worlds
2 of the justin.tv founders were kiko founders.
There are no gremlins, but there is combustion happening in the cylinders. Dennett's Consciousness Explained is like your above explanation of internal combustion engines. Your explanation mentions combustion but is missing details about how the resulting pressure and forces are channeled. His explanation is missing essential details as well.

There are no gremlins. There are laws of physics. There are facts of molecular biology. We don't know all of these things yet. I think it's premature to declare that "there's nothing to explain" until we know more about the brain.

I suspect we're like Galileo if he were confronted with an internal combustion engine. He might be able to deduce that it's all just physical phenomena, but he wouldn't even know all of the physical laws a team of engineers would use to design the thing.
No, I live in the real world where unrestrained free trade is bad because people seeking profit are not inherently good when they acquire too much power. See Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller and some history about why we started trust busting in the first place.

Your view that the free market works wonderfully if left alone is simply naive. The real world is simply more complex than that.

In fact, your belief that there even is such a thing as a free market is naive and ignores the very real fact that corruption is inevitable and businesses seek out regulation to protect themselves from competitors destroying the very free market they so claim to love. Any truly free market is simply a temporary state of existence destined to die as soon as corruption takes hold, which it always does.
Is OpenOffice 'profoundly sick'?
I think it actually happened a few days ago. I noticed a jump last week.
I had a similar experience as an undergraduate, except that I didn't get the marks: I was taking a course on differential equations, and one of the final exam questions was to demonstrate that a solution existed to a given system.

I gave a very elegant non-constructive proof which showed that a solution existed without giving any hint of what the solution was -- but the instructor expected students to provide a solution. I ended up deciding that it wasn't worth the effort of formally appealing the grade, but I still think that I should have gotten the marks -- it wasn't my fault that the exam didn't ask the question the instructor intended to ask.
Rumor Watch: New Mac mini go for launch
went from a 7 to a 4. wtf? i blame my bbPress forums, which I didn't realize for a while didnt no follow links until i hacked the theme a bit to no follow.
Britain to outsource big brother monitoring to private companies
I would be extremely surprised if they had that much dead wood.

...

when people deny any dead wood exists.
I want to second this --- I don't like working in places that are exclusionary, that privilege gender (or, say, ethnicity0 above talent. It's not about the eye candy. Generally places that you'd only want to work if you were male are not places I want to work.