skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. I posted saying basically, he was dismissing Google's attachment to good content far too readily - consider YouTube, where they pay royalties per music playback. Might they do something similar for books?
This is an extreme nitpick, but the American Indians (most American Indians prefer this name over "Native American," but see Wikipedia for more details on the name question) weren't entirely happy with how they were living, as of the time of the European colonization... So they fixed it.

The parts of the Jesuit Relations dealing with the Jesuits' first missionary work among the Hurons relates how the Hurons weren't particularly interested in accepting or rejecting the Jesuits' religious message; what they were interested in was how to build French-style houses. The Cherokee tribe took this even further than the Hurons, developing a syllabic script, and assimilating completely to the norms of the American South (even to the point of owning African slaves, unfortunately).

Personally, my complaint about the wars with the American Indians is not that the United States all but annihilated deadly enemies like the Iroquois and the Sioux (although coexistence with them would have been better, and we're doing a little better that way at present); my objection is that the United States all but annihilated peoples like the Cherokee, who were better Europeans than most of the American frontiersmen who wanted them displaced. Like the American Indian casinos, I try to avoid twenty-dollar bills.
More people taking injustices personally, no matter how small, is a very good thing. It may be the only way to make a serious dent in them.
Sorry, the post was only 5 minutes old when I said that, seemed a narrow window to change in. My bad.
Looks cool but the transparent background wasn't necesary. It's hideous. In my opinion. All the best.
As somebody who has worked in video production for 7+ years, I can tell you that crew sizes are down to a science. There's no profit in traveling overseas with more people than you absolutely need.
That seems high. I've done some development work for an independent web designer who seems to be pretty good. He can be reached at michael at cutbankdesign dot com. I know nothing about his prices, but this is in Montana, so he might be cheaper than designers elsewhere.
> Many practical problems - optimization, differential equations, signal processing, etc. - boil down to solving linear systems, even when the original problems are non-linear. Finite element software, for example, spends nearly all its time solving linear equations.

If I remember correctly, it's not that all these problems are actually sets of linear sub-problems. We just are a lot more apt to think in terms of linear equations, making it so that we tend to break down any problem we have to a linear problem. If done incorrectly of course this has dire consequences to your results.

This is similar to how in physics we try to reduce or approximate every problem to a harmonic oscillator, because everything else is just too damn complicated to actually solve.
Airline baggage fees lead to lower revenue
The only name that comes to mind is David Cronenberg.
// Workaround for a bug in ASP.NET Ajax Beta, you don't need this in the final version

and this is also kind of funny: <!--[if lt IE 7]> ...
Ask HN: Please review my startup - Accounting for Google Apps
I would love to understand more about this subject, and I have tried to learn it the same way I learned how to program: by Googling and working on my own problems. However, the resources simply don't seem to be there in the same way. What's the deal, here?

I would suggest the method that works (and is proven to work by the gazillion undegraduate mathematicians and physicists who get it to work every year): get some tutoring in the topic and/or acquire some quality undegraduate (or graduate) textbooks.

Once you have the basic principles down (basically the curriculum of a degree), you will still find it hard to approach a completely new topic like "convex sets/functions/optimisations", but you'll have a method that works.
Google Adwords can now target Ad's by Device / Mobile OS.
Several typos on the front page... I guess it's just another blog but, I don't know, I would expect Bill Gates to put his stuff through some proper proof-reading.
Lulz:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/unitpngfix.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/ie6.css" />
<![endif]-->
HIRING FULLTIME SPAMMERS PLZ (15 bids posted). God. Damnit.
This is my problem with mathematics.

"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater." - Albert Einstein
You need textbooks, which are primarily useful for their flattening of some subject into a sequence that can be absorbed. That's pretty much their purpose. Poking around online you can find a surprising array of reasonable quality text books both free and legal, though I have no particular suggestions for this topic.
I'm very surprised that the airline execs actually thought this would help revenue. The demand for travel is extremely elastic, therefore any increase in the costs of travel is going to cause a decrease in demand.
That looks amazing, what great way for your users to interact with your site. I'd be very interested in hearing those technical details as would plenty of others I'm sure.
Abobes isn't
Why is it useless (I've never worked with robots.txt)? Are the /css and /js files not large enough to bother skipping?
Microsoft sues TiVo over patent
Apple disrupts e-book market with new "agency" model. Are publishers saved?
I doubt it. What you're doing informs your body language (and vice-versa); I'm sure one of the reasons girls like muscle shots is because the guys in the pictures look like they're showing off their muscles, and guys with their pets look like guys hanging out with their pets. That is--if you took the pets or the washboard abs out of the picture, the face or other aspects would still convey that information.

I'm talking about the subtle changes in demeanor and facial expression: the way you carry yourself differently when you start your day by looking in the mirror and thinking, "I am a sexy man-beast, and the day is my prey." If you started with a blah photograph, photoshopping in the other disparate elements wouldn't change those subtle cues that you're giving off (or not giving off) in the real picture.

I know you probably asked this mostly facetiously, but this felt like a good rant opportunity anyway. :-)

Edit: Though, this subsequently makes me wonder what kind of mixed signals would be sent by a guy who is actually attempting to show off his hot bod, pet a cat, strum a guitar and brood simultaneously.
> For me, I usually think of things as strong/average/weak, where strength is of character, internal strength so to speak. So you could be strong (of character) in an area, or average, or weak. On that notion, I don't believe that quality women are more forgiving of weakness - just the opposite actually.

Could you elaborate on this? I find a woman to be higher 'quality' if she is forgiving of weakness. But maybe I'm just interpreting the words 'strong/weak' in the wrong way. Perhaps you meant to say that 'quality' women value integrity. In that case I would agree with you.
By way of Groklaw: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2010012014205446
To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid
$71.50 per night is upwards of $2k/mo. Although it doesn't seem unreasonable for a free-standing single-family home, it strikes me as a little high for only a thousand square feet.

Then again, I'm cheap^H^H^H^H^Hfrugal.

More to the point, I'm curious if you priced out what a 250 square foot apartment in Mountain View would cost, if it's even available.
"But what are the inherent rights of the creator of an intellectual work over his product?"

Inherent rights?

I want to agree with you that a person who thinks up something and makes it concrete in some form has some special claim on that, but I'm hard pressed to explain how that would be, other than other people all agreeing that is how it should be. That is, it's not a right, but a social convention.
McAfee introduce Google hack scanning tool
Yes, Chrome on Mac.
Maybe Google Knows Too Much, GoogleSharing Can Help
What, you mean if I complain hard enough, the knowledge will not zap itself into my brain, or magically appear in my browser window? Preposterous! Shenanigans! Chicanery!

Joking aside... I'll have to start snooping around for some good textbooks. I bet a couple of HNers out there might have some good suggestions, too!
New imagery of Port-au-Prince
I wasn't suggesting it was legal, or non-infringing, only that referring to it as doing damage is incorrect. Whether something is actually damaging doesn't have perfect correlation with whether you can get legal damages in court.
Damn... Mr. Einstein saw me coming from 50 years away. You win this time, Al!
Intel's WiMax chipset proves power hungry
This ranks right up there with another rentacoder job which said "please make a clone of facebook.com, will pay up to $100".
Man Buried in Haiti Rubble Uses iPhone to Treat Wounds, Survive
Useless in the sense it doesn't really need to mention Bing.

Blocking /css and /js makes sense because they don't add value in being crawled. Not necessary, but doesn't hurt.

Best practice: Always have a robots.txt file, even if it's empty.
Kutcher has 4.5 mil twitter followers, Tisdale has 2.5 mil, it was probably a good way to end up in the stream of the top twitter celebrities to get that initial bump
Look at the comments...

# robots.txt
#
# This file is to prevent the crawling and indexing of certain parts
# of your site by web crawlers and spiders run by sites like Yahoo!
# and Google. By telling these "robots" where not to go on your site,
# you save bandwidth and server resources.
On the other hand, just as it's not really paranoia when they're really out to get you, a protection racket is preferable to being overrun by hordes of Teutonic Nietzcheans. :) Having the same structure doesn't always mean being the same thing.
It's funny, I thought this was an odd choice when the winner was originally announced. I felt the judges were overly moved by the presence of a human element (the fence) in the shot, especially considering the emphasis on wildlife photography. I doubt if bears in a dump would have been considered, or monkeys on a safari vehicle. But I think this shot evoked a certain fairytale imagery in the minds of the judges, and they let themselves be led by their emotional response without fully considering the criteria. The strange thing is that the rules don't necessarily invalidate the image, even if the allegations are true. Images using models are allowed, but must be declared. If he had declared that he used a model (and it's still not proven that he did), his photo would still be eligible. Besides, some of the leading wildlife photographers/videographers in the world use elaborately staged sets (ant colonies set behind glass, known tame animals in game preserves, etc.) to achieve more "realistic" images. What was the objective of this contest?
whoah, whoah.... I have really wanted to use cross-site http requests, but I'm having some trouble understanding certain decisions here.

Why are they using a new set of HTTP headers to describe scenarios that are already covered by HTTP response codes? Why does the client send an Origin header at all in the first place, when it can be inferred from the referer? Why does the server respond with a list of allowed origins, when it could simply send an HTTP response code to say allowed/not allowed/auth required/etc.

I'm probably missing something, but this just doesn't add up...

EDIT:

Oh - maybe because there isn't a good javascript interface to HTTP response codes? Well, it sounds like a client-side solution would be to build this interface, rather than making the server support some weird headers that will still rely on the client to faithfully perform access control.
Nick Patterson is mentioned early in this article as a mentor to Cocks (half of the Cocks-Ellis pair that originally invented what we know as RSA).

Patterson now applies his mathematical prowess to investigating human genetics at the Broad Institute http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/science/12prof.html . (Sorry to continually add biological asides to all of these discussions.)
the name "next-gen sequencing" is unfortunate; what shall we call the generation after this?

XP? 2000? 7?
I am a mathematician myself, and I have some of the same problems when learning about topics away from my experience, or over my head. Wikipedia is great for cherry-picking topics if you're already familiar with them, but math is a subject that really builds on foundations of previous concepts (arguably, that's all it is). Wikipedia's content organization doesn't lend itself well to "entry points" nor to the partial ordering of topics.

Until you get some foundational knowledge, math is one of the topics where you're better off using traditional textbooks than wikipedia. The information is arranged in a logical manner that builds on previous concepts. Unfortunately, most individual topics are better-explained in wikipedia than in most books. A suitable compromise might be using a textbook's table of contents as the order to follow in navigating wikipedia, but the articles also have the problem of not always being consistent with each other, in style, nomenclature, required knowledge, and point of view.

After about one semester's worth each of algebra and analysis, you would probably have enough working knowledge to at least not stumble around like a blind man on 50% of topics. My personal favorite analysis textbook was Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis, however it's... not for the feint of heart. Seriously. It could kill a man. If you want to get the full value out of that book, you will be spending over an hour per page to make sure you understand every step of every argument.
For a good grounding in a lot of maths, I have somewhat fond memories of Boas: http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Methods-Physical-Sciences...

Arfken was also tough, but excellent: http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Methods-Physicists-Sixth-...

Yes, these books are fucking expensive.

PS: I did a physics degree, so my favourite books are maths for physicists... maybe former Maths students will have "purer" books to recommend. Anyway, between these two, you'll have a good year or two of hard studying before you need to buy another one :-)
The huge flaw with this article: explaining WHY I would ever want to use a soft maximum.

Yes, it "sands off the corners".

Why do I want that?
Yeah. I've never seen any solid stats, and I hate using my gut as an information source, but my gut tells me that piracy has been a much larger help to artists. I've seen a few news articles that imply it. Piracy is a threat to labels, but really, when a musician can grab Garage Band and a few thousand bucks of hardware and publish his own music... do we need labels?
It's too bad Hadoop seems to have been inspired by Google papers as a solution to Nutch's scaling issues. See http://research.yahoo.com/files/cutting.pdf [pdf]

To me (and IANAL), this implies that Hadoop users are at Google's mercy.
UK Launches Open Data Site; Puts Data.gov to Shame
http://data.gov.uk/
YC S07
I'm pretty sure that nobody would really care if someone stole CDs out of a publisher's warehouse. It's not even worth the legal costs to press charges. If some crackhead punches a hole in my window to take my CDs and I call the cops, they're going to say "sorry bud, shit happens." I highly doubt the Obama administration would support a $675k judgement against someone who stole 30 CDs from FYE. Just sayin. The guy would get a thousand dollar fine, a slap on the wrist, and a month of probation.
While I sympathize with the Publishers, they're beginning to sound a lot like the RIAA. For capitalism to work, dinosaurs have to die. And it's beginning to look like the publishers are turning into dinosaurs.

Personally, if I were to publish a book, I'd be tempted to just cut out the middle man and forego the big advance (which I hear usually isn't that big anyway).
Yet another move by Facebook to show utter disrespect for their users. Sure, we will all read the dialog before giving away our email address. However, 90% of Facebook's users wont.

Proof: when they updated the privacy settings a few months ago to default to public. Pretty much everyone in my friends list now have their profiles fully public. Craziness.
Seeing things like this make me glad I started programming with a (then) higher level language like C.
New features that I like:

- Computed styles and DOM are now tabs when working in HTML

- "Persist" buttons for both the Console and Net. I haven't tested it yet, but there have been many times where it would have been very useful.
The article was possibly aimed at engineers or mathematicians so the author thought the benefits didn't need explaining.

A soft maximum might be useful if you want a differentiable function that closely approximates the max() function. By differentiable I mean you can work out the rate of change of the function at any point. With the hard maximum, the rate of change at the hard edge is not defined. Nicer to have one function to represent the RoC and not have to worry about special cases.
I wish there were more resources available detailing how to write drivers. I've had this dream in the back of my mind for a long time of hacking a standard USB port on the end of a Steel Battalion controller, and then writing a PC driver for it. But I wouldn't even know where to start, really.
When you say "server based searching" I assume you mean things like Google's web search. It's fast because they dedicate tens of thousands of machines to storing the index and executing the queries. They can do that because their millions of users are all searching the same data set (the web). Dropbox couldn't do that because each user would be searching a different data set (their own files).

The fact that it's run on a server machine and not on a desktop machine has little effect on performance, and it probably doesn't make sense for Dropbox to provide the resources for good search when your desktop should be able to do a fine job of it.
Yup, he'll never make it in the real world if he doesn't master this fourth grade handwriting course.
I've done this before, even if ticket prices are a little higher but there are no fees other than what I pay for initially. I hate getting to the airport and getting nickled and dimed at the check-in counter. There just seems to be something wrong with that.
Or you can use Facebook's proxy option (something like username@proxyemail.facebook.com) so app devs don't actually see your real email address. Same sort of thing that Craigslist does.
Google to rent movies through YouTube
It seems like there a danger of the accuracy of Kurzweil's specific predictions being confused with the accuracy of overall "singularity" prediction.

Neither implies the other.
There's an obvious selection bias here. Airlines that aren't facing a revenue decline don't need to charge baggage fees.
Verizon Terminating Copyright Infringers’ Internet Access
Maybe if you've already burned bridges and ruined your brand.
Why are all of the x-axises drawn at different points on the y-axis? The x-axis for "The Effect of a Woman's Facial Attitude" is just below 8.7, but for "The Effect of a Man's Facial Attitude" it's at just below 0.6. And in both diagrams which are supposedly comparing the same thing the y-axis represents different information (i.e. "women met per contact" vs "new contacts monthly")

I also find the style of graph misleading. It makes it look like the the numbers that go below the drawn x-axis are negative y-values, but they're not. They are just positive values that are less than where they chose to draw the axis.

It's the same with "Popular Female Photo Contexts." The x-axis is drawn at just below 9 contacts made monthly and all graph values that are less than that are drawn in grey (instead of color) which further misleads to the viewer/reader into thinking, at glance, that the values are negative. Which doesn't necessarily make sense (you can't have negative contacts per month), but why not just start the x-axis at y=0 and be done with it? The relative sizes of the numbers would be the same.
Similar situation - I've been following the Dropbox story as I have other YC companies, but never had a compelling personal use.

I assumed a new global role with my company this month, and the second task I was assigned was 'Register for Dropbox and tell us how we can use it for our 160+ people'. That it was specifically 'Dropbox' shows how a clean and simple service that works easily can make massive inroads.
Does this require a Google Apps Premier account, or will it work for the Standard (free) version as well?
Having a very good background in accounts I wanted to see what the application could do for me. Maybe I missed it but I desperately needed a tour! What is your unique selling proposition? What is Google Application Engine to a non-hacker ie., a business owner?

Me thinks it needs work:)
Top10SQLPerformanceTips
After the Port Arthur Massacre in Tasmania, it turned out a number of journalists lied to airline staff, saying that they were relatives of some of the recently deceased so that they could get a seat on some of the limited number of flights heading from mainland Australia to Tasmania.

This was exposed by a news programme, Media Watch, and (anecdotally, at least) led to the Australian airlines requiring official proof of death/illness before trying to find last-minute seats for the relatives of dead or dying people.
Looks like some of the data sets are in PDF :-(

Is there any standard, to publish these data sets? If yes, why can't the governments, municipal corporations etc agree on publishing the data in that format? It would be much easier to build apps ...
I'm not trying to excuse file sharing, it's currently illegal just as a lot of recreational drugs are illegal. The Eldridge case, copyright lasting forever (retroactively extending copyright) was a clear failure of the courts. Since the purpose of copyright is to encourage creation, retroactive copyright extension has no basis.

In my opinion there will be a time when drugs are legalized, and copyright will most likely no longer exist.
The act of listening is an act of neural prediction
F# Permutations (translated  from Haskell Data.List.permutations)
Better Cacti Templates
I have a script that receives email from dropbox re shared folders and pulls the email address and folder name. This info gets put in a table. A cron job looks in this table and notices when the folder appears. It sends an email to the user who has to do a final confirmation step to protect against fake emails. Once that's done the cron job checks every minute for new files, processes them as it would files uploaded through the web, then deletes them.

Hackish parts: 1. The email format could change. 2. If the folder name isn't unique the email contains the non-unique name. Eg "ourdoings" in email, then when I accept, the folder is named "ourdoings (28)". I have to change the folder by hand. 3. They have to use the same email for dropbox and ourdoings signup. 4. Often people make subfolders of their "Photos" folder which doesn't fit the workflow.

There are changes I could make to help address these issues. It just hasn't been a high priority. The system works great once setup is done. I'm really glad I implemented it rather than just wait for an api. There's no more convenient way to upload photos.
You should be recycling, you're wasting valuable nickels.
This reminds me of companies who spam their customer email lists... They only look at the immediate results without being accountable for how many people are tuning you out.
The Lowdown On Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS)
Why should someone whose website looks like that have an opinion on design that anyone should listen to?