skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking of child prodigies--I've noticed something extremely odd about childhood ability in my own experiences.

I got a 5 on the Calculus AB AP exam when I was ~10 years old and around the same time got a ~1490 (I don't remember exactly) on the SAT. 6 years later, I did no better on the SAT than I did when I was a preteen and I didn't feel as if I was any better at math than I had been 6 years earlier.

Despite the fact that I had done so well at math as a child, I was never competitive in the higher-level math competitions like the AMC and AIME, where I consistently scored mediocre (~110 on the AMC, ~0-1 on the AIME). I went to school with plenty of classmates who scored near-perfect on both competitions and yet had not been nearly as much of a supposed "prodigy" as I was.

Today, I doubt I am even above average at my college; I am relieved to have simply passed the math courses required for my major with barely-tolerable grades. And yet whenever I read stories of "real" prodigies, I never see anything like this--they always seem to continue their trend and prove to be brilliant mathematicians. Or is this selection bias?

I still don't fully understand what happened. Does mathematical ability plateau at an early age? Is there something special about courses beyond basic calculus that are inherently more difficult? Did my skill simply stop developing because I lost interest?
A cool example of the new Away3D Lite Flash 3D Engine
Looks similar to the stuff in this Google Tech Talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SLdSbp6VjM
On a tangent, bragging about intelligence you can't apply is like bragging about a car you can't drive. So you see, can't overvalue innate intelligence. Although it may just be a sign that he has no reason to be in touch with today's trends.
to be honest though, with the advent of passenger (basically mod_rails), ruby webapps don't feel harder to deploy then PHP at all any more.

I don't see any practical reason to translate Ruby to PHP. Compared to other translations, this one doesn't make sense at all as you don't get any advantages of the translations result.

Compare this to a translator that translates Ruby to JS: Here you get the ability to run Ruby in the browsers. Or JRuby where you get the ability to run Ruby in a Java-only environment (plus a bit of performance in some cases), or IronRuby for the same reasons for the .NET platform.

But PHP? I don't get it.
Do you know how html works?
Normal browser
* Have link to content, say blah.html
* Download blah.html
* Parse blah.html,
* extract links to css, js, images, flash ...
* Download from extracted links
* Display

Instapaper
* Have link blah.html
* Download blah.html
* Don't parse, don't worry about any built-in links
* Display

Now realize this has NOTHING to do with a derived work or copyright infringement. I'm merely choosing not to download and display some parts of published content, saving bandwidth which I'm paying for!
You should read a bit about micro finance. Most of the people receiving it are already in debt, micro finance offers debt at a better interest rate, sometimes with training, and often with a support group. Its supposed to be (in theory) better debt.
Bluntly, this doesn't look particularly compelling, especially when compared to something like http://bandcamp.com/

"I am a firm believer that the functions of these dinosaurs can be accurately simulated through web technologies."

I'd be interested to have you expand on that. Specifically, what are the things that a label provides to an artist and how do web-technologies replace these?

Yes, I am playing Devil's Advocate here :)

Still, I am geniunely interested in your thoughts.
If that was on a CO flight to EWR that may have been me!

(If I ever need a job I'm buying a round trip ticket with a 12 hour layover at IAH. Ruby's bar is like one rolling job interview for the extroverted who likes to travel.)
More Play for Less Pay: 
Long before I ever joined the Shockwave team, I was a huge fan of the site that was the original home for online, on-demand gaming. It’s hard to believe, but it’s been over 10 years since Shockwave.com started introducing people to their first web gaming experience. It’s amazing how gaming has become so core to so many people’s lives since then - from the introduction of casual download games.
isn't that taking the stance that marketing in general is basically unethical?
XMPP is only the connection part of the Wave - the other, if not more complex then at least much less understood part, is http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transfor... which is a theory about how to change a document according to concurrent editing commands streams. The idea is that using a special document structure and operations you can emulate the interface of any communication application (in email that document is a thread of conversation with rules allowing people append new 'emails', irc channels can be similarly represented with the document being the channel 'screen', you can even represent a chess game as a series of editing of the chess board). This generality let's you mix and match freely the communication modes used in different communication tools (like wiki and im etc).
http://nelobanda.com i'm part of Nelo at ang Tala, a pop/rock band in the Philippines. I compose the songs and play vocals and guitars. We're planning on recording a new album all DIY using a USB condenser mic with built in mixer from Samson (GM1U).
This article isn't really about map-reduce, but anyway.

Map-Reduce on GPUs

It depends whether your code is suited to GPUs. If you're map-reducing a bunch of single precision floating point data it may be a good idea.

Still not sure if Java is a good front end to OpenCL.

It doesn't matter IMO; you're still writing the code that does the actual work in OpenCL. Think of it like a different flavor of JNI.
Interactive Graphic to Illustrate How Patents Have Driven American Economy
I am a hacker and an amateur musician myself. Two years back when I realised that there is no service where you can upload audio and receive community help from the same platform (the only option then was to share your mp3 link on a php BB music forum and the experience sucked), I started http://www.muziboo.com - a social platform for sharing and discussing music. This is a place where other musicians can collaborate with your or offer technical help. Even though, my musical aspirations have taken a back seat because coding for Muziboo itself takes a lot of time, I have a learnt a lot through the community. The best part is the kind of collaborations that happen across georgraphies and genres. Am sure you will appreciate it.

Would love to get your feedback on the site. Please use the contact form (link in footer).

PS: I love t61 as a listener .. esp the fact that music keeps playing no matter what you do .. great interaction design there!
" And yet whenever I read stories of "real" prodigies, I never see anything like this--they always seem to continue their trend and prove to be brilliant mathematicians."

No, it's very, very rare that child prodigies go on to have significant impact in the field they were brilliant at as a child.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_of_Mathematically_Precoci... for some details. (I read a very interesting article about Tao previously which addressed this - trying to find it now)
Results don't always matter. politics can factor in, too. :(
Wow, that is really, really good. Excellent vocals and interesting tunes.
You raise an interesting point. I have a sandbox account and while I've seen a couple of cool things on there (in a limited amount of time spent), I've yet to see anything that makes me feel 'I must use this...all the time'.

Great for threaded discussions - HN could probably be re-implemented easily - but so far I haven't tripped across any bold new paradigms with it. Anyone have suggestions for particular things to check out?
See the discussion at:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802643

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=799806

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=799783
Same with my granddad, he had to work in the Opel factories. Their gig was to make cars that would function when tested, but that would fail within a couple of days of delivery to the field.

So, whenever they could they would structurally weaken some element deep in the engine just enough to make it fail.

This is a lot more difficult than it sounds, it is a study in planned obsolescence, because if you make it fail to soon you get a bullet to the back there is not a lot of room for error.

Finally they settled on making a fairly small cut in the wall of a piston, apparently that was good enough to survive a test or two but would fail quickly enough under actual use.
Twictures: tweets in pictures
Your skill stopped developing because you lost interest. Courses beyond basic calculus are not inherently more difficult. They are only more intimidating, and perhaps require a little bit more study time, and spaced repetition. There are more rules, problem types, and proof techniques to remember. If you can do logic, you can do college-level advanced mathematics.

Speaking from personal experience, everyone I went to grade school with who showed exceptional mathematical promise was bested by me in college. Indeed, one of my friends who was put in the "slow" math section is now a math major. Math is doable, and simply becomes something that you have to study for; you no longer get a freebie because you're smart.
Which one and who is we ?
i'd be curious to see what the trend is going to be over 10 years or so.

possibly like myspace?: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=myspace
To me it reads like the current operating guide for just about every politician I've ever met ;)
It's comical how much this sounds like some peoples' workplaces.
It might not be impossible to set up, but there are far more webhosts that offer php than rails (and believe it or not, there are plenty of people who are in the market for $2/month webhosting).
Hmm. Reading the papers from that study group seems to prove me 100% wrong. I suspect my selective referencing skills need improving.
maybe it's sarcasm?
Garmin GPS receiver charging stand
Every Garmin product is designed to meet the most demanding standard: customers' satisfaction. That's why Garmin equipment is manufactured to give you reliable service for years to come, with intuitive features you can grow into over time - all at a price you can afford.
i think this article, like most, concentrates on the value of of using other people's tweets, but doesn't touch on the value of actually submitting tweets.

i can understand why submitting tweets might be valuable for celebrities and companies (to message a massive audience at once), but otherwise there isn't much value in using/switching to twitter as a platform for which you communicate with friends.
Equating a religious group with an ethnic one is mistaken (like saying 'Arabs when 'Muslims is meant), regardless of whether anyone is offended.
Elite was the only game that ever managed to capture me. Everything else I could put down easily, but Elite was different.

At some point I had played it so much that I looked at a white wall with some kind of structure paint on it and I swear I saw a viper dodge away. That's when I realized I had been playing Elite a little much and I stopped.

Another nice little detail about Elite was the way the game state file was encrypted. We tried to break through that, but when after the sixth layer or so we came upon this message that read 'does your mother know you're doing this' we realized that we were probably already on a false trail, and we gave up.

The 'split mode' screen on the BBC was very impressive, basically in 'flight' mode what they did is reprogram the vdu on the fly to switch to a different mode about 80% down on the screen. That way the 3d display was all black & white and high resolution, the dashboard was in colour.

Elite is what put me on the track of becoming a games programmer for a while, though - in spite of much more powerful machines - we never managed to put anything out that could put a dent in it in terms of playability or fun.

Anybody interested in buying some small furry creatures ?
I seem to still have a surplus of them, it started out as one...
The PCNTL extension is about process control, not threading. I don't see how it could help to solve the limitations mentioned in the section 7.1 of the thesis.
I have a feeling that the time to make a rails application transcoded to PHP actually work on a $2/month hoster amounts to much more money than a rails hosting plan, which, after googling for "rails hosting" seems to be available for $4/month.

So unless your time is really cheap ($2/month, that's, considering a 40 hours week $0.0125/hour), you'd be better off just getting a rails hoster.

No. This feels like it's of pure academical value.
YouTube - YSE #21 - Y SIN EMBARGO magazine #21, ink or link?
Woopra coming out of beta
no. Marketing does not need to be manipulative or deceptive. In fact, if you are not anonymous and not going away when the company dies, deceptive or manipulative marketing is probably not long-term effective.

Pointing out that you exist and that your price is X and some other measurable attribute is Y is ethical, I think, assuming you use consensual channels, and that your price is in fact X and your other measurable attribute is in fact Y.

So yes, good marketing is honest and is important for both the buyer and the seller.
Meebo is not just another web-based chat. Meebo allows access to all the major instant messaging services via the web. In other words: whenever you just have http-access to the internet, you can get access to your instant messaging.

For those people with a lot if communication happening via ICQ and MSN and whatsoever, this is a very strong and helpful thing.
Excellent finding there with the second link. But please note that the Maghrebees are dogs as well, an exception in all mediteranean, semitic, ancient-egyptian and abrahimi traditions: these clearly are not representative of the larger community of the inhabitants of this region; they were either pushed by extreme hunger, or it's a culture brought in from other parts of the region (excepting consumption of these meets for medicinal or ritual purposes.)

But I'm sure it's all just a conspiracy of lies ;0)>

I never alluded to conspiracy, don't put words in my mouth.

Regards.
I begun to work on the master thesis when there was no mod_rails, Rails hostings were less common and they were more expensive than PHP hostings. So the other commenters in this thread are right about the "deployability" reason.

When the work was being finished, I aleready saw that the real-world usefulness of the compiler is minimal. This is why I didn't develop the compiler further after finishing the thesis.
Copying Y combinator is pointless.

For one to 'copy' it you need the people that make up Y combinator, and even if you could you'd just be diluting the soup, not contributing to it

Don't copy, innovate!

Besides that, the world is a lot larger than just silicon valley, if you can put together a team with 'star attractor' power for would-be founders then you may have a possibility. But without HN (which really is just the top of the feeder of the funnel leading to YC startups) you're going to have a hard time to get the same exposure and mindset in the founders of the start-ups that approach you.

And HN is also a pretty good way to measure the quality of the people approaching you. You're going to have to find alternative solutions to those problems too.

Without a quick 'triage' stage it is very hard to run a seed fund, by making an end run around the process YC has a distinct advantage here. Basically the HN ecosystem is what provides YC with both the start-ups and a quick way to judge the ones that are probably run by level headed people.

edit: funny moderation on this reply, up/down/up/down come on moderators, if you don't agree with it that's fine with me but do me a favour and point out why you don't agree with me.

I did read the article, I think it makes a good point but I really don't think 'copying' a concept that relies uniquely on a few key people is a winning model. Even in principle.

Do your own thing, and do it better. So that way you don't need to think about copying.
The federal government.
Maybe classic around these parts, but it depends on the startup ...
Anti aging creams
If you are looking for anti aging creams, then kaplanmd would be the best choice.
Convex Optimization & Euclidean Distance Geometry by Jon Dattaro (e-book)
There are many variables. Memory, disk speed, average row length, whether or not MySQL has been correctly tuned to handle that kind of load.
James, just imagine if you believed in God ;)
The Medical Causes of Home Mortgage Foreclosures
Good read. When should founders start to incorporate a company? Can founders just release a Web application without worrying about things like incorporation?
In reference 6 from the Wikipedia article on Radiation Hormesis, the abstract says "Data concerning about 85,000 exposed animals and their 45,000 corresponding controls, with a total of over 60,000 and 12,000 cancers in exposed and control animals, respectively, have been collected." So, for suitable definitions of controlled environment, they have been repeated.

I'm frankly tempted to believe this data. There does seem to be a plausible mechanism of action, and there isn't, to my knowledge, much evidence to prefer the Linear No Threshold model. On the other hand, I probably won't go and tape a radioactive source over my pancreas, so I don't believe either model enough to actively do anything about it.
The cipher message told to dig another 30 feet to find the treasure. Then 10 feet lower a man made tunnel was found leading to the water, it instantly flooded the tunnel.

Every 10 feet was a layer of logs that was left over from the construction.
Here are the tips for VC: Make your operations more scalable, increase diversity, fund in smaller amounts and expect less control and equity in exchange.

I would add to that:

Allow founders to [partially] cash out early.

I think that may be the single most significant thing other than investing smaller amounts. Founders who have to wait 4-6 years gambling ever higher stakes on a "liquidity event" that may never happen (on the VCs' terms, that is) are increasingly finding that it's better to just tell institutional investors "blow me" and wing it themselves, unless the project is just prohibitively capital-intensive.

Nobody who's young and on the margin of broke wants to be strung along by condescending "carrots" of "future incentives" and encouraged to "think about the big picture" instead of focusing on getting some actual payoff from one's efforts.
And people are not defined entirely by what they do.

I would expect that entrepreneurs are one of the communities that is very likely to disagree with you.
Yea, I got quite a nice job offer while on a flight once by following point 2. I've also met a bunch of interesting people and had some fascinating discussions.

The corollary to that point is that you have to be able to quickly gauge the level interest of the person sitting next to you. Introduce yourself, then wait and see how the person responds, if he show no interest in talking to you, then don't pester them.
Thanks :-)

The source code is available on my website: http://www.majda.cz/download/translating-ruby-to-php-cd.tar..... I didn't push it on GitHub because I didn't indend to develop the compiler further after finishing the thesis.

The code is BSD-licensed however, so if anyone wants to hack on it, he is free to go :-)
One of my fellow grad students related a tale in which he was his advisor was telling him to work on something and he wanted to know whether his advisor was going to help. His advisor's reply: "Let me consult Ph.D. Comics." (Said advisor has a sense of humor.)
although acting as an organization mightn't be so attractive.

I think that's the key issue undermining the economic coherence of such an endeavour.
Not sure about patents in "traditional" industries, such as machinery, aviation - they may be indeed useful, but pharmaceutical and, our darlings, software patents are very harmful.
Math is doable, and simply becomes something that you have to study for; you no longer get a freebie because you're smart.

I found it was the exact reverse. Many concepts, in my experience, could not be learned well how hard I studied. And yet people who did significantly less work than I did found them extremely easy. One example is natural deduction proofs; I slogged my way through them with extreme difficulty while some friends of mine did them nearly effortlessly by comparison.

Overall, at least my own experience suggests that studying and hard work can never fully replace innate ability.
And of course whatever else is running on that machine. If you do this on a production server then you might end up seeking back and forth across the disk all the time.

Alter tables are pretty bad, there is a quick way to do them though, here is how:

- create new table, right structure, no keys

- load data in it
(now you should have a .MYD)

- create table with all keys defined, copy the .frm and .MYI files over the ones of the .MYD above

- flush tables
(don't forget this, alternatively you can shut down mysql at this point and use the my*chk tool with the -r option to recreate your indexes)

- repair table
(skip if you shutdown mysql above)

This will work a whole lot faster than an alter table on a table of the same size, but it is a very gory hack and I would advise you to make a backup before trying any of this.
ACM 20 Most Influential Papers on Programming Languages [tarball]
I find that some concepts are slippery to some people, and others are slippery to others, but when you approach a slippery subject and an excellent teacher explains in the right way to you (or a bright peer), it becomes easier to understand. That combined with practice is good enough to fill you in and hard work does indeed compare with prodigy. I don't know if I believe in prodigies -- any piano prodigy I've known has played piano from a young age. Same with math. Practice is everything. Exercise your brain muscle and it gets bigger.
These are actually 18 of the papers that I could find in the "free" web, away from the ACM/IEEE pay wall. I got them all from the authors' websites and collected them for my own reading. I share them with you here for the love of learning, they're a treasure. I hope I don't annoy anybody for doing this.

Here is the original ACM announcement:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mckinley/20-years.html

And these are the papers in the tarball:

A Data Locality Optimizing Algorithm.pdf

A Safe Approximate Algorithm for Interprocedural Pointer

Aliasing.pdf

An Evaluation of Staged Run-Time Optimizations in DyC.pdf

An Implementation of Lazy Code Motion for SUIF.pdf

Analysis of Pointers and Structures.pdf

Balanced Scheduling- Instruction Scheduling When Memory Latency is Uncertain.pdf

Complete Removal of Redundant Expressions.pdf

Global Register Allocation at Link Time.pdf

How To Read Floating Point Numbers Accurately.pdf

Improving Register Allocation for Subscripted Variables.pdf

Interprocedural Constant Propagation.pdf

Interprocedural Slicing Using Dependence Graphs.pdf

Lazy Code Motion.pdf

On-The-Fly Detection of Access Anomalies.pdf

Register Windows vs. Register Allocation.pdf

Soft Typing.pdf

Software Pipelining-- An Effective Scheduling Technique for VLIW Machines.pdf

The Design and Implementation of a Certifying Compiler.pdf
He seems to be quite up-to-date otherwise: blogging about new results:
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/