skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love Harry Potter, but somebody needs to explain to me how e.g. the Weasleys experience material privation by Muggle standards with regards to things like not being able to afford clothes when both Weasley parents and, for most of the series, most of their children are all capable of conjuring valuable things (including clothes) from the ether. Or how Harry is rich like a king due to his inheritance despite his parents having no detectable business or reason for excessive wealth (well, aside from their prodigious abilities at conjuring valuable things from the ether). Or how Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic, both of which are shown as having truly prodigious amounts of wealth expended in their construction and upkeep, are sustained via contributions from a parallel economy where the level of economic sophistication has not exceeded "a one-room store attended by an artisan", except for (apparently) multinational corporations, branding campaigns, and market sophistication in... quidditch broomsticks.

Economics is a real spoilsport for fantasy literature. I was once taught a single sentence which now nags at me in every book I read: "Describe how this army is fed." For example, the carnivorous Canim in the Furies of Calderon series fielded an army of some 60,000 apex predators in a sparsely populated agricultural region for a period of over two years. Their purchasing agent should require about as many sources of meat as all the McDonalds nationwide, but the economy as depicted couldn't possibly support that.
Context: I have a PhD. I found school easy, first degree pretty easy, and PhD bloody hard work. Hated some, nearly gave up, didn't, and am so pleased I finished.

You may hate what you're doing, but what makes you think starting a business will be easier? Yes, you'll be doing what you think you want to do, but I assume you thought you wanted to do your degree.

And trust me - parts of running a business will be far, far worse than finishing your degree. It's even more bloody hard, extremely boring, ultra-frustrating trivia that, if it doesn't get done, will kill it all.

So, for what it's worth, here's my advice. Find something to pay the bills. Postpone your degree for a year, or convert to part-time, and realise that not finishing your degree is a waste. (Compare: it might be a sunk cost and perhaps you should abandon it. What, you expected a simple answer?)

All that said, you must find your own balance, your own way, your own satisfaction, your own contentment, and your own life.

Life is not a rehearsal. Take action. Open doors, try not to close doors.

My opinion, without actually knowing you.
But they now _don't_ fail in every browser, because everyone else didn't slack off and actually implemented them. I tested this earlier today, and Chromium get 100/100, FX3.5 on Linux got 97/100, and FX Windows 3.5.5 here gets 93/100.

IE8 gets 12.
Anyone who's interested in HTML5 should give this a look. Ares heavily leverages things like the <canvas> tag to provide a rather nice development environment.

More importantly it's a web app, so your tools are always up-to-date. The moment that Palm releases a new SDK or device, it'll be available via Ares.

I've been playing with it during the Alpha period, and I've been really impressed by the speed of development. New functionality and bugfixes have been pushed regularly, and the Palm developers have been extremely responsive to bug reports and feature requests. They've been iterating incredibly rapidly, which bodes well for the future.
This is why it's a really good idea to have the unit tests written by someone who didn't write the code being tested.
If you just want to brainstorm, pick an idea and throw it out here on HN to see what you get. They often say: Ideas are worth little to nothing - it's execution that matters.
Not seeing the benefit over emacs python mode, myself.
This is then my ignorance showing, in that I made a classic blunder of accepting the premise of division by zero in a test case.

What I should have said is that if you intentionally craft the circumstances of an equation such that you are dividing by zero, it is your premise that is nonsense, NOT the equation itself.
Genescient (sf author Gregory Benford's company) raises more angel funding
The decline of the MBA will cut off the supply of bullshit
It is indeed based on Bespin, which means no IE support. Scuttlebutt from the Ares dev team is that they're trying to support all browsers that are HTML5 compliant, but abandoning the ones that aren't.
So did the lady get outed?

That is unclear since she has not been identified in the lawsuit. But several people were successfully identified, and she might have been one of them.

Whether or not she was outed then, I'm willing to bet money that at some point during the lawsuit she will be tracked down and outed in a rather public fashion. Filing lawsuits that upset tech people is not a good way to protect your privacy...
I agree that the transmission should be encrypted, but I think the usefulness of the video feed to insurgents is overstated. You can hear and see the drones overhead, so it is pretty clear if your area is under surveillance.
Fun D-Wave fact: They employ more lawyers than scientists.
" they want publicity for themselves, and bad press for MS. In his previous blog post he begged for this to become viral."

But the upshot is that it's creating bad press for Plurk, because they're now coming off, in the words of another poster here, as petulant.

I read Microsoft's statement, then saw the Plurk comment, and I thought they came off as a bit childish.

Microsoft seems to have done the proper, stand-up thing here. Shake hands and be done.
Have you tried the Merchant Princes? It may contain the only sci-fantasy book with a cover quote from an economist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross#Merchant_Princes...
I just checked my facebook search privacy settings, and was greeted with a popup:

"Worried about search engines? Your information is safe.
There have been misleading rumors recently about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. This is not true. Facebook created public search listings in 2007 to enable people to search for your name and see a link to your Facebook profile. They will still only see a basic set of information."
As for the timing, it always happens before payout for one clear reason: since so many accounts never earn enough to get paid out it makes no sense to do significant auditing until there's an actual disbursement of cash. Thus the catch that many fraudulent (or suspected fraudulent) accounts don't get flagged until they actually trigger a payment.
if ya put it like that, it sounds more like a fundamental failing
Sounds to me like Mark's basically delegated all the stuff he didn't care about to somebody who not only cares but probably has a better skill set to do it. Seems like a great plan to me.
$5-$20 million each, and the military ordered several hundred drones.
This is my assumption as well, I mean this lady really does not want her privacy concealed if she is taking netflix to court she really wants money to compensate for what little damage was done. To be honest people are much more accepting of gay people and she would be able to stay relatively closeted (depending on the size of her home town) compared to what will happen when this becomes a public spectacle.
Digg v. Reddit War Continues
Google Analytics API v2 Python Client Library
Journalists are hurt by "balance" requirements, by Robin Hanson
It's been a decade since I read much about it, but this site states that the F-117 has a radar cross section of 30 square centimeters while the B-2 has an RCS of 14 square centimeters.

http://www.deagel.com/Long-Range-Attack-Aircraft/B-2A-Spirit...
http://www.deagel.com/Strike-and-Fighter-Aircraft/F-117A-Nig...
IAAP,BNTRTOP but I assume you could count how many you detect to get a reasonable idea of how common they are in this part of the universe, at least. Then you could adjust it for the fact that WIMPs tend to prefer to hang out in gravity wells, like around here, and get a pretty good idea of the overall distribution. I haven't done the maths, but if you're detecting _any_ of 'em then they've got to be reasonably common, since they should be relatively uniformly distributed throughout the galaxy.

What I didn't understand until just now was this: if WIMPs interact by gravity why don't they fall into stars and planets, or even form stars and planets of their own? The answer is that they do fall into stars and planets, but just keep going through the middle (since they are not subject to any ordinary interactions) and out the other side. And they can't form dark-matter planets of their own since they don't interact strongly with each other either, so they won't stick together. Neato!
Mathematicians will tell you that the inequality is undefined for x=1.5, and is otherwise satisfied for x>1.0.

Yes, the inequality simplifies, but when x=1.5 you are multiplying both sides by 0 which is not a permitted operation.

In this case nothing goes wrong if you blindly simplify and use the simpler inequality. Mathematicians go ballistic when you do that because there are other occasions where similar operations create nonsense. The usual proof that 1=2 is an example.

Trying to show why this sort of thing is wrong is like trying to show that a fallacious proof of a true theorem is wrong. Counter-examples are hard to produce because the theorem is true.

And that's why it's a general rule. If you are dividing by something you have to preclude the possibility that the denominator is 0.
I haven't, but if it is available on my Kindle, you deserve an affiliate commission.
Codenode is like "Google Docs" for programming.

The benefits are more the ability to "code anywhere", to not have to install anything (think Windows here), to have the backend server contain lots of pre-installed packages, and to do real-time code writing collaboration with others.

The real-time collaboration is a work in progress. For more information, see here: http://github.com/clemesha/hotdot
Of course, it's pre-alpha currently.
They indicate a region where a new "Cell" can be inserted.
I suspect people with high-end digital DLRs uploading RAW files on a regular basis constitute a small portion of your ISP's customer base, so it probably is just you.
Sock puppets are bad. I'm not advocating that at all.

What I'm saying is that the OP should take note of some of the people who dig what he's doing here and let them know next time he has a post on HN.

I like voting for good stuff and helping to promote interesting links on HN. When people who's stuff I like post new stories, they let me know, and I'm glad for it.
Love seeing this kind of analysis, Jon.
Even Linux Is Going Social: Newest Ubuntu To Feature Social Networking Menu
Google Talks Transparency, But Hides Surveillance Stats
Thanks yeah, I'll have to factor in all those percent changes and ROI's to make sure everything is worthwhile, landing page optimization is a specialty of mine so it should actually be fun :)
http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2009/12/cdms-live.html

"18:20 Summarizing, no discovery. Just a hint of a signal but with a very low statistical significance. Was fun anyway."

As the newspaper article said, a 75% chance of finding new particles.
That's all true, from the client end you cant trust this to stop the server end from snooping your data, but there seems to be a class of problems this approach _does_ solve. Where the guy running the server wants better than just plausible deniability about knowing what his users are storing. It can't guarantee to the "customer" that the "server" can't read his unencrypted data, but it'd probably be as close as you could get to a guarantee for the guy legally responsible for the "server" that he couldn't read (and hence be in any way responsible for) the unencrypted customer data...
BNTRTOP?
"a standard review of closed cases highlighted mine for reopening"

I think that's in fact true. As in, their standard review of closed cases includes a clause that they should indulge in the face of legal threats in most cases.

But it does sound funny!
It's a convenient way to give a person more money than you carry in cash. No one I know has a personal card reader they carry around (yet).
Tetris as "cognitive vaccine" to prevent PTSD
But Not The Really Top Order Physicist?

Boy, Newton Totally Responded To Our Planet?

Basically, Nobody Trusts RMS To Out-think PG?
I'm pretty sure it's something to the effect of: But Not The Right Type Of Physicist.
But not the right type of physicist.

This is amusing: http://www.google.ca/search?q=BNTRTOP

Also amusing is that if you refresh it, you see from the "x minutes ago" part just how often the crawler is picking it up.
It could probably be implemented in an easier way to install with a browser extension.
First, Please avoid editorializing story titles.

Second, this article has the facts wrong. MBAs from top schools aren't having trouble finding jobs, nor have those jobs started paying way less.
Sauce?
Though no-one knows for sure, it's also been rumored that the fighter designation was done as a security measure to hide the true purpose of the aircraft, or that the F-117 designation existed in early planning documents and was simply never changed once the aircraft became a reality.

It's also not the first attack aircraft to carry a fighter designation; the F-111 long-range attack aircraft also carried that designation (though in that case it was because the aircraft was originally meant, in part, to fill an Naval air-defense fighter role).
It depends on the type of Zip codes. Basic Zip codes are only 5 digits so ~30,000+ people per Zip code. However, Zip + 4 codes dramatically reduce that.
Great article Todd,

One key thing to highlight is the importance of compression and using a streaming compression algorithm. Compression means there's less data to transfer (across the network and -- even more importantly -- from disk), which means the transfers will complete faster.

Not only does it allow your compressed files to be splittable (not possible with a conventional compression algorithm which requires all compressed data to have its own Huffman tree), it runs very quickly and easily adopts to a _stream_ (rather than a monolithic chunk) of data.

We've just added support for LZF (a similar arithmetic/streaming compression codec) into Voldemort and performance results have been great:

http://groups.google.com/group/project-voldemort/browse_thre...

Here's some background:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel_Ziv

(I had the good fortune to take an information theory class during undergrad)
If The Economist can use the word bullshit, in the technical sense -- self-conscious jargoneering intended to inflate the speaker's perceived importance -- then the rest of us can too, right?
>Exercise 4-13. Write a function reverse(s) which reverses the string s by turning the mind inside out, converting madness into reality and opening the door to allow the Old Ones to creep forth once more from their sunken crypt beyond time.

Would this be easier to do in Perl?
Also, I don't think it's the MBAs that are the problems. Rather, the job market was sending the wrong signals by paying people with MBAs far more than they're worth. Due to the inflationary monetary supply enabled by the federal reserve, the finance industry was able to grow and become extremely profitable, attracting lots of talent with large salaries. These people would have naturally gravitated to many different career choices if the pay scales weren't so lopsided.
JooJoo responds to TechCrunch lawsuit over who owns touchscreen tablet
The analogy to the house holds because both a roof and a basement are necessary for a good house. Similarly, both good marketing and good engineering are necessary for a good product.

Again you offer no proof to the validity of your analogy other than because you said so.
Looks cool, but for those unfamiliar with Sage, it has a similar notebook feature built-in. Codenode looks promising, but Sage's notebook is currently more mature. You can try the Sage notebook out at http://sagenb.org (needs registration but it's a quick process). (use shift+enter to evaluate what's in the current box)
Well - may be pirate is the new terrorist
The others who said "but not the right type of physicist" correctly ascertained my meaning, though yours are all quite accurate as well.
Fairly large media company + phone call from their CEO will = legal contract from their legal department = their attorney will be involved in the deal.

Since "deal making" is out of your element, you might want to talk to an attorney who can help you with the deal process from open to close. I would imagine we probably have a few attorneys who read this forum that can help you out. You will probably need to come up with the numbers on your own though, that is a business decision.
I wonder how many mothers of multiple children with Netflix subscriptions and IMDB accounts from Franklin County, Ohio, will be traveling to the location of the court in which the suit is being made on the date of the trial and have also visited the offices of the lawyer representing "Jane Doe". It seems as though perhaps the lawsuit may be insufficiently anonymizing her personal data.

I don't know that it was necessarily a good or a legal decision for Netflix to release the contest data, but it doesn't help the plaintiffs' case when they quote where the privacy policy of Netflix specifically states that they may disclose the information disclosed in the contest and immediately claim that the policy states no such thing.
"While I like the Einstein branding very much, it seems that I will have to get rid of it as soon as I get any serious traction."

It'd be better to get rid of it now, or be prepared to receive a letter demanding a payment of some X dollars. Corbis does not mess around.
Do they trust their soldiers/Marines with these encryption keys? Don’t know that.

It's interesting to see how the Army and the MPAA respond differently to the same problem - it only takes one person to crack the code (or leak the secret keys) to render the whole scheme useless. The MPAA builds ridiculously complex encryption schemes in the hopes of slowing people down, and sues the downloaders it can find. The Army doesn't bother with encryption because it's too much of a burden, and kills the downloaders it can find.
Wow, thank you all for your responses so far. I find it interesting that they have all been independent, non-replies, for what it's worth.

I think the best way to sum up how I feel about it all is that I feel like I'm being forced to get a degree and put aside my passions, and then now I'm failing the degree part. So I'm being forced to do something that I don't want to do and I am not doing well at it. That is a horribly demoralizing situation and makes it really hard for me to put any resources towards fixing it because it keeps leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

A few of you have recommended part time, which is probably my biggest option if I didn't get booted in the coming semester. Thank you for that suggestion.

In regards to whether or not I really want to start a company instead of get a degree, I do have to say that I have had this mentality since middle school. I never said I wanted a job working for someone else, I always questioned other people about why they don't want to create and start their own thing. I have just had a different view on my professional goals for a long time.

Of course, everyone thinks their business is going to strike it rich, and I'm not any different. But I'm confident that if it does succeed, the need for the degree I'm getting will be exactly 0. That's disheartening, as I know that all of these hours I've spent could have gone to working on what I truly want to do.

I've been stubbornly opposed to college for so long. And with being depressed for so long, it was hard to think starting a company was even close to realistic. But now I'm on the ups and feeling much better and working really hard, so it's just leaving me questioning why I go to school when I do. I'm quiet at school when I do go, I'm not taking any business or cs classes, and I haven't done networking in any way whatsoever, so I haven't really pulled much out of attending the University than a few bad report cards.

My plan for now is to see how I did this semester and just keep working on my startup, hopefully getting enough traction to make it a more realistic option for my time.
First, Please avoid editorializing story titles.

The submission title is a direct quote from the article: The decline of the MBA will cut off the supply of bullshit at source

Second, this article has the facts wrong. MBAs from top schools aren't having trouble finding jobs, nor have those jobs started paying way less.

I don't have the statistics to support or refute this claim, but the article discussed a massive glut of graduating MBAs, not just the top of the class from "top schools". I'm not sure if you actually read the article, or simply penned a knee-jerk defensive response to the harsh wording.
To be fair, it was almost a verbatim quote from the article.

Editorializing the headline, yes, but still surprisingly representative of the article's content.
They don't need page rank, even your home page doesn't if it's long tail enough.

Once upon a time I was tutoring people in finance. I registered the domain name HoustonFinanceTutor.com since that's where I lived. Within a few weeks I was #1 in Google for the search "houston finance tutor". It was a brand new website with zero page rank. It ranked there just because i had the keywords in the domain name, and this on-page factor was enough. Play around with it...
Found this in the docs:

Ares has been tested on:

* OSX: Safari 4.0+, Firefox 3.5+
* Windows: Chrome 3, 4, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4.0+
* Linux: Firefox 3.5+
Thank you Google for the slow Internet
Also from Cosmic Variance:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/12/17/...

2:50: Bottom line: “The results cannot be interpreted as significant evidence for WIMP interactions, but we cannot reject the possibility that either event is signal.” –Risa

To which I reply "Hang on, so you made a big deal out of this for what? Wake me when you have something which _can_ be interpreted as significant evidence for something"
I used to be impressed by hacks such as these, but now they mostly make me sad: in 20 years of computer improvements, we still have to resort to ugly hacks like these?

The chip on an iPhone runs at what, 600 MHz, maybe 800 MHz? My Apple II ran at 1 MHz. I was counting bytes then. I hope I'll see a day where I don't count bytes anymore :-)
This post makes the assumption that one has been following this drama for a long time in detail. I know there was a bit of controversy around D-Wave a long while back, but that's faded from memory now. The Google post brought them back into memory, but I found it hard to make it past the first few back-and-forths in Scott's post.

Can someone clarify what the situation is here without the "socratic-dramatic"? :)
The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History in the White House
Valid point :) I guess I was saying that with your brand new site, you might not have good content yet if it's supposed to be user generated. So it's a con because it's a chicken/egg problem.
"C" meets H P Lovecraft's "Shadow over Innsmouth"
Scenic Ring Theme - Blackberry Javelin - Bold - Gemini Themes
First, the title wasn't editorializing, and second, you are the one with the facts wrong about the MBA job market:

MBAs Confront a Savage Job Market
The MBA Class of 2009 was hit harder than expected by the recession. At some top schools, 1 in 5 are jobless 3 months after graduation....For many programs, it marked the first time since the tech bubble burst that salaries didn't increase. Signing bonuses, too, fell both in value and quantity.

http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/oct2009/bs20091...

And now for some editorializing: the MBA is a completely bullshit degree.