skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"By that logic, we shouldn't teach chemistry or physics in schools either."

I'm pretty comfortable with that conclusion.

Anti-teaching, the teaching of things that are actively misleading about the nature of the subject or even actively wrong, is a bad idea. It doesn't matter how much "prior art" it has. It doesn't matter how much we have to just fill time while the students are sitting there. It doesn't matter whether there isn't a "better choice", because nothing really is a better choice than anti-teaching. Anti-teaching is a bad idea.

Besides, ask around. Ask your non-geek friends simple, basic physics questions. If you like, even ask if they took physics in high school. If the goal of physics is for students to pass a test in school, we're OK. If the goal of physics is to give the general public an understanding of simple, basic Newtonian physics... we already aren't teaching physics, we're just going through the motions. The "threat" you raise is already the situation we are in.
1. # of startups
2. # of startup conferences
3. # of VCs

I think Silicon Valley leads in all 3 of those categories?
Have you read "Why to Move to a Startup Hub"?

http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html
I'd say there are many places (downtown Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale) where this would work fine, even without a car.

Notwithstanding my original comment, I make a point of leaving for lunch, even if there's food paid for by the company, including if I partake of the food itself. The break is important.

However, for some things, like an occasional small snack or a bit of caffeine-sugar water, it would be both a waste of time and of money to go out. Arguably, fiddling with a "free" coffee machine is also time-wasting.

For some, the severity of the interruption is more significant than the length of time or quantity of money involved. The variance in working style makes any one-size-fits-all policy questionable.

If your former boss made it very easy to get reimbursed for those trips out for coffee, his reasoning would carry more weight.
I'm a fan of additive synthesis (the technology in use here) and recommend this to anyone interested in electronic music/sound design, with two caveats:

a) you are likely to get the most sonically interesting results by taking recordings of sounds you already like and converting them to image files, then applying a variety of filters and treatments in photoshop or similar, before exporting back to Photosounder for rendition as audio...although this is necessarily a rather slow process. If you like Javascript, you could get into Processing, and achieve the same effect by sweeping a windowed fast-fourier transform across your audio sample (or doing a reverse FFT on vertical strips of an image). The weird digital quality of the sounds generated by a tool like this stem from harmonic juxtapositions that do not exist in nature (see below).

b) the big problem with this and all other spectrogram tools I've used over the years if that they treat the audible frequency spectrum as a flat geometrical (edit: cartesian, sorry) space. So if you look at a spectrogram of a sine wave, you'll see a single horizontal line; if you examine a saw wave (which includes all harmonics) you'll see a group of horizontal lines of decreasing intensity from bottom to top.

So far so good, because we can learn a lot from that, but an FFT/Spectrogram obscures the concept of pitch. For example, in conventional western tuning a 440 Hz tone is the note A, while tones of 220 or 880 Hz are the same note played an octave lower and higher, respectively. Our brains are 'wired' to pay particular attention to powers of 2; not just in pure tones, but even in distorted ones. People generally express a liking for the sound of second-harmonic distortion (at double the fundamental, the typical electric guitar sound) while exhibiting an intense dislike for third-harmonic distortion (bad transistor radio). My point here is that the sound spectrum, unlike that of light, encompasses multiple octaves and psychoacoustic research provides strong evidence for the idea that the brain evaluates sounds with multiple frequency components around a pitch spiral rather than a 2d cartesian space...but although we have the required computer power, there has been little progress in the development of tools to represent and manipulate sound this way. It's hard to find any kind of real-time tools that map the results of an FFT onto a polar coordinate system.

EDIT: there's some information about construction of the polar FFT here, but it's regrettably beyond my capacity to implement at present: http://www.math.umn.edu/~focm/c_/Elad.pdf
Sorry, what I say was probably not clear enough. I agree with you, eye contact is a way to communicate something. It may be defiance (that's what I meant by "it might be linked"), but it could also be seduction, fear, friendly etc. And we can accept most looks much longer than animals.

I just had a strange experience in Paris subway : a complete stranger on the platform (seemed tough) and I on the train did catch each other looks for a good few seconds and ended up smiling at each other. It was not the first time that I put myself in a friendly mood and got friendly looks back at me.
Pretty unusual, as shown in this (french) cartoon
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7fp4s_18-baston-de-regard_...
(you don't need to understand French to get it)
Also I never forget watching a US TV show, where they said someone slid down the stairs on their fanny. I never laughed so hard.
Why would Sarbox drive up audit costs for non-public companies (i.e. startups and small business owners)?

Financial statement audits for private companies are exempt from SOX.

PS: I used to be an external auditor at PwC.
Google Opens Up About Real-Time Search, Cloud Computing, and Data Liberation
That becomes impractical when your input space is more than a couple dozen bits, and completely impossible by the time you reach several dozen.
As someone once said, "Omit needless words!"
True, but what else can you do? Modern aircraft are too complex to fly without automation... I'm not a CS-educated programmer- are there systems for programming in a way that can somehow be proven to work for all situations? What paradigm do they use for programming at NASA?
This is the logical extension and evolution of "user" generated content. The great myth of 2006 Web2.0 was the whole "if you build it, they will come". Well, it depends on what you build, and what they'll do when they come. For aggregator sites like HN, Digg, etc the content comes in the form of simple voting and discussions.

Voting is easy and solved. People will do it.
Engaging in discussions is easy and solved. People will do it.

Writing useful content for a broader audience without too much direct feedback like you get with discussions... well, getting people to volunteer their time, effort and knowledge. That's not solved. Compound this with the necessity to write about "boring" topics and you have quite a situation.

I'd say the only two sites that have solved it are WikiHow, and Wikipedia.

Of course the demand for such content is there. People ARE obviously searching for how-tos, and general information and there's obviously money to be made from this traffic. So what's easier: figure out a way to get people to write these kind of articles for free or just pay a nominal amount such that it's worth the writer's time, and you're able to get a healthy ROI?

If anything, I see a business opportunity here. There are quite a few companies involved in this content generation space, and it's actually increasing as time goes on. Every single one of them appears to be reinventing the wheel in regards to writer management, pay, editing, etc.

I can tell you that a SaaS 3rd party system that plugs into a filterable pool of writers, editors and is easy to manage would do extremely extremely well. It could be a layer on top of Mechanical Turk, or a totally home-grown solution. Maybe use a bidding model. The details can be sorted out later, but something like this WILL get built in the next 12-18 months, if it doesn't already exist.
it works with dual monitors but you just have to be very delicate and move the mouse extremely slow which defeats the purpose.
I've personally just switched to Chromium from Safari. Firefox on Mac is a dog and doesn't seem to be getting better.

I wonder if Chrome will start rapidly eating at Firefox's share since more technically inclined users are probably more like to switch, and more likely to use FF in the first place.
I use the Zooom/2 (http://coderage-software.com/zooom/) windows resizer since long time. Not W7-like but it's great 'anyway'.
"Omit needless words!"
Why would the fact that we like things that taste sweet indicate that they were hard to find?

Assuming that nothing in how the body works happens for no good reason:

The fact that we enjoy it means that our body rewards us for eating it, something that most likely means that it's something the body wants us to do. If it was abundant, though, that'd make us eat too much of it (which is what's happening today) unless there was something to stop us. With salt it's possible to eat too much: that makes us feel bad. That suggests that salt was abundant, otherwise we wouldn't need the counter system. The lack of a counter system for sweets suggests that it wasn't abundant, at least not to the degree that we could eat enough of it to prevent us from reproducing.

Our bodies run on sugar; sources of sugar, such as fruits and starches were not hard to find.

Eveything we digest is converted to sugar, be it fruits, bread or meat.

Regarding the link:

That some of our ancestors two million years ago might have, or might not have, eaten mostly fruits doesn't say much of anything about how Homo Sapiens work. In the article they say that even the Homo Erectus were omnivores, and that was 1.5M years ago. Things have happened since then...
Ford Goes WiFi With Mobile Hotspots For SYNC Vehicles
I don't know why this has been downmodded.

It's not hard to have DNS CNAME and TXT records for machines, so that you can have both a naming theme for certain classes of servers, as well as descriptive names that indicate function, location, etc.

The way I handle the problem is pretty simple. Functionality gets a subnet 'name' under the root, and there are TXT records and aliases within that to handle description. So, if you have a datacenter in Sacramento, your DB and web machines would be named and alised:

johnny.sac.mycorp.com => db1.sac.mycorp.com
TXT Rack 1, Slot 1-4

devi.sac.mycorp.com => db2.sac.mycorp.com
TXT Rack 1, Slot 5-8

spooky.sac.mycorp.com => db3.sac.mycorp.com
TXT Rack 1, Slot 9-12

tenna.sac.mycorp.com => db4.sac.mycorp.com
TXT Rack 1, Slot 13-16

zim.sac.mycorp.com => web1.sac.mycorp.com
TXT Rack 2, Slot 1

gir.sac.mycorp.com => web2.sac.mycorp.com
TXT Rack 2, Slot 2

For ambiguous names (like 'mercury' existing in both { planets } and { elements }), only one copy of that name can exist on the network. The people who work with that machine will know it's theirs, and for everybody else, there's CNAME and TXT records for when they're not sure.
Interestingly enough, the same theory applies to recruiting and internships.

I was part of IBM's premier internship program (Extreme Blue) last summer, and of the 3 best developers in the lab, none of them wanted to work for IBM.

One of them actually cited "no free coffee and soda" as his reasoning.

Goes to show that this applies to recruiting as much as employee retention.
What makes you think governments (or government-sponsored bodies) do not set accounting standards already? (they do).

The problem is more that the US accounting standards are rule-based, instead of principles-based (e.g. IFRS).

Moreover, there's a distinction between listing requirements and GAAP.
Definitely it is a bug in the Wolfram Alpha.

Mathematically the correct answer is "Indeterminate" but parsing the statement in a computer science world, both results are correct.

The statement "10(0/0)" requires no reduction of equation. The statement will translated into "10 * ( 0 / 0 )" but the statement "X(Y/Y)" it requires reduction of equation into "X" therefor all you need is the value of X.
The Justice League of Entrepreneurs
Couldn't have said it better.

Large companies have economies of scale in the operational/business sense, but they're terribly inefficient in the people sense.
No, that (removing soda as an option) wouldn't go over well at all. Forget the idea of being offended, the practical matter is that soda is no longer an option... or at least a convenient option. You may as well take away the coffee as see how that goes over.
Probably because one needs standardized accounting methods, otherwise looking at two sets of financial statements would be like looking at a tractor on the one hand, and a strawberry on the other.
How would they know the books are being cooked?
If you were to run for a legislative office in my jurisdiction, you'd have my vote.
There are lots of stock exchanges which offer alternative algorithms for order-matching. It's up to each individual company which primary exchange it chooses to be listed on (although obviously it can't stop interested parties creating a secondary exchange using whatever rules they want between them).

Some exchanges specifically prohibit the practice of flashing while others don't. It's a free-market, if people and companies want to trade on exchanges with alternative matching algorithms and prohibitions on flashing, there's nothing stopping them from doing it.

Exchanges are only as valuable as the people who trade on them, if the traders want another set of rules than the exchanges have to adapt otherwise the traders will go elsewhere.
What are you basing this on?
Depends how you define "best". For a company holding 90% of the world's desktop OS market, it's not doing so bad at all.
Another flaw in the spec is that it provides no means to specify client buffering behavior: you cannot tell the client how many seconds to buffer before playback. This completely breaks the buffering model inherent in modern video compression systems and basically only works properly at all if the users' connection is far higher than the bitrate of the video.

Until HTML5 has basic feature parity with Flash's video capabilities, it will probably not be used very widely. This is of course ignoring the fact that Firefox doesn't support a video format that anyone actually uses, and the fact that IE (still unfortunately the most popular browser) doesn't support anything at all.

The sad reality is that a single system often has the advantage over a group of conflicting, incompatible systems; even if the single system is bad, one at least only has to compensate for its weaknesses, and not for everything else's.
When I learned of Nash Equilibriums, it changed the way I saw a variety of fields - government, business, advertising, and so on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

> In game theory, Nash equilibrium (named after John Forbes Nash, who proposed it) is a solution concept of a game involving two or more players, in which each player is assumed to know the equilibrium strategies of the other players, and no player has anything to gain by changing only his or her own strategy unilaterally.

It's fascinating stuff. Nash equilibriums are regarded as "stable" - no one will change what they do. Things tend to trend towards Nash Equilibriums and settle there until there's new technology.

Government legislation, including higher taxes, frequently breaks equilibrium. The new best solution for large players might be to divert earnings or leave the area they were doing business. Frequently, this results in the legislators getting angry and legislating more solutions.

One that immediately springs to mind is North Carolina and Amazon. North Carolina legislators were annoyed that Amazon customers in NC didn't pay sales tax because Amazon didn't have a presence there. They passed a law that made it so Amazon having affiliates there would count as them having a business presence, so Amazon would have to start charging their NC customers sales tax and remitting it to the NC government.

Amazon responded by canceling NC affiliates. This was the start of that email:

> We regret to inform you that the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) appears ready to enact an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates. You are receiving this e-mail because our records indicate that you are an Amazon Associate and resident of North Carolina.

Now, that obviously wasn't an NC legislator's intention. But it turned out to be the new stable best solution for Amazon. They must've done some math and decided that not charging sales tax in NC is important than letting affiliates with a NC address continue to participate in earning referral fees.

Too often legislators think people will accept their legislation and things will go according to their planned scenario. They don't stop and think, "How does this change people's incentives? What nasty secondary effects could come from this?" When the nasty secondary effects come, they either try to shame the organization in line (which doesn't usually work), or they pass even harsher legislation. You can see where this leads - it's not pleasant. Disrupt Nash equilibriums if you must, but do it with your eyes open that there could be some really nasty secondary effects to the process.
Well, if Google paid tax in the European country where they have the largest presence, they would pay it in ... Ireland. Just like they do now.
Not 305%?
SOX is the one I've heard most often.
Good point. Maybe he should have had a couple concentrated chapters at the beginning of the book, and then used the rest as a historical reference. If you want to check up on his arguments against the current dogma just check on his analyses of the the few high quality large scale studies that have been done.
My favorite corporate structure is that of the Virgin Group. Instead of a single gigantic company with a single figure at the top, there is a plethora of small companies -- startups indeed -- each focusing on its own business and market. I like to think of it as the open source version of corporate culture, with Richard Branson playing the role of a BDFL.
A "like" represents agreement. An upvote represents an informative contribution that should be highlighted...in my opinion.
HP Face-Tracking Webcams Don't Recognize Black People
Leading scientists still reject God
What about quality over quantity?
my employment contract listed all you can drink star bucks coffee as a benefit. We used to have a credit card we would pass around, and you could go around the corner. After $18k a year coffee benefits the president purchased a star bucks coffee machine. Personally I like this a lot better, far more coffee.
this is why Y combinator is important, and the offspring it has spawned in the last 3 years.
Supply and demand, and business processes tuned for bigco audits?

A similar thing happened with security audits. Huge demand from large companies with extreme requirements has definitely raised the cost of assessments for small companies.
On how well the new hedge funds are doing, of course: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126135805328299533.html?mod=...

IMHO Finance is far from dead in NYC and the recent startup activity is mostly smoke from a small fire.
From what I remember from Greenspan's "Age of Turbulence," he mentioned that he was pleasantly surprised that the markets were able to absorb much of the shock that happened on 9/11. I believe he attributed much of that to flexibility in the markets, which is probably related to the liquidity and efficiency that are provided by, for example, high-volume traders. Greenspan argues for deregulation of such activities since they make the markets so much more flexible, and able to withstand sudden shocks such as 9/11.

Of course, much of that was before the fall '08 crisis, so I don't know how he'd respond to that :)
I can't speak for the auditors, since I am a business attorney, but I do know what I have seen in helping to find this type of service for clients. For example, just within the past year, I was asked to help find a good auditing firm by one closely held Silicon Valley startup with fewer than 50 employees and a few million in annual revenues - the cheapest estimate came in at the $60K-$80K range (and this was from regional firms, not Big Four).

Don't know exactly why this is, except that the auditors themselves kept referring to Sarbox-type requirements that had become standard practice for all audits, public and private. Also, I think many of the smaller players have been chased out of the auditing field by the new complexities injected by Sarbox and relating recent developments in the field. Whatever the cause, at least in and around Silicon Valley, it is no longer easy to find a small firm that will do a quickie audit for a modest sum.

[Edit: just saw reply by tptacek - he says it much better than I do.]
I hear Sox and Sarbox. I've never heard Soxley. (Sarbox is a [weak] security audit driver, so it's something we talk about a bit).
According to Wikipedia: "Hotmail originally ran on a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems. A project was started to move Hotmail to Windows 2000. In June 2001, Microsoft claimed this had been completed; a few days later they retracted and admitted that the DNS functions of the Hotmail system were still reliant on FreeBSD." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail
Strict mode should top the list. By default, MySQL hates your data and wants to quietly mangle it.

In fact ENUM is an especially bad idea without strict mode, because it converts any typo to the empty string, which is almost certainly not what you meant to store. This also happens behind your back whenever the database doesn't have the correct version of the schema...
That assumes that they move to competitors.
Off topic:

Is there any problem with buying a certificate and using the same certificate for your postfix TLS email authentication that you use for your web server authentication?

I would like to have authenticated email, to minimize the chance of my emails bouncing, and I was hoping to only purchase one certificate. I can't find anybody talking about mail server TLS email authentication on the certification websites. They only talk about web authentication and a bit about email client authentication.
Surely that works both ways? If the government isn't aware that companies are using a loophole to avoid tax or more companies start using loopholes to avoid tax then it isn't a Nash equilibrium either and the government will be pressured to react by introducing new legislation to remove that loophole.

I think by ignoring this and focusing solely on the legislators, you are exposing your biases.
A few months back I went to a VC meet up where one guy said the biggest distinction between NY startups and Valley startups, is that the latter talk more openly about their ideas.

Us NY startups, he said, play our cards more guardedly. Not sure if he wasn't just fishing for ideas :-)
Market opportunity?
When Not To Listen To Users
Anybody Can Do Usability
Need A Weight Loss Plan Strategy?
So maybe this just opens up the market for more small CPA firms?
The space shuttle does have the ability to snatch satellites out of space and bring them back to Earth. No other craft does this, and this was probably an important feature during the Cold War. NASA doesn't talk much about the military uses of its spacecraft.
Justin.tv Unifies Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, And Their Own Chat
Really? I don't see that. Only on the order of $100 million has been invested in Twitter so far, from what I've been able to find. Given that their revenue is already a quarter of that I don't think there's a requirement for off-the-charts wild profitability here.
Atlanta's EyeWonder bought for $110M