skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would just like to recommend that you keep track of where each bit of information comes from. A system that regurgitates knowledge is only as good as its sources, so keep track! This is something that would have to be in place before your project gets too big, so do it as soon as possible.

When presenting the information, how about something like this:

> What is the population of China?

The population of China is [some number]

This knowledge is from:

1. xxx

2. xxx

3. xxx

[click to see the rest]

The ordering could be determined like pagerank, where sources that have more information are ranked higher.
The C10K page is historical; it's about 5 years old. Now that the Web serving problem has been solved there's not much point in updating the page.
Poppler already exists if that's what you want.
"An example of a copy that's disguised rather than hidden is a hash function, which has all the memory-access cost of a copy and also involves more computation."

A hash function requires reading all the input, but it only writes to a constant-sized region of memory, unlike a memory copy. I'd say this difference makes the comparison pretty inaccurate.
No.

Machine Utilization - $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed

Amazon SimpleDB measures the machine utilization of each request and charges based on the amount of machine capacity used to complete the particular request (QUERY, GET, PUT, etc.), normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor.
(Books|Resources) on (LLC|Inc)ing
So, I'm nearly done with my first product. I'd like to form an LLC and do things right from the start. Like most people reading hacker news, I admint I'm not too good with the business/legal side of a business. Can anyone recommend some useful resources or books?
Does Google Make You Smarter or Dumber?
I'd have to say I'm heavily Con in this debate (siding with Smarter), but I certainly appreciate the point that the Pro side is making.

Led me to an interesting hypothetical: if you had to give up either all access to books or efficient information retrieval from the World Wide Web, which would it be?
Newsweek just completely lost my respect when a video 2/3rds the way down the page started automatically playing.
What's wrong with Bohemianism?
Ahh, not cdbaby.com's default style, this one: http://cdbaby.com/?css=plain
This might help ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79626
Falling walls
I have "Form Your Own LLC" from Nolo. They also sell one about ongoing operations that I need to order sometime soon.
i hope it will be a best one ....
but it will take time... to become popular as wikipedia
Yeah, the Nolo books are really good. They're available at torrent sites and emule also, if you prefer to illegally acquire your information.
I wonder how things like this might affect startups coming out of universities. In the past, there were people like Dr. Ousterhout who, realizing they had something hot on their hands, would spin it out into a company from the University. A large corporation breathing down your neck might crimp that to some degree.
Newest Victim of DMCA: Here Comes Another Bubble Video
Here is the photographer's flickr page where she posts her story: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fetching/2090802706/
CSS Text Wrapper in Beta
Money is all relative. Quitting an awesome job is scary no matter what you have in the bank, since life is about more than income.
"The Most Complex Piece of Engineering Known to Man"
Thanks for the blogging idea - anonymous blog might be really better for my current state of mind. I definitely have the too many projects problem, and I am not even sure which one I am in love with.
i would pay a billion and $1 for that shirt
Very good description! Yes that "software full of WTFs" thing is absolutely part of my problem. But I don't want to be like that - I want to be able to decide on something and do whatever it takes to achieve it. It just seems that my mind doesn't work like a simple machine...
Worked for me at times, too ;-) At the moment can't think of a game I'd like to play, and don't feel as if I have earned it.
First in-depth demo of Twine with Nova Spivack [video]
There is a short (10min) edit, but it leaves out most of juicy stuff: [http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/technology/1712/editors-ch...]
Ask YC: Including source code with commercial software
So, if any of you are wondering where I've disappeared to, I quit my
job last week, so now I actually have work to do :-). I'm going sans
partner and sans investors on a subset of the idea from my YC
application. The original idea was a web service targeted at
developers, but I later realized that what I thought of as
down-the-road functionality of the web service would actually work
well as a standalone program for the desktop. It's sufficiently
limited in scope that I can make something feature-complete long
before my savings run out. So, the plan is to work full time until I get to a release, and
then get a new job and maintain this on the side. If it's sufficiently
successful, I get back together with my partner and use the cash flow
and the resume boost to jumpstart the original idea.

I'm going with a freemium licensing model: this is a database tool, and
it'll be free for use with sufficiently small databases; use with larger
ones carries a per-seat fee.

Anyhow: I'm giving consideration using a Minix-style license.
I.e., the program includes source code, which you're permitted to
modify and distribute patches against. This would essentially result
in free users being on the honor system not to subvert the
database-size check. There are a number of reasons that I'm considering
doing this:

- Given that I expect a fairly sophisticated user base, anyone
determined to circumvent the size restriction is likely going to
succeed whether or not they get the source.

- The program is written in Haskell and has several dependencies
licensed under the LGPL. Due to some GHC implementation details
involving static linking and intermodule optimization, binary-only
programs that use LGPL code are rather dubiously in compliance.
With some work I could get around this, and I realize the chances of
getting sued over such a thing are infinitesimal, but the necessary
accomodations would be annoying and I'd feel bad about not making
them.

- Although the idea behind the program is novel AFAIK, no part of what
it does is especially magical, so I don't place much value on any
trade secrets.

- It means that I get to crowdsource a lot of my technical support and
bug-fixing.

- People will be less hesitant about using software from a small vendor
for potentially mission-critical work if they know that they can
do their own maintenance if necessary.

- There's a decent-sized community that gets excited about Haskell being
used successfully in industry. Letting them see the source may turn
some of them into customers and/or advocates. (Much as practically
everyone in the Haskell community uses darcs rather than git or bzr
even though the three are pretty much functionally identical.)

So, what are everyone's thoughts on this? Am I out of my mind for
thinking about this? Any major pitfalls I'm overlooking?
Switch off? why the hell would you want to do that. I like being "turned" ON all the time. I love working when others are sleeping, gives me the feeling of "catching up".

You're the kinda person i would love to have working for me.
It's definitely boring, and in the "should do" category rather than the "want do" one. I'd really like to blog, on the other hand.

I am guessing from this that there is a market for hosting blogs with domain names. Blogger supposedly does it, but I could not get it to work yet.
China and India Exploit Icy Energy Reserves
At least you had 8 productive months. I say definitely go on the vacation, you have earned it!
Have one, but long-distance. Might be part of the problem, unresolved issues in private life.
I think/hope my mind still works OK when it comes to problem solving. It worked for the project euler problems, which of course had zero commercial value to me. Thanks for trying to help anyway!
I hope it went OK nevertheless!
Thanks for all your helpful replies! A lot of things ring very true to me, I'll try to sort them out one at a time...
Top 10 Books for Web Workers 2007
Well, if it's written in C, it can be used pretty much anywhere and linked to from pretty much anything. Yes, the code needs to be written portably, but that's a solved problem.

In addition to that, the FSF has some weird religious adherence to C that goes beyond linkability. e.g. they're opposed to libraries being written in highly portable C++ which export their bindings in pure C, even if you only used features supported by Cfront in 1990.
Summary: There is a lot of very accessible methane hydrate in frozen form off the coasts of India and China. Carbon dioxide can displace the methane in the ice. As a non-technical article I don't entirely trust it, but it does seem like there is a way to extract energy from the ocean floor while safely and permanently storing our CO2 below the ocean floor.
New idea: rent out advertising on 404 pages ;-)
Searching for various expletives is always fun, too.
Congratulations on quitting your job! With the database tool, what you say makes a lot of sense.

See this thread for two different people releasing source-available commercial products: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=73130
A greener way to recover methane
I'm all for photographers/artists/etc getting paid for their work, but "her story" is basically her being whiny and greedy:

...has founded a new company called YieldEx, which is still early, but aims to help Web site owners maximize their ad revenue. He's mum on the details, but VentureBeat hears he has $3 million...

so these guys expect me to work for free? Are they serious?

How much does she expect to get paid for a low resolution photo shown for a fraction of a second in a silly web video?
Can I get a billion dollar for my business advice?

1. See what is coming
2. Adapt to it
3. ???
4. Profit
I haven't had a web app impress me like this in a long time
I would say that more than victim of the DMCA, the video has been victim of a stupid, greedy photographer without knowledge of how the copyright laws work.

I think the real problem is that given the expenses of a lawsuit, lawyers behave like blackmailers.
Google and the Wisdom of Clouds
SimpleDB is BerkeleyDB
Is there a way to subtract points from a post? Or at least to undo an addition by mistake?
This comment is bizarre. Whois says:

-Domain record activated: 10-May-1999

-Domain record last updated: 03-Sep-2007

-Domain expires: 31-Jul-2008

So it was activated in 1999 after all...
Thats why I have always loved genetic algorithms.

They are creating some patent worthy inventions using them now. Check John Koza's work.

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/0e13af26862ba010vgnvcm1...
Mental Reserves Keep the Brain Agile
I like the mental image of a guy sitting around in awe. I don't know why.

http://xkcd.com/354/
A sleek introduction of $299 laptops
Oops, lies. Not likes. I should not be awake at night.
In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment
Very, very interesting link... thank you!
Stress as major cause of bad programming and impaired cognition
US Public Universities seem to be going down the same path as the US Postal Service (an interesting topic in itself as the USPS is established in the Constitution). The government is cutting them loose. I am wary as to whether this is a good idea or not. Private Universities can take care of themselves, but Public Universities, especially land grant universities (e.g. the entire University of California system), were created for a specific purpose and to serve a specific constituency. It is debatable whether or not large multinational corporations are included in this constituency or if they are appropriate entities that should be driving Public University policy.
Cue Matrix
Genetic algorithms are fun but let's not overhype them. They solve optimization problems by following an iteration procedure. And we all know that iteration commonly produces a _local_ maximum.
Among the titles I've seen;

Ruby on Rails Ninja....
Actionscript Rockstar...
Java Guru...
C++ Genius...
C# Jedi...
PHP junkie...

and finally

HTML Whiz
Computer History Museum channel on YouTube
True, but there are a host of techniques to skip local maximums, for example running several totally separate populations (families) for a certain number of generations and then creating a new population (family) based only on combinations from two other families.

And a lot of times even the first local maximums are impressive.

To see how powerful these things can be just compare using brute force random solutions to genetic algorithms you get results that are better by quite a few orders of magnitude.

Or in short don't knock it till you've tried it. It isn't a universal solution for every problem and it can take quite a lot of work to correctly tweak with the fitness score and with all the variables but it is a very useful tool and can produce some very cool results.
The local maximum problem has something to do with iteration?
Yes, iteration in this sense is basically traversing along a plane mostly in the direction of biggest gain. So you'll mostly traverse to local maximum, once you get to a local maximum, there is no evolutionary advantage to doing a step in any direction as they all lead to reduced performance which can cause you to miss a bigger maximum just around the corner.

That is why all iterative algorithms suffer from local maximum problems.
"No matter the intent, though, the speech seemed to fit the Valley's growing cult of youth, if not a movement, based on 'Don't Fund Anyone Under 30.'"

Under?
That's true to a degree. However, Google also follows the mantra, "what's good for the Internet is good for Google." For example, they provide the monetization system (ads) to ask.com, which is a direct competitor. Why not also provide compute clusters?

I think Google and Microsoft are asleep at the wheel while Amazon is forging ahead becoming the leading provider of internet infrastructure for the next generation of startups.
Are you sure you're not getting GAs mixed up with gradient descent? The whole point of a GA is that they're a global search. Mutation and crossover (with certain conditions) generally mean you don't get stuck in local maxima.

Of course, there are conditions on that. The quality of your RNG, the probabilities of mutation/crossover, etc..
Pix,

What is the liscence policy on the pixcavator SDK? If I wanted to incorporate some of your binaries into a product, what would be the cost?
How about the math. dept?
Anyone else notice that BusinessWeek and the New York Times both just came out with feature articles on how Google is taking on Microsoft via cloud computing?

There are even charming anecdotes in both stories from the same engineers -- people like Christophe Bisciglia.

Happy Holidays, Google PR.

edit: Sorry if I'm coming across as too cynical, but I could have sworn I've been reading very similar Google versus Microsoft articles for years. Of course, that topic is a big deal -- it's just the timing, the lack of a hard-news angle, and the anecdotes in these two articles strongly suggest PR orchestration.
Here-say and speculation, although not that far fetched.
I was suprised to see the photographer and most of the flickr commenters have a similar attitude to copyright as the MPAA and RIAA, often using the same arguements and language, and instinct for legal action.

I had kinda assumed that sort of thing was the winding down of huge organizations slowly adapting to the new reality of mashups and whatnot, but there seems to be a lot of anger from small independants about the way the web has changed the business of photography. I'm curious if this is indicative of attitudes of other independent photographers, musicians, artists etc.
Can't hurt. But I'd imagine the idea of starting something might be a harder sell to a math geek than a comp sci. geek.
It is free currently. Get in touch though. And thanks for a new name, I like it!
Marcus replied to that http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=90115.
This page is talking about implementation techniques for webservers and other network servers, not comparing webserver implementations themselves.
Probably, you are going to do the wrong thing.
Paint.NET gets ripped off - Freeware Authors: Beware of "Backspaceware"
Exactly. He's describing gradient descent (and possibly simulated annealing), not a genetic algorithm.

Mutation, especially burst mutation with population stagnation, is what stops you getting stuck in local maxima.
If the Federal government is cutting US public universities loose, then State governments will have to pick up more of the slack. Or close them.

Having been a professor (now in the private sector), I'm not sure that multinationals will get what they are expecting from academia. Bell Labs and PARC had "applications" built into their DNA. Professors, especially tenured ones, always have an out: academic freedom. Concomitantly, I'm not sure that universities will get what they want, ultimately, either. They are selling their academic horsepower, but may lose academic integrity. It's an interesting relationship.

Having said that, a really smart multinational might get more bang for their buck by funding an army of startups and small research-oriented firms, both with much lower overhead costs than academia (50%+).
Stephen Fry's Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive
An invaluable documentary in fighting the stigma of those who cope with this disease.
It is for me one of the best contributions I have ever seen to fight this problem. Aside from the discussions of the definition of the disease, one of the biggest struggles of the manic depressives and their close ones is how to overcome the social stigma. I will admire the genius of the Stephen Fry and all of the participants in this documentary, wherever it comes from.
It does not matter _how_ it is done, it is still an iteration. You may have several iterations going on but at best you can expect to find several local maxima - at any given time. Further, if there is no "stagnation", how do you know that you've found a solution?
It's not a good comparison. In the very, very long-term, the "fit" inventions do tend to win out, but that says nothing about the processes by which they were built. That is, unless you get really loose with the definition. If I'm designing a bridge, and I come up with 10 blueprints, and select the best one...that's not really an evolutionary process, and neither would it be if 10 different engineers came up with a blueprint. If we build 10 bridges and wait for nine to collapse, well, that would be an evolutionary engineering process. (Again, over centuries and centuries, that very thing occurs.)

A better analogy would be comparing the marketplace with a harsh environment. There, Linux survives for a mundane reason--just like mammals needed less heat from the atmosphere, linux needs less money from its customers. So, it may win out in the end.
Be sure to check all the parts, 1 to 7 the first episode, and 8 to 14 the second.
Stagnation is the case where the best individuals in the populations fitness hasn't increased by some value for a certain period of time.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'a solution'? You know you've not arrived at an acceptable solution when your fitness is below your required level.

Granted, you never know there is a configuration with a fitness greater than your required fitness but this is generally considered when constructing the fitness function.
What companies get is a good chunk of the infrastructure is funded by the public.

Most labs get big chunks of money from the government, which funds basic research. As a result of this funding, the lab exists and people are trained in the basic science. Turning an already existing lab towards stuff useful for the company is much easier than building one from scratch.

Since much of that basic research money is funneled into universities, corporations have to go to universities to get the benefits.
I understand that when a certain level of fitness is reached the procedure stops. But, it may stop too early - missing the global max. And second, it may never stop!
What Children Can Teach You About Business
True.

I've seen some interesting work on the latter case that produces upper and lower bounds for time to an acceptable solution but so far it seems to be limited in it's application to real world tasks.

Missing the global max less of an issue, an acceptable level of fitness is generally all that's required for most applications. Though I guess there are several tasks for which a global max would be useful.
It does list webserver implementations at the bottom.
Nasty Details of Vista DRM
Why was it posted, then?
Graduate study in the US for international students?
Hi,

I am currently an undergraduate CS student in Europe and would like to do a graduate study in the US. Does anyone have the experience just what it takes to be accepted to the universities there? I am thinking of the more respectable universities of course.

Anything would be very much appreciated.
Yes, There Can Be Life After Word & MS Office
That's a totally speculative inference. Amazon is a big company, and just because someone in Amazon wrote a BDB interface for erlang doesn't mean SimpleDB is erlang + BDB.
Another dumb app asking users for their email usernames and passwords. Wrong! No, it's not OK to tech users to be stupid, stop doing this.
Its not a comparison at all.

Linus replied to someone who said Linux coding style is not improving because no one sets the rules. Linus said that it is improving via evolution. Style liked by many will be taken over by others, style liked by few will fade out.

Not a comparison. Just a fact.
This is a really really old page. Interesting for historical reasons, but the limit isn't really there any more.
Python decorators in Lisp, Part 1
2008 Trends & Forecasts for Digital Media - the UBER list
The Next Generation of Neural Networks [Google Tech Talk]
N.Y.S.E. Places Buy on Linux, Hold on Unix
Django Book 1.0 online
Facebook suing Ontario porn firm
A Canadian company specializing in Internet porn is being sued by Facebook amid allegations it hacked the popular social networking website's computers and tried to access the personal information of users, court documents show.
it depends what u want to do - MS? MBA? etc. - you need to visit university website and see what they need - you need to be good at writing an essay and good at TOEFL, GRE or GMAT tests.
The collaborative way this book was made is quite impressive. More books should be wikis or blogs in their infancy.
Probably an error caused by Mr. Levy's extreme ancientness... ;-)
I am interested in a MS/PhD program. So are these test the most important whether you get accepted to top programs or is it something else? Are perfect grades more important? Or research work / competitions / etc? How difficult is it to get accepted?
Orgel's Second Rule: "Evolution is cleverer than you are."

But that's just because humans are pretty stupid in the grand scheme of things.
I agree the limit shouldn't be there, but the majority of web servers in common use don't use these techniques and so still top out at a few hundred connections, for whatever reason...
http://www.killnine.com/comics/15.php
Try it, and see what happens. Worst case, nothing comes of it, and you dust yourself off and think of a new idea.