skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That certainly explains why we never observe entropy running exactly backwards, but there are conceivable pathways that could result in entropy running backwards into a less entropic state. For instance, put two gasses of equal density into a container, where one gas is on top and one is on the bottom, separated by a sheet of glass. Remove the sheet of glass. The gasses mix. Now, entropy could run backwards for no known reason, and re-order the gasses, but in the other direction; the top gas now separated on the bottom, the bottom gas on the top.

This argument, while essentially correct IMHO, doesn't seem to cover the entire state space of what backwards-running entropy could do. But it's still an interesting argument.
I'm not recommending German or Chinese systems as a solution. What I believe is that tossing around insults, defamation, etc. anonymously is cowardly and should not be tolerated by our society. Make people stand behind their words. I think you can tackle one problem without creating the other.
I think it makes sense. Some generations are bigger than others, and the bigger ones (like the one this guy is complaining about) can throw their weight around at the expense of the others. They carry more political weight.

I, for instance, was born in a smaller generation. The baby boomers will control things for a decade or two more, and after they start dying, those younger than me will become dominant.

I'm not really that concerned about this - I came to terms with it long ago. But it's still there, and I can understand if some people get bitter about things like this.
I don't have Prolog on this computer, but it looks like the interpreter environment (state) is passed around in two a-lists.

Prolog can do neat tricks (difference lists!) with infinite data structures by passing around unbound variables, and then "retroactively" binding them, perhaps partially, further in the execution. It's conceptually different from lazy evaluation (more like dataflow variables), but has many similar applications. I wouldn't be surprised if it does handle closures automatically during unification of the code tree, though I can't check at the moment.

Prolog works by filling in all the blanks in a way that makes sense as a whole, but in this case it happens that the check if something could have been passed in as an argument can be used to set the argument to it, if valid. This probably sounds like weird quantum physics stuff, but Prolog is capable of testing whether the variables in the goal being tested are bound, explicitly binding and revoking them, collecting the list of possible valid bindings, etc.
Submitted for rant^Wdiscussion reasons.
I buy CDs because: They're cheap, they have proper inlay art, not all music is on iTunes, and they have the best sound quality - and I note that even P2P rippers won't be ripping a rare single from 1994 I bought off Discogs.com.
No one is ever going to give me anything, so I just have to suck it up and get it for myself.

Taking it one step further, the ruthless and ambitious (becoming a norm just to survive) will aim to take as much as possible and give back little or nothing at all, maybe a bit of lip service with some condescension.

Then there's bosses making staff feel they owe them something just for providing a work opportunity in a particular field, or even just providing an income. Bosses wanting their pound of flesh and then some: $1 more for you is $1 less for me.

Being paid regularly an honest wage for an honest days' work is a great thing, anything else and someone's being screwed over.
I dont see a thing!
I'm usually annoyed by "this doesn't belong on HN" comments, but this time I agree.

This belongs on reddit, not HN.
Thank you for your detailed reply. I've never actually used the application as I don't have a blackberry or an iPhone (I'm an Android user). I just ran across this service and was wondering what HN would think of such an application. If you or anyone else out there is willing to test it out, please do post what you think about its quality and functionality to this thread. Thanks
The worst thing is debugging OO code written by somebody newly infatuated with Haskell. (I learned my lesson.)
Why is it _impossible_ to read?

Even though I frowned at their splitting the 3 short sections into 3 pages, frowned again at their forcing opening of a new browser/tab for each section, it at least provides a (semi)decent summary of the different search engines in the market and hence stays high above the lower quadrant of the worst articles I've seen in terms of intent, content, layout, or color.
>>how to fall without damaging my self

Judo, right?
Yikes, would love to see how this goes! I read about all these live on $X for a month and shy away, mainly for nutritional value every very cheap diet I've seen has a fairly bad mix of calorie distribution. Is this always the case?

That being said, food is the one place I'm not stingy. Apartment? Sure. I downsized from a highrise condo to a small loft apartment. Got rid of satellite/cable TV, and did small things like removing unlimited texting from my phone, etc, I just can't find/get myself to eat cheaply. I try to get groceries on the cheap... then I just end up going out to eat 3x a week with my friends that have regular jobs and have lots of disposable income.
Another tip, prepare your presentation on paper using a spider diagram, central theme in the middle, sub-topics adding legs, add extra spiders on spiders as required. You can make something like this very quickly (less than 30 minutes) especially when you know your subject it's a handy cue for the key topics. It can be used to help prepare a PowerPoint however stick to the recommondations on here and in the link.
With as much outrage as I'm seeing in the comments, I'm shocked that this garbage hasn't been deleted yet.
What is the correct attitude that twenty-somethings should have? So far I have a few guesses: work on creating value for the world, be relentlessly resourceful, focus on cause and effect instead of whether something is "right" or "wrong", etc. Am I on the right track?
Ask HN:  An alternative to advertising that is fun and boosts your IQ?
Imagine for example telling people about every app in the app store via a game like this:

http://dual-n-back.com

Instead of letters, you can have app profiles.
Whether the model is a "skank" (which I read, as a UK English user, to be similar to a slag - a loose woman of low morals, skank suggests "scruffy" where slag does not) is a matter of opinion and not a matter of objective fact.

How then can one show that she is being defamed, if one considers here to be a skank then under that subjective definition she is. No defamation/libel just name calling.

If you said specifically she "slept around" and there was no factual basis for that then it would be different.
Pretty animation. Actual information = 0. Especially when using my first+last name since there are quite a few of us with the same name.

Without being able to see what was used to generate each category it is nothing more than eye candy.
Noted that it also has a session with VC Companies. Check this one out
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/peter-thiel
Reports of Mozilla's Failure Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (2000)
I'm very curious about this...how did they collect their data? Did they spider/screen scrape HN, or were they able to get a data feed/dump?

I've mentioned before that I'm interested in making some better algorithms for social news sites (I'm learning Scheme/Arc so that I can play around with news.arc); I think one very neat feature that could be added to social news sites is a sort of 'tracker' -- just like torrent trackers have a standard URL that clients can reach certain data at, it would be very cool for social news sites to decide on a data format whereby spiders and the like can get data feeds on stories, user "karma" and so forth.

To expand on that, you could even normalize the scores from each site, and build a social news "karma aggregator" that monitors lots of these feeds, and ranks your username across all of the sites!

EDIT: When I get up to speed on Scheme/Arc, I think I'm going to write a 'stats.arc' page to link into news.arc somehow. Is that a feature that anyone else thinks is useful? I'm talking detailed stats analysis/heuristics here, not just the 'top XX users' or whatever.
I'm usually the guy complaining about people saying "This doesn't belong on HN." But, uh, not this time.
For those wondering, I believe the visualizations on this page were created with OpenDX (http://opendx.org/) or its predecessor from IBM.
Opera needs a better logo. I find their current one rather uninspiring. Wait. Am I hypothesizing that their logo affects their adoption rate? Yup, probably more than we assume.
Uh oh. They're on to you!

Anyway, I don't think it's all that accurate in categorization. They seem to pick up keywords and label them as some arbitrary category they've defined the word as. I showed up close to 15% in Fashion and I work in Infrastructure Engineering with a dab of Software.
sorry to say this, but typical media lab project - looks pretty, sounds groundbreaking, but is completely useless. I bet whoever made this got an A though.
Idiotic.

People spend most of their money on things other than food, so to save money by cutting your food budget is silly. It's far more efficient to cut your housing budget by the same number of dollars.

Also, this reeks of muddy-headed thinking - they're "Social Justice" teachers? That's basically an extreme left wing ideology. Wikipedia says "Social justice, sometimes called civil justice, refers to the concept of a society in which "justice" is achieved in every aspect of society, rather than merely the administration of law. It is generally thought of as a world which affords individuals and groups fair treatment and an impartial share of the benefits of society.

Under this LITERALLY beyond-communist ideology, if some people generate a ton of value by hard work and risk taking, their resources should be redistributed to everyone, including the lazy and indolent.

The reason that $1-per-day eating is tied up with this is that social justice folks want to redistribute ALL resources, across the entire planet.

So, rather than generate utility themselves, these folks are making plans on how we can all live on drastically (and artificially) diminished resources.

Bah.
This is an awesome post, would love to see more overview and analysis like this from more of the YC companies. Good stuff.
I searched for my handle, the military stuff came from Everquest discussions on other message boards. In particular it seemed to be focusing on words like "tank" which describes a role in a "raid"; which are actually part of a fantasy video game not a real military discussion.

For my real name, I got a lot of sports stuff because there's a guy of the same name who writes sports books.
Baywords: A free and uncensored blogging service from the piratebay
It's as though the man designed his site deliberately to piss me off. Frames are one thing: I can excuse sticking with an old design, as irritating as it may be. No, what gets me is the fact that on the left column, at the bottom, is the text:

"Contact
Please use contact details in each page"

Okay, so I click on the top article.

"Contact details are in the article" appears at the bottom.

No email address on that page that seems to be his. I try the next, and the next. Same thing. I hit Ctrl-U so I can see if there's some javascript bot-catching thing that's hidden it from me, too.

Except it's a frame site, so I can't see the source.

Fuck this.
Yeah I had the same thinking with my comment below (above?, wherever it is now). I don't cut corners with food, that's the one place (and maybe my tech gadgets..). I saved a few hundred moving to another place, and then another hundred getting rid of cable I rarely watched.
completely wrong in my case.
Upvoted for having more programming insight than the OP. Well done!!!
I repeated this three times with my name. It gave me completely different results each time...
Education and Learning to Think
Could they just have sold to the platform provider? Maybe not in this case, but in general is a possible and good strategy?
What does this memory game have to do with advertising, and why would someone tell people about things using it?
Read it again then. Because his final images are MUCH better at visualizing the data, so he's doing something right.
I was also perplexed by this as several categories didn't seem to fit me at all. I was also shocked by a rather large section marked "illegal". Thanks to a link below from rrival, the philosophy behind the program is a mix of art and social awareness. We all expect computers to be infallible giving a precise characticture of ourselves from data. However, the computer is intrinsically unaware of many human traits and can't differentiate appropriately. Judging from my own reactions and those of others thus far, we haven't yet grasped this concept.

The philsophy: "In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant."
In what way?

(I am glad to say that I have not yet written "class Foo does Monad, Functor {}" ;)
Serious Games
Jim Lunsford was one of the first pioneers in the development and use of serious games; He created his first serious computer game in 1990 for military training.
We don't even know what "Art" means according to the experiment, much less how you got there.
20 Ways to Begin & Improve Your LinkedIn Presence
I'm with you until the third sentence, then you completely lose me. The linked article doesn't talk about any of that stuff. It's about eating cheaply.

Why inject a political rant where none is called for?
I agree with you that the best presenters probably don't use handouts or powerpoint but maybe it's because they're gifted speakers. I think it's hard for most people to carry an audience without any supporting material. A few slides won't hurt if you're engaging and have information that adds value to your presentation.
Un-indexed queries are not inherently evil... sometimes they are faster than using/maintaining an index.

Queries are all about context; how big of a data set, how much/fast is that data set changing, how often is the query being made, etc.

I've seen some cases where a single table had a crap-load of indexes, one specifically for each query that was being performed. The overhead of maintaining all of those indexes was killing performance.

I find the most effective query tuning is a result of having realistic stress/load testing combined with internal analytics from the database (EXPLAIN or EXPLAIN PLAN). This points out the low hanging fruit, which you can optimize using various methods such as indexes, materialized views, and in some cases, re-arranging the data model to better suit your queries.

It also gives you a better idea of which queries are being hit the most, and which ones it makes sense to spend your time tuning.
You've far and away missed the point. You went from two people who wanted to see how much of the world lives by having a very limited food budget to "beyond-communist" ideals.
13+ Facebook Groups for Computer Programmers
Calculated Risk: U.S. Population Distribution by Age, 1950 through 2050
When Ken trained me on Scrum, he was very clear about the fact that Scrum in and of itself was not sufficient for project success. Scrum punts a large number of important decisions to the "Project Owner," and therefore it is a very poor fit with projects that don't have an active,hands on project owner or proxy for the project owner.

if you have a incoherent project owner whose priorities drift from sprint to sprint, you will end up with a beautifully executed, disciplined execution of an incoherent product.
The best advice I have seen is here (800KB pdf)

http://www.sethgodin.com/freeprize/reallybad-1.pdf

"If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report. Do it in PowerPoint if you want, but it’s not a presentation, it’s a report. It will contain whatever you write down, but don’t imagine for a second that you’re powerfully communicating any ideas.

Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.) Unless you’re an amazing writer, it’s awfully hard to do that in a report."
This is an alternative to advertising that promotes everyone's product for free.

The idea is to get users to look at every product (e.g., every app in the app store).

To make this fun, a memory game could be used. This may end up boosting your IQ as well.
Sure, but have you tried the Chana Masala? It's delicious.
in what way? There was a set of google result snippets for the query 'paul graham' surrounded by a bunch of flashy graphics
Google Apps gets a redesign. Makes it even harder to find free option.
I didn't inject it.

These folks self-describe on their website as "Social Justice teachers".

If the website had been about hemp clothing and the folks called themselves "pro-marijuana activisits", that would be relevant.

If the website had been about eugenics and the folks called themselves "national socialists", that would be relevant.

I brought nothing new to the discussion - I merely pointed out what their words mean, for those who don't have a background to understand.
"I wouldn't photograph something I don't own, or that no one owns This would restrict you to photography only within your house, with all the shades drawn. Maybe even with the TV off."

I actually mistyped that sentence, sorry. What I meant was: I would only photograph something I own, or that no one owns.

I don't know how I messed that sentence up, I guess my brain flat-lined for a minute.
How a 'Made' Startup Was Clipped
Learn how to look at yourself from the other side of the table and build bridges, take, but also give equally.
Having a last name that is commonly used as both a noun and a verb makes this sort of thing pretty useless. I can't really effectively Google myself either.
The Entrepreneur Whiz-Kid Myth
n2n looks like it could be pretty useful! Peer to Peer VPN could really come in handy at conferences.
I had Seth's blog on my Google Reader RSS for maybe 3 months. It seemed interesting and novel at first. Then, it started looking vacuous and empty. I dropped the feed. I checked the link to see if something changed in my perception/assessment. No, no change. Maybe I am shallow, but I find his blog shallow. There.
Last month I tried, for the first time, to go with the Presentation Zen thing, and I think it turned into one of the best presentations I've ever done.

On the other hand, one key person from the audience has asserted just this morning that I failed to tell her a piece of information that is critical to her. I remember saying it, and it's right there in the notes for the relevant slide.

But boy, do I wish that I had a slide with bullet points on it, so I could show her: "Oh yeah? Well, what's this?".
You don't have to live like a monk. Save 20% of your income always (don't make much? don't worry you won't be saving much. That 20% is your money don't give it away.) and start practicing at networking early. You probably wont do it washing dishes, but maybe hammering nails. Construction is for a client who you can meet, washing dishes you're in the kitchen.

Talk to the people who need your services, talk to people because they might know someone who needs your services. Work out a way you can bring your talents to help others for money. I've never been without work and it's not because I'm particularly bright. I'm good at what I do, I love what I do (most of the time), and I talk about my work because of that.

I hear my friends talk about not finding any work because of "the economy". I yell at them, I've never been busier. Most of it is routine work, but for the hard sells it comes down to a simple fact. My clients hire me so I can save them money long term. So I stay busy.

I don't see how that can translate over to retail. But I can for many other professions. The writers, the sectaries, the office managers, for big companies for small for, for non profits. Chances are you can do the job for less money and with an added technical twist. They can pay you 3/4th as much, and you can make some pretty excel reports that will blow them away.

It's never that simple, but that's the jist I've seen working. But what do I know? I'm a whiney 25 year old.
It sounds like your grandfather was and is technical.

I'm talking about trends about nontechnical people. The question for me is whether nontechnical people are getting more technically literate.

Literacy to me is about the deeper patterns. For radio, think AM/FM/Satellite and radio waves. For the telephone, think electricity and sound waves. For television, think about the broadcast spectrum and channels. These concepts become part of the literate vocabulary only afer the technology gets better established and people get better informed.
OK XD
reminds me a lot of this submission a few weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=732770

these guys have more of a purpose behind what they're doing, so its harder to say that its a bad idea due to sacrificing personal health.
What the hell is with the lowercase text transform for the entire site? Who thought that would be a grand idea? I guess the same person that made the bottom menu say "clients" but typing clients in wouldn't bring you to the clients page. Or "start" for ideas instead of "ideas."
When I was a lad, I wrote an implementation of Scheme in a new-fangled language called Java that nobody had heard of. You certainly couldn't get a job in a bank with Java experience at the time.

I'm glad I did so, the Java experience gave me enough money to take time off my career and the Lisp experience gave me something interesting to do with the time off.
Whoa whoa...
The solvency issues of Social Security are primarily due to the Government of my parents "borrowing" money from the system that they paid into it. There are of course the exacerbating burden of of longer life expectancy that they have failed to address as well. I believe it was Al Gore who spoke about the idea of a "lock-box."

All this and generations want to call me entitled? Look you spent the money you were supposed to save. I can appreciate the social programs that result (I'm a bleeding heart) but, don't shit every where and then blame my generation for stepping in it.
Excellent point. And as the Discussion section of the paper lightly suggests, "possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties." Which brings to mind applying the model to certain negative cultural memes, which are certainly highly infectious and, in their way, produce...zombies!
Ask HN: Best Startup Phone Option
I run a startup where a large amount of our sales and business are conducted over the phone. We've been considering getting a phone service so that we can have a phone number for our business and so that we can place that number on our website for potential clients to call.

We're a team with a virtual office so landline options probably won't work.

Does anyone have a service they really like (VoIP or otherwise)?
Should my company not even bother?
Just plain nice. Thanks for the link.
how about 'what is sequoia capital'? Not being snarky, but I think people underestimate how often a natural language query will work, and how often non-techies use them (although if you don't know who they are, you probably aren't likely to have a relationship with them).