skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My college abstract algebra professor, who was fond of grilling us in class, once asked me to define an "isomorphism". I said something to the effect that an isomorphism is when you have two structures that though technically different, share an essential similarity. To which he quipped "that's the Time Magazine definition of an isomorphism, I want you to tell me how you really define it, mathematically."

This article, I submit, is the Time Magazine definition of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Read at your own peril.

(Peter Hacker is the only academic I know who really seems to get Wittgenstein. You're probably best off ignoring the secondary sources on Wittgenstein altogether, but if you must, I recommend you read Hacker---please not Daniel Dennet.)
Exactly for this reason I found myself writing assembly again: Invoke C functions from a scripting language. The last I wrote was probably 15 years back.
I filled one compartment of my backpack with 1-cent bubblegum balls (circa 1997) that I got from a machine at the grocery store.

I spent my profits on something retarded like a metal detector a few months later, if I remember correctly.
My start up is in a similar place right now and I've been trying to come up with a valuation.

The problem is that so many of the normal methods taught for valuing a company break down for an early stage start up. How do you predict your free cash flow in the future without pulling a number out of nowhere? How do you come up with a meaningful weighted average cost of capital when you have little debt or equity on your balance sheet.

I think what we'll be doing is looking at our earnings and then setting our valuation at a simple multiple of earnings plus assets.

Very interesting to see you guys on here as my start up is very similar. We're focused on selling editorial side products to help college newspaper websites succeed. The plan though is to eventually expand to all local news sites.
That they dont get split into smaller pieces [like Ma Bell]
You always see pictures of guy who are obviously tremendously muscular and who have gained 30lbs of fat for the sole purpose of photographing it and losing it again.

The diet ad doesn't say, Hey, unless you have 65lbs of muscle under your flab and are able to devote several hours a day to working out, this 4 week plan/pill isn't going to work.
They might not have a leg to stand on with an anti trust suit if Microsoft blocks their own ads as well.

Not that that will prevent a suit, but it would be useful as a defence.
I disagree, in the strongest possible terms, that bounce rate is a useful metric.

Somewhat surprisingly to me, it seems that folks I find very credible in the field disagree with me.

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/08/standard-metrics-revi...

He knows what he's talking about, and he says "Bounce rate is a beautiful way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your website", which do not appear to include the words "of less value than the toenail clippings of squirrels", which is about where I think bounce rate should be. In fact, I think it insults squirrels that I would mention their toenail clippings in the same sentence as bounce rate.

The gap between what I believe and what everyone else believes is so large that this suggests I should make the discussion a blog post. I'll do that later.
Wittgenstein's generation was the first one in which Philosophy as an academic and literary endeavour has contributed virtually nothing to our understanding of the world.

I think I remember this refrain from a history textbook somewhere, perhaps. Maybe it is a common view, but I have never seen it supported. To begin with, it would be necessary to show precisely what previous philosophy had done to contribute to "understanding of our world". That very phrase, which is being wielded so causally to criticize analytic philosophy, is precisely the sort of idea that analytic philosophy would handle much more carefully...

To my mind, Wittgenstein's work is actually incredibly helpful, because it helps clear up deep linguistic confusions... confusions that have inhibited real progress in philosophy.
The fragmentation of traffic sources might limit Google's growth (i.e. Facebook and other social media are quickly becoming a very meaningful place to advertise). In addition, international competitors and Bing might put more pressure on them.

But in terms of something killing Google - that would have to be a really fundamental screw up and/or shift in the way the Internet works I think. Then again, history is full of wrong predictions :)
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already happening... Just the other day there was an 'ask hn' thread on this.
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Comparison of PubSubHubbub to light-pinging protocols
Ok I'll bite.

Posting under an anon account isnt doing your argument much credence.

The startup / how to posts (including web design and posts from "key" players) are the original focus of News.YC. Remember? All the points you want to see more of are, well, incidental and the kind of content that probably appears under the "other interesting stuff" category.

Also, quit friggin making blog posts somewhere and then linking to them from here. Come on people, you can't be that desperate for cash. Just make it a ycombinator post and humble yourself with that.

The site deliberately discourages you to do that. Note how the open post of a thread is in unreadable light grey. It was even explicitly mentioned not to do that too much once.

Ultimately if your not here to read "how to do a startup" material and it's related humdrum then, well, your in the wrong place I fear :)

Rather than complaining post some of the content you want to see; if it proves popular you may start a new trend! (this is the same advice you give in the "just go do it" part of your thread dont forget ;))
I've actually thought about writing a diet book. They are the most consistently profitable type of book. They're easy to write because there is a specific outline you follow.

Mine would be about how to use meditation to gain control over your food willpower, then generic stuff about eating healthy and the right number of calories. The central tip would be "if you're feeling hungry, go meditate until you are aware that the feeling of hunger exists but you don't have to act on it."

I think it could work but don't really want to write it right now.
i don't get it? please clarify!
Don't forget that it comes from the creator of the web3.0.
A few years back the iTunes store used to sell pamphlets on things like how-tos as PDFs, but they seem to have gone now.

http://www.mcelhearn.com/2004/12/17/organize-pdf-files-in-it...
If an effective search method was developed that wasn't based on pagerank and link volumes, but rather the internal quality of a page
This reminds me a little of how Shaka Zulu broke from rituals to conquer most of sub-Saharan Africa. Shaka was one of the most effective African generals and conquerers in recorded history, because he changed the nature of African warfare very quickly.

Basically, pre-Shaka, warfare was a ritualized thing in the area. The tribes would take throwing spears and stand on two hilltops facing each other, and threw spears and shout at each other until one side gave up and fled. The conflicts would create injuries, but not so many fatalities.

Shaka moved to a more shock troop charge style of attack. He outfitted his guys with large, wooden shields, and short, heavy spears that could slash or stab. So when the other side lined up to fight ritually, Shaka charged and would have his side massacre the other.

Normally you'd see the other sides adapt, but he brutalized and then assimilated his enemies very quickly so they couldn't adjust to his tactics. He swept through Africa conquering very quickly.

This has been seen many times throughout history - basically, the side of the war that fights with less rules, wins. But normally, if the other side realizes you're not fighting a gentlemanly ritual any more, they adapt. Yet a few military men in history moved so fast that their opponents couldn't adapt. Shaka, Alexander, and Genghis Khan are the first three examples that come to mind - they fought relatively dirty, breaking rituals and customs of warfare with new equipment, a more brutal focus, and immediately assimilating or executing prisoners of the defeated. Because they moved so fast, and all the survivors became either new recruits or were killed, there was no time for an organized, adapted resistance. That's how those guys were able to take such large amounts of land in short amounts of time.

The ironic part is that the kind of personality that'll do that rarely knows restraint, so they overextend themselves and have their empires die after their usually premature death.
How about...

The AI Google is growing becomes "too powerful to fail," a more insidious version of the "too big to fail" we hear from banking. The humans at Google lose control of their business as automation increasingly leaches more money from any business possible. It becomes harder and harder for the Google humans to unwind each ad transaction to determine whether the ad leads people into scams. Users start to step back from their engagement with Google. Alternatives begin to get traction. Humans at Google start to become alarmed. As a defense against the power of the AI, Google transitions over to a new system and allows the old data to fossilize. The new system allows for a higher degree of human input, though it's still not under human control. At this critical point, competitors move in and take away a lot of the market from Google.
Does anybody else think this is really, really funny?
The Skype founders sold their company for billions of dollars and didn't sell the technology. It's kinda cool that it's two guys dicking with a massive corporation instead of the other way around.
> If you had beans for dinner, beware, the ball tends to amplify sounds from down there

Also an issue with Aeron's "mesh"
"There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical."
Hmm.. your point looks somewhat surprising (and confusing) to me. (Where did squirrels enter the picture).

Will be definitely looking forward to your post.
It's bad that you can't copy your PDFs into iPhone and read those later. Not unless it's jail broken. iPhone can render PDF, but only when the file is sent as mail attachment or downloaded from web.

This single thing is preventing me from purchasing the iPhone. I have a lots of PDFs and need to read those over time.
They won't. All this does is remove a convenient excuse they have to throttle the bandwidth.
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How about click fraud getting wildly out of control? Google's profit is based solely off of online advertising. Click fraud is a never ending battle to undermine that business and Google has teams of phds hard at work to understand what is click fraud and what is not. Now if click fraud reached a point where advertisers can't trust the pay per click model, Google's revenues go poof.
You can make laptop stands for the bed like this from wood http://bedzine.com/blog/bed-furniture/laptop-stand-for-bed/ buy them online http://www.badbacks.com.au/shop/product/1897/223/laptop-laid... , or even make an experimental one from cardboard http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/05/build-a-sturdy-cardboar...
yes, we cannot prove that we are in a Matrix either.

And... everybody has the right to believe whatever he/she likes as long as the induced behavior is not harmful to others.
I actually agree with some of your points. Nearly every avc.com post finds its way up here with a total disregard for the individual quality of the postings.
But the process is very democratic - with its upsides (what the masses want, the masses get), and downsides (sometimes a lack of depth in featured items; groupthink).
Nah, they're thinking of the CIA.

...it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering.
...would only cover a portion of the document.
Actually i use a desktop PC while horizontal. My monitor is on a short table beside my bed, and I use a couple pillows for my head. Keyboard's on my lap.
There are certainly people who write shellcode. As I understand it, people have written shellcodes that use only bytes that happen to map to ASCII, are obfuscated to bypass intrusion detection systems, and so on. I'm sure it requires quite a bit of (specialized) knowledge.
"I had swum to the island, but was too tired to swim back."
So you would like a forum that works like HN - but dedicated to something different to HN - I say go start it up!

Let us know when it is running and those with an interest are sure to come along and visit. I will certainly drop by ;).

In the mean time the HN denizens can keep up with stuff relevant to start-ups with a leavening of interesting posts "off topic" so to speak.
Revenue from MS Office and Windows is great, sure. But those products are more than ten years old, and are increasingly being commoditized. What new technology has Microsoft led in the 2000s?

Surface isn't an invention. Portable media they lost out on bigtime. Web video they lost on. The CLR is innovative and great but more than 10 years old now.
time.com - a good example of a badly put together website.

It looks awful and finding stuff is virtually impossible. How wide exactly is that text column where I am supposed to read from ? 300px ?

<shudder>
When Google doesn't find a way to stay on top of real-time search, social search and regular search - or doesn't find a way to combine those before a competitor does - they are going to fail. It's not a given that Google stays on top. Remember Yahoo, Altavista et al? Search is going to adopt to changing times and possibilities. And the #1 spot will be up for grabs again soon enough.
As I understand - and I may be mistaken - the problem is that it's very hard to make sure that the emitted code is correct in the presence of raw pointers à la C.

I am told that Fortran does better than C here; there is a reason it is still widely used in the scientific computing community, after all.

This is also part of the reasoning behind C99's new restrict keyword.
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Well, you can still use C with GCC and Intel intrinsics I guess.
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I agree with you perfectly. However your point can stand on its own merits without needing to be impolite.
Try ARM. x86 assembly is ugly and wart ridden. ARM is like a breath of fresh air. Unbelievably well designed.
Mozilla also use assembly for heavily used computationally expensive operations like image decoding. mmoy’s work is worth looking at:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanc...
Syncing to Apple devices not using iTunes works at best and is a nightmare at worst.
You can - I use the WiFi Discover app for this. But the iPhone is not suitable for long reading - small screen, battery - get a dedicated ebook reader instead.
iTunes still has PDFs for download under iTunes U (mostly slides that come with video lectures and that sort of thing.) I believe they're all free, though.
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I've only got an iPhone so I can't compare it to eBook readers but reading on the iPhone is good enough for me not to even consider buying an e-reader. Especially since the iPhone offers so many more than just being able to read books on it. (Perhaps once I've actually used an e-reader I'll whistle a different tune :)

Also, the battery consumption for just reading isn't that bad. I've found that the battery drains the quickest when wi-fi is on or playing intensive games. I, personally, wouldn't be worried about battery life when reading a book.

(Man, what has the world come to! I'm becoming an Apple apologist!)
Actually, no. If you're dealing with obfuscation, IDS and antivirus evasion etc. you need to know how to read, write and otherwise manipulate assembly code (debug, self-modification, name-it).
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Intrinsics are still worse (performance-wise) than hand-coded assembly, for two reasons.

The first reason is the whole category of optimizations that the compiler is worse than a human at (like register allocation) or cannot do effectively at all (messing with calling conventions, computed jumps).

The second reason is more subtle: in any case that you abstract yourself from some part of a problem, you inherently create a less efficient solution.

For example, intrinsics mean that you don't have to manually allocate registers. But this also means that if your algorithm uses too many registers and it would be more efficient to modify it to require fewer (and thus not need spills), you will have no way of knowing such a thing. By insulating yourself from that layer of complexity, you've also limited your ability to make higher-level optimizations that improve lower-level performance.

This applies on practically every level possible: any method of abstraction, no matter how well designed, will always in some fashion reduce the maximum performance you can achieve. Of course, this doesn't mean abstraction is bad--it provides an often-useful tradeoff between developer time and performance.
Buy the author's book: http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-A...

And please put a NSFW tag on links to a racist's website (no, this is not about the graphic, this is about the rest of the content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Sheppard_%28activist%29).
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I've been reading novels from non-iPhone cell phones with screens around 55 mm for the last 5 years. I've gone through around 80 books so far.

I read mostly in the bus to work. I'm always carrying my phone, a kindle or a paperback book would be a big extra thing to carry along.

One win for the e-ink display would be that it'd be readable in bright sunlight, unlike the active display of the phone.
I also heard that Bertrand Russell exhorted the post-war US and UK governments to launch pre-emptive strikes on the USSR before they got nuclear weapons. It makes for quite a contrast with his later pacifist stance.
Would having to use the (free) Dropbox iPhone app as an intermediate step bother you?

1. Sign up for Dropbox, if you haven't already; put PDFs you want to read into your Dropbox, and, obviously, buy an iPhone.

2. Install the Dropbox iPhone app.

3. In the Dropbox iPhone app, mark the PDFs as "favorites," and they'll be synced to the iPhone's drive, accessible whether or not the phone is online.

There are all the "network drive" applications as well, of course, but I think this is the best of both worlds: if you're at home the LAN sync will negate any extra bandwidth usage, while if you're out somewhere you can still pull the file from the network (once) and then keep it stored locally from then on. Then again, you can't do the "promiscuous sharing to anything around me that can speak Bonjour" this way, but I'm guessing you probably don't want people pirating books off your phone anyway :)
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Microsoft already pays ISPs to use IE and Microsoft search, and has done since the mid 1990s.
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I would reply directly, but haven't been able to find your email, so a brief response here:

Originality is hard to pin down. I've never seen it suggested that this should be a new regular form, rather than an ad hoc collection of joke forms. I've never before heard "lunk" and "cluck" used like this. Has anyone else? Is that original? I'm not a grammar expert, no doubt I've may have missed some. Besides, if I'm re-inventing, then perhaps it truly is an idea whose time has come (yes - joking)

I am aware of the differences between present perfect, simple past, past continuitive, past perfect, past pluperfect, etc, but I was trying to avoid having this turn into an article on grammar. For one, although I have a working knowledge I'm not an expert, for another, that wasn't the point.

Good catch about "cutch" in the present perfect. I'll need to re-write an earlier part to make it clear that it's not really the "past tense", but the "word form usually used for the past tense" (avoiding technical grammatical terms).

I appreciate your observations - thanks.
True. Too bad the media is on a witch hunt, and finds it convenient to gloss over facts for the sake of generating indignation over Tax-Payer Funded Bonuses Of Inconceivable Magnitude, so most people don't know this.

The GS employees I know are not happy about this...
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I don't like how this has been downvoted. It feels like people are disagreeing with the poster's point by giving him or her downvotes. That's not the point of the voting system, I'd say.

rms - though I see what you're saying, in this case I disagree with the statement because much of Wittgenstein's work concerned logic and I don't feel the negative aspects of his character affected the quality of it.
Forcing people to use bing isn't really going to work IMHO.
Because ad-blockers are trivially simple to get past.
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What he suggests is done, but in a more general way, in the constructed language "lojban". There the fundamental concept is the predicate (loosely equivalent to verb) and "nouns" are extracted/abstracted places from the predicates.

Thus "mi tavla do" is "I speak to you", so "le tavla" is "the speaker" and "le se tavla" is "the listener". In this example, "mi" and "do" are the equivalent of pronouns.

http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban+Introductory+Brochure
Lojban: A constructed language, grammatically based on Predicate Calculus
I agree with your arguments, but they apply to non-vector code as well. Perhaps higher level programming using the right primitives is good enough in most cases.
Google is also paying browser manufacturers to include Google search.