skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's actually pretty insulting that the author assumes most developers are just looking to add needless complexity. The OA is just a multi-page rant against this blatantly braindead straw man.

The truth of good software development practices is that there are no absolutes. We work in an abstract world, where the architectures we build are limitless and the requirements are rarely complete.

For instance, the author seems to be preaching hard-code business logic rather than dynamic data-driven logic. Well you can't really make that decision in a vacuum. It depends on how often you expect those conditions to change, whether you need to use them in another context, if they are dynamic who will be responsible for editing them, what is the cost of editing them incorrectly, how does the additional dynamic logic dilute the clarity of the program, etc.

In my experience, writing the CRUD code is not tedious. Once I decide what needs to be written I type it out in a couple of minutes (your framework has facilities for this, your IDE has autocomplete, right?). However even the most trivial app is full of critical decisions based on the reality of the business requirements. Every decision is interrelated and has many potential outcomes that are difficult to quantify. What I find fascinating is trying to provide the best solution to a business problem. There's no busywork about it.
TechStars founder David Cohen on why his startup bootcamp is expanding to Boston
OK, HTC has now proven it can build an Android phone. Twice. Anybody else?
The name is incredibly awkward. Plop = poop. I suspect you may struggle to gain traction because of that issue (and the design/look&feel of the site).
I dont think the debate was as much between intuitionism and formalism as it was between intuitionists and people who thought infinite objects are really real. In particular, intuitionists dont object to "A or not A" for finite sets.

In many cases theories become simpler not more complicated with constructive foundations for mathematics, (for instance, synthetic differential geometry is a much more elegant way of doing geometry). Modern categorical foundations for mathematics, using topos theory, has intuitionistic logic as its natural language.

It is exactly constructive foundations of mathematics which is related to foundations of programming languages, and this in many cases is formalized via the Curry-Howard correspondence which takes programs to proofs and vice versa.
You want the TED talk. Stunning:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_...
Tech people can't sell
Stimulus-tracking Recovery.gov site goes live
Basecamp is web-based. It works on anything.

From reading the actual Apple profile, it looks like the advantages they're really touting are:

* It's a little easier to use.

* It has video chat (a $20 webcam + mic kit and skype do that)

* Switching made them realize that they could use basecamp instead of expensive windows-based software.

It's cool for 37signals to show it off and everything, but for Apple, it looks like they're stretching their benefits a lot.
This is nice.

Kind of but not really in a similar vein: I have 'sd' aliased to a small script that goes to the 'next interesting directory', where an 'interesting directory' is one with a visible non-directory or more than one sub-directory. So, for instance, if you're sitting at foo, and underneath you is bar/baz/bat/bit.txt, 'sd bar' will bring you all the way down to bat, and then 'sd ..' will pull you all the way back up to the previous interesting directory.

Just to keep from getting lost, it does a pwd when it gets where it's going, and because typing ls after cd had burned itself into my muscle memory, it goes ahead and does that, too.

It's a small thing, but I really like it for hopping around source trees in languages that use directories to denote package structure.
StartupCamp Australia Startups Now Auctioned on Sitepoint
There is something to that - due in the next Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 is an update to Offline Files and network copying, where the server will keep hashes of every file, in smallish chunks.

The idea is that if you copy two similar files from the server, it can check the hashes and tell your client to use parts of a file it already has instead of transferring them (or only copy changed parts of a big file).

I have no source handy to find more details about exactly what scenarios it will be used at the moment though.
Post like you just did should have a mandatory link to the code :)
I think a rock the vote feature would be neat; although, might be hard to implement.
why not use CDPATH?

At work, I have the interesting heads of our source tree in CDPATH, so I can get to most directories I care about by typing their short names.

For instance http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200503181431142...
Ted: How mind-boggling science will outlast the crisis
thanks for your detailed reply. I personally feel that introduction of a new platform does not kill it but rather forces it to reshape and evolve with a niche. For instance TV did not kill radio and internet did not kill TV. All of these are still existent with their own niche appeal.

I also feel that people do need local news about their communities. All of us are concerned how our city councilman are doing. We also want to know the state of our schools. We also want to know the updates of a murder investigation etc. etc. So i feel that local news will remain relevant.

The Newspaper i feel will have to team up with new technology companies to provide service on a revenue share basis. Plus advertising platform will also evolve for local newspapers.
Well sure, the algorithm would have to be smarter than that and take into account all the costs associated with transferring certain knowledge vs. downloading the data, etc. It was just a rough idea to get someone thinking, after all. :)
Ironic that Obama's approach to tech is open source and decentralized, but his approach to the economy is command and control.
From the discussion here emerges another question. Is professional content creation out of date? Do users appreciate professional content so much that they are willing to be inconvenienced in terms of money or time to acquire it?
Most layman I have talked to think of evolution as having a fitness function selecting for perfection. Most of these type of arguments end up being about environmental pressure selecting non-desired traits rather than evolution per se. It's a terminology problem. The arguments are correct if you ignore this.

I like "descent with modification" when explaining what evolution is to layman. They find it easier to understand as the term isn't so loaded.
Awesome. That's a lot like what I was imagining - keeping a library of known hashes and chunks of shared files in the hopes that, at least occasionally, having those chunks pays off when transferring future files. You could even use OS files and offsets within them that you could be sure were present on the client side. Stuff like that.
There's a python portion:
http://pastebin.com/f16aae31d

And a small bash function (since you can only change your shell's pwd from the shell itself):

http://pastebin.com/f5d93d12a
An algorithm's meaning: that which is computed when the algorithm runs. Pretty simple. Of course, you need something to run it on. But one could say that proofs are meaningless without humans to run on as well.

Given that algorithms can have undecidable outcomes, its hard to even tell what a meaningful description of such algorithms in terms of proof even entails.
Playing with fire.
Poll: How do you support technology decisions?
Which of the following tools do you use when making technology decisions for your startup, e.g which of competing software packages to use? Do you have any other to add? What would you like to see in this space?
blog posts, other forums
information on project/product website
commercial reports
word of mouth, personal advice
Wikipedia vandal puts epithets onto page one of Google "Barack Obama" results
Netcat is an old and venerable Unix hacker tool. If you want to be a better hacker the netcat README is required reading. I would also recommend reading the source code, in particular the comments. Hobbit can be quite funny at times.

Netcat is usually installed on linux systems these days, but it is seldom compiled with -DGAPING_SECURITY_HOLE like it should be. Those really were the good old days...
Well... I've got nowhere to move, except only back in time :) All laptop manufacturers stopped using high-quality LCD panels and switched to selling overpriced TN-film based junk (often glossy, to compensate for lack of deep blacks).

Some of these machines cost a fortune (like my MBP and ThinkPad) while they're capable of only 262K colors instead of used to be standard 16.7 million, and don't get me started on vertical viewing angles. [I'm a photography nut]

My latest Thinkpad took away true-color screen, the one before it took away standard display ratio, now the newest MBP said 'good bye' to the matte screen, frankly I'm not looking forward for the new announcements. Instead, I'm hunting for older Thinkpad T60s on ebay, the ones with standard ratio true color displays.
It'd be really nice to have a "flag user" option.
Google, others launch M-Lab to track network openness
Fantastic article... I think everyone who reads HN can relate to the theories and thoughts the author outlined. Interesting to read when you consider where to start your next business.
Because that lets politicians talk about $BIGNUM in "tax relief" and also $BIGNUM2 in "protecting the vulnerable"?

Another fun fact, obscured by the headlines, is that "tax relief" includes wealth transfers from taxpayers to non-taxpayers (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/refundablecredit.asp).
transparent government isn't really a solution unless people are willing to act on the data. but we have already shown that this isn't the case. when people hear of corruption are the people involved outed? for the most part no.
I'm an american so of course I could be wrong, but isn't "plop" kind offensive in Britain? I heard it's the same as saying "shit".
The 15" MacBook Pro has a removable battery and easy hard drive access... It's the 17" and Air that have built-in batteries.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/24/apples_unibody...
If it must be expired domains, try none other than http://www.expireddomains.com
The question I see here is whether you are interested in Mathematics as end, or in the Application of Mathematics as an end. Certainly, if all you need is an algorithm that works, don't write a formal proof. However, if your mathematical work is foundational for some future algorithm, you need to know that p(x) holds for every x, not just a bunch that you tested.

Most students do not need to be concerned with (and indeed, are not instructed in) formal proofs. But, if we are going to push math forward, we need to lay a solid foundation of axioms and proofs.
Most compression algorithms do consider the context of previously-received data -- but only from the same file/unit/transmission/whetever, aside from predefined contexts and dictionaries for some algorithms (like the DCT in jpeg or the fixed huffman tree in H.263 decoders).

but I think it might be worth considering that compression need not always be bound by the type of data, but also by the receiver of that data and the intention and method of that data's transmission.

It is. This is why we have various entropy-coding schemes for important data (arthmetic, golomb, huffman, lzw, burrows-wheeler/bzip2, rle), and lossy compression for data that doesn't need to be perfect, such as audio, video, and imagery (mp3, h.264, jpg) which use irreversible transforms to pack a lot more information in each bit.
Will my next job be as poetic as...
"I don’t wish it on anyone, but if you haven’t ever faced a lawsuit or been threatened with a lawsuit, you probably don’t matter."

That one seems a little extreme... especially if he's talking about 1M revenue businesses.
The name "sd" conflicts with this, however:

http://github.com/obra/sd/tree/master

Yay for two-letter identifiers. ;)
I think that's variously called rsync, compare-by-hash, WAN acceleration, or deduplication.
See(), an alternative to Python's dir()
I usually use the various options for a contrived test case or two, hack together a quick trade study, and pick something that meets my needs. Not so possible with hardware or closed-source though...
Those are marketplaces, I'm mostly focusing on an application.

ed: to clarify, the only reason to have any portal is to promote the app.

ed2: I should have just linked to this in the first place:
http://ludamix.blogspot.com/2009/01/intro.html
Twitter in now under the microscope of the public and media so they have to take extra steps to preserve their image. Of all their departments, HR should be the one that best represents their brand/company and this oversight is unprofessional and hopefully not indicative of a problem with their corporate culture.
"can't listen on a port with curl"

Sorry, waited too long to edit.
if (submission_count > count_cutoff && (submission_rating / submission_count) < rating_cutoff) {

autoflag(user);

}
Techcrunch aside, this top list at Time is essentially a publicity stunt. They pick some of the most popular blogs and say they are over-ratted; what better way to get people's attention?
I'd agree with the author that only logicians are interested in formal proofs.

But what the author describes as the Hilbet-Bourbaki method is simply what math is. Any mathematician will tell you that if you're not proving theorems then you're not really doing math.

Anyway, what good is a computer proof if it doesn't provide any insight ? (which is usually the case). A good proof usually illuminates why some mathematical statement is true, and that is why computer proofs are usually looked upon with suspicion by many mathematicians.

After all, a computer simply churning out the answer (42 ?) doesn't advance the state of human knowledge at all.
Funny you mention it, because when I hear "obsession with formal proofs" I immediately think of Anselm and Plantinga.
I think it's more a "Humans vs Computers" debate. Some background:

Tom Hales cleverly reduced the Kepler Conjecture to the solution thousands of linear programming problems: if all the solutions are bigger than something, the kepler conjecture is true. Then he had a computer solve the LP problems, and the result was that Kepler was true.

However, his solution was informal in the following sense; he didn't have a rigorous proof that the solution of the LP problems was accurate, nor were his programs proven correct. Now he is attempting to redo the proof in HOL, a formal theorem proving system.

More background: no math paper is completely formal. All involve some handwaving, especially the 200 page monsters that appear in Annals of Math. An example from a paper I'm currently writing: "It can be easily seen by elementary calculus arguments that..."

Doron is arguing that the mathematical community is holding Hale's computer proof to a higher standard than it would hold a comparable 200 page human-written paper. Basically, he is claiming that we should accept an informal computer-assisted proof just like we would accept an informal human-written proof.
Installed, I like it. I do a lot of one-off Python with unfamiliar libs and that's just the thing.

Mapped it to der() ... because that just feels better, I guess.
It's just a bash function, you can name it anything you want, and the tool you linked is hardly standard.
"Help us out here, Computer. This just will not cut it. Blimey!"

I enjoyed their documentation style.
Clearly when developing an algorithm one should have an intention as to what it will do. The idea behind many algorithmic proofs and, I assume, that of the original poster, is to prove that ones implementation in fact does what you intended. For example, proving that a sorting algorithm always outputs a properly sorted list or something to that effect.

Modern theorem provers are also pretty awesome in that they can often, using the correspondence between formal proofs and programs (the Curry-Howard isomorphism for those interested), turn a proof that some unspecified function F, say, sorts a list into a Haskell/ML implementation of a function satisfying that proof.
no, I introduce people to it and they all get hooked too. no more time wasted waiting for pages to load.

ctrl + click does the same thing, and ctrl + shift + t opens the last tab you closed.
Free Market Bank Nationalization
A followup to this discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=483435

which answers many of the commenters' criticisms.

"A speed bankruptcy; 1) punishes current management reducing moral hazard, 2) will be less politicized if done under the auspices of the FDIC than if done piecemeal with congressional involvement and 3) will get the banks working again as soon as possible."
The background is that after doing some thorough evaluations (and debriefings) for my last startup, I thought this must be re-done over and over by founders. So I'm considering making some kind of for-pay info-product aimed at tech founders. Also looking for authors ;)
Medical reference works for mobile
If you like this, you'll love ipython.

Ipython makes introspection 3.14 times more fun.
I have been under the impression that where the author mentions 'clicks' on a page, that is actually recording the loading of a new page.
Anybody care to correct me on this.
Therefore (if I am correct), bounce rates are not effective on ajax heavy sites where pages and the analytics javascript are not reloaded, and analytics can therefore not track the changes in the user session.
I think he forgot to make his point, and the whole article is just flamebait.
The problem is that it's not the funding or the batch concept that makes Y Combinator. It's something that can't be replicated once, let alone 100 times.
But it isn't always adding complexity for the sake of complexity. sometimes it is efficiency in a scenario where making the code 10% more efficient isn't really worth it because it makes the code harder to maintain.
The site brings my browser (Firefox 3 on Linux) nearly to a halt.
What the author is disagreeing with, the Hilbert-Bourbaki method, isn't mathematics as the proving of theorems, but rather the proving of theorems as a necessarily formal task; that is, that when one is doing a proof it ought to be done in a (preferably intuitionistic) formal system with no steps omitted. The alternative, and what almost all mathematicians do in practice, is to informally lay out a proof that any professional mathematician (but, perhaps not a computer) can follow, filling in details as necessary.

Further, formal computer proofs are rarely wholly generated by computer. Rather the user specifies goals and tactics which the computer verifies or refutes. If one is using a reasonably powerful logic (ie first-order and not propositional) there are only relatively small tasks that can be automated. Hence, the result is often equivalent, or, at least, close to a human generated proof in terms of what is illuminated about the mathematical statement, but every step is necessarily valid.

Further, there is a field of modern mathematical logic called proof mining which concerns itself with the analysis of fully formal proofs and can often obtain illuminating details from a formal proof that wouldn't be possible from an informal equivalent.

This isn't to say that all mathematics should be formal in the sense indicated, but just to point out that it remains an interesting endeavor that is worth keeping an eye on. Also, note that the author /does/ think that formal verification of this sort can be useful for software development which is indeed what formal methods are mostly used for these days.
GM requests $16.6 billion more in Viability Plan
Ask HN: How is routing done on maps?
Ask HN: How is routing done on maps?

I've seen Google and Yahoo doing routing on maps but now even a small startup in my locality have a routing API (so it sounds that its not expensive). How do they find out routes on maps?

Is there any method to do it? I'm trying to solve a problem that needs routing data and would like to know the route points of service roads etc, which Google or Yahoo Maps do not show (they mark only the shortest routes).
Pudo,

Thanks for your comment. It's one of the more interesting ones I've received about the post so far.

I do think it's a serious question, and it's something I'm passionate about. Of course, I don't mean to say I'm "right", and I'd also be very for the question to be picked up properly in much more well frequented places that my own small blog!

As for reach, I'm quite happy with my one or two visits per day. I don't post often enough to warrant anything more than that.

I've written a short follow-up to this post, available here:

http://blog.renaissancecms.com/2009/02/web-40-follow-up/

thanks,
Rob
Top Twitter Tips For Startup Founders
Web 4.0 Manifesto Follow-Up
No, of course not, but they seem to be related in the mids of many people.

There's a great collection of short stories, Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder, that has (as I recall) a tale of some institute that was hiring mathematicians. The candidates affected assorted behavioral quirks so as to come off as sufficiently bizarre, and, hence, brilliant.

It seems a common stereotype.
Red Hat, Microsoft as partners?
Yeah, that's probably the case, I was just entertaining a thought experiment because I really like the people I've met through techstars and want them to do well.

The bay area's network effects really do create different kinds of opportunity rather than just more of the same - it's the reason I moved to the bay area in the first place three years ago and it's been a great career decision. Living here means being able to do things like apply to yc, whereas I'd probably never consider moving to Boulder or Boston if it just came down to 5 digits of seed investment. I'd rather stay here and force my projects to happen during nights and weekends instead. Here, you'd be crazy to turn down admission to yc and access to the advisors involved, no matter what your day job pays.
I saw some friends pee away £40K of their own money for just reasons outlined here. It's too true.
I do this too.

One possibility would be to send the product id in the link's url, then display the product in a lightbox on the new tab.
Now I know how programmers must have felt when Why The Lucky Stiff came on the scene.
Loneliness Affects How The Brain Operates
Very neat tool. I saw this when it was mentioned on a post I made not long ago.

If you want something you can simply add to .bashrc, here are some bash functions to also help jump around to directories you want:
http://mattie.posterous.com/some-handy-bash-commands

There's a link there for the "up" command (taking you to some directory higher in your path with that name) and also for "down" (similar downward) and "cdd" which just does a rapid use of locate to find the first directory that matches.
Some quotes:

"and I believe that mathematicians who continue to do pure human, pencil-and-paper, computer-less, research, are wasting their time."

"The axiomatic method is not even the most efficient way to prove theorems in Euclidean Geometry."

The author is disagreeing with math as practiced by most mathematicians: proof using only pencil, paper and coffee.

BTW, formalism is only a fairy tale mathematicians tell their children when putting them to bed at night. In our hearts, we're all closet platonists.