skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not how constructivity works, though --- it's all or nothing. You can be careful about the points at which you use classical reasoning (or, here, probability), but then the whole proof is no longer constructive. The argument in favor of the constructive approach is that you can very carefully decide when you depart from it.

For a (Curry-Howard) corresponding intuition, a program is no longer functional the moment any computational effect is involved (mutable state, control effects like continuations and backtracking, etc.).
Multiplayer Doom should be a lot of fun!

I just finished a great book based on the two John's from id Software called Masters of Doom [http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cultu...]. It was a great read and I would recommend it to anyone who loved games.
I don't know. I quite like the background photos on the current Live.com. It's a welcome change from the boring white pages.

I do agree that the results interface looks cluttered. Granted, they are trying to present a lot of information, but they should find a way to simplify it. I suspect they'll change it up in time and after a real world launch.
Not to mention the fact that it runs independently from your browser tab. I know that Chrome already has separate processes for each tab but no other browser has that yet and sandboxing a video player in its own application is great for stability.
Google Wave Federation Protocol
Ringtones cost $2.40 because the cellular carrier takes 50%, as do other middlemen. If it were a direct market, a much smaller micropayment would work.

There is no reason good micropayments, such as http://twitpay.me and http://rt2buy.com/ (no affiliation) can't work in all the markets he dismisses, other than Amazon and Paypal costing too much to effect the transfer. But the cost is coming down, Amazon payments way undercut Paypal for small transactions. Its only a matter of time.
Steve Ballmer, International Security, and Us Little Folk
Each song is classified according to the Music Genome Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project). The song's genes are rated according to how strongly they are expressed on a 1-5 scale. They break down your song ratings into ratings of certain genes and groups of genes (focus traits) and pick a new song that rates highly in the genes you "like".

They also account for lemons on a band-level and song-level basis. If you negatively rate a song, they won't play it again on that station. If you negatively rate a band twice, they won't play that band again on that station.
I imagine that you wouldn't actually have to process the transaction until somebody owes a largish ammount of money (relatively).

Something around $10-20.

What would work even better (this is how allofmp3.com used to work) would be to buy a bunch of credits...$10-$20 worth of them, then as you make "micropayments", it draws from this supply.

Google's ad program also works this way. You pay in $50 or so, then each click costs you $0.90 or $0.10 or whatever it is, it doesn't process a transaction for each one, it just draws from your reserve.

This is good because it encourages people to continue using the service until their balance is gone. This causes the cost of moving to another service to increase.

The idea of this isn't new, it's just stupid.
because they're so insistent on not involving a human

Classic case of something that was a tactical advantage becoming a key weakness.
Sweet, overall winner will receive $250,000. Should I quit my job, and make a killer app for the Android? Any tips?
Did you notice the slide (#48) pointing to the Java implementation of Arc? I'm not sure how full the interop is yet, but it's a start.

http://github.com/conanite/rainbow/tree/master
Facebook Names First Class Of fbFund REV, Its New Incubator
The enormous psychological gap between "free" and "non-free" definitely exists, at least in my own mind.

There is yet another issue, which I have never seen brought up. Unlike physical goods, with information you know practically nothing about what you're buying until you've non-refundably consumed it, almost by definition. The only possible exceptions are very large aggregates such as books. And most available information, by volume, is simply worthless.

Let's say that a dime were deducted from my bank account every time I read a HN article, and given to the author. I would feel that most of the money is spent unwisely. Not necessarily because almost everything is garbage (Sturgeon's Law applies!) but because I have not had the chance to evaluate it before purchasing, since doing so is effectively impossible.

This makes the common comparison of proposed Internet micropayments to costs such as my electric bill rather specious, since every KWatt/Hour which comes out of my breaker panel is worth the same to me, and I know exactly what to expect from it.

I refuse to participate in any scheme which rewards the worthless 90% of a Sturgeon's Law universe equally to the valuable 10%.
Did hulu have "labs" before this? heheh
Doesn't Apple do this? If you make a purchase, you won't get a receipt until a few days later. It will aggregate all your "store" purchases across iTunes desktop, iTunes on devices, and the App Store on a weekly basis.
It looks like they're trying to make a mix of Google and Wolfram-Alpha. Not a bad idea - let's see if they can make it work.
It's amazing how illogical people are when thinking about food/nutrition. Here are some sources:

First, read The China Study:

http://www.amazon.com/China-Study-Comprehensive-Nutrition-Im...

The incredibly thorough, epidemiological study conducted shows that consumption of animal protein (meat, fish, dairy) correlates hugely with 0besity and diseases of affluence. Further, more micro studies confirm that animal protein is the cause of cancer actually developing after exposure to a carcinogen.

Then walk into a vegetarian restaurant and look around. People are pale, chunky, weak-looking, and generally the opposite of health. You'll find the same at most health food co-ops.

Then look at a "health food" cook book and see the huge amounts of oils, nuts, etc. that are used in the recipes. You'll notice that most of the food has around 50% of calories from fat. Compare this to the stats from a McDonalds menu.

Now go into a vegetarian Indian restaurant -- most of the people who work there and eat there will be chunky.

For more information on some of the downside of the typical "healthy" diet in modern America, check out the book "The 80 10 10 diet" which really hits hard on the fat content of so-called health food. Doug Graham advocates eating mostly fresh fruits and vegetables. The China Study (above) suggests that Graham is a bit more extreme than necessary and that carbs are OK too, but the less refined the better:

http://www.amazon.com/80-10-Diet/dp/1893831248/ref=sr_1_1?ie...

Bottom line: Food producing companies know that food products are significantly easier to sell if they are labled "health foods". So lots of foods are labeled that way. The whole "healthy oils" movement is a farce (explained in both books I cite). No, slathering your food in olive oil does not make it more nutritious!

Consider the undisputed fact that big agriculture is heavily corn-driven. Corn sweetens your cola and cereal, feeds your beef and chicken, etc. But did you know that corn and soy are a standard crop rotation? Of course we are told that soy protein is good for you (in fact, the compound soy protein isolate found in many health foods promotes cancer cell growth the same way that meat does).

I am shocked that my comment above got modded down. I encourage anyone who is curious and open minded to take a look at the references and observable evidence cited above.
For the people that watched the keynote: Kinda funny how they praised JavaScript for an hour and latter, on the AppEngine note they tell us to write Java and let them handle all the conversion to filthy JavaScript :>
Didn't RSS readers solve a problem by aggregating disparate streams? Granted, the problem is a lot bigger here. Instead of aggregating/organizing lots of sources using only 2 protocols, you are trying to do the same for many protocols and many models. But I suspect this is why it would be a big win -- the users find this daunting as well!
Green Anarchists want to kill Singularitarians
JQuery and Colour: The cheapest way to enhance user experience
You probably should consider the definition of mainstream, since a price-point really has nothing to do with its meaning. http://www.answers.com/mainstream
For anyone interested in the nitty gritty details, the original Cell article is here:
http://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(09)00378-X

Edit: And this video by the lead researcher himself is pretty good at explaining the basics of the research: http://download.cell.com/mmcs/journals/0092-8674/PIIS0092867...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/New_in_JavaScript_1.8#Expre...

New in 1.8 you can omit the return and curly braces. So at least a little improvement!
I am totally open minded about this topic, but I didn't find that article particularly convincing. The general point is that you are exposed to millions of harmful pathogens per year; a vaccination is just a few more, so .00000000000x% increase.

But, this is assuming that a vaccination is in no way different than normal pathogens, which I have no way of knowing.

I have heard both anecdotal, as well as confirmed (I am quite sure) cases of children dying within very close proximity to receiving certain vaccinations. I think I have heard of 3 Canadian (or was it US) girls getting sick and dying within days after receiving the new cervical cancer vaccination.

Now, maybe I can't prove that it was the vaccination that caused my daughter to die 3 days later, but sometimes recurring coincidences sometimes indicate something is happening outside our sphere of knowledge.
Since we're on the internet, I believe it is appropriate to compare CVS to Hitler.

At least it made the trains run on time.
Yeah, me too, but writing a bi-directional wrapper for JSON or the even better future thing might be non-trivial -- unless the protocol gets ugly and uglier.
I found absolutely no point in the article. Confused.
From the slides, it looks like Arc dumps lots of short words in to one giant global namespace where they can easily collide with local names. Is this correct?

For example, it looks like Arc uses the "t" as a global true value. Is it really safe to assume "t" wouldn't be accidentally used as a local variable?
This is precisely why something like Tipjoy should succeed. (A shame that it probably won't.)
Wave is not just a singular tool, it is also a communication protocol. There is no single way to use it.

If you watched the demo you would see that many of the issues you mentioned in your comment can be addressed simply by choosing to use wave in the manner that is appropriate for the specific communication's context. You are free to approach it as:

'Collaborative draft and then publish'
'off the cuff IM type conversations'
'Push type communication like email'
'Pull type conversation like a blog'
* etc...

Its really hard to explain without seeing the demo. When they publish the video for the day 2 keynote you should definitely watch it:
http://wave.google.com

I would just respond to your summary by saying that it does what existing communication types do already... but better... and throws in things like versioning (history and record/playback), collaboration, and concurrent modification for free.
Another great website to buy a motorboats particular suitable for European rivers and canals is http://www.motorbootmatch.nl . Try it, there I found a boat that really meets my requriements.
Travel time to major cities
How an Intern Stole NASA's Moon Rocks
Step 1 is knowing that the name alone doesn't mean shit.
Why sleeping more could help you lose weight
God: process and task monitoring done right
People just need to get used to spending money again, rather than the false sense of "free" from ad-supported services.

You say that like it's simple. Changing people's thinking is about the most challenging goal a startup can take on. It can take an awfully long time. I'd love to hear (tipjoy) Ivan's thoughts/plans on this topic.
Nolan Bushnell has a blog: A Serial Entepreneur's Perspective
Well, there are a few things where you pay first - books, as you say, but also movies, theater, fast food and so forth. Unsurprisingly, this involves high marketing and a tightly controlled supply chain to be profitable, or else a very qualified consumer (no way am I going to pay >$30 for the privilege of reading a paper in Nature or something that I might find interesting, but if I was a specialist in that field that would be different).

I don't worry about the free/non-free thing. I see lots of stuff on the web that I'd consider worth a nickel, a dime, a quarter or even a dollar. The issue for me is that I am not going to get my credit card out and go through the 2-3 minute process of submitting all my billing information for such a tiny amount. Affiliate and adwords-type stuff is faster and better from the consumer point of view, but of course that often results in content degradation: as pointed out on HN recently, why write expertly about an obscure topic when there's more money to be made writing crap about a popular topic.
I agree that a bookmark based search will never be comprehensive. Neither will any other kind of social solution - I doubt anything will do sort of a search engine that looks at semantics.

The real problem with SearchWiki (or other upvoting/downvoting) is that you keep going back to the search page while your search is failing. As soon as you click through and find the page that you want, you stop - you do what you wanted and get on with your life. Whereas if that is the page you need and bookmark it (granted your point that we don't bookmark everything), that is a true and accurate indicator of success.

Since HN was explicitly mentioned upthread, it would be interesting to know how many people upvote/downvote stories (which you have to get back to the main page to do) versus comments (which are in your face in their totality when you are asked to vote). I can only speak for myself, but I vote on comments massively more often than I vote on stories, exactly for the reason I described. So in order for SearchWiki to really work for me, I want to express my happiness when I am viewing the target page, not the search page. (I am sure this can be accomplished in theory, I just don't think the support is currently there).
Biology|College Biology|General Biology
Rapid Learning Center offers visual learning courses for biological and medical sciences, including high school biology, college biology, microbiology, genetics, anatomy and physiology, microbiology, molecular cell biology, evolutionary biology, ecology, immunology and other medical courses.
":-)"
What's so bad about companies not bullshitting? If Microsoft said "We think HTML5 isn't worth our time, and we won't lift a finger until we see it picking up," I'd like them a lot more than when they make empty claims. That way, when they actually do stuff (does the IE team do stuff anymore?) I can trust them and look forward to it happening.
All the flight stuff is farecast.
Money is a medium of exchange. So no, I don't think they should be able to arbitrarily reduce your wealth, but hopefully cash doesn't comprise more than a tiny fraction of your wealth.

If inflation truly scares you, don't keep a significant portion of cash on hand. Go take it all and buy gold/houses/land/businesses/securities. If hyperinflation truly happens, we can both laugh all the way to the bank (most of my 'wealth' is likewise in some kind of asset). If it doesn't happen, you'll probably still have made some decent investments.
What a micropayment system needs to succeed is to drop the transaction cost, so that very small payments are feasible, and then they need to be transparent to the user. The charges can't just happen silently and then end up on a bill at the end of the month.

You don't need to actually move money every time for that. Just have an easily accessible widget/meter. (OS X Widgets, but connected to a page in the browser would be perfect for that.)

You can also give the user tools, like a 'Max burn rate' setting that prevented you from spending money at a rate faster than you're comfortable doing. (This would appear as the site restricting access based on pay.)

The people to make this happen are actually Google and Mozilla with cooperation from Opera. If you make it a part of the web infrastructure like the little lock icon for SSL is a part of it, or like the (default) Google search field in the upper right corner, then it will work, so long as it's voluntary. (Tipping) Make it an open protocol, and provide the centralized back-end processing for free, and the webapp hosting companies will throw it in, and everyone will have it.
Time away breeds ignorance...thanks for the reference
Making your work interesting instead of your personal troubles wins.
Has anyone come across any more details on the nature of his solution? The Swedish article (that this English version is based on) doesn't offer much more.
Increasing Ubiquity
The Truth Behind Last.fm Story: Techcrunch conned?
What if Google hosted something like TipJoy, and the scheme was built as a very specifically formatted REST call with open source server-side software that authenticated and forwarded the transaction. If Mozilla built this into Firefox, then it would quickly become a part of what the users perceives as the Web Infrastructure, just like the (default) Google search box on the upper right hand corner, or the SSL lock icon.
"The ADC 2 contest is open only to applications that have not been published -- whether through Android market, a public web site, or any other means."

I wonder whether apps ported from another platform are eligible.
I agree. The only thing he says about Mercurial is "I've used it some, and found it to be incredibly pleasant." That doesn't tell me anything. This could potentially be quite interesting to someone like me who has used a DVCS, Git in my case, only a handful of times, but instead it ends up as anecdotal.
A Technical Look at Google Wave
The form for searching out plane tickets and such was the only thing that jumped out at me. It might be a winner if they make it very easy to buy things through the search engine page...eg you search for 'Great New Movie', get a list of cinemas local to your zip, pick the theater+showtime you want, and then get a 'buy' button, all without leaving the search environment.

But things like that have been tried many times before. And I'm sure Google could resurrect Checkout or Wallet or whatever it was called.
"we used Xyzzy" ...

Where can I find/use Xyzzy?
I search, but couldn't find it.

Any pointers appreciated.
It sounds useful.
That was Mussolin-- aw, forget it.
I was just looking at the protocol specification. Its still very much a draft but it is based on XMPP.
A Solution to the Fundamental Problem of Micropayments.
The psychological barrier to spending "anything" versus nothing is often said to be the fundamental roadblock in the way of micropayments.

I propose a site where one would subscribe and deposit a fixed amount each month, which would then be divvied up and distributed to sites based on up-votes which the user delivers through an embeddable widget, a la Reddit.

This would remove the psychological cost of micropayment transactions, since each "payment" does not affect the amount of money the user will spend.
sounds a lot like tipjoy.
After further reflection I'm not sure my belief is wrong.

The match between GM Roman Dzindzichashvili and Rybka has finished with a somewhat surprising (at least to me) score of 4-4.

http://www.chessville.com/Wall/DzindziRybka.htm
http://www.haxial.com/products/xyzzy/
Just because such code parses, it doesn't mean you should write that way. Rather than requiring a ludicrously dense or terse style, most real projects will just have fairly reasonable coding standards (whether formally specified or just commonly understood) and expect you to exercise good judgment.

Besides, I don't think anybody is really expecting you to cram as much into one line as possible.
Siri: A Powerful Virtual Assistant For The iPhone
Amazon does. I use their mp3 store on Android. They appear to only charge my credit card at the end of the day so that songs can be grouped.
Boxee is on Apple TV if you hack it. It did have working Hulu support in the last April 2009 build (currently Hulu isn't working for me on it, as of about 2 weeks ago - they might have broke it again, and Boxee is semi-slow at releasing updates for their Apple TV build).

The interface is a bit clunky (due to an underpowered Apple TV). It works and it does give you this "Oh, that's cool!" feeling, but it's not quite there yet. If the interface was sped up more (especially when you're navigating the menu's while a video is playing in the background), I'd love it. Comedy Central and TED video's stream wonderfully! :)

Out of the box though, Apple TV is nearly useless unless you buy lots of content off of iTunes for it.
Yay, we reinvented Usenet, more cluttered though.
Interesting, even if the author suggests that Sneakers is a bad movie.
How about a history-based search engine? A plugin that simply submits every link you visit (when your privacy features are off) to the aggregator, along with how long you kept each page open before you closed it/surfed away. I know it would be incredibly invasive, but it would basically be a Nielsen Box for the Internet.
The pitfalls of unicode sorting (with Perl examples)
I started coding up a site using this (yesterday, actually) and it's very easy. Whoosh support is cool, although you have to use a forked version that reverts a couple changes. One thing that bothers me is that you have to label the template files for search results as *.txt for some reason.
True, I am currently researching giftcards for that reason.

Merchant services are still bastards.

Rich, rich bastards.
Because "Microsoft", as a brand, is recognized as a corporation. "Google", as a brand, is a search engine. People don't want to use corporate branded things daily. It's why the IM is called MSN Messenger and not Microsoft Messenger.

On a branding level, some things work better if corporate branded, some if independetly branded. You can't just throw the same brand identity at everything.

Imagine for example using "Procter & Gamble Soft Soap", "Procter & Gamble cleaning fluid", etc.
The truth is that "there's no story". Because somebody (everybody?) is stonewalling.

Paul Carr provides a good summary of what (impaired) journalistic-like investigation has been done so far.

I don't follow Carr, but glanced around the guardian.co.uk page and noticed that the 3rd "most followed stories" was, "Woman may have kept mother's body in freezer for 20 years." Ah. Well, I guess Guardian is not exactly targeting HN readers.
already made a c-based simulator. would like to do some hands-on hardware work. good idea, though.
It's already 6 months "in the future" from that statement. Google also didn't get where they are by waiting indefinitely to do 'easy' things.
A Django Developer’s Views on Rails
I just had a Scary Thought:

Maybe the masterplan isn't to migrate everyone over from email, but to create a parallel world of Google Wave. Another inbox to check, in addition to email + RSS + twitter + Facebook + bug tracker + Hacker News. :-(
I actually enjoy complexity that's empowering. If it challenges me, the complexity is very pleasant. But sometimes I must deal with complexity that's disempowering. The effort I invest to understand that complexity is tedious work. It doesn't add anything to my abilities.

All those who design and maintain programming languages, libraries, and frameworks, heed this man's words!
Pimping "Google Wave" seems a little too deep into the hype machine for my tastes. Nobody ever heard of it last week and now it's going to "leapfrog" something..

We'll see. A lot of things stand in the way of Bing gaining traction, the least of which is a product that itself has no traction. IMO, naturally.