skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting analysis. I suspect it's only going to get worse in coming years, with the economic crisis taking a big chunk out of endowments and professors' retirement savings alike.
> Seriously, there the pizza is terrible, doesn't matter if you are in Havana, Santiago, or Gerona.

But do the Cubans know that?
A quick google search turns up a glut of these services...are you looking for something different?
We asked the same thing, didn't see one, and rolled our own invite code stuff for Django. I think it's modular enough that we may release it. I'll ask that site's dev lead about that.
Small side comment: Google is just about the least affirming place I've worked. I've never been lauded for doing anything "clever", since (I assume), that should be taken as a matter of course.

One place I worked at my boss would occasionally buy candy and drop it off at our desk (psuedo-connected to hitting milestones). I'm not sure if I was being rewarded for mediocrity or some-such, and I imagine that it would vary from person to person.
Actually I would settle for a site that matches you up with intellectual folks...
It's different from being #2 with a real girl how?

Viscerally I agree with you, but I can't rationally understand why.
P=NP: An Illustrated Guide
To clarify: Ferocious means positive, good here.
A proper webbased project management tool.
The current hybrid technology produces the most fuel-efficiency gains in stop and start driving. In other words, it works much better for taxi fleets than for family road trips.
Typeset in lovely, 50-column ASCII.
"I was bad at presenting it"

was their constructive criticism to relax?
Wow, good one. I'd never even thought of that, perhaps I'd finally learn C...
HN suffices to provide online conversation with intellectual folks, but I suppose that you and the person to whom you replied have a more specific meaning of "match up" in mind. The difficulty of face-meeting people for intellectual conversation is indeed what keeps a lot of online discussion groups going.
Programming Collective Stupidity: Harnessing the Ignorance of Crowds
Under 80%
On Clojure
Hero Protagonist
A pan-European plan for the iPhone so that I could actually use the phone while travelling.
Math could conceivably be better preparation for game programming than Computer Science.
You're at -8 because you forgot the trailing slash.
With their combined R&D budgets I am still waiting for an autonomous vehicle. This to me is an unnecessary incremental improvement on current vehicles. When I can sit in a vehicle and not drive, that I'd pay anything for. The darpa grandchallenge seemed to prove it's possible today, different companies are coming at it from different angles (irobot, autonomous warehouse robots).
you pitch other people's stuff to users. i.e. you pitch a weight loss company that sells a drink for $39.99, and a $10 bonus for affiliates.

You basically pitch their stuff, by buying adwords and other advertising methods and hoping to drive paying customers.

Basically the people I know who do this big time, start out small, then when they find something that works, they scale their campaigns by putting more money into it.

Of course there is a huge risk, since a campaign might suck and you might lose money. The guy I know who did this, lost something like $15,000 before he learned how to do it properly. Now he makes something like 3K/day in profit on average. His record was something like 25K in one day.
the problem with benching a VPS is that your score depends a whole lot on what your neighbors are doing. For a fair test, you want to re-run the test a number of times over a period of days.
Do you have a blender?
Seconded. Just today I looked at ebook reader devices again because I really want one - but the prices are ridiculous.

$359 for a kindle? Come on, that buys me about 35 physical books - close to 2 years of reading material. Give me the kindle and 20 books included, then we might be talking.
I would for sure do research before putting prices up first.

In a store, people look around for items they like and then check the price. Sure, many other stores have prices listed there, but that doesn't make it the best thing for you to do.

The current workflow is more like window shopping, which could definitely serve a large audience. This isn't selling computer parts - you want the users to become attached to items before trying to sell it to them.
Naive question: what mathematically verifiable properties do current SQL DBs have that current OODBs cannot?

Also remember that strictly speaking, the following things are not the same: modern SQL DBs, all RDBMSes, and pure relational theory. I can easily imagine an RDBMS that does not use a SQL interface, and modern DBs are not the same as the Codd's pure conceptual work.
Student Protests Are Turning Into A Twitter Revolution In Moldova
Oh cool thanks for the heads up, I just installed 9.6 and it's right there in the "What's new in 9.6" copy.

"Quick Find

Have you ever forgotten the page where you found that great article or that perfect gift? When using Opera, the browser remembers not only the titles and addresses, but also the actual content of the Web pages you visit."

No need to pay for it either!
> prove that a well-designed photocopier must give a particular result.

Yes, that was stupid of me (you can copy books too after all).

When you place an object on a photocopier its goal is to make an object that has the same optical properties as the original. So the copier will scan it with light to determine how it reacts. Then it will produce an object that reacts in the same way. So the result should also be a mirror.

> Please, ask if there's anything still unclear. It's nice to reactivate the associated mental pathways.

The numbers A and B that are the input to the algorithm that checks if they multiply to N can't be arbitrary size, because then we'd need an infinite graph to represent them. So it's important that 1<A<N and 1<B<N.

What you're saying about the TM is that if you have a TM and a number K you can create a graph that will execute the first K steps of the TM. And because checking is polynomial in N you can make K big enough to execute the algorithm, but still polynomial in N.

I don't understand exactly how you'd connect state+tape K with state+tape K+1 so that state K+1 is forced to be the right state. You'd need a giant switch statement of the program counter and then connect the states and tape cells to the next state+tape through the results of the giant switch. But I'm not sure why the resulting graph is still polynomial in N.
you probably also don't want to run a DB on non-raid disk. I believe the ec2 instances have non-mirrored disk, I mean, if you are not using ebs. (if you don't care about the data, use something with more ram, and mount the disk async. Ram is going to be faster than disk, always.)
Well, most of our driving is stop and go, in-town driving. However, it doesn't make much sense to buy a family car if it doesn't work for road trips as well. Especially since it is cost prohibitive to fly for a family of 6 when we can drive for 8-12 hours for a fraction of the cost.
Bluefirepoker hiring summer interns
Bluefirepoker, a leader in the poker training industry is hiring summer interns. Recently featured on Fox News, they've created buzz throughout the poker world for the creative marketing and it's ability to help players make money playing poker. Bluefirepoker is looking for interns who have the ability to spread the word about Bluefirepoker, and be involved in many aspects of the company including: marketing, customer support, as well as helping with some administrative duties.
http://www.bluefirepoker.com/
Ah yes, takes me back to my days with a Mac Duo.

We didn't have any decent syncing software hopes then.

I'll second your motion.
This is so true. France produces 70%+ of its electricity from Nuclear Power stations. There has not been a major disaster with that.

And, looking at France's economy, it does not seem infeasible.
I upvoted you but I disagree wholeheartedly with your google invocation: No, Larry and Sergey never expected their startup to become what it is today. Your small-step success feeds into your ambition; it's one they nailed search that they have started to visualize bigger and bigger success, then execute it.
Cool. I asked because there have been some problems with energy efficient houses in the Netherlands. People actually got health problems because the ventilation doesn't work well enough. Have there been independent studies of air quality for the houses in Germany?
A small business server appliance for non-IT based small businesses.
I'm thinking: Network attached storage with a built in Samba NT compatible domain controller/windows file/print sharing capabilities. RAID-1 plus an automated backup mechanism ... maybe, attach an external USB drive and it automatically does Sunday fulls and daily differentials keeping as many as it can store. Bonus points if it can take extra SATA hard drives / external drives for expansion without adding a huge cost.

Why I'd buy it?
My dad's company is running a (very nice in its day) server on Windows NT with "redundant everything" that is starting to fail something fierce. It's 13 years old but it meets the needs of him and his ten employees and at the time there wasn't much of a better choice. Since they don't do anything locally but file/print sharing it seems like such a waste to have a power hungry box with a monitor on it for such a simple set of requirements.
Also, if something like this were available, I'd replace my existing home-brew NAS ... based on openSuSE with it in a second if it'd lower my electricity bill.
That's not a relevant example.
The problem is that DB application will try to sync disk either via fsync or o_direct. EBS may have a very long latency for such kind access.
People often laugh at me when I tell them this, but "Awful Mart" on the Awful Forums is a GREAT place to get good graphic design quickly. Lot of REALLY talented people visit the awful forums. http://forums.somethingawful.com

edit: Just noticed you said you hate searching through forums. SA is rather large and if you have the patience for a usual 1-2 day turn around its worth it.
I was thinking about a type system that forces all pointers to be non-null, with a Maybe/Option type for optional data.
I did not read the whole article - just scanned through it (it is long). Firstly, it Focusses on a reactor in Finland and most of those costs are very recent.

Your stats of the above is probably based on this part:

> In October 2007, Moody’s Investor Services piled on with a report projecting that new reactors would cost $5,000 to $6,000 per kilowatt to build, or up to $12 billion per unit. This figure, which was based on actual bids for new reactors in the United States, caused considerable sticker shock.

Current prices for nuclear reactors shot up extremely over the past 5 years. This is because nuclear power became an option for a lot of countries (with global warming fears). The problem with this is that it increased costs significantly.

Being a very specialized field, construction of new nuclear power stations can not just be increased as demand increases. As a good example - there is only one company that can forge a reactor vessel in one step - and it has a backlog of more than 5 years.

See this for an example: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=ho...
Do ppl still enjoy a good RickRoll?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XffuAFl18_k - watch out :)

.
Unfortunately these numbers don't really mean much. Aside from what else is happening on the machines, in some cases note that writing was showing up faster than reading, which really means that it's just writing things to disk buffers. For this test to have been meaningful there should have been an fsync at the end of the run. The direct-i/o measurements should be closer to apples-to-apples.

When I'm doing I/O benchmarking I start every run with a clean reboot and follow an exact set of steps from bootup to start of the benchmark. It's almost impossible to simulate that on a VPS.
The importance of having a plan
That’s Interesting. Does anyone know if we can stream the music from anywhere? If I remember, spotify was supported only in UK and some other countries in Europe.
Well, you can try to find the problems in their occasional bad designs. And if you're a real UI guru, maybe you'll have a good criticism for even a good product.

But the rest of the time? Yeah.
Agreed ... Foxit's e-book reader "appears as though" it's getting a little closer. For me it's not about page size but price. It seems like there'd be a market for a "light on features" ebook reader for those of us who don't care about whispernet, touch screens or wifi.

Though I don't know that I would be willing to skimp on everything (like a reader with just forward and backward buttons). When I read PDF files on my screen, I regularly use the search features to zero in on things.

Your statement of "as if it had been printed" is intriguing. So the device would have to have something that you can at least plug a page number into (kinda like thumbing to somewhere that you think might be the location you're looking for). At the right price, I'd give up search if it had this as a minimum.
RFC: Three Letter Acronym (TLA) exhaustion: enjoy
Thanks. Fixed it! By the way, even though it is outdated, I still see some of the problems prevalent today. Does anyone know where to find current statistics?

I tried browsing through the U.S Census data but that was almost hopeless.
I dropped out of a top-ten math PhD program because I looked around and thought, "Most of these guys aren't going to get jobs, and I don't feel like one of the exceptions. I'm not going to spend five years in graduate school to end up a failure."

Of course, by "job" I meant a tenure-track research position in a livable city, and by "failure" I meant... well, basically, by "failure" I meant my father, who taught at a small, bad public university in a rural wasteland. I'm pretty sure my mom hated him for every hour and minute she had to live in that town. If I picked up a wife or girlfriend in the hip, thriving city where I lived, would she follow me to Bumfuck, USA? Would I let her if she wanted to? I constantly obsessed over the fear of ending up teaching hopeless kids at a double-directional school in a little town at the end of the universe, watching my kids grow up alienated from their provincial peers and underserved by the school system, burdened with the knowledge that it was my failure that forced my family to live there.

So I quit and got a job as a programmer to keep myself afloat while I figured out what to do with my life. It turns out there are lots of challenges in computing, and I've worked alongside a couple of math PhDs on interesting problems. I think grad school would have been a lot more fun if I had realized that failing to get a hot tenure-track position wouldn't ruin my entire life.
I'll settle for an inexpensive minivan that I can buy new. Seems like it's a dying breed but when you have kids it's a necessity.
To be fair to you, I think the "bad" design that you're commenting on is much more conducive to actually creating a sale to your nifty page.

Usability and familiarity go hand in hand.
seen suspicious serif fonts, inspected some text and seen
font-family:'Arial';

any chance of catering for those of us without arial
font-family:Arial, sans-serif;

:)
"Become a R0ck$tar programmer in 21 hours".
Couldn't you use Amazon's mechanical turk?
Thank you for explaining what his post said. And thank you again for then paraphrasing his post. And, a third thanks, for ignoring the main argument in my last post, and continuing to nullify the types of e-mails that I pulled out of my ass, specifically, the "close" e-mail.

And, yet, I'm still at a loss as to why it is unreasonable to think that there could be different generic e-mails sent out to different groups.

>>If they're prepared to fund 1,000 companies they think are _really_ likely to make it, I think that implies there's no need for strata.

Only if every company not accepted was rejected for precisely the same reason, and this reason could not at all be broken down at all. Do you think that is likely?

Perhaps somebody could list out all of the YC philosophies of acceptance, and every type of generic e-mail that wouldn't make sense to send; then we could use deduction to solve this mystery of no stratified rejection e-mails.

All I set out to do was test the hypothesis: Were there different rejection letters sent, because it seems pretty reasonable that there would be. Maybe some letters would contain feedback, albeit generic? After all, they need to make a conscientious decision to accept/deny, why not have a few reasons for denying? I even proposed a method to test out this hypothesis.

Thank you to everyone who did the MD5 to verify that there was only 1 type of e-mail sent. That's what I was looking for.

But when I get in return, and not just on this thread, are people talking about the YC acceptance process as if they are part of YC, or (in this case) paraphrasing the fucking rejection letter or YC application notes, I find that to be really annoying. I can read and understand things myself. It would be a disservice to myself if I didn't express that annoyance.
It should default to sans. Thanks for pointing that out.
Apparently we won't be forced to enter our "Matrix" pods, the economy will make it the only option.
Has anyone used AdWords like this, and how did it work out?
More Firefly
Not for people to use a completely blank site
Justin.tv is hiring Summer Interns
All the old business advice books I read talked about the importance of having a plan. In the interviews I do with successful entrepreneurs, I don't see clear, detailed plans. I wonder what this means?
I have an old associate from uni who was arrested and detained in Dubai on a tourist visit, for carrying Melatonin, an over-the-counter sleep aid. He was locked up for a month in a filthy prison, strip searched, forced to give urine samples and sign documents he did not understand, and was finally only released after intense media pressure. His name's Cat "Diz" Le-Huy, if you want to look up the story.

I'm never going to Dubai. And I don't have much sympathy for the expats there either - ignoring basic dignity of others, spitting on their whole inheritance of liberal democracy and hard-won human rights just to make a quick buck. The whole place can disappear back into the sand as far as I'm concerned.

Before that happens though, after reading that article I sure wish I could drop a few planeloads of small arms into one of those worker prison camps first, for a very abrupt and entertaining demonstration of reaping what one has sown.
A proven cure for tinnitus. I'd clean out my bank account and cash in all my 401Ks, if need be, to pay for the treatment. For those who don't know what tinnitus is, just imagine having a high-pitched ringing sound in your head that never, ever, ever stops. Ever.
I had decent Mexican food in London. It wasn't spectacular, but I remember enjoying it.
To the first question, I don't know which properties are verifiably impossible to have in an OODB, but would be quite interested. I think one would first need a more thorough definition of what actually constitutes an OODB (and OO, for that matter.).

To the latter: Yes, of course. Tutorial D and all that.

Personally, I'm not doing anything at the moment for which Twitter-esque scalability is really a requirement (though hardly anyone is, honestly). Postgresql is a sufficient large RDBMS, for my purposes, SQLite works nicely as a smaller one, and below that, in-memory Lua tables, Python dicts, or Scheme sexps are fine. I'm mostly curious about what alternative database-like tools could be made for roughly the same domain as SQLite. To some extent, that could overlap with objects, but OOP is not in any way a requirement for me. (There may be some intersection with filesystems, too; they're databases, after all.)
You might also be interested in "The Little DOer", Friedman and Felleisen's guide to imperative programming with the Algol family of programming languages :-P
A REAL sequel to Star Control 2 (a.k.a. Ur-Quan Masters)
The article talks as if the idea that moral judgements are based on feeling or perception rather than on reason is a recent one. As one (important) example, Hume explicitly advocated such a position in the 1700s.

It also seems to confuse moral philosophy and moral psychology. The former can use reason and arguments to attempt to justify practical principles and actions (at least somewhat) independently of how, psychologically, human agents, in fact, make moral judgements in real-life situations.

"The End of Philosophy" is a silly title because, for a start, what is discussed is only relevant to moral philosophy; and secondly, whatever firm scientific results may be produced regarding moral psychology, there are still endless issues that moral philosophers can continue to sensibly discuss, for example, the semantics of (what appear to be) deductive moral arguments.
"Also it's the same anywhere else in the Middle East. "

The Gulf (oil-rich) countries are not the entire middle east. Things are very different in the Levant, North Africa, Yemen, Persia,...

Not that what you say is not true in Saudi Arabia or the UAE but it's an important distinction to make... these are cultural and economic problems particular to certain countries, not to the Middle East as a whole, or to all arab countries.
Beware the self-validating assumption. Your users are your users because they like your site better than, say Zappos. By definition, your users prefer your site. But as long as your market share is only a tiny fraction of the whole market, you can't say anything about the rest of the population.

It's only when you acquire a substantial fraction of the entire market that you can claim to have validated assumptions about the market in general.
The Problem With Rails, Restful Auth And OpenID
Recently decided to implement a combination of Restful authentication with OpenID in a Rials project. For the most part it was real easy to do except when I got to the point of testing the OpenID implementation. Turns out there are some issues with the plugin and Rails 2.1+ but luckily, there is also a fix.
An internet cafe in Tokyo was easily the worst nights sleep I've ever had. The cubes aren't big enough to actually stretch out (admittedly, this might not be a problem for most Asians), so you end up folding your legs over a footrest with 8" of clearance under the desk. Every 40 minutes somebody's alarm goes off.
It shows up as a blank page for me, with Firebug noting a Javascript error. Seems to work fine in Safari. It wouldn't hurt to make your site be able and degrade smoothly. At least show me a message that something happened, right now it just looks like you don't exist. Having it able to degrade would also let you get search engine traffic.
We finished our product: www.FlyingCart.com - cash flow positive, 6,000 stores.

That said. Would still love some mentors to figure out how to scale my company faster.
Famous puzzles that are easy to solve but hard to do so using close to minimal moves?
It seems particularly telling to me that Norvig himself seems to have switched to Python for most work.

Christian Queinnec's _Lisp in Small Pieces_ is another absolutely brilliant book on Lisp, btw. It and PAIP are both about equally expensive, but both are well worth it IMHO. (FWIW, PAIP is probably of more interest to people with no intention of using Lisp.)

(Also: Remapping your keyboard helps, whether you do it in your editor or overall. And, I did not write the above just to say "IMHO FWIW PAIP". Honest. :) )
How about, '/Things like/: old women, dogs, decoy tanks, captured tanks, someone cutting up a dead tank for scrap..'.
Survey for Business Idea.  Help us with our Idea
I think this was called Cobalt but Sun killed it.