skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure if it is excessively literal, though; if Facebook disappears within 10 or 30 or 50 years, presumably all of the data on Facebook will disappear with it.

Even ancient civilisations kept orders of magnitude more records than have survived now, and they even had the added bonus of being physical — with linguistics the only obstacle to future generations' reading of their content. Our mass of data that seems so permanent is wrapped up in proprietary file formats; it's stored on volatile media; and it's kept around by companies who, in the context of centuries, are flashes in the pan.

How much of the digital information you possessed even ten years ago is still readily accessible? I know in my case there's not a great deal. Now extrapolate that forward 50, 100, 150 years…
The real value of the app that one builds is seen only when the customer uses it. And in most cases getting paid customer for a MVP is tough (unless the customer is a known person). Give the app free to the customer for a fixed time, make him use it. And if the product has value, the customer will pay you money. Once you get your initial few customers pricing will take care of itself!
>It's a sign that we are mature individuals, with an understanding of the cycle of life, and not me!me!me! egoists that seek to prolong their lives forever, earth, resources and other generations be damned.

Not hardly. Keep in mind that most people believe in some form of afterlife, so they don't actually think they're going to die at all. If the approach to death is the ultimate test of a civilization's sophistication (which, frankly, is just a silly thing to say, even if it does sound Deeply Wise), then surely it would be the infantile civilization that deals with death by making up a bunch of fairy tales to convince itself that death doesn't really happen after all.
DHH on PJAX, client side MVC and how Basecamp is built
If I were in the audience I would ask this:
Most people like to treat servers as generic JSON APIs so that they can build multiple clients for it -﻿ iOS, web, etc. If the server serves html specific code, then does not bind it to one type of a client/view ?
>But it's understood that we are very far from medical technology that can tackle the problem.

That's not what the question in the survey was. The question was "how long do you WANT to live?", not "how long do you think you WILL live?". Saying you don't want something just because you can't have it is just sour grapes.

>The idea that we can cure aging with some miracle cure is a pipe dream until we have a far better understanding and control of biological processes.

I don't think any informed people believe that some "miracle cure" is going to come along and cure death and aging. Curing death and aging is going to be a slow, incremental process because aging is made up of many components (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#The_seven_types_...)
I don't think you are seeing the parallels here. When you look closer you'll see that the domains are different but the problems are very similar and not so abstract, which explains the high degree of simularity and effectiveness of the congestion control algorithm.

I would also take issue with what you see as a common misunderstanding. Evolution is, by it's very definition a process which adapts to a specific environment. Nothing more, no design, but optimal for any given environmental condition. When the environment changes rapidly, the pace of evolution increases, and vice versa. I don't think this is commonly misunderstood at all. Some people will always have no clue and of course there are those that think the fossils were planted by god, but aside from the out of band idiots, evolution is commonly correctly understood.
> you're 0 of 3

But the jury still thinks you own 2million
Interestingly Adrian Holovaty(django) also spoke about similar things http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ml88L39cng
Pre-purchases sounds like an ideal situation. That's awesome if you can get people to do that. Mind sharing more on how you sold them on prepurchase? What is the book you mentioned?
I cringe a little whenever I see someone try to solve an issue with planning and productivity that's already been covered years ago by awesome systems like GTD - especially when they try to solve it with technology. I want a tool, not an infomercial-esque "solution."

To be constructive -- in order to make this useful as a tool and retain the central value-adding idea, make sure you include tags and tag filters at the very least. That's all you need to make it both simple enough for casual users and versatile enough for power users. I can't tell you how many tools I would love to try but can't because they don't have tagging or replace it with something not versatile enough (like nested lists). Foremost among those is Google Tasks.
Startup On Wire
A celebration of Phillip Petit's high-wire walk in the twin towers and how it relates to the startup entrepreneur life and philosophy. Members of the Miami Startup Community write their impressions after watching the documentary clip and pictures of the amazing feet.
Getting A Knife
Ask HN: Idea - Github for sharing revenue amongst contributors
What do ya'll think: A service which takes all revenue made by an open source project on Github and distributes it by percentage contribution amongst its committers?

So first you have an open source project which has revenue or revenue-potential. Maybe it's funded by investors (Meteor) or Kickstarter (Light Table), a purchasable product (Textmate), a Freemium service with a private branch hosting its premium IP, etc. Then you have the service I'm proposing: a web app which collects the revenue somehow - this needs to be thought out, but maybe interfaces with Kickstarter as an example, and the funds are escrowed to this service per project instead of the project owner. The service monitors the Github project's "Contributors" graph (eg, http://goo.gl/3Byjj) and uses Gittip to distribute funds based on percentage contribution. This includes commits by coders, designers, legal specialists (LICENSE), writers (README, gh-pages, documentation), etc.

It strikes me as something that could create dynamic, auto-pilot micro-companies; catalyze bootstrapped products; and better incentivize contribution to open source. It also enables coders to invest with their commits. "Meteor? Oh, I'd totally use that - I'll start committing to make sure it happens."

Anyway, what you guys think?
That's like saying things fall because if gravity, all you've done is given something a label, it doesn't help anything.

Read Richard Feynman for more details, he explains it well.
yes,I do.hunci@126.com
List of limitations.

http://docs.xamarin.com/ios/about/limitations
Ahha,my I pay everyone's attention please?!
Yes,I play with java,sqlServer,mysql..
Cut your iPhone bill from $107 to $45
Ask HN: Polyglot Workplace Success Stories?
I've been a firm believer in choosing the right tool for the job. I've always believed a company shouldn't just bill themselves as a "Java Shop", ".Net Shop", or a "Ruby Shop" but rather focus on delivering results and using whichever language or frameworks work best.

I'm sure a lot of other companies do this... what are some success stories?
Ask HN: Disrupt Housing?
This may be a dumb question but why is housing so expensive? Or I guess to rephrase that question more correctly why DOES IT HAVE TO BE so expensive??

Do you think in the near future with improved robotics, materials, building methods that an average size home might cost $25000 instead of $250000?
As a fellow CTO with a much smaller team I can offer some advice that may just be interesting to think about if nothing else.

I'd remove the requirements of html5 apis, css3, sass, etc, as well as "current JS frameworks". They are all things that can be learned in a weekend by someone able. Your only job is to find the able ones.

I'd also reconsider the search for someone with serious js chops and also the ability to design. That sounds like 2 separate positions to me.
"Burning" the edges [of the final print] to the extent it mimics the "deep black" of space, is in fact faithful to the scene. PJ's "Burn" the edges of news images everyday. That is, they "darken" the edges to create relative contast to the focal point they wish to show. This is not deemed unethical, but rather legitmatley "expressive". The terminology comes from film emulsion days, when the overexposre of the positive image to (unfiltered) light, would darkens the photosensive elemnts of the (white) paper. The fact that this was shot originally in MF film, makes me feel better about this, for some reason. The original negative would have been "clear" in this area.
Many years ago I tackled the Project Euler problem involving Sudoku. I wrote a solution. Ran it. It worked but was way slower than I wanted it to be.

I googled, found Norvig's article. Read it. Looked conceptually simpler. Tried implementing again. Massively faster.

Why? Because I used strings rather than a fancy object representation. And strings are faster. Not a little bit, but an order of magnitude at least.
It's a manipulation of the truth. By presenting that image as truth you have lied to the viewer. There are (or at least, should be) strict ethical controls on journalists to avoid lying to their readers. That's why quotes are what the interviewee actually said, and not what the journalist wanted them to say. And it's why pictures of events are what was actually captured by the camera, with minimal manipulation for publication, but without adding or removing stuff.
My point is not that Microsoft is not doing an amazing thing with W8 (I'll wait until service pack 1 to make that decision), but rather that they are not doing anything new. I'd be amazed if you could find an example of any technology that was new when it hit the mass market.
Lessons from fashion’s free culture
I had Shriram as a professor - great lecturer. Here's a racket implementation for the memoize function based off of class notes:

#lang racket

(define memo-table (box empty))
(define-struct memo (key ans))

(define (memoize f)
(lambda args
(local ([define lookup (filter (lambda (v)
(equal? args (memo-key v)))
(unbox memo-table))])
(if (empty? lookup)
(begin (local ([define ans (apply f args)])
(begin
(set-box! memo-table (cons (make-memo args ans)
(unbox memo-table)))
ans)))
(memo-ans (first lookup))))))

Edit: I guess HN doesn't like my formatting. Here's a readable version http://pastie.org/4591751
Things Fall Apart (1958)
I'm sorry to say this - but the article tells little or nothing about the 'how' of pricing. Picking a random price point and experimenting with that won't work. Here are the issues:

1. The customers who you ask initially need not represent the buying majority. How do you select the set of people who represent the majority segments of your user base in order to determine pricing ?
2. In the first version of your product, how can you distinguish the issues the customers have with pricing v/s product features. As it is, mobile analytics is in such infancy. I can't even figure out my user base demographics. 'Asia' is not the demographic I'm looking for.
2. Even Apple faltered with pricing when they announced a steep price cut to the original iPhone but that's Apple, not a no-name startup. If a no-name startup pisses customers off by changing the pricing, then what's the backup plan.

Pricing, especially for consumer apps is a pretty complicated issue and not as simple as the author makes it sound like.
The Atlantic doesn't state who it is, but Aldrin's name appears nowhere in the text: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/neil-arm...
There are so many reasons to stop using Apple, and the number of reasons to jump ship is literally increasing every day.

I'm confident that I will never willingly give Apple any of my money for any of their products or services, simply because I believe they're steering society in a painfully dangerous direction.

I hope people eventually see sense and choose the alternatives that are available; because if the world ends up as an image of Steve Jobs' ideal, it's going to be very depressing place to live.
i don't consider _any_ Apple product as a "must-have".
I moved from an Indian iTunes account to a US Account a few months ago, and I faced similar problems.

As soon as I migrated my account, I was happy too see that it was working fine. Little did I know that Apple does not transfer "Purchases" into the new account. When I called AppleCare, they told me that I will have to manually go through the history of apps I have bought from my account and download them in the US Store. I won't be charged for the apps but this is still going to be a manual process.

In their words, they do this primarily because some of the apps might not be available in the new location store. I mean, WTF?

The least that Apple has done is that I would still receive update notifications on my iOS devices.

Now, note this scenario that I use the same iTunes Account for my purchases in iTunes and also as my primary Apple Developer account.

The account originally being from India, I did not have access to the option of renewing my Dev account online. I moved on and never thought about this issue again.

Last week, it was time to renew my developer account, and I was happy that at least this time I won't have to fax my details to Apple and it will all be a smooth online payment.

NO. Not the case. My Developer account is still an Indian account as per Apple's records and I had to make the payment using fax.

I hope Apple comes up a solution soon, as the current thing just sucks
If I had been talking about how objects of mass attracted each other (or some similar system), him saying 'gravity' would also serve to provide me with textbooks of information and research that might be relevant to what I was talking about. As it so happens, I was aware of the term 'emergence', but if I was not, then his mentioning it makes it far easier for me to do further research on that thing I described in my first post.
Supply and demand. A house which is 60 years old and has changed hands many times doesn't cost X because the owners are still paying off the materials. It's because demand is driving up the cost. Even with cheap materials, the land the house sits on may still be scarce (depending on the location.)
How do payments work?
I see that most of the limitations are about dynamic code generation, but it's on general because of the iphone?, so trying to do a java-objective c in these cases won't work?
Jud Apatow is known for working with Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill, Quentin Tarantino is known for working with Uma Thurman and Michael Madsen, Martin Scorcese is known for working with Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio, Tim Burton is known for working with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter...

The list goes on and on. Software is special, but it isn't that special.
For christ's sake. I've met far too many people with Uni degrees who don't know what a B-Tree is, or even what a linked list is (truly scary).
If future generations judge me based on what I post publicly online (and that includes Facebook), they will get a very superficial picture of me because I'm careful to not post more. Perhaps I should keep a diary.
When I was younger and less of a technophile, I often wished analog computing would somehow overtake digital computing. I suppose from my naïve perspective I found it unsettling that our model of computing is discrete while the space-time we exist in is continuous.

Being much more into technology today than I was 10 years ago (but equally naïve :-), my perspective seems to have flipped. I question whether reality is really continuous or whether it is just our limited perception of it that makes it seem that way. Obviously, my growing interest in digital technology has had a profound impact on how I view the world in which we live.

In any case, I'm glad DARPA is looking more seriously into analog computing. I think there is a lot to be learned from revisiting the issue in a field that is still very young.
There are plenty of failures in Silicon Valley, thanks
Nope, that's not all that should matter. The reason is copyright vs. patents. Both are made to prevent copying but in different ways. Copyright says this product is not copyable. Patents say this aspect of the product is not copyable. HUGE difference. Now in this case Apple used several patents to act similarly to a copyright. The difference is that these patents were found valid meaning that if your product infringes even ONE of them, you can get sued big time. So if you create a product with rounded corners you could get sued, even if you didn't copy apple at all. Should Samsung get sued and pay $1 billion for copying Apple? Probably. Should Samsung get sued using individual aspects like having rounded corners? Definitely not, considering now several companies who have done nothing wrong will be liable.
Formal training in computer programming should expose people to "standard" methods of solving problems (like constraint satisfaction, dynamic programming etc.).

I did an AI course (and separately a lab) while at college and there were a few problems we were asked to solve using specific algorithms. The "hardest" was a Tic-Tac-Toe player that used a game tree. It wasn't too hard and I remember thinking that I didn't learn much but the general methodologies stay in your head and when there's a problem that comes up later, you have an arsenal of thing you can draw on to attack it.

I'm not saying that it will guarantee better solutions but when all you have is a hammer, every problem will look like a nail.
As far as I have understood, this is just regular memoization. I mean, often in functional languages one just turns a regular function into a memoized version by calling memoize(function). Sometimes that works to create a function that does what your code does, and sometimes it does not. When it does not I think that's a shortcoming of the language/implementation.
> By definition, a computer is a machine that processes and stores data as ones and zeroes.

No, of course thats only true for digital computers. Otherwise, what would be the point of the headline? Not a great article but interesting news.

I could imagine specialized computer for artificial neural networks (ANN) being commercially successful in the future. Not sure if this is what the people in this DARPA project are working on.
As far as I can tell, there are a lot of breakthroughs in ANN's at the moment, especially in the realms of pattern (e.g. image) recognition:
Ng: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNOAtZIgIk
Hinton: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4403662
Some real world examples I've seen where people have screwed up because of not understanding theory:

A graphical toolkit system that stored all the styles applied to components as a linked-list, but each element included a pointer to the the head of the linked list and everytime a new component was instantiated it was added to the head of the linked list. Which meant that creating a new graphical element went from O(1) to O(N) and caused significant slow down (i.e seconds of time).

A well known open-source xml parsing library which stored the attributes of an xml element in a linked-list, as part of it's xml validation it had to ensure attribute uniqueness and do that it had to iterate through every attribute. This means that to insert N attributes would take O(N^2) - again enough to cause a significant performance degradation.

Iteration through hashtables.
Show HN: I built a hurricane / typhoon tracker
The book: http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com

Blog post about it: http://planscope.io/blog/selling-2000-worth-of-my-unfinished...

HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4422151

Feel free to drop me a line (email's in profile), I'd be more than happy to answer any and all questions.
iirc, 1000memories is billing itself as facebook for dead people.
I can't wait for the next Hollywood sci-fi movie in which aliens discover Earth just to find out that humanity wiped out itself to extinction or mysteriously left the planet for some reason... but Facebook, YouTube, and Google - as computational infrastructures - still work (powered on by means of a rusty switch in some dark industrial facility room) and they start to learn about humans from their profiles.
I like how you started this reply with a question and ended it with a statement. You've decided you know better than all other Treo owners and so now you can speak over them and overrule their decisions.

No.

This is not how civil discourse works, and for the record I owned Windows Mobile phones before the iPhone and while they were not as good as the iPhone or the HTC Dream or many competitors, they had rounded corners, a bezel, a rough multitasking framework, apps etc.

They were in every way a proto-iPhone, and the idea that the iPhone did anything but promote smartphones to the average person is hilarious.
That awkward moment on the next deploy...
Much credit goes to wensing and Stormpulse for the inspiration.

This site uses the Ruby static site generator Middleman and is hosted on Amazon S3.

Ruby scripts pull data from (currently) 8 different government agencies from around the world. This data is then stored in YAML format so that it can be used by Middleman. The site is then rebuilt and uploaded to S3.
Trying to solve a problem one doesn't understand is a pretty heinous crime.
Funny, I came to the exact opposite conclusion:
It's unsettling our models of physics are based on continuous functions while the space-time we exist in is obviously discrete. Considering them as continuous is a simplification to make the math easier, but not correct.
NASA transcript of moon landing, with comments, pictures and video footage
Reminds me of this:

"By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman."

http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...
So in a sense housing will always be expensive because of scarcity of land and demand for housing?
And what truth is that? There was nothing of any substance added or removed to the image, indeed adding the black only served to make it aesthetically appealing.

There's distortion of the truth, and then there's removing redeye from a picture. Which of these would you say this falls under?
This is not what the article was talking about, but back in the 1800s, Charles Babbage designed a completely mechanacal computer. There are currently plans to actually build it, http://plan28.org/

As a side note, this machine also doesn't work in binary, it works in decimal. I think this is to reduce vertical space requirements.
You don't have to use the same account for everything.

I have one for social interactions with all privacy settings maxed out (including opting out of the Facebook platform [0]), and one for apps, with no friends.

The same goes for Twitter. http://twitter.com/loganloginski

[0] Otherwise the apps of your friends have access to your data.
We're talking about Facebook. Even if you mark something as totally public, the Archive still can't crawl it. Facebook is not a part of the public Internet.