skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always wondered if we could could find something in nature that shows P=NP. It could be bacteria, autistic savants, dna computing, etc. Has anyone set up a test like this?

I'm thinking you simply increase the number and inputs on an NP problem and watch at what rate the time taken by one of these methods increases. (Is this too naive of an approach?)
One of the main reasons The Economist is doing so well is that they've done such a piss poor job of promoting their website that it's almost as if they never started posting articles for free in the first place. It's a lot easier to charge for something when people don't realize they can get it for free. It's a lot harder to the NYT, which everyone is used to reading for free.
Except that's not what happened. MS didn't "get caught" for a GPL violation

Just as a record in the Memory Hole, a paste from a separate thread, now buried:

-8<---------------------

MJF: Hemminger is claiming Microsoft put the LIC code under the GPL because it was in violation of the GPL. Is this true? Did you have to suggest to (Microsoft Platform Strategy Chief Sam) Ramji & Co. that they were in violation in order to get them to agree to release the code under GPLv2?

GKH: I didn’t have to “suggest” anything, I only had to merely point out the obviousness of the situation :)

MJF: If this isn’t accurate, could you let me know how to interpret (Hemminger’s) comments on his blog.

GKH: No, that sounds accurate.

[...]

Ramji didn’t come right out and deny the GPL violations claim, but I guess that’s as much as we’re going to get.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3433

------------------------
You could also use awe.sm to set up a redirector on a domain of your choice, which is pretty cheap and looks more professional than a generic shortener (disclosure: I know the founder).
How to Make Healthy Green Smoothies
The spirit and message of this post remind me of one of the best books I've read: The Practicing Mind. (http://www.amazon.com/Practicing-Mind-Bringing-Discipline-Fo...)

I fight myself over striving for perfection constantly. When I get closer to the "practicing" mindset I'm happier and more productive. It takes discipline and constant reminding, but it's worth the struggle.
I've read this before but RF is one of my personal 'heros' in life and so find it as touching today as ever. And a tacit reminder that no matter who any of us are the forces or nature apply equally. I'm sure that one day when cancer is eradicated from our lives that it will be someone who read RF.

Thinking Machines eventually went out of business but if I remember correctly the s/w part of the company became part of Sun, which as we all know, also is no longer. The company DNA has ended up in Redwood Shores, home to both SQL the language and SQL the airport.

There are a lot of very interesting youtube video interviews with RF from the British TV series Horizon.
Seems to be a repeat of a previous submission, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191212. But yeah wonderful article.
How Reuters Should Be Responding To The AP's Suicide
Taking "Me, Inc." Public: Market Caps for Individuals
I couldn't disagree more.

Facts don't float around waiting to be plucked from the air and distributed to readers. It takes serious work to uncover secret CIA prisons. I do not believe there is any other organization today that has the time and resources to needed to uncover something like that.

And you're wrong about the business of newspapers. They've never made money distributing news. They're in the advertising business. The money you pay for a subscription barely covers the cost of getting the paper printed and to your door.

Newspapers made lots of money because -- for a time -- they were absolutely the best advertising medium in the world. Newspapers are in serious trouble right now not because of subscription declines (which have been slow bleed for years) but because of a rapid decline in ad spending, which fell off a cliff about a year ago.

What's killing newspapers isn't the competition from online news startups, it's really AdWords and Craiglist along with the decline of national retail chains and the failure of car dealerships.
I'm pretty annoyed at how badly the Richard Stallman cult members have flooded the Kindle DX Amazon reviews. It's very tedious now to wade through the spam to find reviews written by somebody who actually owns a Kindle.

Is this supposed to make me sympathetic to the Free Software movement? It's certainly not going to convince me not to buy a Kindle DX which is the first gadget that I've seen worth getting excited about in the last 10 years.
Oh my god. The Pythagorean one just blew my mind. I am so embarrassed.
But isn't this the whole point of LLVM? Separating the compile process into two intermediate steps, one of compiling a programming given language into an intermediate virtual machine and another of compiling that virtual machine code into a binary for the target architecture. Then each module of the LLVM can be worked on and optimized independently with little duplication of labor.

So the promise of LLVM is not just being able to compile to every architecture, but to compile every language to every architecture.
They're not a monopoly, there are several other big wire services and dozens of smaller ones. They're just one of the best.
One thing that has struck me about paywalls is that the implementation of them for newspaper websites is almost always entirely backwards. Usually even the most fanatically subscription driven news organizations offer some of their content for free to potential subscribers as a taster. And it's usually the most recent items. It's always seemed to me that the right way to set up paid access is to charge for the freshest articles and leave the archives open with ads and various longtail merchandising. I think that would make more sense to most people, if they click to a site and can browse the archives at will, but when the try to read todays headlines they get the "This story will be free to the public in $d days $h hours and $m minutes."
I've seen this story before too, but I always enjoy re-reading it.

I especially enjoyed the part where Feynman showed up and they didn't have anything important for him to do right away, so they sent him out to get office supplies. A lot of people would have thrown around a lot of attitude about how running an errand like that was beneath them. Even though Feynman really was a big shot, he never acted like one (and he despised those who did act that way). It was just a job that needed to be done, so he went out and did it.
Seems rather pointless. How does this microformat describing rights stop me from copy/pasting an article onto my blog?

But I suppose I should be happy they didn't decide that I need to install a Silverlight player to read their articles.
Also delightful, but significantly more advanced is David Friedman's Price Theory:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC...
Price Theory by David Friedman
The thing is, there already is a Google for news. It's called Google News.

...and it already pays AP license fees to use their content. What, exactly, do they thing this new program is going to accomplish?
To quote John Gruber,

They have no idea what they’re talking about. Seriously, look at this gibberish [http://www.ap.org/media/images/APnewsregistry.jpg]. Someone just sold the Associated Press a bag of magic beans.
Can two-way stars, hitting and pitching, thrive in Major League Baseball?
I Love Wireframes
If you like this, you'll love the book Proofs without Words: Exercises in Visual Thinking: http://www.amazon.com/Proofs-without-Words-Exercises-Classro...
I agree with your point, but let me clarify what I mean: I don't mean to say that people are averse to paying for content they want. On the contrary, I do think most people are happy to pay what they feel is a reasonable price for things.

The thing though, is this: Once I've bought something I wanted and I have it, and it's infinitely sharable - why not share it with my friends, or even just anyone who might want it? That's where I think the real issue lies. I don't think most people see anything wrong with sharing something when it costs them nothing to do it. To the contrary, I think people in general are social and caring, and even desire sharing with others when possible.

Also, I think people are happy to pay someone for creating or providing goods they want. I don't think many people want to pay for copies of digital content, because single digital copies truly are worth nothing.
Sounds like you need to find bigger libraries. I read 50-150 books a year and my to-read list keeps growing longer.
Does anyone actually understand how this microformat & "tracking beacon" are supposed to work? Is it an image bug in the source?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232192

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554338
Here is something that scientists have studied which does this http://www.tjhsst.edu/~rlatimer/techlab06/Students/OuyangPap...

They actually take the approach that you state. They also have to judge how the system solved the problem. If you don't reach an optimal state you could be only approximating P=NP.
It's also interesting that he always says, "I don't always drink beer, but..." I suppose that they are targeting men that mostly drink hard liquor?
According to the AP, yes.

But not really. Linking to an article to discuss it is not copyright infringement. And therefore they would have no legal right to tell you what to do.

I suppose they could have all their licensees check Referrer headers and reject hits for unapproved sources, if they were serious about this... but I can't imagine why anyone would go along with that. And it doesn't change the fact that posting content on the Internet and asking people not to link to it, will never really be a good plan.
While I do like their commercials, Dos Equis is a horrible product. Why put so much money and effort into avoiding having to make a better product?
They're the only one you ever hear about.
VC 101 - Getting to Know
Sponsored tweets
Ask HN: Best e-commerce solution for an online record label?
I've been asked to help put together an e-commerce store for an online music label. They are popular within a niche genre and those who know them are likely to visit their site so providing sales directly from it seems wise. In return for my efforts they are willing to offer me a cut of their profits.

Having done a bit of research my options seem to be:

- Write a site from scratch using Codeigniter
- Use Joomla + Virtuemart (open source)
- X-Cart (a framework with licensing charges of around 200 dollars a year)
- Try to find an existing solution from the 100s of hosted services (most of which seem unreasonably expensive and inflexible)

Although I'm fairly comfortable with writing my own simple projects with codeigniter I'm daunted by the task of writing a full ecommerce solution with payment facilities, security issues, etc. I have no prior experience and I feel that the time spent learning how to put a solution together might be better spent concentrating on the business side.

What's best for me? Are there alternative options I've missed?
Here is a promotional movie about a later thinking machines model http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blvC0DA96dI
INK comes to the Hollywood Theater (Trippy Sci-Fi Fantasy Film)
I agree. I love these commercials. Perhaps it's because the dude himself claims, "I don't always drink beer..." Which, perhaps counter-intuitively, ends up being a more powerful endorsement than if he unrealistically only and always drank their beer. The Indiana Jones/James Bond antics the character has lived through are hilarious. It's like, "what if these super heroic people from the movies actually existed - and what would they be like in retirement?"
Tech in Movies
if ($job == 'manual') {
automate($job);
}
Reuters and AFP would be the other two big ones.

AP is just the biggest and the best for US news.
From the article:

"This is an extraordinary game and certainly not representative of the average revenue from other paid apps in the App Store. But it also isn’t even currently on the top list of paid apps, and it continues to pull in substantial dollars, spiking, we hear, to as much as $60,000 per day."
My vote is for "Yo". It recently emerged at a couple Baltimore schools.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005298.h...

"It was clear from the results that students in these two schools use yo as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun, primarily in subject position

"Yo was tuckin' in his shirt!
Yo threw a thumbtack at me.
Yo been runnin' the halls.
Yo put his foot up.
Behind the scenes of a Daily Show interview
Is hu pronounced hew?
"Dear AP: your RSS feed is for syndicating your stories. If you don't want the content out there, don't syndicate the content!"

Have to disagree there. Just because my blog has an RSS feed, doesn't mean you can repost the contents on another site.

As someone who has had spam sites set up based on my feeds, it's pretty friggin' annoying.
I don't think the author realizes this, but what he is really doing is pointing out that sometimes slavery can be beneficial for slaves.

Selling your future output net of cost-of-living is essentially what slavery is, after all; and the argument the author is making -- that if one could buy someone's future output (or the future output of a group of people) then one would have an incentive to invest in education and health care and other services which would maximize that output -- is one which dates back to at least the Roman republic, and probably earlier: Roman slaveowners would often pay to have their slaves educated or trained, because it increased the slaves' value more than the education or training cost.
Reuters could do nothing and come out ahead while the AP wastes money on this. They don't even have to make a statement. All they have to do is not follow the AP's footsteps.
The ad campaign does flow through well on radio. I heard this one the other day and I knew right away that it was a Dos Equis.

"Most songs about love are written for him, about him, or by him.

He'd never initiate a conversation about the weather, even in a typhoon.

He's against cruelty to animals, but isn't afraid to issue a stern warning.

Whatever side of the tracks he's currently on is the right side. If he crossed them, he would still be the right side.

He won the same lifetime achievement award twice."
It's not slavery if one is willing to be enslaved.
IIRC that proof is from India around 900 C.E.
IPhone Suicide: Foxconn Tragedy Underscores Labor Violations
Yes, the difference is between Joe User who just wants to read the news in his RSS reader rather than in a browser window, and Jane Website who takes the content and republishes it to her own users with her own ads pasted over the top. I don't see how the latter case is any different from someone including GPL code in their own proprietary product. You might as well say if they didn't want the source code out there, why did they publish it...?
The brain is remarkable in children. I lost my right eye in an accident when I was 7, and of course I can't see from that side, but I /do/ have perfect depth perception. I use shadows, relative object sizes, and parallax to get the data I lose without binocular vision.
I have to say I love this line of commercials and it actually works. Last time I was at the beer store, I asked for a Dos Equis specifically because I'd never tried it and this commercial made me aware of it.

Alas, they were out of stock.
The USB spec requires that USB devices be connected-device agnostistic. That is, they must be capable of communicating with any device, over USB, that knows the proper codes/bytes/etc.

Hiding the codes/keeping them secret, like most vendors do, is okay -- the USB spec does not require disclosure.

BUT changing the codes to prevent interoperability is prohibited by the USB spec b/c it defeats the whole point of the USB spec.
Perhaps there should be a separation between points for a comment and karma?

Now, a user's karma is the sum of all points, so it doesn't necessarily say much about the average quality. What if the maximum limit a comment could modify your karma was from -2 to +2?

I'm not sure how this should be calculated, but perhaps a score between 2 and 10 would add 1 karma point, and everything above would add 2?
Hidden Features of Erlang
Virtual worlds for children: Online playgrounds
The spread of pop-up retailing: Gone tomorrow
World trade: Unpredictable tides
You're talking about inflation, and the honest thing to say is "we're not sure what causes inflation". Monetarists think it's mostly a supply-and-demand thing with the money supply outpacing economic growth, for instance. But, of course, inflation is sometimes thought to be only one component of the cost of living.

In macro, there's two measures of inflation: the cost of living index (which is based on the cost of living and a market basket of equivalent goods) and a factor that is used to adjust nominal GDP measurements from year to year. Cost-of-living may change based on efficiencies (for instance, Wal-Mart has been credited with single-handedly holding down the cost of living for years) while the GDP factor is more closely tied to "true" inflation.

In other words, you may be right but cost of living is fucking complicated.
This reasoning seems to be based on the amount of attention gained by all these side projects in the media and tech community.

Of course, "Microsoft continues to make boatloads of money with Windows and Office" doesn't make for a great headline, compared to "OMG, Zune sucks LOL".

The important part is how many resources Microsoft allocates to "shiny objects", relative to its core products.
Home Remedies for Oily Skin
>Yes, the difference is between Joe User who just wants to read the news in his RSS reader rather than in a browser window, and Jane Website who takes the content and republishes it to her own users with her own ads pasted over the top

And where does that leave services like google reader? If they decided to start using ads, in which of the two groups would you put them?

RSS readers are relatively new and will probably evolve in unpredictable ways. The distinction between what is a "feed reader" and what is a "web site" is already outdated.
Solar energy in Israel: It's a knockout
I'm sure that in practice it's a quagmire of ethical and practical details, but the idea is quite intriguing. It opens the possibility of divideds, (hostile?) take overs, stock buy backs, options for people who take a risk on someone.

It could be great.
Superstition and finance: A total eclipse of the brain
Public companies can always spend cash on buying back stock so they can go private again.
Face value: Flush with ambition
a little context helps. dvorak is an admitted troll.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMQv0j29WHA
They have built a section of a brain that has 10K neurons and 30M connections between them and they claim all it is needed is to "just scale it". They might be able to scale the number of neurons to the right amount in the near future (many estimate the number of neurons in the human brain between 10G and 100G). But the biggest problem is the number of neuronal connections. Current estimates on the number of synapses in the human is around 10P (P for peta- i.e. 10^15). That doesn't sound as easy as "just scaling it up".

It seems most articles and discussions about the brain talk about the number of neurons and how to get enough processing power to simulate them, the way I see it, the bigger challenge is to be able to simulate the connections between the neurons.
Actually retailers by definition have negative working capital: their customers pay upfront while they pay their suppliers after 30/60/90 days. Which is why retailing is such a great business (see Wal-Mart).
I personally have no problem with people investing their retirement in the market...if the market was directly tied to the economy and the growth of companies.

But I don't see that market as being ABOUT that anymore. It's become a world of side bets and arbitrage plays. When an outsider analyst has more influence over the price of a stock than the company itself, then the market is a game, not an investment.

For example: a company can show growth, real POSITIVE growth...but ohmygodholyjebus if it's not EXACTLY what the analysts predicted then the stock is toast for the quarter. What the hell is that all about? Why do we play quarter to quarter instead of decade to decade? Because Wall Street is now about churn. And churn makes commissions.
Economics is great for telling us about these hidden costs, and I agree the minimum wage example is a good example where the costs outweigh the benefits. But it's not a clear-cut libertarian case of "all things that cause economic inefficiencies are bad policies". All economics can tell us is approximately how much inefficiency, for instance, would be caused by subsidized food stamps. It's up to everyone to learn what that cost-benefit is and decide whether we can afford to subsidize some folks' food purchases. (Food stamps, and voucher schemes in general, seem to work well in my opinion.)

Or conversely, if we come down and say we want to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions, we might say, "Oh, let's inspect and license all the smokestacks in the US and write each of them permits every year." Economists will shake their heads and say that's an inefficient allocation method, and then they will invent cap-and-trade, where we sell them permits and let them trade the same fixed number of permits, so that SO2 emissions stay under a determined scarcity, but that scarcity is market-allocated. We've been doing that with SO2 for years and it's one of the great recent triumphs of economics.
I'm really torn between whether this is about those crazy black kids that won't get off my lawn, or the future our society is heading in... ideas?
Yeah, great business leaders never make mistakes. Which is why 95% of computers come with OS/2 and Lotus 1-2-3, right?
are you going to hit the China market? email me at paul.pajo [at] asiapay [dot] com - we also have some turn-key solutions ...
Yeah, the FT example is an apt one. Don't alienate your audience. Make it come back frequently and get used to you. Then ask them to pay. Also don't forget about the classic Freemium model: Offering more for paid customers.
"Marriage is for white people"
I've heard the Watergate story used as an example before of a reason why news organizations should "matter." At first thought, it sounds like there is a third value proposition there (the three being fact distribution, analysis and investigation).

Upon thinking about it more, don't you think that the value of the Washington Post is a little over-emphasized in that story today? As much as the newspaper itself played a huge part in allowing the story to break - from employing and training their staff, through providing an infrastructure for doing the investigation to publishing the actual piece - they almost had as much of a role in killing the story. If the editor at the time had succumbed to the pressure from the politicians, he may have caused the story to disappear.

In the end, it wasn't the "newspaper" who investigated it, it was two guys named Woodward and Bernstein.

One thing I believe in is that the internet empowers the individual to do things that were previously impossible to do by one person. Theoretically, I think this applies in this situation as well.

As for the SJ Mercury News example, would that not be the same thing here? I'm sure there at least a couple of individuals in that group that are driving this kind of journalism. Maybe the newspaper as an organization helps foster and nurture this type of behaviour, but so what? Couldn't an organization that is not in the business of printing on paper do the same thing? What is the difference between a newspaper and a blogging organization anyway? Is it the salary? Is it the medium?

Nobody is decrying journalism, just the old (economically) unsustainable models.