skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely not, and for far more reasons than I enumerate below.

The language used to encode the search space will be under constant development and expansion.

The creation of the axioms of any proof system is not a search problem.

Recognition of "meaningful" proofs will be extremely hard to automate. The checking of statements does not create mathematical theory, but it is the collection of related statementswhich do.

The search space is likely to be still much too large for proof systems to exhaustly enumerate all meaningful statements in any person's lifetime.

If mathematical statements could be easily checked, it would make mathematical study quite different. But likely much more interesting and fast paced.
well, it just brings us a couple of steps closer to an answer for "life, universe and everything"! :-)
Milwaukee protocol (treating rabies without the vaccine)
Built 10MinuteMail.com to learn Seam. The site now gets over 100,000 hits/day.

Started Sparkred.com and have been profitable while competing against much larger established players.

Built a woodshed that didn't fall over from the snow last winter. Built a closet that makes my wife happy. Built a desk that makes me happy.
I've always wondered why we wait so long to take the animals into captivity and breed them manually. It seems like as soon as a species looked like it might be in danger of extinction, a couple should be captured and breed- just in case.
Can it be viewed somewhere online or otherwise?
If you have to sue, that's no recourse at all.
TheFunded.com Co-founder Job Board
I don't get it. Your reasoning for supporting an arbitrary age line is because after "a decade or more of life-experience and hard-won wisdom", your perspective changes and you'll know that it's not unwise. I don't doubt the benefit of experience and wisdom, but where is your actual reasoning?

Logistically speaking, an arbitrary age limit is the best option for the way western urban society is set up (it actually self-reinforces the whole thing). The fact is that society does segregate young from old, and it does delay adulthood for a great number of teens.

But I'm young and inexperienced, and in due time I will see that the way our society is set up is the only way, right?
But if you already know most of what they are teaching you, it doesn't teach learning.

School needs to use a pre-test, post-test methodology. Pass the pre-test and you can skip a topic, fail the post-test and you have to study it longer.
The point that many of us are attempting to make is that this is so because of how we currently treat teenagers. When you treat someone like a child they tend to act like a child.
You are 100% right. It really works like that. If you grow up with little or no opportunity to meet your responsibilities head on and to shoulder your weight you'll lose a decade. Sometimes more.

I started working at 17, mailroom boy at first, worked my way up to systems programmer then started my own business. By the time my friends graduated I had a nice little business going. But I doubt if that would have been possible in the period after I got started and before the whole www thing happened.

The barrier to entry was pretty high for a long time.

I attribute most of what happened to luck and the little bit that's left to plain old fashioned hard work. But then again, I like my work. That really helps.
Persuaded my girlfriend to be with me.
I think this is a good idea; I am a founder looking for a good co-founder and I have found it hard to find good talent since I am not currently enrolled in school or plugged into one of the talent networks (Google, FB etc...).
Gmail and Mutt.
Martin Fowler: Is it worth it to design software well?
I'd love to see that. I bet he could sell you your own shoes.
That depends very much on where you work. There are plenty of opportunities to grow in some of the larger institutions. I ended up working for a bank and I learned lots of stuff that came in very handy in my later career. Contrast that to my buddies who took the university path and all got stuck in middle level management or very boring code maintenance.

A CS degree is not a free pass to a well paying and interesting job.
Isn't it weird leaving that sort of thing behind? I also built a "purchase prediction model" right before I left a startup. It did really well on the test portion of the data (which wasn't included when building the model), but I have no idea how it's performing in the wild. It's stranger than leaving something like a program that has a clear function, because it's not necessarily obvious how well the model is performing compared to how well it "could" be performing.

Have you thought about getting ahold of them to find out how it performs now, just for curiosity's sake?
Starting a search experience by asking the user what they are looking for misses a lot of important use cases.

For instance, checkout some of the demos of Marti Hearst's research into faceted search at Berkeley: http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/demos.html
That is amazing. I work for the competition (FreshBooks) but I would have relished working right out of high school in a high tech position.

Good on ya.
I agree with jpwagner... In Paul Grams essay "Startups in 13 sentences" #10 is Avoid Distractions. I would consider school a distraction even if you do find time to work on your startup its not the main focus of your life.
Set Theory is the building blocks of mathematics, and Halmos is a first-rate mathematician and teacher. Excellent recommendation Paul. I worked through Halmos 8 months into my mathematics self-study and loved it.
Note to all: Phil Schiller is actually a human being who lives on earth and reads the news. He also sends an email from time to time.
How much weight did you lose on the trip? Did you also lose weight from the training? [This sounds amazing. I bet you got a lot of Forrest Gump jokes, though.]
I too have heard a bacteriophage treatment in the same terms in the past. It's basically using viruses that prey on bacteria, as a treatment for bacterial infection. It was fairly widely used in the soviet bloc in lieu of antibiotics, so (presumably) has a reasonable amount of clinical use behind it. It it, as far as I know, very effective - and doesn't have the same issues with bacterial resistance as antibiotics, because the bacteria and viruses evolve in parallel; essentially it's the same arms race, but instead of us doing all the expensive development work on antibiotics for the anti-bacterial side, we let evolution do it for us by using naturally occurring viruses instead.

So - my question is, does anyone know why bacteriophage treatment isn't more widespread?
Awesome! I'm planning a ride from DC to NY this September. Not exactly across the US, but it'll be my longest ride.
I feel like it's the wrong question. I don't think anyone would really advocate postponing responsibilities until the brain had reached maximum maturity. The responsibility question's function signature is wrong: it's returning a boolean when it should be returning a float.
Security experts warn of dangers of rogue Wi-Fi hotspots
Did you really just call someone you've never met before -- who created a service you seem to enjoy -- a little brat? People who create great products which get acquired do not get "set up" by their acquirer. The cash they earn is often in exchange for giving up full control over the product's destiny. That is what happened here, and you can certainly argue whether or not Delicious is better or worse off for being underneath Yahoo, but it's foolish of you to try and divine how truthful you think Josh is being, merely because you may trade the best thing you've ever created for $15 million.
fetchmail/procmail/mutt. All of my addresses forward to a single imap account (some via gmail for spam filtering).
Advice from me (now) to me (then)
Poll: How Often Do Strangers Ask For Your Customer Data?
How often do you get requests from people you do not know, by email, asking for break downs of your customers and their market segment? I ask because it's <i>not</i> cool and it seems to be happening more and more frequently.
Should have used deniable encryption...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption
Reminds me of living on Ft. Irwin (NTC): We were required to have a lawn in the fenced in backyard, though Ft. Irwin is just south of Death Valley. Our lawn did okay. Our next door neighbor's lawn died something like twice a year because his backyard was the mirror opposite of ours, so his grass got the worst of the sun every day. Not to worry: He could keep replanting it for free because the government supplied seeds and such to people in government housing. When we moved out, we were required to remove the cacti and other succulents we had planted lest some child be poked.
Actually yes it was weird and kind of sad because the developers that I left to maintain it are kind of morons (IMHO).

I never really considered asking them how it was doing now; I have been so busy working on other projects but I would like to know.
That sounds like your competitors trying to get a leg up.
>John Taylor Gatto has long warned about the dangers of artificially extending childhood, and has blamed our schools for damaging families and stifling creativity and a love of learning.

I think it's ridiculous that it is now normal (or actually preferable) now to be in school until you are done with 1/4 to 1/3 of your life without seeing what "the real world" was like. This means the average person won't be able to do anything significant until they have already wasted their best years in school and low level positions.

I can get decent grades pretty easily (much like many people here) and so slacking off and procrastination was just a smart way of using my time. Now that I think I'm of the age where I can make something of myself, I need to unlearn a lot of the bad habits learned in school in order to get things done. Many smart, ambitious people I know do not try to start independant projects because they are still "just students," but then go on to do amazing things after graduating and finding their purpose in life. Much of this can be prevented with an early firsthand exposure to a life outside of the artificial punishment and reward system of school.

Chances are, even after reform people will probably still go on the same path -- highschool, college, graduate school, but they will have a much better reason to do well, since it will be what they chose to do.
And it syncs all the accounts over to my iPhone:)
Was high school terrible for kids who become entrepreneurs and hackers?
I am just curious whether entrepreneur/hackerish guys have it rougher because we probably think very differently from most people. High school was certainly terrible for me.

Despite being good at sports and being excellent in school, I was probably the most miserable kid in high school.

It was too long ago, but my vague memories includes posing all sorts of weird questions to my teachers which people laughed at, and being absolutely outlandish in my ideas on how to do things.

It was really bad last time, but looking hard, these are very much the same "heck it" traits that made me start the various projects I did. Just curious - did any of you share the same experience?
I use Gnus.

I've got it setup so all my incoming mail lands in Gmail. Then, Gnus checks that account via POP3. Gnus only checks mail when prompted, so anything that Gnus hasn't fetched yet shows up as unread when viewed on the web or via iPhone/IMAP. Gnus is setup to select the correct SMTP server based on the contents of the message being replied to or the view that initiated compose-mail.
claws

http://www.claws-mail.org
Video: Ward Cunningham on "technical debt"
> You've never had a problem with a null pointer in C or C++? Ever?

Not once we had a recorded bug caused by calling a class method on a null pointer. If the code is operating with references, it requires some ingenuity to return a null reference from a function. And if the code operates with pointers, the null checks are typically there. So, yeah, the p->foo() with p being null is a very uncommon issue.

With regards to what are the common sources of instability are - based strictly on my experience, the "instability" in C++ context typically comes from not enforcing class invariants, or not adhering to the declared class semantics. This clearly can come in a variety of forms and shapes, and it is hardly possible to pinpoint specific language construct as a single most common root of these problems. Also, I frankly do not remember when was the last time we had an actual crash in our production code. In C context the sources of crashes vary, but more often than not they are caused by the side effects of the functions, i.e. you have a data structure (pointed at or allocated in some other fashion), you feed it to the function and this call invalidates it, but you assume it does not. This sort of thing. Again, if there are pointers, then any C programmer worth his salt will have either an assert or a conditional right after where this pointer is initialized or changed. I have never seen a bug caused by calling a null function pointer, and there is some code that makes a very extensive use of them.

Hopefully this answers your question.

Now, how about the link to that article ?
Well, yeah, but you would not believe how often, brazen, and somewhat sycophantic it is. Some of these messages seem so... oblivious. They even admit that they are working on competing projects. It's starting to get weird.
Imaginary worlds are early sign of highly creative kids
Negative tech press and negative popular press are different things. When the tech press disparages you, that will likely have no correlation at all to how either the public or the developers see you. When the popular press say something bad about you, the public's opinion will start to shift, and then the developers will feel justified in changing their minds to a greater extent. To put it another way: the tech press has said bad things about every version of Windows. The popular press only said bad things about Vista.
9 startups or 9 websites?
Breeding two animals is practically useless - the gene pool would be too undiversified, and populations which have been brought back from the brink by such techniques have a bunch of problems.

More to the point, the numbers are overwhelming. Thousands of vertebrate species are threatened, not to mention plants and insects which are probably even more valuable to the ecosystem - for example there's no point saving the koala if eucalyptus goes extinct, because there will be nothing for the koala to eat.

See: http://dodosgone.blogspot.com/2007/06/extinction-rate-estima... for some numbers.
it doesn't sync all your mail.
More than one decade.
As far as I understand, this law was created to get very important information from really serious criminals. But if a person has materials that may get him into more serious troubles than 5 years jail-time it is in their interest not to provide encryption keys.

Or do I miss something?
I've been using computers since the 1980's, and have had dozens and dozens of passwords. I honestly don't remember the vast majority of passwords I've used in the past.

Many of the passwords I currently use have been randomly generated and are stored in a password storage app, the database in which these passwords are stored could be easily lost, damaged beyond recovery, or to which I could forget the master password.

So, if legally required to produce a password for some reason, I could quite conceivably go to jail even if I were willing to provide the password, but just couldn't remember what it was (or if it was one of the randomly generated passwords that I'd never memorized in the first place but no longer had access to for some reason).
Their focus isn't web design.
GyazMail: http://gyazsquare.com/gyazmail/

I've been using this Mac OS X client for quite some time. It's everything I want in a desktop client. It has become rock soid and is slowly but steadily improving and adding features.
It does look quite snazzy.
I'm pretty at Mathematics and doing that takes a lot of work. And the Mathematics books for noobs are no good.

The better approach is to get a theoretical book, something like Spivak's Calculus or Linear Algebra by Friedberg, Insel and Spence. And then from there whenever you have difficulty with the material spread out laterally and you really start to gradually grow an understanding of mathematics.

And then perhaps, one day you'll be up for Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds!
Google and Amazon, not publishers, will dominate the book's next chapter
Absolutely. I was being at least partly sarcastic here ;)

The funny thing about bit.ly is that they take this model to the next level - they are actually building to be bought by a specific company which has yet to make any income itself.

On the other hand, bit.ly's investors have a lot of pull in Twitter, so it's a unique situation. I don't know enough about VC investments to tell, but the situation where investors in X create Y in order for it to be bought by X - obviously with some profit - is pretty interesting.
Summary: There is a design pay-off line - having little software design may get you to market faster but then hampers you downstream; having too much design slows you down for no additional payoff.

I call this the "less talk more code" point. Of course the trick is figuring out where that point is without the benefit of hindsight. In my experience it really helps to know what the shelf-life of the product is, and the length of the future development cycles, which is not always clear in advance. I have called "less talk more code" on a project thinking we would only need the software for 3-5 years before having more time to refactor; if I had known we would have been still using it 10 years later in its original state, my determination of where the payoff line might have been different.
Congratulations! It sounds like a crazy interesting trip. What was the best part of the trip? Who were the (mostly older) individuals who did the trip with you and what were they like? Close but not intimate or good friends? Did you have time to go off on your own?
Nginx, high volume http and mail proxy
I second that complaint about Mail.app. It's a great client and I use it for my main job email account. But the refresh button is essentially useless.

More than once our mail server has been down at work and I don't notice until I try and send something.
This discussion highlights why these questions are so difficult and frightening: ethics prevents good science.

Randomly sample a bunch of kids, hook them all up to monitoring devices, put them in different schools and societies that involve transitions into adulthood at different rates and onsets, set up a control group (Lord of the Flies setup), do the longitudinal study, and write it up. An associate professor and his 5 grad students would get a bunch of solid papers out of it. Theorists would have fun defining "optimality" in this context (to be fair, the philosophers have been gnawing at it for a while..)

This is unethical .. right? Then, you have to ask yourself: wouldn't it be more ethical to do the study, figure out how best to raise kids, and let all human young for posterity (or at least 'til the results are invalidated) benefit from the wisdom?

Hmm.. :)
The article in the comment you replied on has a solid theory: it's hard to patent bacteriophages in their natural state, and tailoring bacteriophages to a specific person presents difficulties with the FDA. Therefore, obtaining profit through these methods is difficult.
In other words: Basic Socialism.
EngineYard announces the winners of their programming contest
Do you have something special on the go ?

I remember that in the early days of the webcam - before I realized the value of what we were doing - we'd get the weirdest visitors, ostensibly to meet to see if they could 'partner' and under this guise they would ask all kinds of questions that would be none of their business.

Eventually I wised up to it, which is why my first response to you was that it sounds like competitors.

Keep your cool, make sure the people you work with (also in lower positions) know that you're under a mild form of attack. Especially front line people are prone to being 'pumped' for sensitive information.
Isn't it O(log n)? I guess computationally it may blow up if you are doing a significant number of operations.
* Basically treating it as your private hotel resort. I've seen many people who choose this route, and I find it pretty repugnant.*

I assume that by this, you mean buying cheap food/beer and ignoring local culture? While it isn't my preference, I'm curious why you find it repugnant.
Thanks everyone for your comments. I really appreciate the feedback.
I don't think that UK police will get a section 49 notice just to get some random password because I am pretty sure that the NTAC requires a lot of information proving that they are looking for data that may help preventing future illegal actions or something like that.

So I think the police really know what are they looking for when obtaining this warrant.
"Have you ever throttled a mountain lion with your bare hands?"

I think you need to actually experience a story to use it as an icebreaker. Nobody likes a liar.
(Coventry, UK) Python Developer Required
Take over development of a web-app written primarily in Python. The application primarily uses CherryPy, SQLAlchemy, and mechanize. In addition to Python, you will need to be familiar with JQuery for the frontend, be comfortable with MySQL, git, and a minimal amount of Perl.

Location : Coventry, UK
Salary : £35,000 - £45,000 pa
Accommodation : Available

Please contact brokerquote@gmail.com with resume if possible.
Hayek and friedman are certainly among the more outspoken proponents of socialism
Smoothy TextMate Theme.
Tradition. Apple laptop screens have always been subpar. Worse panels, worse lighting, worse resolution than what you'd get in a similarly priced PC laptop.

I guess this has to do with the screen being one of the most expensive parts and apple selling smaller quantities than other manufacturers. Better panels would likely eat into their margin significantly.

Anyways Apple is not dumb and has long realized that this flaw can be trivially concealed simply by ensuring that your product is never on display side-by-side with competing brands.

Hence the apple-isles...
As a hacker I solve problems and do not believe in simply regurgitating facts for the hell of it.

High school was horrible. I left early to work for a startup and it was the best decision I ever made.
For Google's data centers: faster == cheaper. They need less servers to handle the same amount of load. Even a few % at this scale could be a big saving.
I, too, was surprised there weren't more. I use this; I like it quite a lot. The search feels quite superior to Thunderbird's native search.
The proper analogy would be refusing to give a combination for a safe, which you can probably do, its not such an issue because they can break the safe open.
It is available for Firefox 3.5 and it does sync all your recent mail, including attachments. It uses an automatic, non-configurable heuristic to determine how much mail to sync. I believe mine syncs the past 1 year's.
I didn't read the article because it's on scribd and I haven't installed flash on the new system yet.

But the headline sounds a bit too dramatic. We've been using and expanding applied mathematics for thousands of years. A proof of P=NP will not retro-actively make Roman aqueducts collapse, let alone destroy the infrastructure we're all using day-to-day. Which in turn means that whatever flawed assumptions have been made (and there's plenty of gray space to be found), the field of mathematics will not be destroyed.

QED. (Don't I feel smug).

[edit : I clicked on the scribd link initially but have now saved the PDF link for tomorrow's reading]
How Effective is American Health Care?