skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ... these are communities of living people - each with its own tiny culture. There are problems with these places that I don't know how to solve, but their gradual decay is sad in the same way that the destruction of cultures all over the world is sad.

But if they are not self-sustainable then who will subsidize them. Should everyone's taxes go towards supporting unsustainable communities out in the middle of nowhere?

There are lot of communities with their own culture. It gives us a fuzzy and warm feeling to think about the quiet little town and the local gathering at a local diner in the morning to chat and sociailize. But at the end of the day, if they are all living on welfare, we can only have so many such small towns.

Often economic reality is at odds with our warm fuzzy feelings. This is one of those instances.
yeah and 'underling' or 'sidekick'?

Can we make different semantic maps to match up with different (possibly distorted) perceptions of reality?

If 'to be is to be perceived', it seems that a single semantic web will be flawed as it canonicalizes something that is not an objective reality.

Need multiple immutable semantic webs in layers with shared structure, where you can access the shared structure.
New Samsung E-Paper
It is a knee-jerk reaction because Garmin presumably is going to react and may even get into the Android game themselves. It's too soon to write them off.

Edit: http://www8.garmin.com/nuvifone/
The market is overreacting. Standalone units are just much more accessible to a larger mainstream audience that doesn't have a $200 SmartPhone and a $30/month data plan. The hardware isn't rugged enough to replace many applications of standalone GPS units. The reliance on cellular data is completely unrealistic in a fleet environment for example where you might have hundreds or thousands of units deployed. It's fundamentally limited by SmartPhone hardware -- screen size & battery life. I suspect it will be popular among a certain group of people who already have SmartPhones, car chargers, data plans, etc but that's a fraction of the total GPS market.
Hello almost, I don't know Python so I'm not sure about this problems, btw starting from Redis 1.1 the client libraries will no longer be included in the main project (now they are in the tarball of Redis), and I'll try to stimulate much more a Bazar development style for client libraries.

Btw the Ruby client lib is solid, like it appears to be the Java one. Still there are client libs that absolutely need to be improved.

Currently the Ruby one is as far as I know the only one supporting consistent hashing but probably this problem will be fixed with the introduction of a new daemon 'redis-cluster' that will work as a proxy taking care to deal with the hash ring in a transparent way.
"because in this world everyone has their own computer. Most people don't have their own chemistry lab."

It's worth pointing out that this wasn't always true- ``home chemistry kits'' used to be reasonably popular.
Zappos Gets Personal, But Not Too Personal
I'm sorry but the wording/phrasing on that survey was just atrocious. Did anyone review this prior to putting it online or was it just a stream of conciousness from one author? Look at question #12:

Do you frequently purchase or download apps of established online/digital brands? eg. classic games ported to the iPhone (Doom, The Sims, Rock Band) or web services that you use frequently (eg. Facebook, eBay, Amazon).

How much of your total app collection is made up of these sort of apps?

I don't know how to begin answering that question.

No offense but the author needs to read a few, "How to design a survey" articles. It won't take more than 15 minutes but the data you get back will be valuable as opposed to "What did he mean when he said 'No'? Was he answering No to the first or second question?"
Amazon PayPhrase Tries to Make Paying Online Easier
Redis is particularly useful for implementing simple message queueing systems where the full functionality or power of something like RabbitMQ is not required.

For example, when parsing incoming data into a database, push incoming data onto one end of a Redis list, and have a seperate worker process popping them off the end and into CouchDB, MySQL or whatever.

The fact that Redis list operations are atomic mean that multiple worker processes (possibly on seperate physical boxes) can process jobs simultaneously.

Result: the internet is entirely decoupled from both the hard drive and the database, and extremely high performance is possible.

Twitter Streaming API, anybody?..
We only have enough data for your point 2 - certainly an Android handset costs more than a typical GPS unit. Even if you get the handset "free" from the telco it's really paid for through your contract.
The Perfect Server - CentOS 5.4 x86_64 [ISPConfig 2]
I can see this being successful but essentially see it as a mashup of a webex type of service and instant messenger...
California Enters a Reflationary Depression
OK, so, what are the advantages of small rural towns?
yeah and 'underling'

I think you mean 'minion'.
And markets for horses, horse food, horse-drawn carriages, large barns, and stable boys too. Just because it's a good thing doesn't mean it's not dramatic or even traumatic.
Not to mention "pointy-haired ex-boss".
If you read my reply again, you will see that I commented on the pre-independance image of India, that of snake charmers. That image is a product of narrow, west-is-superior-in-everything mindset of the 18 and 19th century europe.

I largely agree with your comment on present day situation. We can do lot better in promoting Basic Sciences.
agreed..I recall first studying his work in highschool math. and that was in Canada.
and that that name was the name of the reverend conducting the funeral service, not the deceased
How can you say that the inventor of taxicab numbers is unknown? Most people I know know who he is.
In my experience, the people who are most informed about how a computer actually works are those most convinced that it runs on magic. All my compE friends insist that cpus are maintained and operated by tiny gnomes.

While less technical people don't understand, they have 'faith' that there's a logical, scientific explanation for how computer's work.
I don't get it.. Maybe I'm just being a little slow, but how does the fact that I consider I went out on a date with X not mean that I'm dating X?
Special for Left 4 Dead 2 gamers - Free PlayClaw edition
You're ridiculously uninformed. The chinese market is very free, and very very few sites are blocked compared to the size of the internet. Don't comment when you have no idea.
Deal Terms and Returns: Antidilution Protection
Can renewable energy save the world? (Not without better batteries)
Breakthrough Inventions and Migrating Clusters of Innovation
There is at least one college which requires demonstrated skill (albeit not $N years of experience).

http://www.juilliard.edu/admissions/entrance/index.html

According to my mother (a musician) most music programs tend to require prior experience. The rationale is a stronger version of what forensic said: anyone serious about music would have already invested effort into learning how to play. The same could be easily said about CS.
FailCon: Failing Forward To Success
In the logical sense it does, however typically the term "dating" connotes a commitment to the relationship that is a a bit deeper than simply going on a single date. I think it's the modern equivalent of "going steady".
I think McDonalds, Starbucks, KFC, Coke, Pepsi, etc etc may disagree with you. Software has a thing or two to learn from those guys wrt China.
Orwell? The list is far from complete, I doubt those would be the first words people would think to add, I'm sure word with negative connotations will be added in the future.
iPhone's not so much of a problem for them - they probably don't mind competing with a paid app.
You can definitely host tiny apps for free.

If they are fairly low traffic sites with small databases (< 5 MB) that don't require SSL or more than a daily cron, they should fit within the parameters of a free plan - i.e. "blossom" database server, 1 dyno, etc.
Not really. Most people know Newton as a physicist, but any pupil knows about Pythagoras. Also, any high school pupil that studies science (not human arts) knows about (Joseph Louis) Lagrange.
I don't think the structure of the surface textures have much to do with how the chair is collapsing, the biggest factor is the compressibility of the foam material itself. If you built the structure out of a more rigid material then yes, the shape of the object would play a larger role.
Snippets:

"To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue."

"Fitzgerald’s income was almost tax free (5.5 percent effective rate), while today’s taxpayer making $500,000 would probably pay 40 percent in income and Social Security taxes."

"As he put it, “So the only lesson I learned from it was that my money usually turns up somewhere in time of need, and that at the worst you can always borrow—a lesson that would make Benjamin Franklin turn over in his grave.”"

"Fitzgerald did not agree with Chicago School market theory, which is to say, he did not believe that more sellers means more competition, which means lower prices. Fitzgerald thought that if you had more sellers they simply raised prices to whatever they needed to survive. He wrote that Great Neck “became the most expensive [town] in the world” because the gold rush had lured “too many food purveyors for the population.”"

"The wolf was at the door. For the next five weeks he went to a large bare room over the garage and worked 12 hours a day “to rise from abject poverty back into the middle class.”"

"He wrote to Edmund Wilson, “I really worked hard as hell last winter—but it was all trash and it nearly broke my heart as well as my iron constitution.” He wrote that he was “far from satisfied with the whole affair.” A young man “can work at excessive speed with no ill effect but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.”"

"During the 1920s and 1930s, the tax system relied almost entirely on the honesty of taxpayers. Fitzgerald reported every dollar he had entered in his ledger. He was impeccably honest in his reporting."

"a friend wrote from France to suggest that Fitz­gerald join the many Americans living well in Europe on the strong American dollar. The friend wrote that it cost one-tenth as much to live in Europe: he had just finished “a meal fit for a king, washed down with champagne, for the absurd sum of sixty-one cents.”"
Acoustic Hyperlens Could Sharpen Ultrasound Imaging
I LOVE HEROKU.

In the process of migrating a large app to the cloud via Heroku. (We have other apps already running there.)

The guys there are awesome and very helpful, and the service is mind-blowingly bad-ass! Amazing how Rails deployment has evolved!!
I don't understand what the problem is asking.
ASK KEN - Visual Knowledge Browser [HTML5 - Canvas]
The idea is to figure out how many cycles it takes before a 'beaver' halts, if at all (it is a given they should, but after how many cycles is an open problem for more than the smallest numbers of states).

They have extremely simple rules, yet take a very long time before they finally do come to a halt.

It's an interesting little problem, if such tremendously simple state machines can exhibit such complex behavior it gives you some indication of how hard it would be to answer those questions for more complicated state machines.
I don't use it because it stopped showing the titles on blog posts. When I click on a blog in google reader it just shows a bunch of blank lines and I have to click on each one and open it to read the content.

Google really needs a way to report bugs like this.
Don't you mean "fearless leader"?
Whitehouse.gov adopts Drupal
I don't believe that I suggested anywhere that we subsidize these communities or somehow act to stop what it is occurring. I said I didn't see any real solutions to the problems presented within them.

I was taking issue with the idea that these towns are valueless - that nothing would be lost with their disappearance.
Changed Indian landscape forces foreign PE firms to exit
Please explain how the average New Yorker has a significantly smaller impact on the environment than the average small town resident. Are you referring to CAFO?
Twist of F8
Here is a clearer explanation of the problem:
http://www.logique.jussieu.fr/~michel/tmi.html

My attempt at explaining it (I'm not sure I've understood it completely, though): Busy Beavers are Turing machines that eventually reach a halting state. The goal is to find the busy beaver, for a given number of states, that takes the longest to do so. This turns out to be a tricky problem for states >= 5. That is, there are solutions to n=5,..., but no one has formally proved that there isn't a busy beaver that will take longer to halt.
This problem is what originally got me interested in computational complexity. Everybody knows about the halting problem; but the Busy Beaver, now that's a clever and weird idea! The growth rate of Sigma(n) is ridiculous. Studying this illuminated just how vast a problem-space can be (especially concerning the lack of knowledge we have by knowing a particular machine's configuration: we don't learn much by inspection, we just have to run the damn thing). I see the Busy Beaver "competition" as our more-interesting equivalent to searching for large primes.
It's basically asking, 'what's the biggest number a particular Turing Machine can compute?' (expressed in unary).

This is interesting as an upper bound - for example, if we have a Turing Machine and we know its Busy Beaver number _m_, we can run any of its programs and if the program fills more than _m_ while running, we know the program doesn't terminate! (Because if it did ever terminate, we would have a different Busy Beaver number, which is a contradiction.) In other words, the Busy Beaver lets us solve the Halting Problem for a specific Turing Machine; doesn't violate Turing, but is still very interesting.

As Wikipedia says, "This machine attains the limits on the amount of time and space that a halting Turing machine of the same class can consume." (This is terribly worded, so I'm going to go edit it now...)
> I don't look at social security systems as a good thing for starting a new business.

It isn't. It is a good thing when the business fails! At least according to the author. Personal opinions may differ about whether or not it is, and how to best go about providing said safety network, but that is economics/politics, and there be flamewars.
Though this is good news, it still appears that you have to pay at least $399 to publish to an iphone.
Is anyone else seeing differences between the HTML5 and HTML4 example pages, on the latest Firefox and Chrome? The article dates are in different places and the footer is displayed in a different place.
The Rise of “Risk Capital” Part 2
In Denmark it is very easy to start a company, but paying employees are a lot of paperwork, which most companies has to outsource due to the complexity.

So everybody who does free lancing for +$2500/year creates their own single-person company because it is much simpler for his customers to pay him as B2B rather than paying him as an time-limited employee.
Denmark has +300.000 companies. Population 5.500.000
That is more than 1 company per 10 persons in the active workforce!
I read the first paragraph, stopped, read the wikipedia page (in particular the section Examples of busy beaver Turing machines), came back and enjoyed the article.
This reminds me of an essay I really like (it covers what the busy beaver numbers are, and what their utility is): http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html
How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse
Ask HN: Podcast Recommendations?
HN,

I'm looking for a new podcast/s to listen to. Ideally I'm looking for a smart show covering topics like economics, tech, pop science, trends in new media, pop culture, etc, with the tone of Freakonomics or similar. The kinds of shows I listen to already (and totally recommend people check out): some NPR, The Sound Of Young America, East Meets West. That's the kind of thing I'm going for.

If there's a podcast you like listening to and want to tell people about but it doesn't fit the criteria above, don't let me stop you from posting it here. In the event that I don't like it, I'm sure someone else here on HN will.

I've gotta go to bed soon, but I'll check back in the morning. Talk amongst yourselves -- I'm pretty boring anyway.

Recommend away, HN!
I like the fact that it is possible to switch off/on individual parts of the website (link in the upper-right corner). It would be cool if someone came up with a general solution applicable to all websites.
You can achieve that now. Just by running java as the main process.

Erlang can do that (more or less). People run dedicated machines where erlang vm is the init script. With the ability to distribute code in a cluster and update a live code it's a perfect environment to manage :) Running different services is already implemented through the standard "supervisor" processes.
great link/look, just wish it was available in a more general-purpose form (ie not a firefox tool)
I still don't understand why the doctype for html5 is:

<!DOCTYPE html>

and not

<!DOCTYPE html5>
Mobile Home Purchase or Refinance
M H LENDING was established to respond to the specific lending needs of the mobile home and manufactured borrower, either for purchase or refinance.
Thanks for the reply. I do know about PERT and Gantt charts, and my sense from having seen them in action is that they're complete overkill for what I want. I don't want Gantt charts, and I don't need graphical input. All I want is a simple text file input, and then a suggested sequencing.

I'll continue to investigate "Planner," but I was looking for something smaller and more concise. Specifically, I don't need it to talk to loads of other software.

For all the time investigating other tools, or writing one, I might just get on and do it all by hand with index cards after all.
I grew up in a small town out on the prairie. My parents and I worked quite deliberately to get me to school out of state, and that area is where I stuck.

Yet I wouldn't trade the childhood experience for anything. One author told of her move to a city that it was hardest on one of her sons because "on the farm, they were men in training, but in the city they were just boys" (Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean).

On the other side of the coin, the attempts to maintain the small family farm through subsidies is excruciatingly expensive, for America and Japan as well. Oddly, the farm subsidies have a bigger positive impact on the large agribusiness entities than the family farm.

Personally, I have the reverse view of cities, even though I have lived in cities for now most of my life. If you grew up in a city, you might think much of what we see in life is normal. I think it is not. The only time that most New Yorkers got to see the milky way was when the Ohio powerline intersected a tree and the power went out. But did they know to look up and see that terrifying grandeur?

So I have an insider's view of this article, like many others, that come in from the outside to "fix" something that they only partially understand. Imagine a task force of rural leaders from, say Idaho or Oklahoma, come to New York, set up an interview shop, publish a paper on the decay of society and what we as a nation need to do to fix it.

The migration is a larger phenomenon that seems inevitable, but some of us have mixed feelings about.
the article even stated that the way to find the present value of money is flawed for the first years it was available to WWI. Therefore, anything from 1919 to 1940 is probably wrong. I would assume Wolfram Alpha is using the incorrect process to calculate the above figures.
How to Remove Hidden Spam Links from WordPress | TechJaws.com
Double-plus good comment, TrevorJ.
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released
For a case-by-case basis, check out the Printliminator -- really neat use of JS & CSS to hide pesky elements

http://css-tricks.com/examples/ThePrintliminator/

Now if this could be scripted with greasemonkey! Imagine getting rid of a few elements, then hitting 'save' in the plugin -- any subsequent visits to the page would apply the relevant css.
Oh lighten up. Americans have a lovely variety of stereotypical images - fat McDonalds consumers, Texan bullies, imperialists, the Japanese apparently think we "all smell like butter" or some such. Its kidding, and when done by friends is supposed to be answered good-naturedly.
WNYC's RadioLab - It's this American Life meets Science Friday. Best show on NPR.
Why Paying to Pitch is Necessarily a Scam
Writing an Erlang PubSub Client with Exmpp
The best way to compare: http://www.doingbusiness.org/ExploreTopics/StartingBusiness/

In short, Europe is too varied a place to make sweeping generalizations. Even within the EU, the differences between two countries can be mind-boggling; in the US there is much less variance between states.
What happens to your Facebook After you Die?
The paper describing the attack is here:
http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/CHEN/BHUSA09...

It makes one wonder how many other peripherals have user programmable firmware.
For Texas Instruments, Calculator Hackers Don't Add Up
> People who've traveled far from where they originated have been highly respected through almost all of history.

> People from New York are more respected in Los Angeles than in NYC. People from California are more respected in New York than in Los Angeles.

Is there any actual evidence of this? It's the first time that I've ever heard of this theory.

FWIW, I migrated from Philadelphia to New York City five years ago, but I'm not getting any respect this week :-/
On Matt Asay's "R.I.P., open-source evangelism"
I am not objecting to the existence of national stereotypes, I object to the existence of nations.
URLs to include Chinese and Arabic Characters
I smell some ignorance on our part - we don't have much goodwill to take care of geniuses.

Why should the extension of goodwill be exclusive to "geniuses"? why not everyone?
No. People don't call Newton: "That gravity guy", people know Newton's name. Every time I go to talk to a non-Mathematician about John Nash and say his name they go: "Who?", me: "The Mathematician from A Beautiful Mind." them: "Oh." Newton is Newton and in terms of popularity, John Nash; "The Beautiful Mind guy" isn't even in his league.
YouTube would be nice. I'm using a Greasemonkey script (http://pastie.org/674946) but it requires some management to keep up with changes.
There is a rattling great market opportunity here. Assuming Demand Media and friends manage to complete the race to the bottom - and why not, it's happened in every market - there's going to be a prestige knowledge-brokering market springing up.

Translate "personal shopper" to the limitless library and now you're talking. Tricky to scale outside niches - so it's most likely not a scale, VC business - but there's a million very nice consultancies waiting here for Internet safari guides...
Good insights on how a particular legal structure (the limited partnership) gave rise to the modern Silicon Valley venture industry, discussing how the key financial incentives (the "carry" in particular) and the key investment window (up to 10 years) are peculiarly tied to that structure. Somewhat technical but interesting, especially for Valley historical buffs.
FYI Mac OS X has a configurable highlight color in the Appearance system preference pane... he's probably (or should be) using that.
Memcache-top - perl command-line memcached stat reporter, top-like output
Question for those in California - is it reckless for me to consider taking a job in San Francisco moving from Austin?