skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Algebra itself started out as a bunch of recipes for doing computations back in Babylonian times, "fathered" by Diophantus, and Al-Khwarizmi who named and codified Algebra.
I use KeePass (http://keepass.info/), it's free and open source. It stores all your passwords in addition to being able to generate passwords with a myriad of options. You need only remember a single password to get in. They also have a bunch of plug-ins for various different uses.
Even if that meant having a very standardized building, it seems like it would be so cost efficient that the aesthetic compromise would be alright.

Skyscraper tend to be designed to be iconic, e.g. non-standardized. Building codes evolve, which also defeats standardized construction.

The new Freedom Tower (One of the World Trade Center replacements; a symbolic 1776 feet high), a hyper-iconic building, is lately estimated to cost around $1,000/sqft of floor area to construct. Simpler skyscrapers can cost as little as $200/sqft, so that's your competition. Your proposed venture needs to be able to 1) complete skyscraper projects at substantially less than $200/sqft, 2) meet building codes, and 3) convince authorities to grant construction permits for a radical construction technology.

Skyscraper construction, like house construction, is already automated to a great degree. Parts are mass produced in centralized factories, shipped to the construction sites, and put together like parts from a kit. Here is the brand new Trump Chicago being built with a helicopter delivering prefabricated parts: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?s=000ea7e2e81...
Jane Street Summer Project 2009
Trying to read that on my iPhone redirects to special iPhone portal. Pretty annoying for any site to not support direct linking for mobile versions of their site. For the playboy site it is weird, you find yourself on the playboy homepage... ;-)
I think it just comes down to wording. The post that ends with "FAIL" got downvoted.

That seems pretty harsh to me, but I think people are just hypervigilant against any hint of encroaching diggishness.
Quick update:

Looks like enom.com itself is down right now. Ironic dog food.

Twitter updates for #enom: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23enom
Global Game Jam: 1750 people, 48 hours, 100s of games
I think that's a mistake. How are people going to learn their submissions are off topic if everyone refuses to tell them?
I was wondering if that's a bug or a feature...
I just fell off my chair.
I store all my account URLs, user IDs, and passwords in a text file that is inside of an encrypted TrueCrypt volume. The TrueCrypt volume appears as an ordinary file on my computer, and the password to decrypt it is stronger than any password inside the file (13 characters, mixed case with some numbers and symbols mixed in).

For non-critical accounts, I use an old Kerberos password from a long-expired ISP account that I used to have. It's burned into my memory as strongly as my own birth date. For more secure account needs, I have s stronger and longer password that I use. When I need to rotate passwords regularly, I use three characters of the month, a symbol, two digits of the year, and my old Kerberos password all concatenated together. It's easy to remember and difficult to crack because it's eleven characters long, and mixed-case alpha-numeric.
Richard Nixon said, "I am a Keynesian." Obama is no better than in second place (in Keynsianism :-).
Scientists Create Logic Gates from Living Neurons
Reading the paper, it seems less useful than perhaps imagined. They claim to be able to reversibly add hydrogen to change the properties of the graphene. This does not seem to lend itself to fast-switching transistors (it seems that the reversal requires ~450C, and hydrogenating requires several hours to fully saturate the graphene.

The big issue is that they have appeared to create a configurable resistor, not a semiconductor. Unless major breakthroughs are made, I doubt that this will be able to replace silicon as the fundamental technology behind computers.
I'm obviously doing something wrong. Nothing happens when I click the button, and I can't drag the link at right to my toolbar. I spent 3 minutes trying all sorts of things, and have given up.

Any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong? I'm using IE7 on Windows XP Home, and I have JavaScript turned on. I don't see unicorns, glitter, or any changes.
Single neurons have RAM-like activity
There attempting to build something like this, http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/15/rival-robots-prepping-to-... . Personally I think its a horrible idea, I have a gross aversion to suburbia clones, let alone soviet style skyscrapers that all look the same. But I suppose it would be interesting. As gravitycop pointed out skyscrapers more often than not are ego plays so the more outlandish the better.
Edward Tufte has a good thread of collected moderation advice and policies from over the years here:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

Here is the short essay he provides to anyone who cares to comment, at the top of the comment form:

-----------------------

This board is only about evidence presentations and analytical design. For all business matters (book orders, courses, shipping, prices, delivery dates), please go to the Graphics Press contact information on our home page

On the Ask ET forum, we seek to publish questions and contributions that advance the analytical content of the thread, provide a good example, or raise an interesting question. Contributions should be relevant to the chosen thread. Please no marketing pitches, gratuitous links, or incivilities. There are about 6,000 contributions in the 500 threads now published on this board; they provide good examples of what has been accepted for publication.

Some new contributions go to a non-public queue, which is frequently reviewed by a member of the editorial board in order to decide whether the material should be posted. About 30% of submitted contributions are posted; after publication, about half survive the occasional reviews of published items. The editors are unable to reconsider their decisions or to answer any queries about editorial decisions (some of which may well be mistaken). Publication policies are described in detail at Moderating internet forums [Ed. the link I mention above]

If your contribution is published, your email address will be masked on the board, and your identifying IP number will not be published.

-----------------------
Try reading the help section on windowing:

:help window

Here are some basics:

Split to a new file (create a new window)

:split [file]
:vsplit [file]

Switch windows

C-w [movement-key]
C-w C-w

Resizing windows (w/o mouse)

C-w [row-size] _
C-w [col-size] |

Here is a tutorial that has stuff on windows and tabs (if you want) (pdf):

http://research.iiit.ac.in/~smr/data/advanced_vim_tutorial.p...

This is for Vim, though. I'm not sure if it will work for Vi.

> The simple stuff in this "cheatsheet" is stuff anyone other than a complete beginner will use absolutely all the time.

Not exactly...

Over time, as you memorize commands, you'll gradually become less and less dependent on the cheat sheet.

Even so, I doubt that this will work. I started using Vim by learning one or two commands at a time, not a whole bunch at once, and it worked for me. I believe that a beginner would use this cheat sheet as a crutch because the beginner would use it "absolutely all the time."

Dumb question, but how do we know exactly if it works or not? It didn't cite any test cases. Did anybody try this?
I just cornified my blog.
Understand what your apps are competing against, and how to take the upper hand
Bob's discussion of the SOLID principles on Hanselminutes (which is what Jeff and Joel are referencing) was pretty good.

Jeff and Joel started by talking about the Bob interview, but then went on to criticize the dogmatic types more in the abstract than directed at Bob. At least that's how I took it.

Seems like their arguments and rebuttals crossed in the mail. Nothing to see here.
The article cites this as the essential feature of Keyne's theory that Obama is calling for: government spending should make up the difference between national capacity for economic output, and the current projected level of economic output.

Paraphrasing the article: the US economy has a $15 trillion capacity, but the lack of effective demand has reduced our projected output to $14 trillion. By spending $650 billion we can make up that difference in output with the help of Keynesian multipliers.

I certainly sympathize with the parent. For the last three months I canvassed for Greenpeace pushing a reinvestment in renewable energy. One gentleman whose door I knocked on was skeptical (way more than just this one guy, door-to-door canvassing amidst recession is a great job if you enjoy getting kicked in the nuggets 100 times/day). He speculated the green movement was just another attempt to sell a newly packaged bubble to the American people.

So are we foolish to pursue this short-term fix? Is the reinvestment plan fairly characterized as a short-term fix?

To the first question I can at least express the hope that this investment will leave us with something inherently useful: much needed improvements to our infrastructure. We've been riding the wave of cheap energy from the petrochemical revolution for the last 100 years (thanks Steve Jobs Playboy article) and that is certainly appearing to mainstream America as a habit to kick.

To the second question, maybe it will help to explore the long term consequences of not meeting our productive capacity. By analogy we can consider the consequences of not meeting our capacity to educate. Imagine if America lost an entire year of engineering graduates. A short fall in capacity may result in a long-term compounded drop in overall engineering output.
It's a known bug. (Or to the developers, a feature)

Doesn't do any good to complain. Many of us have tried.
I just want to see, oh, an 8-bit full adder. Not all that many gates and it can do real work.
http://twitter.com/LeoLaporte/status/1164672251
Pizzigati Prize 2009 competition
I sent this info to my sister. She teaches science in a high school and the school's Internet filter blocks all access to YouTube, so she was thrilled to learn about this.
Is it possible to use hjkl in command-mode?
Or http://chatterous.com/hnyc
Creating Graphviz graphs from Ruby arrays
Twittering subversion commits
NetHack (or Angband, et al.) is another great way to learn hjkl. I can't say you'll notice a significant increase in productivity, but you'll at least get accustomed to the keys.
I can remember when -23 points would be reserved for something like a string of racial epithets, not merely a lame but inoffensive attempt at humor.
Roboform (http://www.roboform.com/) sounds similar to some of the password managers here, but also does form filling. There's also a Robo2Go app that let's you tote your passwords on a USB drive.

The browser integration is really nice in that login fields can be prefilled as you visit different sites.

Also there's a password generator than can be customized for special characters, upper, lower, numbers, length, etc.
> Because literature's fascinating?

Yes, that's a good reason to get a literature major. But if you paid in blood to go to a top-tier school that doesn't seem all that much better at teaching literature than a lot of other reasonably good schools, and are paying huge sums to do it, and expect excellent job prospects, then you may be making a mistake. Sounds like this isn't your case. But I get the impression this is pretty common.

What shocks me is meeting people who seem intensely focused on the rat race and appear to want to take on the world, but then get into Yale or whatever and decide to study something that is not exactly conductive to world domination. Then they complain. This...makes my brain hurt. I totally respect your choice regarding Finnegans Wake and the billion dollars. But surely the philistine who preferred the billion would not be better off with the English major. And surely he has no right to be surprised when he has trouble getting jobs as good as those of his engineering peers.
Thank you for the reference. I find the built-in "help" stuff in vi deeply frustrating, because I can't navigate until I learn its navigation commands, and it gives me no way to learn the navigation commands other than by navigating around inside the help system. I'll try again with your suggested reference(s).

With regards this last point though, I don't seem to have expressed myself clearly. My point is that the material covered in this "cheatsheet" page is very, very basic stuff, and if you use vi more than an hour a day then you'll no longer need the cheatsheet within 72 hours. There's little point in having a cheatsheet on the utter basics. Much better to have a cheatsheet on the next level, covering things you only use occasionally, and hence might not remember.

In short, I think we agree.
Definitely, the first thing I tried to do was drag them around. +1 for that feature!
End Times - Can America’s paper of record survive the death of newsprint? Can journalism?
I don't understand why someone would google for "facebook" in the first place (or at least, more than once). I wonder how accurately the web search traffic for facebook correlates with its actual usage/popularity.
Favorite Keynes quote, "In the long run, we'll all be dead"

Methinks the long run has finally arrived. Keynes and pals, as he predicted, are gone.
Yep. I use it all the time.
Sorry for this. It was unnecessary vitriol.
The post was on January 4th though. I wonder whether it's a chaotic system effect.
I recently came across SICP's amazon page and based on this and Paul Graham's reviews, I decided to buy it and work my way through it. It arrived yesterday and now I am about halfway through Chapter 1. So far its a pretty good review and I've gotten a much clearer understanding of some things.

I finished school almost 2 years ago, so a lot of things I found confusing and odd about Scheme when I first used it in school have had time to settle in my mind (lambdas, first-class functions, etc). Hopefully it will be worth my time.
There are quite a few people with photos and/or mp3s they don't want to lose.
My experience is that your parents and teachers won't allow you not to care about your grades. I'm in an elite school right now and am trying to ignore grades. However, I'm finding the powers that be are really trying to stop me from learning for its own sake.
I saw 0.01 version of one in San Mateo, CA about 20 years ago. The building was built from the top down. Each floor was built on the ground, cast concrete, I believe, and hoisted into place underneath the one on top. It probably didnt have any real advantages, because I havent seen it done again.

One would thing that simple, but well designed and constructed, housing would dominate, but it hasnt happened. Construction codes are one thing, but I think the real reason is that nothing can compete with fine contros and flexibility of humans when it comes to building large structures.
JS has some issues, but it's got a lot of really cool features. It's got closures, an eval function [so you can do

eval("somefunc()")

or

eval("3+5")

and it will evaluate that command.]

It's a little Ruby-like in that it draws on a lot of language idioms. It has objects, yet it has some functional seasoning thrown it.

And that functional seasoning is used a lot with the frameworks like jQuery or even Ubiquity, the firefox extension. Both of them make heavy use of being able to just pass "function(){ ... code ... }" as parameters.

It may have some issues, but it has a lot of power and extensibility too.
Jenny Poussin, wild on beach video
I think the "names" illustration refers to dynamic typing and points out that assignment creates an association between a name and a value. Differs from C where a name represents a fixed size and location in memory.
"It is good enough that you can deploy hordes of programmers to produce crappy software that sort of works. And that is good enough for making money."

Well, I respect the author for he is a Fellow at MIT. But that's quite unfair. So Gmail is a crappy software? People have done great stuff with JavaScript and it's not for money. For me, though I neglected the language for some years as I always thought it's a toy language (lesson leanred: always try rather than listening to complaints) but despite its shortcomings the language has a strange appeal. Also, I know for a fact that good JavaScript developers are not in abundance.
The way author has tried to compare Java & ActionScript--which is totally beyond my comprehension. I think I'm moderately competent but I can show author quite a few things that can be expressed quite elegantly in JavaScript than say Java.
I'm actually surprised as to why someone at Software Design Group at MIT would bash a language with comments like "crappy software that sorts of work. And that is good enough for making money" ;(
Brandy Dahl, coast guard in tiny bikini
turn on : http://i16.tinypic.com/2h4gr5u.jpg

download : http://www.mediafire.com/?jmnmuwmjzzd
I'm not so sure about that. A single troll can do a lot of damage. A single person can acquire scripting software ( like the Arrington username ), abuse the page formatting on every page, and destroy the balance of conversation by pissing people off.

It takes the ethos of the entire community to keep this all in check. Some trolls might assimilate, but a determined person would be hard to deal with.
Build a game for 3d displays that replaces (the mind-blowingly boring) eye push-ups?
Has this been done already?
A surprisingly large number of people always use their favorite search engine to get to other sites. They Google for "facebook" or "www.facebook.com". This goes for all web sites.
A lot of people use google instead of typing in URLs. So to get to facebook, people go to google, then type in facebook or facebook.com, and then go from there.
Who said this is going to be a bad year for IPOs?

Installed: http://bit.ly/Akao
I don't give a shit about my grades, but I still go to class and work hard because I want to learn more. I want to be the best. This is because, ultimately, my success in the startup world will depend on what I learn.

But I may be an exception.
Like all policies, you have to look at the downside risk.

IMO, the downside of a Keynesian solution is MASSIVELY larger than an chicago school type solution. You have the government taking on huge quantities of debt, no guaranteed cure for unemployment, and a risk for massive inflation..
Dear pg, could you give us a graph of noprocrast vs override and new-visit rates?
I would like to know what the optimal noprocrast setting is, or at least have more information about how to modify my behavior.
The main point of the paper is that whole Hi-Tech industry (i.e. Startups also as part of that industry) consumes more capital from the rest of the economy than gives back to the economy (especially it is true for consumer products oriented hi-tech companies). This situation was possible due to constant money issuing to the economy via finance sector. That process started in the late 70 and often called as Reaganomics. More details are in paper.

In general if issuing of money stops, the 25-35% of USA economy will disappear. Most of that 25-35% are Hi-Tech companies.
So, economics of startups are in danger. VCs firms don't have hot money anymore for funding. No more easy exits such as IPO and aquisition. Customer spending are going down.

And it will become true very soon :-(
Do you think you can design a new and functional circuit based on cultured neurons?
Do you know what your neighbours want? What they like and dislike, what they want for their children, and so on?

Now, do you think a genius would know? And if he knew, would he know better than them?

You can "run the economy" (that is, rule other people) to achieve your goals (e.g. if you are a pharaoh and want your own pyramid) but you just can't go against people's will to help them achieve their own goals.
I'm pretty sure Uncle Bob is misrepresenting what we actually said, so I transcribed the ten minutes or so from the podcast that he's upset about here, so you can judge for yourself:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/01/31.html
mine is up - http://madetokill.com/
I wish him luck, but it seems like a really big gamble to me :-( Going the Keynes route seems relatively uninspired - isn't that what all governments like to do, because it gives them an excuse to spend large?
I recommend checking out Keynes' opus The General theory of Employment Interest and Money. If it seems too daunting skip straight chapter 24 for a more general take before diving into the rest.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/g...

If that first sentence doesn't strike you as odd go back and re-read Mind the Gap by Paul Graham.
Very cool. Deeper info on project page:

http://www.weizmann.ac.il/complex/EMoses/projects/NeuralDevi...

This shows an oscillator built of diodes. On to the Nature Physics article, now.
The story is on topic. On topic = interesting to the intellectually curious. Whereas this comment is not merely a facile witticism, but of a type the site guidelines explicitly ask users not to make.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I knew a kid who desperately wanted straight A+'s. He was really sharp, and took physics and math. But when he got to third year, quantum mechanics loomed ahead, and, reportedly, he wasn't sure if he could ace it. He abandoned physics, and switched to chemistry.

He did, in fact, get a perfect 4.3 GPA. But I think it left marks.
This should've been "Review my STARTUP"!
I think that the cost of human labor is <10% of the cost of materials, so it would not make much of a difference.

I wish I could find some numbers for some recent projects, I haven't got anything to back this up.
aren't noprocrast & override private data? blush
Most of you who are punishing jrockway for his mild and inoffensive joke could take lessons from him on how to behave here. He has been an active member of the news.yc community for a couple of years now.
I wonder how they could compete with, cooperate with, or complement craigslist?
It's not so unusual, I do it too:

http://daniellefong.com/2008/08/24/enhancing-multitasking-to...
Joel on Software: From Podcast 38
Is it a good candidate as an algorithm though? The novel part of pagerank is representing hyperlinks as a connectivity matrix and using the eigenvalues as search ranking. Finding the eigenvalues themselves was not new, and the rest doesn't seem as important in an algorithmic sense.
Completely off-topic, but for a few years now I thought Greenpeace was... how should I put it in a polite way? Too passionate to be taken seriously. I take it it's not really so?
The Serious Need for Play
How about "Don't say anything you wouldn't say to someone's face" next to the submit button for the comment box? It could be a link to the full guidelines page maybe.

Even for older users it could be good to have a little reminder to not be an arsehole (I could certainly use that sort of reminder on occasion).
I'm a little suprised nobody has mentioned the Simplex algorithm yet. I don't think it's importance in the history of optimization problems could be overstated.

Also: does the Monte Carlo method count as an algorithm?
bayesian spam filter
Shedskin: An experimental optimizing Python-to-C++ compiler
It makes most sense to manufacture things when they're small, cheap, and made in large quantities. High-rises are at the other extreme.
It is -- it's a thoughtful and thorough investigation of a perfectly legitimate area of scientific study -- but it also smells like the sort of thing the hormone-drunk adolescents that rule Reddit go nuts for, so surely some people can be forgiven for dismissing it out-of-hand, especially given recent history here.