skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I upvoted it (and read it, but the title actually did convey all the information that I cared about).
Why? Because I really like git and I think that for Perl development to move to git (and to have done such a careful/fantastic job of it) is impressive. I also like Perl, and it makes me happy to see it continue to develop and take advantage of the latest technology. Not becase it is cool, but because it is better (specifically referring to git).
Well done Garry and Sachin. I was always super impressed with how well you guys execute. Congratulations!
The thing is, even compiled C++ apps are no better when loading a bunch of shared libraries etc.

OpenOffice.. I'm looking at you! ;-)
A somewhat related book I recommend is The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose.
no worries woodsider

also you can check out a demo at http://www.simpleinvoices.org/demo if you don't have time to do the install

cheers

justin
they're not quite the same. if you raise an absurd amount of cash -- say $50mm on $500mm pre -- your bar for even a 2x return is over a billion dollars, eliminating virtually all your possible exits. especially in this environment.
Textecution Hopes To Put An End To Texting While Driving
One could make a reasonable argument that if their balance sheet was so tied up in sketchy mortgage assets that they were forced to meet margin calls when the market fell, then they weren't as solid as they seemed. Their problems started before they got in the car.

I realize that there's a bit of begging-the-question here, but even so, if you've borrowed a ton of money and secured it with "assets" of questionable value, then you're taking a risky bet. The accounting regulations didn't make the bet better or worse -- they just kicked the losers out of the game before they wanted to quit.
As well as Timothy Gowers (who is, yes, an absolutely first-rate mathematician and a very good expositor too), the PCM has a bunch of contributions from Terry Tao (blog at http://terrytao.wordpress.com/; http://terrytao.wordpress.com/?s=princeton+companion+to+math... to find pre-production versions of several of his PCM articles) who is also a Fields Medallist, a very good expositor, and a blogger.
Then you should know that there is a pretty good negative correlation between the availability of internet (and thus, fast, anonymous porn) and rape.
Violet Blue’s List of The Top Ten Sexy Geeks 2008
Cosma Shalizi's review is particularly good because (1) Shalizi knows a lot about the stuff Wolfram is writing about and (2) it is called "A rare blend of monster raving egomania and utter batshit insanity".
There is a section on that in their FAQ. If they see one of the telltale signs of a spoof they send you a confirmation email asking if you really posted. Sounds effective to me.
The point is to be a sort of Google algorithm for Twitter. This is plenty of data to at least get a very solid idea of who the top Tweeters are based on their connections, influence, and popularity.

Also, keep in mind he scraped the TOP Twitter users (those with X+ followers). A lot of Twitters tweets likely come from those under that threshold, saving time, storage space, and effort.
we did an order from www.printingblue.com/ and where happy with the cost and quality, lead time was a bit long - 10 days - but overall satisfied.
I just checked ModelMayhem. Wouldn't their growth be explained by the fact that a significant chunk of their content appear to be naked ladies?
What you say in your last statement is true and helps to clarify a subtle point. I tend to shove all of that stuff (logic, set theory, problems of undecidability, etc) into the nondescript box labeled "philosophy of mathematics." When I meant a field was "small," it was not meant to be pejorative. Philosophy of mathematics is a rich and productive field with many applications within its varied fields. The main problems I see are the ones described the article I linked, in that people attempt to apply the theorems to things like physics, politics, law, or postmodern philosophy.

Of course Goedel's theorems do not totally exist in a bubble that only contains arcane mathematical incantations. For instance, Goedel's theorems imply (like the halting problem) that you cannot create a compiler that would be able to determine whether a program will not terminate and reject it, by considering what happens when you feed it a Goedel statement. However, this problem is something that I would also classify under "philosophy of mathematics."

Also, I hope I did not provide any implication that my view (or any view, for that matter), is the final word on the subject. I'm not dead-set in my own beliefs on incompleteness and if you can provide a convincing argument of a rigorous, nonmathematical application of Goedels theorems, I'd be more than happy to change my mind.

There is considerable discussion as to what exactly the incompleteness theorems imply, and there are many eminent minds on the many different sides of the argument. For instance, I believe Stephen Hawking is somebody who believes that physics cannot ultimately be formulated into a final number of finite principles. Do I believe this to be a rigorous application of Goedel's incompleteness theorems? No. Do I believe that this can be applied to fields outside a relatively restricted problem space? No. Does this mean I'm right? Of course not.

As to your point about Strong AI, I don't want to open that can of worms in this thread. I'm not yet convinced that the human mind is equivalent to any finite state machine, so I'm afraid that we don't even agree upon its the basic premises. However, I would love to discuss it any time outside of the thread.
Online database of Theoretical Physics lectures
If you look at the rest of the site, they're not only against porn, but seem to be discouraging orgasm in general, based on the ideas of spiritual traditions such as Taoism.

While it's true that many traditions did advise this kind of thing, that usually would have been in the context of cultivating some kind of overall spiritual path. It's not something that would just be recommended to everyone in a blanket way. It seems to me the people in their forums who talk about struggling not to masturbate at all may be doing themselves more harm than good (at least, they could apply their energy to something other than trying to subdue a basic biological function). I think a lot of people persuaded by the message of this site are just indulging some aspect of their psychology that gives them a tendency toward self-denial, while buying into the notion that it's for some higher purpose.

It's important to distinguish between a habit and an addiction. It would be a difficult adjustment for me to live for two weeks without electricity, but I wouldn't consider myself to have an electricity "addiction". To qualify as an addiction, a habit would have to have additional characteristics: for example, escalating momentum, interfering with other life activities, being used as an escape from problems that were created by the addiction in the first place, and so on.

There's a tendency to use the most extreme examples as anecdotal evidence. Some people can have a glass of wine with dinner and it's not an issue, and some people (alcoholics) may ruin their lives in a matter of days after the first drink. But that's not a particularly strong argument for saying that no one should ever drink, just because some people may become alcoholics. You just have to carefully observe your own life and figure out how to make use of your energy in an appropriate way. Anyone who has a blanket prescription for everyone is peddling dogma.
If the RIAA's losing so much real money over this filesharing,. then the costs of paying an ISP to reduce it should pay back in droves.

... unless they're full of it.
You don't have to eval xml.
Interesting. I've done some consulting work for one of the companies that makes TV graphics visualization software (that does the flips, the crawls, the statshots, etc...), here in Tirol:

http://vizrt.com/
It's staring at me from my book shelf, laughing that I won't get around to starting it.
I think people are happy to see a project dump Perforce for git. Perl may be on the decline, but it is still a pretty significant free-software project.
A great example of a good use of screenshots is HN member pxlpshr's company Salt Lick Labs ( http://saltlicklabs.com/ ). He is only marketing the iPhone apps, but there is a level of polish that makes you want to see more, even though you know you don't actually need to read about peoples' horrible relationships or to catalog your own relationship endeavors.

The gaming company Blizzard is known for their delays in releasing games, but they are also more known for having the sharpest, most intuitive user interfaces and game play out there. Take this ideology into consideration when preparing a service like OverTrainer (something I'm actually interested in using). Build it to work, but don't show it until it makes people think, "Wow, I need to get involved n this product/service/community."
I'm surprised that Iron Sky hasn't come up. It's an online collaboration, and the trailer looks frickin' awesome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn4DW1uvsAE

From Wikipedia:

Iron Sky is produced in collaboration with an on-line community of film enthusiasts. At Wreck-a-Movie, everyone interested in chipping in with their ideas and creativity can read the tasks given to the community and take a shot (write an entry) at them.
I'm sure you've seen the menshealth version of this:
menshealth.genesant.com

Could give you some ideas... I use it and it's $5 a month.

They don't have an iphone version which is dumb, so you clearly rock their world there.

But they also have prebuilt routines that you can just start with. That would be easy for you to add.
Threads like these are the reason I adore hacker news sometimes.
It depends if he wants to focus on a more broad market or specifically at people looking to get bigger and weigh more. Overt-raining is a great way to build muscle fast without the use of drugs, focusing on a small amount of reps that make you over-exert yourself, lifting to "failure" on your last 2 sets.
Erlang has its roots in prolog (was originally built on top of prolog, actually..) Software Engineering Radio's episode 89 is a great listen for anyone interested in Erlang
congrats sir!
When I first moved to the Bay Area, my roommate told me that the best way to find good places to eat and drink was to go onto a foodie forum like Chowhound and say something along the lines of "At [X], I had the best [Y] I've ever had!" because before you know it, you would have dozens of responses saying how wrong you were and among those responses, you'd find the best places to get [Y].

Is this trolling? Probably. But now I have an extensive list of great Bay Area eateries.
Quite a few did not miss the crisis. Peter Schiff comes to mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

This isn't a question of economists focusing on things that were too abstract or that somehow these crises are just inherently unpredictable. This was caused by the widespread idea that you can legislate away economic problems e.g. 1% interest rates following the tech bubble. You can't subvert reality with clever accounting tricks. Eventually the chickens come home to roost.
start reading it tonight. it is an amazing book.
Stop respecting the predictions of economists. It is a social science that pretends to be a hard science, with disastrous results. Can anyone justify the efficient market hypothesis after the current crisis? This is all explained very well in The Black Swan.
All of them, or perhaps just the truly violent ones?
Where is Perl on the decline?

Oh, in terms of brightly-colored blogs... I get it.
I'm sure. I read 'emperor's new mind' and loved it for the most part. I have quite a bit of a backlog of books that are earlier in the queue before I get to it.

Which reminds me, we should consider the semantics of starting a science/math/etc book club dedicated to important books and concepts.
These companies are all really good, just make sure to select vinyl printing inks and not paper based stickers otherwise you may get some of the same issues. These companies are all fairly small so you will get really good service if you ask any questions:

http://contagiousgraphics.com/Stickers/stickers.html
http://stickerrobot.com/
http://vgkids.com/stickers.php
I signed up :) Good luck!
I'm a Linux
Why I Left Yahoo for a Startup
This is indeed what I use :)

I still have bad memories floating around in my head from when I used Firefox, though.
A crucial point in The Black Swam is that randomness is relative. Something that's random to you is not necessarily random to someone else (i.e. the dots in the sky were randomly distributed and unpredictable to many people a few thousand years ago.) It's all about how much knowledge you have about the system.

So don't listen to SOME economists, and keep in mind their track record of predictions. Not all economists are equally bad.
Boxee Will Soon Be Open To All
Investors, however, are very much influenced by whether a company has the potential to go public, and the availability of funding affects the number of startups that succeed.
The author laments about how America is a society that prefers to break things and then fix them later, the opposite of which should be to prevent things from breaking in the first place.

Ironic, considering that his solution to obesity is to tax unhealthy foods, which sounds very much like a bandaid solution to fix something that's already broken.

Why not suggest things to actually prevent obesity in the first place? Like fitness awareness campaigns bought to schools, health food awareness campaigns in corporate settings and so on, just to toss a few ideas up.
The purpose of mark-to-market exceptions are to allow temporary price volatility not to drastically impact a firm's balance sheet. The FASB rule specifies that it's an acceptable practice to suspend mark-to-market in "fire sale" conditions.

But the real issue is the flawed risk ratings on the MBSs. If your asset is AAA then it really shouldn't matter whether you are marking it to market or not, as it's supposed to be quite liquid, by definition, as there is supposed to be extremely little risk that its price will fall.

The reason the MBSs weren't liquid is because the ratings were incorrect and the market knew that -- perverse incentives from ratings agencies had led to this, as had the widespread belief (taken as an assumption by many foolish risk-managers and codified into pricing formulae) that housing prices could not fall.

If the MBSs had been properly rated, then mark-to-market would not have caused the firms holding them on their books to become insolvent, as capital adequacy requirements are based on the riskiness of the assets.

So while mark-to-market may have sped up the failure of those firms, the firms were already weakened due to their treatment (thanks to bad ratings) of risky debt as AAA.

In fact, a few months before things got really bad the SEC sent out a memo advising that the fire-sale provisions of the FASB rule regarding mark-to-market were not to be used, a decision which suggests either that the SEC was OK with some firms failing in the near future (unlikely) or that it believed that the ratings were generally accurate (even more unlikely). I've been told by some Wall Street experts that everybody knew that the ratings were BS. Hence the SEC's decision to send the memo was probably just intended not to telegraph the possibility of a future problem to avoid spooking the market in hopes that the problem would go away.

A few things to note: The regulatory trend is moving toward BASEL II which relies heavily on both mark-to-market accounting and third party ratings agency ratings. So the big regulatory question is, how can the perverse incentives that arose and led to the inaccurate ratings of MBSs be restrained? So far everyone is talking about banning the trading of x, y, and z and of limiting bonus pay, executive salaries, etc., but nobody is talking about the actual concrete perverse incentives (pressure on ratings firms to issue inaccurate ratings) that fed the whole mess.
Thank you. Just ordered.
Your right - there were a number of people predicting this, but when you had year on year growth, their voices seemed less relevant. I was guilty of this - I went to an Entrepreneurs dinner two years back where Jim Mellon, the guest speaker, basically told us that the economy was in for a huge downturn. But oddly enough, he was delivering his message in the wrong environment - all paid for dinner, swish restaurant, lots of nice wine - so I don't think we really registered what he was saying. He gave away free copies of his book, "Wake Up", and it now makes fairly prophetic reading.
This book looks awesome. Mathematics is so vast that as a student its hard to know what classes you should take, or even what the map of the territory looks like. That is one of the reasons I got frustrated with my pure math BS.

The Russian school put out some pretty massive volumes, like

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Its-Content-Methods-Meanin...

but I found those to be a little too caught up in the proposition/proof cycle to be useful as a guide to the uninitiated.
As my other comment perhaps makes clearer, I agree with you on the value of the understanding of the work. I forget that there are people who don't see the point in such things at all, so I forget to make clear that I am not one of them. What I disagree with the orthodox methods of trying to teach that understanding.

Would it be fair to ask you to prove your understanding and appreciation of Bob Marley by asking you to write an essay on him and then judge that essay based on whether it's contents matched up with what other people before you have said? It doesn't seem like that would help you understand if you didn't. It also takes away your own authority on whether your appreciation of the work is valid, which isn't educational at all.

I think your comment highlights the fact that it's normal to not "get" everything, too. That's something that seems to be disregarded in the curriculum, where everyone is supposed to get everything equally at the same time. If someone were to tell you their favorite albums were Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme, Legend, Pet Sounds, Thriller, Dark Side of The Moon, and Revolver, you wouldn't consider them a paragon of refinement so much as a liar. And yet, we're expecting something like that out of students by testing them this way.
Geeks, greeks and structured finance freaks
Intel Begins Shipping 160GB Solid State SATA Drives for Laptops
MBTA hacker case settled, hackers now working with MBTA
Good call. I've found that I'm using Hacker News a lot more since the downturn - perhaps a link between uncertainty and a desire for information. I'm wondering if this could be a factor in Hacker New's recent growth spurt (no puns intended).
Finding better models and understanding things at a deeper level is never a lost cause and even if we know that we can't find a complete set of axioms for all existing math theories, we still try to understand math better. For example, the string theory people are trying to find an answer for everything (and it seems to be much more complex than 42 :-p). In this context, David Hilber tried to do the same for math (namely find a set of axioms for all existing theories) and Gödel proved that this was a lost cause. Does Gödel's incompleteness theorem apply to physics as well? I can't really grasp it, but my intuition says it does - because why would the formal system of TEO have more simple properties than the formal systems for arithmetic or Turing machines...?
Well, the bad news (for me) is that you beat me to a very similar idea that I was planning to do. :)
No I'm sure it came about because of a tax increase!

(if taxes don't matter to investment decisions, then why not raise them to 99%?)

If you believe current taxes are right at the "sweet spot", why do you believe that?
Education is broken, Is "The Met" the solution?
Why couldn't taxing unhealthy foods be preventative? It's not as though only obese people are price sensitive. Nicholas Kristof at least thinks taxing can be very effective:

Let’s break for a quiz: What was the biggest health care breakthrough in the last 40 years in the United States? Heart bypasses? CAT scans and M.R.I.’s? New cancer treatments?

No, it was the cigarette tax. Every 10 percent price increase on cigarettes reduced sales by about 3 percent over all, and 7 percent among teenagers, according to the 2005 book “Prescription for a Healthy Nation.” Just the 1983 increase in the federal tax on cigarettes saved 40,000 lives per year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/opinion/18kristof.html?ref...

That being said, I would be very skeptical of an unhealthy food tax, especially on the federal level, because I don't particularly trust the government to know what's healthy and unhealthy. Furthermore, such a measure would make it even harder for them to change their recommendations in the face of new evidence, for fear of looking stupid.
I assumed the opposite, that one would get more done while not being distracted by sexual desires.
Don't underestimate the entrepreneurial spirit that is going on in China.

It's just political propaganda that China is oppressive and thwarts entrepreneurship. Sure there are some problems, but China's human rights issues are about on par with Gitmo.
You all keep saying that. Do I really keep coding, trying to do successful things to impress women? If that was the case, wouldn't I be more into bodybuilding or something? I started getting into programming when I was like 8 years old, and I really doubt it was to impress women.
So the only reason small companies succeed is because Uncle Sam prevents them from being gobbled up by cruel larger firms who want to pay their founders lots of money? Hmm...
It's so refreshing to hear that. I wish the trait of accountability was as wide spread as self-entitlement.
Agreed. I can't go past consolas on windows. With linux I wasn't aware of liberation (thanks for that !!), but I've always downloaded courier new.
Another beautiful math book is Visual Complex Analysis, http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Complex-Analysis-Tristan-Needha...
Too many modern math texts are utterly alegebraic. VCA embraces geometry to great effect.
Be wary of the bias for large, obvious events. If porn helps lots of people small amounts at the margin, but hurts a few in obvious ways, it may still be a good thing.
Digg: I'm Actually Kind of Impressed
Sony Ericsson W910 
The Sony Ericsson W910 is a modern HSDPA walkman phone. It is especially designed for entertainment. You can hear music, play 3D games, watch videos and even access high-speed web access. The phone lets you choose your own music, the way you desire.
Ask HN: 1 week
This could be fun. If you were locked in a room for 7 days, what 3 things would you bring ?
A very good physics book is 'Visual Quantum Mechanics' and its sequel, 'Advanced Visual Quantum Mechanics'. Don't let the name fool you, this is not a picture book, it's a real mathematical physics books, but with the clearest exposition of QM I'm aware of. It's called "Visual" because of the accompanying Mathematica visualizations.