skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How is this not complete gibberish? A function is a map from a value (set) to a value (set). The identity/definition of a function is the two values it relates. Values don't change, by definition. All he appears to be saying is that a single computer can't compute multiple functions simultaneously, which would be the non-statement of the century.

Definition of function is basic set theory / category theory: http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/Image2.html

EDIT: let's say the function computes the average age of all living people. So at time t=1 the domain is people alive at time 1 and at time t=2 the domain is people alive at time 2. He's saying that the input to the function is a variable called "people" which keeps changing, but that's not how it works. The input to a function is always a fixed value. The functions defined at times 1 and 2 are different functions because they're defined on different domains.
Not only are they seizing defenseless civilian ships, they're bribing countless Somali warlords, paying for their political ambitions and child armies. Not holding these people accountable (or trying to attach ridiculous motives) is a kind of soft bigotry that has hampered Africa for the beginning, and allowed butchers like Mugabe, Idi Amin, and Charles Taylor to gain and hold power.

The fact that the author has seen to have confused toxic waste with nuclear waste makes this all the more unbelievable.
Yeah, I've done a LOT of poker affiliate marketing. There's tremendous money there.

Interestingly though gambling sites still only pay, at best, about half the rev share I've heard porn sites pay their top affiliates. I was one of a few poker sites' largest (generating them hundreds of thousands in rev monthly) and got somewhere between 35 and 40 percent typically. From what I heard from my friends in the financial industry, in porn you can get 85% if you're large enough.

It's baffling to me that a company that serves up web video can make serious profits even while giving 85% of their revenue away.
Waste might be contained and therefore not so wildy spread.

"It appears that the tsunami broke open the containers and scattered a lot of these toxic substances around," Mr Nuttall told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4312553.stm
The point isn't which one is better. The point is that for most companies, it has to be done their way or not at all.
Unix To PowerShell - Nl
I worked at AmateurMatch for almost 2 years and when you go from working on small local business websites that barely get 20 uniques a month to 2 million/month you learn how to scale your code _fast_.

It's not the greatest industry to work in, and can be a little sweatshoppy, but it's a decent stepping stone for bigger and better things.
Functional Programming Resources for Ruby
They're subsidzing the training of several programmers who otherwise might not have had to deal with such huge databases and systems. This is valuable because whenever Facebook dies or when the programmers leave, other companies will be the richer for it. So not a completely huge misue of capital if you're thinking about the whole of society, but definitely a misuse if you're an investor in Facebook heh.
ISP sabotages Sweden's new file sharing law
Are you giving equity in place of some portion of a "market" salary, or are you giving equity in addition to a fair salary? This (should) make a big difference in how you calculate how much to give.

And of course, all equity should be vested, with little or none granted up front. Virtually no employee adds value the day they arrive, thus they should not have any stake in the company at that point.
Yes. The best developers I know do not contribute to open source projects, and have no interest in doing so.

I can understand why. It take a HUGE amount of effort to digest a big codebase; why do it when the most fun in programming is to be had when you're designing/implementing a new system?
You can do everything you said without contributing to an open source project.
this is crackpotery
Are you familiar with any projects currently using Vertica, and how well it's worked for them?
Lindsey’s Honeymoon Story
Submit your favorite travel story to the NWA WorldVacations Travel Blog for a chance to win a free Mexico vacation.
Maybe there is still hope for the Fair Tax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Tax
Spam 'produces 17m tons of CO2'
I've never heard of Greenplum and Teradata.

They are parallel databases, which is what the article is comparing MapReduce against. The basic idea is that you partition the data over a set of machines, and similarly divide and parallelize query processing.

MR is basically a specialized parallel DB that executes a single query of the form:

SELECT map(...), reduce_agg(...)
FROM ...
GROUP BY map(...)

Again, MR's architecture differs in various ways from the design of a typical parallel DB, but they are certainly comparable.

It doesn't make any sense, for example, to talk about loading data into MapReduce

MR input data is typically stored on a distributed filesystem (e.g. HDFS, GFS). Loading the data onto that filesystem is analogous to loading the data into a parallel DB; in both cases, the input data is partitioned over a set of nodes. For good performance, you want a copy of the data to reside close to where the subsequent computation is going to take place. But certainly MR and DBs differ in this respect: a DB typically assumes it "owns" the data, whereas MR is more amenable to processing data stored in an arbitrary external format. This difference is not fundamental, though.

I strongly doubt relational databases are used for precisely the same (or even somewhat similar) tasks.

You would be mistaken, then. If you want to do analysis on large volumes of data using a cluster of machines, both parallel DBs and MR are viable choices. The whole point of the paper is to take a set of queries, execute them using both Hadoop and parallel DBs, and compare the resulting performance and user experience.
let's say i was looking for a new text editor for my mac. i could type the appropriate terms into a search box, find myself presented with several good alternatives, and buy something in a matter of minutes.

now let's say i try that same experiment with porn. i have a specific type of thing in mind, type the necessary search terms, and quickly find myself drowning in unsavory-looking link farms, deceptive advertising, phishing and spyware attempts, and skeevy-looking pages that make me never want to contemplate sex again for the rest of my life.

this is why i say that porn is "ghetto." i'm sure there are hard-working companies in the industry. but if this is the state of the art, those reputable purveyors are quickly going to get pulled down to everybody else's level.
Since when was there a minimum amount of time for a theoretical computer to do any number of computations?

I suppose that any computer must take some finite, non-zero amount of time to perform an "instruction", because if the amount of time per instruction is zero, that would violate Turing's proof of the undecidability of the halting problem over Turing machines. His idea does have some merit, but I still don't think that this means there cannot be a Universal Computer -- just that it may be something that operates on a level above a Turing machine. I'd imagine it would involve some sort of recursive structure.
The Modern State of Software Innovation
The only problem I have with his premise is that handhelds don't really -need- more hardware to become the next major general purpose computing platform.

Incremental advancements will make them -better-, but current generation devices are already there.

Every single person I've seen get a Blackberry, iPhone or android device has seriously curtailed their laptop usage. They've also (almost annoyingly) increased the degree to which they reach for their mobile apps, for tasks that could never justify pulling out the laptop.

It's reminiscent of the way that early laptops, while not yet sufficient to replace any desktop, still significantly ate into desktop usage.

The 'tipping point' he postulates is yet to come has already passed. In my opinion, Nokia's n770 was probably the last device that wasn't -quite- there. Everything after has been plenty capable hardware-wise.
You, T-Pain, and who else?
The easiest way to improve I.Q. scores is probably to take practice tests.
If they're a contributor rather than the BDFL of an open source project, it might not be possible for them to fix style inconsistencies, or do much about design problems. It's not always clear exactly who wrote what without going through the versioning logs. Of course, that also means that an open source project might not be the best thing to give to an interviewer as example code, unless you wrote a significant percentage of it personally.
Wait, is IQ important or not?
Live Lisp Coding as Art
The guidelines for Hacker News welcome posts that interest hackers and entrepreneurs. I submitted this because it offers insight into the business climate of an important country. Evidently, several of our peers agree.

The same guidelines discourage complaining that a submission is not appropriate to the site. Additionally, snarky comments that do not contribute to the discussion are not recommended.
> I've always felt that writing code on a whiteboard is a crap way to interview people

I've never worked at an organization where folks didn't work through ideas together at a whiteboard. Some of said "work through" involves code snippets.

So, while coding on a whiteboard may not be necessary/useful, communicating about code on a whiteboard is extremely important.
How is this supposed to make me think that Turing was wrong?

Akl would certainly not claim that "Turing was wrong" -- the submitted title is obvious flamebait.

He's just produced an artificial restriction on the computer being incapable of reading the data fast enough.

Well, he is assuming a different model of computation. Whether it is "artificial" or not is debatable: in an actual physical system, you can't pause the world, fix all the inputs, and then compute for an arbitrary length of time.

In any case, this is theoretical work: investigating the nature of computation under a different set of assumptions is perfectly valid, and I think it's very interesting.

let's just redefine it's operating speed by a factor of n and his function becomes computable.

For a given function, sure. But unless your machine can perform an infinite number of computations per time step, no machine will be fast enough to compute all possible functions, which is the point.

(BTW, I took some classes with Akl as an undergrad. He's a very sharp guy, and a great professor -- and definitely not a crackpot.)
Sure, you can. The work is "handle 350 requests per hour".
I'll be doing so at the end of the year -- ping me if you're in SE Asia around then.
Same here. My son is adopted (by me): he's my wife's biological son and it's amazing (for good or bad :-) how much like me he is.

ps,
Someone upvote parent please: I accidentally downvoted thismat.
Living under the CCTV gaze
It's like the big brother of Britain.
Please write on your blog about this. I'm serious. I would love to read more about it in general. I had a friend who did this in the US, and I was incredibly jealous of him for being able to do it (he's landlocked again though, so I can't pester him for updates).

How do you do laundry?

How much do you spend a year on diesel? How about on things like sunscreen?

How do you get fresh water?
But a big part of the system described there is about authenticating people as being registered voters, which is what extension said the prerequisite was for fair internet voting.
It's not clear if you are asking for a management book or a programming book. Assuming you want to hack, my question to you is What do you want to accomplish? That would drive which sort of development book we're talking about. Then I would ask How much do you know about programming? Nothing at all? If you don't understand concepts like 'object-oriented' then I bet we're getting ahead of ourselves if we start talking about agile.

I think you need to pick a language. Not knowing much about your situation or your goals, I suppose I'll just recommend one: Agile Web Development with Rails - 3rd Edition, just came out.
Singapore researchers first to transform carbon dioxide into methanol
to a point but I'd want to spend a few hours looking through the major revisions of the work and for multiple candidates that is painful :)

Certainly if it was a close call something like that would help a decision.
Rationals are countable but dense. You can biject Z * Z <-> N trivially (start from origin, spiral out) and Q can be constructed as a subset of Z * Z. Reals are uncountable.
Despite his wealth, Felix Dennis is a very depressed and depressing person. In an extensive interview that I watched, he stressed repeatedly that a major motivating factor behind writing his book was to convince those who think they want to imitate him that they would hate themselves if they actually went through with it.
It's amusing to read this after fourteen years.

Yes, the Internet is not free. But neither is high-fructose corn syrup. What HFCS is, is cheap. And the Internet keeps getting cheaper. The old argument seen here -- that the Internet will just be a plaything for the rich -- gets less relevant every day.

Back in 1995 only geeks knew that the Internet was an amazing social tool. That's how it was possible for this writer to claim that "friends, gym or art class, school clubs or teams, driver's ed., or other such aspects of high school life... could never be delivered direct-to-you through the internet". Gym class is hard to deliver via TCP/IP (alas for our waistlines) as is driver's ed -- but friends, clubs, teams, and art class turn out to be lots of fun online. And the author falls for the common fallacy of either/or, familiar from such classic stupid debates as "nature vs nurture": Either you have an online life or you have an offline life. The notion that these two things might evolve to augment each other was impossible for this writer to grasp in 1995.

As for the final point:

information posted on the internet has virtually no proof of reliability

That could have been written yesterday. People are still fighting through this canard. As if the folks who could afford printing presses, radio transmitters, or TV sets have always been trustworthy.

As time goes on, we see ever more clearly that the mandarins of older media use the word reliable the way European missionaries used the world Christian and the ancient Romans used the word civilized: As a disguised synonym for "respectful of the established authorities that I serve".
In other words, don't say thing to kids like, "don't stuff beans up your nose."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BEANS
There's a difference between a device that can do the job and a device that you prefer to use to do that job. I prefer my android phone to a netbook, because it has the phone part, and because netbooks which are near it in size don't have typable keyboards (for me), so I'm not losing that much.

A friend and I were talking about this recently, and he mentioned that he'd love to just carry around a single device that he could use for all his computing, but that it would have to have all the features of an iPhone or G1, plus the ability to use a regular keyboard, mouse, and screen when he was at home. With such a device, a laptop that was basically just a peripheral bed for the phone/device would be useful, as well, for that typable keyboard.

I think we're almost there, but not quite. The requisite features could be built into current-tech devices, but aren't, at the moment.
It sounds like he's stating that a UTM can't simulate an arbitrary lambda function then

The concept doesn't make sense. Lambda functions don't do anything, they're just notations. The process of beta reduction is what causes things/computation to happen. Beta reduction rewrites all the lambda functions, hence they're no longer the same functions. What you're saying is something like: a computer can't compute "computation".
If youtube is losing money, what's youporn's plan for being profitable?
I think Peter Wegner made this same point in the paper "Why interaction is more powerful than algorithms" in CACM (Volume 40, Issue 5, May 1997).
Depends on who is doing the hiring. Working on opensource or writing your own compiler is on the high value end of a programmer, but "real" experience may be valued higher for a manager. Usually it is the manager doing the hiring.
http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-co...
Quality Extracts from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [PPT]
Turing was simply describing what people do: in a math test, I give you a problem, you solve it - without cheating, that is, interacting with your environment - using an algorithm, you hand it back to me. He idealized what a human does - infinite time and memory -, and then, as a final step, he said: "A machine - also idealized - can do that." The important thing is that in the definition of what was later to be called "Turing computability", interaction during the computation is verboten.
You don't get sea sick?
He seems to be misunderstood. Which is no surprise since he's into unconventional computation - whatever that is[1]. He's well published[2] and has chaired at least one conference on unconventional computing[3]. So that's more than I can say about my career in theoretical computer science. I suspect having unconventional thoughts alone will create some dissonance in related communities. Similar to what Doron Zeilberger gets for his beliefs in Ultrafinitism.

I agree that Akl is talking about a very specific circumstance of UTMs. How many thousands of Mathematicians and Computer Scientists have read that paper in the last 60 years and verified it? If there were ever going to be any true challenge to UTMs it had to be obscure and weird like this. That doesn't mean that I believe he's right, but I don't think he's a crackpot just unconventional.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconventional_computing

[2] http://research.cs.queensu.ca/Parallel//publications.html#Pu...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selim_Akl#Conferences
Sign in with Twitter has arrived
Example: a function accepts as input the source of another program (assume it's computable and halts). Thus, the original function is variable; can it be simulated by a UTM for any arbitrary valid input? I'm probably using the wrong terminology here, but the overall logic is what I'm getting at.
Oh, so they're bullshit artists. I wonder how much of my tax dollars get paid for these people to talk out their asses.

I'll stick with people who actually produce things that move the world forward.
Cool. Similar to http://www.poingo.com/Home.php (which I tried, but was flaky).

Ultimately, though, I wanted an email interface to write to my Google calendar, so I hacked that up for myself.
> the HN users are not to blame.

Sure they are - this one at least is a blatantly off topic story.
Inspired by the parrotsecrets e-book that apparently made the owner quite a bit of money I've thought about writing an e-book on the subject. There are a lot of people asking, and it seems to be a popular subject. And I haven't really found any good information online.

Would you buy something like that? HN users would get it for free of course, just asking whether there's a market :-)
Yes.

With the requisite warnings about "no connection present" duly dismissed (this is an iPod Touch 2.0, so no AT&T network backstopping it either), I can browse my GMail inbox, read messages, make changes, and perform seemingly any "normal" mail function all without a connection. Obviously will have to connect at some point for it to be useful, but can do everything but send/receive new messages while away from a network connection.
Sounds very interesting, I'll have to look more carefully at this option.

All told, how much does it cost (in time and money) to live on a boat for a year?
If you've ever noticed all harbours are behind wave breakers. Otherwise the boats would bang against each other and do a lot of damage. So no, not when you're moored.

When sailing that's another matter..
They say porn is recession proof...
The input to a function can't change (it's a fixed set). If the input changes then you've defined a new function. That's the mathematical definition of a function. You're talking about a set/class of functions, so you would need 1 UTM per function.
This search

http://searchyc.com/robot+brain

turns up the same story from several months ago.
I'm the author. Yes, all that happened during my undergrad (Except my experience at the lawfirm, which started in high school and continued through college. I handled all of their technology related stuff. I wound up doing a lot of consulting for various other firms too through recommendations).

The 30 interviews were all the interviews I've ever done, like jackowayed said.

As far as writing the function goes, yea I was just having an off day, which was the point of the post.
If you are looking for practical advice remember the big 4:

Diet: Specifically micro-nutrients and more generally a healthy diet.

Sleep: Vastly underrated, sleep deprivation is on par with getting drunk. Consider, long term sleep deprivation can kill you.

Mental Activity: Consider, Solitary confinement can quickly lead to long term mental issues.

Exercise: It's frighting how important this is.

PS: I suspect sleep and diet account for most of the differences in measured IQ in the french study.
The article mostly combines rumors from shady sources and some imagination to speculaty about future iPhone uses.

It then tries to sell to us that the combination of video editing, video calling, and more advanced gaming will bring us the 'new pocket pc'? Who is going to edit video on an iPhone? You might want to cut out a small part of a recording and send that to friend, but I find it hard to call that 'video editting' or label that as an important function.

Phones have been able to video call for a while now, but no-one does it, and I guess there's a reason for that.

It then continues to say that a) the iPhone needs a more powerful GPU to compete on the gaming market and b) that game houses are interested in the iPhone because of its installed base of 30 million. That doesn't really add up, if you need the more powerful graphics, the previous devices are useless to you, and so you have to start with a base of 0 users. Even worse, because 30 million people already have an iPhone/iPod touch, they are less likely to upgrade to the new version any time soon.

It also states that more powerful CPU/GPU is necessary for editing office documents. I don't see how more power is going to help in that aspect. The bottleneck here is a poor interface for editing documents. The limited screen size and poor input method are something you can't fix with more power.

That said, I do think that a more powerful iPhone is attractive. It works now, but it would be much nicer if Safari would be more responsive and could hold pages in its cache for longer. Right now looking up something on Google might take more than a minute, with slow Safari start times and slow 3G connectivity.

A faster iPhone will become more usable immediately, even without new apps taking advantage of the increased speed.
I get "Error on page" and the "render" button appears to have no effect. Running on a guest machine with some version of IE7, I think.
I think it's cute that this on the the front page of Hacker News. I think it's confusing that it was published in an IEEE publication, rather than a hobby mag. There was no engineering involved in this, nor any real audio knowledge. That's OK. Not everybody can be an expert at everything, but it was puzzling to see it in IEEE.

I think it's great that this guy is building something with his son, and I liked that he linked to Octopart.com, which is an amazing resource that I wish I had known about years ago.
I'm the author of the post and if people take one thing away from it, I hope that's what they take.