skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a consequence of 3 cards, 3 times around the deck. You have to prioritize getting to all the cards in the deck.
It's worth pointing out that Google App Engine + JRuby & Rack Apps is considerably cheaper than Heroku.

You can build a full Rack app w/ DataMapper, one that is portable (i.e. no lock in) and scalable, w/o having to pay anything, prior to some serious traffic.

(Caveat: Tool chain for Ruby on Google App Engine is a little raw at the moment, but it's coming along)
Google Outage Caused 5% Internet Traffic Decline
Your Unique Identity
The thing is pre-nups aren't always enforcible. The major reason is that no one makes provisions for hitting the jackpot (either literally or founding a business that makes you rich), or that if one person does the partner can contest it in court as an unforeseeable circumstance. This usually ends up falling under the 'unconscionable' clause in the law.

Then there has to be full and/or fair disclosure (your spouse needs to know about that $50,000 you have put away). The other (possibly the easiest reason why prenups can fall apart) is that the agreement has to be entered upon voluntarily by both parties, so if your spouse only agreed to the pre-nup because you threatened a break up then the pre-nup is automatically void.

The sad thing is that if pre-nups were made into law then they would never be enforceable, because everyone would have been forced into them under duress. How can you voluntarily sign an agreement when it could prevent you from being legally married.
Actually, it just assumed some difference along those lines.

> more unequal societies will pay them best

Nope. I just assumed that more unequal societies that do pay them better would have a better chance of attracting them.

All other factors are never the same, but it seems absurd to think that productive people place no weight on being paid better. After all, non-productive people place weight on being paid better.

> That's why studies like the OP are necessary.

I don't see how such studies can find anything non-trivial.

Note that there are specialization and globalization effects. For example, suppose that country A attracts the inventors and is unequal and country B is equal and attracts the drones. (This isn't far-fetched - there's little benefit to being a "tall-poppy" in B and being a drone in A really sucks.) If country B builds the stuff that country A invents, both benefit and have a better standard of living than either by itself.

Suppose further that concentrating inventors has some effect on their productivity.

Note that A could easily end up worse off than B, despite being crucial to B's success.
An idea - Domain name used as postal address?
Hi all,

I had to post a snail-mail and had to write the address of the recipient on the back. I couldn't find it immediately and it was quite long to have to write - and write legibly.

I then had an insight:
Seeing as domains have to be registered, how easy would it be to just write said domain name on the back of the envelope? (instead of the multiline real postal address)

The post office could then take care of the conversion from the domain name to the actual postal address by a whois.

For example, thedailywtf has a postal addres for its sticker campaign ( http://thedailywtf.com/Swag/WTF-Sticker.aspx ). The postal office then receives a mail with address 'thedailywtf.com', does a whois and thus gets the correct postal address!

What do you think?
That's what the ninjas are for.
Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity? I haven't read NKS, so maybe I don't understand the depths of this man's capital offense, but I see nothing in your list that any smart business won't do. Maybe it isn't revolutionary (whatever that means), but it's a damn cool project that's going to be useful to a lot of people, and isn't that all we care about?

Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits?

If the odds are worse without promotion, what rational human wouldn't use it?
Hm. I've been avoiding the hype about this, but it fails on queries like "Chancellor of Germany" which seems like something this should do. Am I missing something, or is there just very little data in it?
If you don't choose to get the update, you don't need to jailbreak. It means that you don't get the advantage of Apple's own work, but that's part of the deal. Either you can get Apple's updates or you can have absolute freedom of your system. I view it as similar to the way that each new version of OS X requires a new version of Shapeshifter for skinning, because Apple keeps changing their UI inner workings. Apple's not beholden to the third parties trying to change their system.
Everyone should stop being impressed that it can answer complex math questions. It obviously has instances of Mathematica available to it, that's probably the first thing Wolfram hooked it up to.

This isn't a search engine. It's a web-based expert system with strong data-manipulation and presentation capabilities.
Because it was no review but an analysis. Review is when renowed reviewer gives his opinion which is backed by his authority. When your'e a poor grad student, like Aaronson in 2002, then you better withold emotional opinons and give facts.

he is proposing

And what Aaronson analyses is that book's statements form no proposal.
Good theory, its not that simple.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ruby+vs+python
Using Wii, he conducts a digital orchestra
Halfway through the paper.

Recent research suggests that the difficulty of having it both ways is not always insurmountable. Women may try to get investment from one man while mating with another who is desirable in different respects. Baker and Bellis have found that when married women have affairs, the matings with
the “extra-pair” male occur disproportionately during the woman’s fertile period. This finding suggests that one goal of short-term matings for women is to secure “good genes” from another mate, and that women may use deception to play a mixed sexual strategy.

This is why I hope there's a hell, or some other form of karmic retribution. These sorts of women need to burn.

Anyway, what is truly hilarious is that women who sleep with "alpha males" aren't giving their children good genes anymore, because narcissistic and psychopathic men are generally unsuccessful in the modern world (with some exceptions, but not enough to make these desirable traits). They're actually placing a genetic curse on their bastards.
Link to full Simpsons episode with Jody Foster as Maggie "Howard Roarke" Simpson
Broadly speaking there are three criteria you have to fulfill to get a patent. They are:

- It has to be novel, meaning that the invention must never before have been published

- It has to be usable, meaning that it has to provide some useful function

- It has to be non-obvious to an expert in the field.

I don't think this has changed.
so you think the post office is going to waste a crapload of man hours just to lookup domain names for the 1-2 techies?
They already automate much of the sorting by scanning in the address (if legibly written).

Would be small effort to scan a domain name and then do a lookup.

Some benefits (broad assumptions):
- less to write so chance of it being legible goes up
- no need to figure out postal address info
- companies will like it because single brand name on envelope

And I am sure there are others. And I am also sure there are some disadvantages...
The other (possibly the easiest reason why prenups can fall apart) is that the agreement has to be entered upon voluntarily by both parties, so if your spouse only agreed to the pre-nup because you threatened a break up then the pre-nup is automatically void.

This is the heart of the matter. The courts have redefined the word "voluntary" in an unbelievably Orwellian way.
Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity?

I believe the last time was Cuil.

Being able to work the hype machine is great, but if you generate more hype than you can deliver on it hurts your image. Since A New Kind of Science was similarly underwhelming, not to mention even more pretentiously hyped, many are cynical.
The paper linked to is of much greater value than the blog entry.

http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/ppxt/HT2007/gen...
Any chance to see the median instead of the average?

It's interesting to see spolsky at #3 with 14.88 on 87 comments and pg at #20 with 7.88 on 4721 comments. How do the underlying distributions compare?
The fact of the matter is that a pre-nup is invalidated simply by you being forced to sign it under any form of duress. You really love the guy, but he want's a pre-nup and you definitely don't, well if you have proof of that (witnesses, etc.) it's a cinch to have the pre-nup invalidated.

Also, to the people who've responded to you and elsewhere that prenuptial's should be forced by the government; well they're already invalid. Forcing someone to sign a legal contract to do something considered a basic human right (it's considered a social right to get married) automatically invalidates a prenuptial that has to legally be entered voluntarily by both parties.

Such ignorance of prenuptial law is probably why a huge amount of prenuptial's are invalidated by judges.
Living abroad? Going outside your comfort zone, experiencing new places, languages, cultures?
I am not talking about the laws or the words, I'm talking about how people in the patent office behaved. In the past, if you wanted a patent for a device, you had to be able to show that what you are describing in the patent actually would work, that you'd actually created something that implemented the idea in the patent.

That is no longer the case. Now you can simply describe something on paper and get a patent, even if the description in the paper isn't sufficient to implement the invention by others.

The whole point, the idea, the impetus behind patents (as a concept) is that you are sharing your repeatable design with the world so they to can replicate your invention in /their/ lab and build upon it.

The point was to make the world a better place for everyone by releasing ideas in the the world with a mechanism that can protect them and enable the risk taker to reap the rewards of the risk without the fear that someone will simply steal the idea and make a bunch of money off it and leave you in the dust.

This philosophy has been lost and patents have morphed into a corporate strategy that makes the world worse for everyone except the patent holder.

The content of the patent has no value. You can have the best idea, with a device, with a demonstrable instance of the idea and it doesn't matter because it still costs millions of dollars to defend in court.

Decades ago, patents had value, now they have none. They describe processes that won't work. They are vague enough to cover, not only the invention, but anything even remotely /like/ the invention even if the invention as described in the patent would never work.

Patents used to be tools of inventors and now they are tools of lawyers.

So yeah, the lingo hasn't changed, but the practice has. It's the practice that I'm talking about. The Bill of Rights hasn't changed in hundreds of years, but today, the press is put in jail, the govt listens to your calls and reads your emails...

Kinda sad really...
I find it fascinating.
It turned awkward when people started taking considerations other than business into account, such as "love". I believe Wolfram Alpha has an article on it.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=love&a=*C.love-_*Wo...
Can it compute the question, though? If not, that's merely cool but useless. Most of the people who would think to ask that already know the answer. It's the question that we need to know(My vote goes to "What do you get if you multiply six by seven?").
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=VMware

'Interpreting "VMware" as "voxware"'
Petty sexism FTW.
Social sciences generally can't manage the strict experimental methods we're taught in science so they rely on quasi-experimentation (and are fully aware that that is less rigorous). The control you suggest would be confounded by the problem of age. What if people get more (or less) creative just through the passage of time?

Not that I'm defending this study, though it may be extremely rigorous, it's really impossible to know from an economist article.
Ask HN: A good open-source implementation of multi-key-value db?
I used redis, memcachedb & tokyo cabinet. They are all key-value database implementation. Is there any multi-key-value database c implementation with open-source? The question is to maintain correspondence of tag and per image. In the special case, I am doing a larger framework in c/c++, so it has to be low latency or just a naive algorithm implementation.
A review of Erlang is Not Functional
Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.
I actually bought a copy of the Codex years ago. I found one on Ebay for a few hundred dollars.

It is truly an amazing thing -- it's like an encyclopedia from an alternative universe. The pictures are incredibly detailed.

It's too bad the fake language probably doesn't code for anything.

More pictures here: http://www.io.com/~iareth/codindx.html and http://www.archimedes-lab.org/Serafi/C_serafini.html
It's questionable whether the extra work time they get by graduating early will is worth the high tuition anyway, when they could do just as well at a state school or maybe even a community college.
you stay number 1 by acting like you're number 2.
I believe the last time was Cuil.

Cuil's sin was failing at a solved problem, and most plainly, trying to be a "Google killer" (I believe they lectured Google on the size of their search database before they even launched).

NLP answer engines aren't a solved problem, and WA was a pretty decent 1.0. Sure it failed techcrunch's vanity test, but for what Wolfram promised in those videos, it performs.
As one who started at Netscape in 1996 and saw it through to the sale to AOL ($4B Sale, Final Day of Trading $10B) - I'll agree that the constant shuffling, moving, and campus growth was a pretty constant distraction - but what else could they do? Ton of product lines, lots of markets in the land grab, and you needed to put the people _somewhere_

I think Netscape managed their office shifts pretty well from 1996 onwards. I don't think it could have been done much better.

And, one could do worse than selling their five year old company (April 4, 1994 - sometime around April, 1999) for $10 Billion. :-)
Well, the page numbering system is internally consistent. It's in base 20-something, IIRC. Though all I figured out about the writing system was that it has a second (like upper-case) form used for titles. There's a Rosetta Stone-ish page near the end (http://evertype.com/pics/bookpics/RosettaView.jpg), which seems almost mocking by the time you get there.

(Edit: http://www.math.bas.bg/~iad/serafin.html . It's base 21, more details there.)

I had it for a few weeks on university library interloan, once upon a time. Looking at individual scanned pages on the web cannot do justice to immersing yourself in hundreds of pages of this gigantic black silk book.
> Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch.

What makes you think it was Wolfram's talent per se and not that of some marketing exec ?
And you're in a good company. Feynman for example found it fascinating too, that's why he worked at Thinking Machines and made first cellular automata based QCD simulations.

Outcome of this popular fascination is now known as AI-winter.
Office 2010 Technical Preview now available on torrent trackers
Microsoft have announced that the new Office 2010 Technical Preview ( also known as Office 14) will be provided to selected “testers” this summer. But the chances of you being one those select few are limited. Do not be too disheartened as, just like the release of Windows 7 RC, Office 14 is now available on torrent trackers :) as a result of specific testers “leaking” them onto the internet. Thus, enabling anyone to download the suite and use the new product!

The “leaked” build is most likely to be “invitation-only” as in the summer Office 14 will be given to “invited” testers. Nevertheless, many of the features that Office 14 contains will still be usable in this preview. Also, the leaked editions are both compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit but do not get so complacent as it will not be the same as what the testers will receive this summer, you may as well register your name and hope to god you are chosen :)
At least it knows that python has a faster runtime.
Measure everything
Oh I wasn't disagreeing with you, just citing some information I thought might be of interest.

I agree that the patent system is broken. Personally I think that the biggest problem is that there's so much prior art and technology advances fast that the patent offices are simply unable to cope, and just rush patents through.

I actually hold a patent on something I've never built, and where there, erhm how do I phrase this, might be prior art that could invalidate the patent.
Since "anti-trust" is bad law, anyone who files complaints about it is "dirty".
Yeah, it doesn't know what happened on April 12, 1961 and can't answer some other trivia questions. That's not a big deal though, feeding information into the system is far easier than building the system in the first place.
Wolfram - How many roads must a man walk down?
Wolfram Alpha seems to be answering life's great questions...
Outsiders? I'm from northern California and lived and worked for years in Oakland. Maybe it wasn't as bad as we thought, but there were definitely areas that you "knew" not be in after dark.

And there are no such places in Bratislava. There is essentially no violent crime. There's no fear. It's a big difference, and every American I know who has moved to Europe talks about the difference.
I recently saw a Notwist show where Martin Gretschmann was using 2 Wiimotes as instruments. He had them connected to what was apparently a custom-built touchscreen PC with custom software (which he used as a virtual keyboard, among dozens of other things).

Here's a video (found on youtube):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcEA7HouZDg
Link to overview, for those who prefer to know what it is without/before bumping up against a PDF.

http://linear.ups.edu/
You're conflating hardware and software. It is Apple's software--which they own, not you--that has a restriction on background tasks. Owners of the hardware can do what they like with it.
I think what you're saying is true, but it's orthogonal to my point. Both of them generated more hype than they delivered on in their launches and people were underwhelmed. That WA has more promise is a separate matter.
Until I read the PDF, I assumed this would be about Nobody Knows Shoes. It's better to abbreviate A New Kind of Science as ANKOS to avoid confusion.
If I understand correctly, most of it is actually written in mathematica.

True, it's an expert system and doesn't appear to be anything new in terms of AI, but it's still pretty impressive.

(edit: according to Wikipedia, "It is written in 5 million lines of Mathematica [...]")
That was a scary documentary.
The Crowd-Sourced Company
This could be the base of a wacky MMORPG.
That's not the point. The point is to deploy in 15 minutes and then -never think about infrastructure again-. In the early days, anything that's keeping your product from customers is getting in your way.
Getting Started in iPhone Development with Pragmatic Studio
Find out what is involved in getting involved in iPhone development from the definitive source, Pragmatic Studio.
Well written and accessible; you mother would understand it. The best passwords, usability and safety, are three word phrases. Easy to remember and easy to type. To accommodate the rules at my clients, I use <Capitalized-word><punctuation><word>.

I worked with a password fanatic who used a generator to create 8-12 random character passwords, which he stored in his PDA, because he couldn't remember them. I dont think his method was more secure than mine. I didn't have to write mine down.
Because newspapers never misquote people or take things out of context. :)

Did it quote Stephen Wolfram as having said that, or just Wolfram? In fact, another source quotes Conrad Wolfram, who is apparently Stephen's brother, as having said that:

http://current.com/items/90053264_googles-search-engine-riva...
IIRC the letters in the words repeat way often than one might expect.
That's an explanation of how it is interpreting the input, not a claim to importance.
A disadvantage is that if a single character of a domain name is illegible, they can't run a whois on it. With a normal postal address there is some redundancy.
Ask HN: Graphical Languages / IDE
when the web was young and so was java, I remember programing my first java app in much the same way you wire up a circuit. this was when macromedia was macromedia and flash was shockwave, and people used angelfire, and geocities over second life. The web was young and it was innovative and people were playing with graphical ways or programing, even before GPUs were around.

One might say that graphical programing languages were ahead of their time.

today, i think labview is the most prevalent graphical programing language out there.

do you know others? i am looking for one that might be good for multi-processing.

i wonder what metaphors would be the bare min to make it functional.

for example a few metaphores

* all base types, should visually show their byte structure

* sets(arrays, vectors, collections) should be squares, or blocks of memory

* objects should be circles or spheres

* public functions should be marked on the surface of an object, where privates are internal

* multiple inheritance could look like a ven-diagram, with a new circle enclosing the composite set.

* variables should be picture hashes, with a dominate color, the variable namespace could be used to generate the hash like a 'code of arms', so it's inheritance might be easily visible.

* all functions have an id, but they also have a creation date, last update, and last editor, all versions of functions exist, and you must attach to a version or a set of versions. once a function lacks any attachment, it can be deleted.

* functions, should just be an array of instructions, supporting full CRUD.

.. what would you want?
To be fair, Google AppEngine gives you that same ability. The difference is, you have to build your app for AppEngine rather than building a plane jane vanilla rack/rails/sinatra/whatever app with postgres.

The app I have running on Heroku uses a number of prebuilt gems, including things like twitter-auth that sort of assume you're using migrations and ActiveRecord with it. I may move it over to AppEngine at some point, but the absolute fastest way for me to get an app up and running was with Heroku.
Duck Duck go on CNN top story as a logo
Since when has Hacker News, with its highly entrepreneurial core, ever so viciously attacked publicity?

Since when polluting valuable community information resource with paid commercial fluff became acceptable?

Aggressive promotion poisons the well for everybody. People come to HN for the honest information and opinion exchange with the like-minded, not to be bombarded with PR.

And by the way, I remember time when NH core were not get-rick-quick wannabes but engineers and, well, hackers. Which does not exclude being entrepreneurial. It just means being not easy for some 'smart business' to manipulate.

If the odds are worse without promotion, what rational human wouldn't use it?

The one that is familiar with game theory. Defection does work in the trusting, cooperative environment. First time. After that the community switches to 'tit-for-tat' strategy and bans the aggressor into oblivion. Or core of the community decamps to greener pastures leaving 'smart businesses' and their shills to their task of filling communal cesspit with more crap.