skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I mean is being able to buy some credits, then going into a realtime environment where I can type "Paul graham eating a tuna sandwich", and after 15 minutes seeing several rough sketches. Then I choose the one I like and get a finished version in less than 24h.
With all the discussions about how Google turned off Gmail/AdSense accounts for no reason, I'm afraid to use App Engine. What if some bright mind or bot decides to kill my Google Account? I won't have access to my app anymore.

I like to have Plan B¹. If I were locked out of my Mosso Cloud Server, I would switch to EC2 or any other VPS in a matter of hours. This is not true with App Engine -- where would I go?

Also, App Engine has an Google-specific API. What if they decide to deprecate a part of it? This happened before with their Blogger API (I'm an author of blog client, and they I had to write new code to use it) and search API.

P.S. And sorry for offtopic.

---

1. E.g. I use only one Mac, but have 3 of them. This is mostly because they break every three months, and I need a replacement quickly (I'm not crazy, this is how Apple's service works in Russia: 2-6 weeks for a trivial repair).
Copier: But a copier produces a piece of paper, so that can't be a mirror. So what does it produce, and why?

> 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.

Yes

> 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.

Exactly.

> But I'm not sure why the resulting graph is still polynomial in N.

The next state of the machine is a combination of the current symbol and the previous state, so that's just a big collection of ANDs and ORs and NOTs and so forth. Each tape cell is the same as the previous, unless it was the active cell in the previous state, and then it's a copy of the symbol that the state machine specifies.

This will be a very, very big graph, because each cell is a combination of all the previous, but that's still "only" quadratic. It's all still polynomial.

You might want to sketch a very small TM that will only take a few steps and only use a small amount of tape. Then write the logical expression for one tape cell in one step as a combination of the cells in the previous step and the state. Then do the same for the state itself.
A secure, online back-up solution for all my computers that is dead-simple to use on all OSes.

And I mean dead-simple as in install a client that by default intelligently finds the stuff that I might want to back-up (iTunes library, folders with lots of pictures, My Documents, /etc & /home directories, etc.), with the ability to specify certain folders/directories as well. Or since we're dreaming, why not the whole computer? And of course it always runs in the background, never consumes 100% of my CPU or bandwidth when I'm using the computer, is always up to date, and pretty much never bothers me once I've set it up.

I don't want to think about back-ups. I don't want my family to have to think about back-ups. My dad is interested in getting an iPod and will definitely purchase songs on iTunes. I want a dead simple setup for him to keep those backed up.
Write algol languages with sexp syntax and you pretty much cut your compiler hacking in half (just focus on semantic analysis and code generation.)

You can further cheat and write a short and tidy attribute grammar for a tiny block-structured and well documented dialect like Oberon, and your grammar will be 1:1 translation from production rules straight to assembly language. No optimization, and certainly no intermediate representation. What you're left with is a clone of the first Turbo C without dynamic memory allocation (just static allocation with a strict stack discipline)

Then you can run around and say you're a compiler hacker. That's how I started :-P
I had the exact same idea for a crowd sourced dating service, exactly as you've implemented it with Yumbunny. Looks great, hope you have great success with it.
Obviously a lot of ingredients go into being successful, and invariable few of them get highlighted more and few less in any advice or suggestion given by anyone.

A great plan will not take one anywhere without good execution. and a great plan executed well can fail if timing is not right or for thousand other reasons.

The bottomline is - there is no single silver bullet.
Something like a Netflix for books and articles. I'd pay just to rent textbooks for general education classes. It would need to have a gigantic library though, big enough to guarantee that I would be able to find any book through there if it wasn't in a library.

PDF versions of the books would be nice to, so I could access the book anywhere immediately.

And it would need a good selection of scientific books. I have a scientific couple books that I want to read, but haven't because they aren't in any local library systems and used copies are going for over $40 on amazon.
The available ones are pretty horrible.
There is a difference between not having a plan and having one that allows for experimenting. Just because you're trying different things doesn't mean you don't have a plan.

A plan is a good thing. It keeps you from losing focus, lets you set goals and helps you know if you're on track.

Create a plan, you'd be a fool not to, but make sure it allows you to experiment.
Generally people who want to pursue a PhD do not do it for the money. A PhD is about loving the field you're in and loving research.
There's Clif bars. You can't live off of those full time, though.

Colcannon? If this is made with turnips, kale, and lots of buttermilk, then it covers a lot of macronutrients. Then take a multivitamin.
５万円 a month is the absolute cheapest he could find? That's hard to believe. A shared room at that time-honoured refuge of newly arrived gaijin, sakura house, runs around 47k/m and that would be way better than the cubicle in that video. And that's in Tokyo proper - Chiba or Saitama would be even less. Hell, I have a friend who lives in minami-sunamachi, rents a one-bedroom apartment and it costs 59k. That's Edogawa ward, 20 minutes from shinjuku, $590/month! That's not including utilities and stuff of course, but still, you get the idea.

Memories of the late 80s/early 90s notwithstanding, Tokyo is not at all expensive compared to other world cities. Compared to Sydney or, worse, London, it's actually pretty cheap. You could definitely do better than that. Weird.
I wonder if there are nerd-oriented escort services?
One Time Opportunity To Own The DNA of the Internet
The hope, of course, is that one day we’ll be able to use the Mini Portrait to resurrect the entire internet in some grim bombed out cyberpunk future.
yeah, those ones.

Especially a decent book on Factor, I'm trying to learn it form the documentation but apparently I'm not trying hard enough.

oh and, "The Life and Adventures of Chris Double", that crazy bastard seems to show up in my google searches for everything sooner or later. TraceMonkey internals, NDS homebrew, dylan, factor! Is there anything he can't do?

http://delicious.com/tags/bluishcoder
Cool challenge!
What was the idea you abandoned?
I Want You to Apologize
I like where you are going with the idea. This was posted on HN a few days ago, might be useful: http://www.imhonest.com/
The secret of great online customer service is speed
Actually, it can make sense to buy a family car that doesn't work for road trips. Save money (fuel + price) by buying a smaller car, and rent a van for the few times a year that you need it.
Looks like those people could make it to 'ramen profitable' quickly.
the pre-1992 version of usenet
Great idea. A Chumby with a built-in video camera + gtalk/video support might fit the bill.
"Good design" can mean a lot of things. In this case, I'm sure PG meant pretty design. Your site is pretty-- but it fails a lot of design tests if your goal is to sell stuff (IMO).

Selling stuff online isn't an artistic exercise-- it's an analytics and psychology exercise.

To be fair, that PG article is pretty ancient and commerce was a different beast back then (i.e. you might have needed high production values to overcome people's fear of online purchasing where you don't today). "Make your site easy" obviously still holds true. Are you contending that your site is easier than the competitors? It'd be interesting to write down a few use cases and then time user success on your site versus your competitor.

Related: part of good commerce design is SEO. A huge huge part. http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Astylous.com
FreeBSD AMI's
A Man Finds an Actual Card Skimmer in the Wild
It's my theory that in arranged-marriage lands, there's more social support; the husband and wife play slotted roles, more, in a larger social millieu. In the West, the couple is on their own more, they're each other's /everything/. The demand on each is higher, the fit has to be better.
AntiSocial Networking
Why post the archive.org version when http://store.yahoo.com/secrets.html is still up?
If it was really cheap I wouldn't mind that. The trick is obviously to go somewhere whenever you aren't sleeping.
Be careful assuming there isn't competition.
We interviewed last November. Paul seemed to fixate on a phrase from our written application, and it went downhill from there. We regrouped with bourbons at a bar in the middle of the day, and moved on. Stressful, yeah, but they have to run through 60 startups in 3 days. I don't envy them.

We are funded and launched (http://www.archivd.com) and, yes, it is "addictively useful". :)
It's like The End of History; a silly title for a silly piece of writing.
Is that you burbed.com?
Definitely. My mother suffers from this and I can't even imagine what it must really be like. A solution would be absolutely wonderful.
> 'The Design and Implementation of Virtual Machines'

Oh that book already does in fact already exist, and it's amazing:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Virtual-Machines-Versatile-Platforms...
Presented an idea 12 months ago for a new programming language that understood modern scalability, concurrency, and software design concerns. Got shot down. We worked on it anyway for 4 months.

Then we had an idea for a new webapp we wanted to build, so we switched to that. Got funding in December through fbFund and we're still working on it today.
Coders At Work (http://www.codersatwork.com)
To generalize, a service that SVN's powerful computers for a hourly fee, targetting general public on netbooks for video editing, graphic processing, gaming.
Scaling Facebook Live Feed for the Inauguration
Would be cool for the browser to recognize that a certain tab has been open for hours or even days. For me, the tabs that are open for a long, long time (and aren't a web app) are usually articles I intend to read.
> "Consequently, many don't even try for student visas in the US and seek higher education in other countries (for example, UK and Australia)."

My wife's currently in college here in Canada and so are many of her friends, apparently all the colleges here are tied to some university in the US offering discounts and stuff to international students.
Same experience with Lisp / Scheme here. There's a truly awe-inspiring amount of computer science research published about Scheme, in particular. I learned a TON, but I also learned that if I'm actually trying to get stuff done, I'm better off using something else, such as Lua or Python.

Lua, while even more Scheme-like than Python, was designed primarily for use as an embedded scripting engine in another languages (typically C or C++). Instead of putting effort into making Lua clones of typical libraries, they worked on making re-using other languages' existing libraries quite easy. It seems to stand the whole NIH thing on its head, too. (Though, languages such as Chicken Scheme that compile to C can inter-operate better than most.)
They exist in the consultingware/project management mold. http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Requirements-Process-Suzanne... is an example.
Potentially, more protection from the elements and safer.

I mean, neither is demonstrated in the videos, but it looks like it could be much safer than a motorcycle (or a scooter) and it seems like the openings would be easy to weatherproof.
It says only premium accounts can request developer keys. So if you're not in a supported country, I guess getting those dev keys will be hard ;)

Guess it's finally time for you US guys to feel left out :P
Google Container Data Center Tour
Great! Thanks for the link on these guys.
Why is the domain for this link showing a dot before it? "(.brainspl.at)"
I would say that our project is definitely unique and could be applied in other fields, but we're sticking with one and seeing how it goes. There's also a dozen ways to make money and none of these include advertising. Because it's different, I'm often worried that people might not "get it" and may never use it.
In my experience, keeping objects consistent is easier than keeping the database consistent. The database can only do trivial consistency checks. With objects you can write arbitrary predicates that check things about your objects. In the applications I write that means that even though I use a relational database, I end up doing all important checks on the objects, and none in the DB.
I had the same issue with my cats but they sell lids that seal the can well enough for a day or so of storage. Just put it in the fridge and you're good.
"EC2 is like the volatile RAM in your laptop"
I can reboot an instance with no data loss, not like ram

"If you use Elastic Block Store (EBS), that helps as it provides persistent storage, but the instance itself is still ephemeral. That means although EBS data can survive an instance failure, the server, its configuration, log data for troubleshooting, completed work that has not been offloaded, etc. is all lost."

ln -s /ebsmnt/log /var - onliner boyeeeeee!

"You need to do things like monitor for instance failure, dynamically rebuild and reconfigure new instances on the fly, ensure data you don’t want to lose is always replicated or on EBS, be able to rollback and recover from lost work when an instance fails, etc."

I would do these anyway. On EC2,Mosso,Colo, Rolling Solo, etc.

"That means if a cloud sever fails, the problem is fixed and your cloud server is brought back online."

huh? "the problem is fixed"

Terrible article, scare tactics 101.

What's your perception of the technical IQ of the readers on here ? Pretty offensive.
Get two cats.
Add in graphic novels and I'm in. It would have to emphasize breadth and new releases to make it clearly superior to the local library.
I have not found that to be true for us (again, a family of 6).

Renting a van will cost $500-$1000 for a week. If you do that 3-4 times a year then you are talking about approx $200/mo in monthly payments that you would have to save.
I would really appreciate if the title gets changed to put [2001]...
You'd get sick of them right quick... the human digestive system craves variety too much for this to be viable.

In any case there are a lot of meal replacement bars out there already. To give you 1/3 of your requirements it has to be a huge bar...
Can someone tell me if this is a good idea?

You put this fast-booting live distro on a thumbdrive or disc, and it boots straight into a kiosk mode where you have just a full-screen browser that is restricted to your web-based sales portal. Perhaps it is simply an online store catalog with shopping cart and checkout.

Let's say you sell products at various fairs or conventions - maybe you travel a lot - wouldn't it be nice to be able to turn any cheap, old computer with a network connection (maybe you have many of them) into a fully-functioning on-site store in under 10 seconds without having to mess with anything? Just plug in that USB drive, boot, remove the USB drive, and you're done (or you do the same for a set of machines). If someone kicks out a power plug, just reboot like you did the first time and relax, knowing that the same exact functionality will be available on every computer you run this on, every time, with nothing to configure, nothing to install, and leaves no footprint on any of the machines you touch (runs completely in memory).

If needed, this fast-booting kiosk distro could download config settings from your web service (maybe you want to change your prices or catalog depending on the computer's location).

Could something like this reduce the cost and hassle of running profitable vendor kiosks at fairs/festivals/shows/conventions/malls/lobbies? Enough to be worth paying for such software?

What are the implications of instantly deployable, domain-specific thin-clients along these lines? What are the risks? Or is this just backward thinking?
Its like a real girl who doesn't take hygiene all that seriously...
Wait, so DannoHung says:

"I guess these attitudes come from being raised in a culture where it's the norm. "

You:

> Your comments are really quite naive and dumb.

and:

> ... aware of these aspects and attitudes are changing. But it's a culture ... and deep-rooted aspects about cultures don't change overnight...

Well which is it?

And you insult him no less.
This seems like a problem in China also - the lack of the rule of law. In the ME it seems this is government sanctioned, whereas in China this is due to rampant corruption.

Either way, the rule of law is absolutely essential to continued economic growth - both countries will run into a brick wall if they don't get their act together. China seems to be reducing corruption and trying to restore investor confidence... the UAE doesn't seem to be doing much of anything.
This is all you need to know about planning, from two of the greatest military minds of the last century:

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week. - George S. Patton
I should just add something for Smashing Magazine headlines that strips off the initial number+adjective.
or if you use Joyent you get slow IO even if you're the only zone on the hardware!
Thanks for the mention. :-)

Yes, the first thing I thought about twi.bz was, "I thought I already solved this with DecentURL" ... but I didn't quite. Looks like twi.bz is still about shortening URLs, whereas DecentURL is about making URLs decent.

Occassionally DecentURL will shorten a URL, but mainly it's intended to turn crazy random-numbers-and-letters addresses into nicely-named ones, while including the domain to make it somewhat "safe" (like twi.bz does).
This is an article about a similar skim on one of the machines for the Dutch railways:

http://web.inter.nl.net/users/p.c.wiegmans/skimapparaat/inde...
"The Java Environment for Java Haters": covering the JVM, the better web and GUI environments, essential legacy libraries, tools, and whatever else is worth carrying over as Clojure and Scala gain traction.
Indeed. Unless it has some user-agent detection for Googlebot and other search spiders, it's completely immune to search engine spiders.

I think it'd be a worthwhile experiment to add an HTML version (like Gmail) just to see the results. It should be easy enough to retain the design without all the excessive javascript.

And I'm sure a super-simple version would take much less time to develop than the current pure-js approach.
I wasn't sure if you were soliciting feedback on your site, but since that seems to be the current direction of the posts...

Overall, I like this concept. I think the "browsing items" effect is pretty cool. As others have suggested, it would be nice to display prices at some point. At the very least, make it contextual. In other words, if someone is going to select one of the price filters, this should be an indication that price is something they are now interested in seeing.

The site looks nice in FF, and obviously has issues in IE. The fact that "iesucks" shows up in the Internet Explorer URL history actually made me smile, but pretty much invalidated my opinion of your site as a serious consumer service.
Am I missing something or does this have nothing to do with "new atheism"?

"It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning."

It seems to me that the position of "new atheists" is that science is the only (known) universal means of answering the questions that it is capable of answering. The contents of the article (though not scientific) have been shaped by scientific insights. Doesn't it sort of back up the idea that we can do morality without god? if anything, wouldn't that give the "new" atheists some backing?
Yeah libraries are awesome. I grew up going to the library. That does mean that I am used to not spending money on books. I usually only buy a book if it is going to be read more than once and I know will find it useful. So I really want full access to the book before I decide to spend money on it.
Yep, that's exactly the kind of thing DecentURL's for. Though it's even better for modifying (say) YouTube URLs which don't have any meaning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4cmrMJul1g turns into http://youtube.decenturl.com/mr-bean-swimming
Are these that unusual? It seems like I hear about cops finding these relatively frequently in the local news wherever I am. I haven't used an ATM in years without checking it out first and covering my hand so a camera can't get the PIN.
The database can only do trivial consistency checks.

Between foreign keys, triggers, and CHECK constraints, databases can actually do pretty sophisticated consistency checks. There's also a SQL standard feature for database-wide assertions that would be very useful, but AFAIK no one implements it (probably for performance reasons).
True, but there comes a point where the sacrifices become too great.

My father is a professor (albeit of Medicine, where salaries are actually pretty good). He easily bought a house in a great neighborhood in San Francisco. On our street, there was a retired cop and a firefighter, and a Communications Professor at SF State. A good friend of mine's father was a physics professor at SF State, and they owned a nice, spacious house in the Sunset. Another buddies parents were both public high school teachers, owned a house in the Sunset no problem(one was full time, the other part time).

My brother is now a professor (tenure track) at SF State. He decided against renting his own 1br (too expensive), so he rooms with a buddy from high school (who teaches high school math).

So these two guys in their early 30s, one of whom is a success story out of his PhD program, rent with a roommate -where their parents easily bought and supported families.

You can say "well, that's the market at work", but then you lose your right to fret about the shortage of Americans in PhD programs in the sciences.

Back when it meant you'll never be rich, but you'll be able to afford a modest house in the western half of San Francisco", I could accept the argument that it's not about the money. But nobody will sign up for 6 years of post-grad + another couple of post-doc for near financial hopelessness or banishment to tiny towns far from the coasts...

Unless, of course, it's the only way to get legal residency in the US. Evidently, the US has decided to use this reality to staff PhD level positions in science and engineering - in spite of all this talk about getting Americans interested in math and science. Everything else is just pissing in the wind, as far as I'm concerned.
Have things suddenly turned around?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/07/engine-yard-cuts-15-of-...
that always happens to my blog domain when it gets posted here. Something with the two letter TLD and the way yc links urls
decidedly yes
Unless you like ham and cheese pizza, then it's paradise.