skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He is probably Jewish. Anyway, if you tried to follow also the new testament it would get silly. E.g. just regarding the hair issue, the mosaic law say you must not cut your hair, Jesus say we have to follow the mosaic law, and Paul say that a man must not have long hair.

It quickly gets impossible, which is why the different Christian denominations chose various interpretations where they only have to follow a subset of the laws and directives put forth in the bible.
Original JavaScript: HTML can't validate forms

Modern JavaScript: we are the best language committee in the world
Thank you! A picture is worth 2^9 words.
I also recently wrote my own blogging platform (in Python). It's really simple -- no web UI for me (yet, anyway), and the whole thing is contained in a few hundred lines of code.

That said, I already like it better than Wordpress. (Which I was using before.) I don't have comments, but I didn't want them anyway. People have written Wordpress plugins for virtually every need I might ever have, but plugins are a pain to deal with for problems that I can now solve in 3 lines of code.
Leading [SF] Transbay tower proposal has potential but plays it too safe
I drew a different conclusion - PHP is a better language than the rails environment for projects which were already written in PHP.
Web 2.0 ventures attract capital spreading from the Bay Area to elsewhere
Just one 4-core box.
Ning Milestone: 100k Social Networks
Ask news.YC:  For the lisp experts - tell me how you learned the language.
Managing Creativity
Paul shares an office with this guy. I assume they're similar ages, and seem to be similarly experienced (both early Googlers, now retired). Is advisor really the right word, here?
Correct me if I'm wrong. But I keep hearing (from the community) that the word "well-documented" rarely showed up next to "Rails"
Startup ideas for social hypnosis, social sleep & dreaming, triggering of childhood memories, etc.
Anyone have any ideas long these lines that you would like to share?

For example, one might use TV clips to try to trigger early childhood memories.
The Perfect 404
Wolfram On Hunting For Our Universe
I haven't been on news.YC very long, so maybe that was mentioned as an issue a while ago. When Rails first came out, there was a paucity of documentation. The book "Agile Web Development" came out to meet the need. Now when I go into a bookstore or search through Amazon, I'm shocked by the number of books on Rails and Ruby. Truly amazing. Then there are the self-published outlets like peepcode.com, flexiblerails.com, etc. Rails and Ruby coders are also active bloggers and IRCers. The folks at Caboo.se, in particular, have been working on internals documentation. (http://www.caboo.se/documentation)
Name that Color
I would say look into public education in the inner city. I don't know "public" education is funded in your part of the states, but in PA it is funded by _local_ property taxes --- so children of wealthy parents get enourmously well funded "public" schools, and children of poor parents go to "public" schools that can't even afford textbooks. I don't know how kids in the city are supposed to break the cycles of crime and poverty in their communities if they are systematically denied a decent education --- and public schools were, I believe, created explicitly for children in these kinds of situations. If you believe in the power of education and access to information in changing lives for the better, I'd say this is a good place to start.
You might find this review of Wolfram's book interesting:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf
Why should it be this network thing? He doesn't back up his assertion that the universe is described by one of these networks.

Juergen Schmidhuber lays out an interesting idea that our Universe is just one Turing machine, generated by an enumeration of all Turing machines (generating all possible Universes). http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/everything/html.html
nice, Thanks!
I don't have much hope for ning. Social networks are pretty easy to program yourself, and their appeal is largely the userbase. You join a social network because all of your friends already did.

If I wanted social networking for my little niche, I'd simply start a facebook group.
I'm personally not to phased by this announcement. I don't think Facebook's real strength is its API but its core functionality. So any attempts to outperform them on this issue is commendable but I don't think it will bother Facebook that much.
The difference is that Wolfram wants an actual, single correct model in his hands, whereas Juergen is just talking about hypothetical computations that theoretically produce our universe as well as all the rest (with no hope of being discovered by us humans)

Effectively Wolfram is pruning the search space by looking for the simplest rules that he thinks have a shot of reproducing known physical features of the universe (eg special and general relativity, with a plan for how QM may come about), and then looking within that space for the specific flavor that is our universe. If you actually want to find the model via searching programs, this is the only realistic way to do it.
That term is borderline retarded. It's the internet slang equivalent of that cousin of yours who got held back in the fourth grade.
Who Can Unseat MySpace?
The battle for social network supremacy continues. Why are there so many social networks? Can you still succeed in this market?
Saying that evolutionary psychology is more true than Ayn Rand is damning with awfully faint praise.
Life Search Programs
For most software developers, it means mapping out the requirements and development phases with hard dates at the outset.

Am I the only one who read this line and shuddered?

In my experience, the surest way to kill creativity is to micro-manage it. Maybe I'm just difficult (and was never meant to be an employee), but my motivation and interest in a project drops off of a cliff when someone comes to me at the outset -- before any information is known -- and tells me not only how to do the project, but the schedule in which I'm going to do it. To me, that's the antithesis of creativity.

Am I wrong? Sometimes I don't know if I'm just a prima donna, but this blogger sounds like every middle-manager who has ever driven me away from software. If you're going to "manage" creative people, it seems that you have to find a way to harness their creativity and go along for the ride. Keeping the horses in a pen doesn't do you much good....
Is $25k starting bonus a usual thing?
I now use this over meebo, so fast and clean
NASA predicted human caused 'ice age' in 1971...
"But I suspect it's really more integrated: that everything is "just space", with the particles being something like special little lumps of connectivity in the network corresponding to space."

He's not saying it's definitely a network, he's just saying that he's going to start looking there because it intuitively makes sense. This seems reasonable for a few reasons. First, networks are the most advanced form of organization we currently know of. Second, it potentially provides a very simple explanation for many things, such as gravity. Third, the idea that matter is just really concentrated nothingness is just too cool not to look at. And it sort of makes sense if you believe in zero-point energy, which supposedly both general relativity and quantum mechanics predict (according to the free energy nuts).

/not a theoretical physicist
I used to have sort of the same issue with Ning as I did with pre-launch Xobni, which is that descriptions failed to make clear exactly what the prodcut does. They're both pretty clear now, but you're right that for most people, there doesn't seem to be much reason to use Ning.

I could see it gaining some traction with corporate intranets, though, especially with a focus on content sharing.
Like the commenters at Rough Type say, "graph" is just the word for how programmers conceptualize a network (as in graph theory). Winer is right that there's no reason to expose consumers to that kind of jargon, though. The reason that it's popping up is that Facebook has been using it since they launched their platform in May, I suspect with the hope that the term will remain closely associated with them so that when people think social networks (or social graphs, as it happens), they think Facebook.
The rise of subjectivity on the web: What's important to you?
Perl: C isn't as good with text.

PHP: I'd rather write my own Perl.

Visual Basic: Crap, we desperately need a way to inflate the number of apps available for Windows.

The same is true for most companies.
How can this guy STILL be that full of himself even after all the shit he took for writing A New Kind of Science?
It'll definitely be interesting to see if/how they try to distinguish themselves from the others.
When the book first came out, I remember there was an air of skepticism surrounding some of its concepts. Has the view towards the book by the science community changed much in the years since? I'm not a physicist, but have always been interested in Wolfram's work out of curiosity from a comp sci perspective.
The book has quite a few citations:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=31...
Software That Fills a Cellphone Gap
$25k starting bonus is unusual, so far as I know, particularly for an early stage startup that, in theory, has no money and would mostly be paying someone like employee #2 mostly in equity.
Web apps: taking five years to get to where desktop apps were a decade earlier?
Is that mostly on CPM or CPC/CPA ads? Curious about what kinds of CTR's you're getting on canvas-page ads...
Is it bad that my first question on seeing that page is "What color space is he doing the nearest color calculation in?"? HSB would do a lot better than RGB, no?
I'm no expert, but I'd suggest two things.

First, while learning recognize the tricky learning curve and keep poking at complex material as you learn. Macros especially feel dense and frivolous before you see them in action. I'd suggest On Lisp both for being full of excellent examples and free. If you're looking at Scheme, then keep SICP by you at all times.

Secondly, more so than in other languages, code to learn. Lisp's parentheses are a turn off to everyone until they reach some critical mass of application and understanding.

Learning Lisp reminds me of learning Chinese: the very medium you write with is vastly different from the norm and rather complex, but as you get into it you learn that there is a whole lot of sense to it.
There's a good reason for having both terms. "Social network" can mean either a site that lets people socialize with each other or one's actual relationships with other people. It's usually used to mean the former. "Social graph" is used to mean only the latter.

"Social networks" are the application. The "social graph" is the data.
A truly wonderful article. Thanks. I wouldn't have been able to appreciate it as much without feeling a certain degree of pain, though. Perhaps I'm the kind that learns most through failure, but now, the resonance is so much more powerful.

While this knowledge would be extremely beneficial for any student of any age, I think the primary difficulty would be in actually feeling the message, as opposed to understanding it. Everybody knows "practice makes ___," but few people act it. The ultimate challenge would be to convey that feeling. Something I'm very interested in :)
Let me preface this by saying that the 1971 doom-prophecies do cast a bad light on global warming and the change of opinion needs to be publicly addressed by Hansen.

Now, having said that...this article appears to have been written in an Exxon boardroom by a committee of chuckling robber-barrons in top hats...being served a puree made from the hearts of orphans.
Machine Learning Animations from CMU's Auton Lab.
It also had a quite a large marketing campaign behind it.

Last I checked most objective scientific writing didn't come with a hype machine attached.
Citations seem a far more reliable positive indicator of quality than hype is a negative one.
I read NKS. Good book! Especially for math, physics, and programming geeks.

There has been a lot of speculation that the universe is a simulation. If Wolfram manages to ascertain the rules and network that "runs" the universe, then the question becomes whether a universe is a simulation, or just acts like one. Is there a difference between something that has only computational rules and structure and a computer program?
Hehe, that's a lot of comments. I guess your remarks really got people going. But anyhow, I'm really into changing the world and have been thinking about it incessantly for several years now. For me the greatest thing was seeing spirituality and technology merge.

According to Buddhism a lot of the stuff we regard as 'real' are just beliefs, and are no more real than a record in a database somewhere. Everything we think is just that, only thought. Thought is where all problems exist (if we all started seeing challenges, there would no longer be any problems, right?) yet also where solutions arise to in order to be passed on.

So what the most important thing to do for this world is to create better ways of thinking. The internet, Web2.0, the Social Web, the Semantic Web, they all provide is with a richer, more direct access to the though processes of other people.

Thanks to this technology I can now imagine being in your position in fairly great detail. If I were to read all your twitter messages, emails, blog posts, bookmarks or calender I could understand you even better, and through that I could learn in what ways you think that I haven't thought of yet, and I could also identify ways of thinking that I've found wanting and alert you of my motivations for abandoning those beliefs/methods of thinking.

Now this is the stuff we IT-people are making possible. This is what we are doing to change the world and trust me ... there's a new generation rising that will blow our minds. I'm 25 and even though I can process vast amounts of information effortlessly and navigate and skim through tons of blogs to get a very detailed feel of any field I'm interested in in a fairly short amount of time ... this new generation, to be born in 5 years or so, will grow up thinking like this. They will have such a massive amount of information at their disposal that what they will be able to do is beyond our wildest dreams.

I envision a generation that has the ability to collectively focus on an issue like the Sudan war and has the ability and willingness to put an end to that suffering in a matter of weeks.I believe that when another hurricane Katrina will strike in 40 years people from around the world will rush to the city and will either have it rebuilt in a month or three or will have found a new home for anyone living there hours after the flood.

That's the kind of stuff we nerds are making possible right now ... Anyhow, this is a bit of a rant. Check my blog where working in the somewhat more formal explanation of this stuff: blog dot mondiality dot nl.
It's a good way to help someone along who might have significant unvested options at a larger company. It might not match the "on the table" money, but might sweeten the deal a bit.
The premise of map-reduce seems to basically be, "if you're asking questions of a set of objects then you can divide that set by the number of cores you have and ask questions in parallel".

Doesn't that seem intuitively obvious? There sure are a whole lot of papers being spawned over this obvious thing. I'll go finish the paper now and see if it's simply about converting machine learning algorithms into "ask questions of a set of objects" form.
I would also suggest keeping the Scheme spec, R5RS, around too.
wow that is incredibly naive. You think people in academia don't actively try to promote and position their work? Let alone the book and journal publishers, and conference organizers that have an obvious interest in all this.
From R5RS.
Hi!
Do you think countries like Portugal should stimulate students to go to Science courses, instead of Humanistics (Philosofy, Languages, History...)?

jb
Some ideas have already become commonplace, others less so.
Simple programs as 'language primitive' for modeling was criticised by many, but is now becoming popular, particularly in biology (see for example http://fontana.med.harvard.edu/www/Documents/WF/Papers/signa...)
General ideas like computational irreduciblity and instrinsic randomness are finding increasingly direct evidence in the physical world (http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/fruit-flies-have-free-will-13...)
In terms of exploring the raw computational universe, lots of people in architecture and generative design are doing related things now.
Unforunately most people are unaware of the fundamental ideas that underly all of these threads.
There was a book by Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach fame) which has a nice introduction. Perhaps the book was called Metamagicum.
>...and Scheme has no libraries.

That's a strange reason to write a brand-new language that has even fewer libraries. If that's the problem with Scheme. I hope PG and JAR had better reasons than that.
Are you referring to Metamagical Themas? That book is a collection of columns he wrote for Scientific American, and only a couple of those have anything to do with Lisp.
Wow, he's turning into a crackpot: long, rambling articles with no introduction or conclusions that have no math or results to speak of, furtive mentions of how the rest of the physics community can't grasp how brilliant and far-out his remarkable work is (which could be because he doesn't publish, doesn't collaborate, doesn't go to conferences, and basically doesn't actually participate in the research community).
You see? You see? Sometimes scientists are wrong! Since experts are unable to predict the possibly dramatic results of climate change, it means we, who know nothing about meteorology or climate modelling, have carte blanche to ignore everything they say and pollute as much as possible!

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to drive my 1.5 children to Little League in a Hummer.
Many machine learning architectures do not immediately suggest scalable training algorithm implementations.

This paper was accepted to NIPS, so apparently some bigwigs thought it was important.
I'm in the same boat, i need one or two more devs... i think in terms of complexity to implement your app(s) and mine are more or less on par...
that bonus is your pay. the salary is just sweat equity. i've been tricked by this before.
I happened to learn it bottom-up. One day when I was in college, I picked up a book about implementing a Lisp interpreter in C. I knew C, Pascal and Fortran back then, but nothing about Lisp except it's a language for AI with full of parentheses. I was more curious about writing-an-interpreter-in-C part rather than Lisp itself. At home I typed the C source into my 386 DOS machine, and immediately fascinated by how the simple fundamental idea enabling such a rich language. (The book is in Japanese and I think out of print. Probably there are similar books in English, though I don't know).

Then I went on to reading existing Scheme/Lisp implementations and start hacking it. Aubrey Jaffer's SCM gave me a good idea of run-time data representations of Scheme and a simple mark-sweep GC. I learned how to compile Scheme code by looking the output of Joel Bartlett's Scheme->C. STk (now stklos) showed the power of CLOS-style metaobject protocol by mapping Tk protocol to Scheme object cleanly like a magic. Other implementations I looked at was T, VSCM, Scheme48, ...

I also started writing tools I use at work in Scheme. Solving real problems is, after all, the best way to learn the language.
I use it on Debian sid, no problems. It tells me it's version 1.0.27.
This is awesome -- thanks, Gabor.
So if our universe is essentially computational, what are the implications of Godel's incompleteness theorem? Doesn't this mean there must be an infinite number of axioms our universe is generated from?
Ah. Neat hack then!
That's exactly what I was thinking. Seems like an obvious - if somewhat subtle - difference.

I don't really see what the fuss is all about.
Maybe, but maybe it just means our universe is full of real contradictions.
The Rebirth of the Electric Car
Case in point: you're kovasb@wolfram.com, I'm not an academic.

Wolfram has used his business to unduly promote his research. There is a huge difference between him and a professor making the rounds.
The book, "The Little Schemer" is the absolute best and fastest way to break your mind of its old habits and get into lisp programming. Try to write each piece of code before looking at the answer. (Use PLT Scheme.) Afterwards, your freshly broken mind will be ready for all the other concepts that are also important to lisps.

"On Lisp" is great whether you go with Common Lisp or Scheme. I actually tried to learn Common Lisp from scratch with that book, and I slowly slogged my way through five chapters. I got a lot out of it but it would have been better had I learned what car, cdr, mapcar, etc. meant first. Maybe you could try that.

Any time you can get away with writing something in Scheme (or CL, whatever) do it. Just code with it all the time.
1 karma to whoever figures out what PR firm is behind this :)
Mongrel, mod_proxy_balancer, and mongrel are all ass. Moving to nginx helped out a bit, but not really. Rails is lame because all the time you saved writing your app gets eaten up by rewriting it and doing sysadmin tasks with undocumented software. Sadly, for my next project I'll be pulling a Derek Sivers.
What exactly is 'unduly' about it? Going on a book tour? Putting up a website?

That his research was funded through success in the market rather than government subsidies doesn't imply any 'unduliness' to me, but attitudes may vary.
It does sound like an old dot.com 1.0 scam: $25K starting bonus!!! And your salary is... stock options!

If it is $25K bonus plus $100K salary plus 2-4% of the company, it is worth considering.

The person they are looking for is hard to find and would be worth $95-$140K STARTING at another startup.
Haskell raytracer (written in a day)
There's a great article on learning Haskell by writing a Scheme interpreter:

http://halogen.note.amherst.edu/~jdtang/scheme_in_48/tutoria...
There is no way that the founder of imo.im is dumb enough to not pay a salary. This job has to have a six figure salary.
I actually think Ning is a clever idea, but I don't see it as anything more than the social networking equivalent of Eve (commercial message board software) or Topica (commercial listserve software). If well-trafficked websites are willing to pay for third-party forum software, why should they not be willing to pay for social networking software?

I don't think Ning is expecting people to try and build the next Facebook on their platform... they're just making it easy for pre-existing communities to add social networks.
The Unwinding of the Asian Currency Crisis
What is it with this crusade against people who have a problem with large amounts of C02 emissions? Why believe people who, for the most part, have every reason to lie (Hannity, Glenn Beck, Exxon executives) over the majority of credentialed scientists? Experiment for you: Take 2 thermometers. Take 2 bottles. Put a thermometer in 1. Close it. Set a match on fire. Put it in the second bottle, enclosed with the thermometer (this will cause CO2 to be created). Read both thermometers after a few hours, to negate any temperature difference that may be caused by the fire. One will read a higher temperature. Guess which one? Guess why? Mail results to Fox News for extra credit. [/Flame off]
jar is working on Arc?
I picked up the language after running sawfish as a window manager. This took me to emacs and from there to Common Lisp. I can highly reommend 'A Gentle Introduction To Symbolic Computation' if you are new to programming and 'Practical Common Lisp' if you aren't new to this field.
If you follow that up with 'On Lisp' and (optionally)
'Lisp In Small Pieces' you cant go wrong.