skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As it's still on ~900 3-d screens, I don't really think it's a censorship issue, unless you figure political views are linked to stereo vision capability ;)
When a number is disconnected it's taken offline for a while to allow notifications to get out. Normally this should be 6 months or so, but depending on population growth it could circulate faster. If you have a 212 number I hear they hold on to them like family heirlooms.

This is probably the 3rd or 4th round of collectors that are just recieving the file after the number was taken out. All you can really do is ask them to stop and take them to court if they persist.
Maybe someday. No wireless carrier could withstand millions of iPhones exclusively streaming content anytime soon. I think it's more likely streaming would be used only when you didn't have a local copy available. 32GB+ is probably enough storage for most people to keep the bulk of their collection local. For people with bigger collections I imagine a smarter syncing algorithm could reduce the need for streaming. Sync newly added files, don't bother syncing stuff I haven't listened to recently, sync my most played songs, etc.
Hospitals: Radical Cost Surgery
Pressured by making statements in public and wanting to act consistently with him.

Robert Cialdini describes this in some of his awesome books on social psychology.

Basically, if you make a statement in public you are much more likely to act consistently with it.

So in this case:

1) She says that the gift is really cool on Reddit.

2) People say that she's evidently not sold on him, and she updates her post to say that she does like the guy. After all, she's received a cool gift. If she didn't like the guy, why would she think it was cool and not creepy?

3) She's now committed in public that a) she thinks the gift is awesome and b) she likes the guy. Under those circumstances making the trip is the consistent thing to do.

4) Hence she's now making a fourteen hour flight to see him.

On the other hand, if she hadn't posted it there'd be no pressure to assert that she liked the guy and no consequent pressure to make the trip. She'd probably think "neat gift, but he's fourteen hours away" and then find reasons not to go.
The study doesn't prove that what the title claims. What it proves is that you can improve your grades, which is not equivalent to becoming smarter. An alternative explanation is that believing makes you more motivated, which results in better grades.

Not saying that it's not possible, just that the title is not a conclusion from the study.
I maintain that people communicate differently and some are much better in certain mediums than others. Some people express themselves better through written words, art, music, etc. Saying face to face communication is always the best way everytime for every person is wrong.

Even for the awkward nerd in all of us - maybe you talk to someone online and you're totally relaxed and being somewhat smooth and then you blow it in person by being a nervous wreck - you still got further through indirect communication than you would have had you just spent 5 minutes with them initially without talking online first, which is my point. I'm not saying being good at indirect communication is all you need, just that some people can get further with it than they can with direct interaction. The basics still need to be in place (general attraction to each other, ability to speak in the presence of a woman, etc).
Using Eclipse's SCM Tooling like the Big Boys
Think you've mastered Eclipse's SCM integration? So did I . . . until I started watching the more experienced developers in my shop. Turns out that the SCM integration is even richer than I thought and the time I've saved since retooling my skills has really paid off. In this article I'll share the three best tips I've learned so that you can increase your productivity and go home on time!
It's the tepid nature of this statement that I am most against. Despite the fact it's also just downright wrong - the malleability of the brain is close to miraculous and studied heavily in many areas of science.

Rats that are kept in cages devoid of adornment have smaller, less dense, brains than rats that have toys and varied sonsory stimulation. It's simple, the more things we have with which to think, the better and more complex our thinking can be.

Think Orwell's Newspeak and Herman Hesse's Glass bead games.

What is awful here is that you seem to be convinced that mediocrity is a worthwhile tactic for people and for children... and I think this rips the heart from the very idea of what it means to be alive and better oneself.
The small business owners I know in Chicago say Yelp calls them incessantly, offering to let them take over their profile pages for $500/month (don't quote me on that price).

Their biggest issue with Yelp is that they tell their customers to go review them on Yelp. The customers do. Then Yelp deletes the reviews because the people who posted them weren't "true Yelpers." So only reviews from people who post lots of reviews are valid? WTF.
haha, well said
I assume this strategy works because they would be functioning as a Dropbox-like service where they just supply the hard-drive space in the cloud. Since space is pretty cheap (and Apple has a ton of cash anyways), it seems like the perfect glue that can connect all of Apple's offline products.
Microsoft teams up with ESPN for live sports on xbox, increase cable threat
Introducing Chirpie - IPhone Twitter Beta Testers needed
Guys, you've been good to me in the past, so I'd like your help now to beta test my new iPhone Twitter app.

Details are here: http://chirpieapp.com

Basically ping us via http://Twitter.com/chirpieapp

hope this doesn't break site rules. If so pls delete.

Cheers guys
I just posted Inc's article on how Yelp can make or break local businesses (this month's article). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062641
She considers herself a member of a community; according to the mores of that community there's a clearly favored course of action, although she might not have realized that before posting.
In between checking email and Google News. I don't have a regular schedule as I'm freelance.
And even if they did admit to it, that seems about as "damning" as it gets for a site whose value proposition is based almost entirely on its credibility.
"Boring features such as scoring, menus and a nice user interface are not implemented. Also, any other non-implemented feature is deemed boring."

Heh.
I for one have got a lot more strict about flagging things that are interesting but off-topic.
Secret low-cost Verizon cell phone plans
The way Lala currently works is that it matches songs you have in your library with their cloud library and only uploads and stores your copy if there's no match. I don't know if Apple would continue doing it that way but that's how it works now.
"A well done scientific hoax"?

Yeah... lemme go find some "Ionized" Salt and give this one a shot.
Any community that gains a critical mass of users will change. The interrogatory form of the headline isn't really necessary.

HN will change as it grows, just as did Slashdot, or Reddit, or Digg. It doesn't have to be a bad thing. YC can try to shape this growth by introducing features and changing algorithms, and the userbase can try to shape it through submissions and voting.

As with many things, it's all a question of balance. You don't want to tip things too far in favor of preserving the old culture lest you scare off newcomers and stagnate (perhaps Slashdot at some periods in its history), nor do you want to tip the other way and lose your core users (Digg).

Only time will tell how HN navigates these waters.
There seems to be a rash of new users posting less relevant 'link-bait' stories that get voted up

When I first encountered HN, not long after its launch, it appeared to function largely as a syndicator of TechCrunch articles. So I find your characterization of a "rash" of new "link-bait" rather amusing...
strongly disagree... he picked something in her field of interest and then made an effort for her, that's the best courting method there is. I mean are you even serious, she liked it enough to post this whole thing about it? You think him buying a plane ticket and showing up to try and get laid would provoke as positive a response?
Baidu, Alibaba.com, Smiling At Google’s Stance
Baidu and Alibaba stand to gain from Google pulling out of China.
QWERTY was not designed to slow typists down. It was designed to maximize the typing speed without the types(?) getting stuck. This is not the fastest layout now, but was the fastest for mechanical typewriters.
I agree that some people are better at communicating in different mediums. However, in your example, I don't think that you really got much further. You still blew it at the "talking in person" stage. It's just that you took longer to get there.
Many years late, California starts replacing its 1970s COBOL-based mainframes
Who deems what is benefical to society?
This seems best answered by server logs.
Craig Newmark on White House 'Modernizing Govt.' forum
but there's nothing wrong with private agreements about personal data. consenting adults can draw up whatever contracts they wish. the difference is that government can write up contracts without your knowledge and then hold you to them at gunpoint.
It is actually fairly plausible that Stoppelmann has no idea at all that his sales representatives are using such shady tactics.

That is not, however, good news for Stoppelmann. Not in any sense. It would indicate that, at the client-business level of interaction, there is no functional oversight at all. That Yelp's management's either willing to turn a blind eye, or are so negligent as to allow this to occur even in the face of growing criticisms.

Incompetence or malevolence; either way, they're in trouble.
Comparing philosophical backgrounds: RMS v ESR
I think the problem is that most HN readers don't bother flagging the link bait stories... many even vote them up.

I would be OK with a "no linkbait headlines" policy where any article that had a sensational headline such as "Why I will never use another Apple product again" or "Shocking lessons from my Google interview" should just be considered inappropriate for HN.
Lisp interpreter in javascript with jQuery : programming
And in contrast, neither the NSA nor the CIA has any interest in what happens on the subcontinent. It suggests bad tradecraft that the Chinese hackers were detected, to be sure.
It was genius marketing, but let's not think its reflective of reality. 99% of the time chunky hard plastic with sharp corners is a sign of poor design rather than virulent masculinity.

True, and Android!=Droid. The Nexus One is much prettier, at least in my opinion and that of my female friend who spent a long time admiring it and its animated wallpapers.
The 22 Immutable Laws of Personal Branding
LU decomposition is the most common choice, which is a similar operation to matrix inversion in that you're iterating row (or column) operations on both sides of an equation. Numerical Recipes has a great section on this, IIRC.

But that kind of obscures the fact that, while algorithms like LU decomposition are faster than a pure matrix inversion, they're faster by a constant factor of about 2 or so. It's not a fundamentally different algorithm, just a different set of tricks to solve a bunch of simultaneous equations. If you aren't hugely performance constrained and already have a matrix inversion routine, you'd never be bothered to re-write your equation solver just for this speedup.
It's not an economics journal at all: it's a pop-politics and pop-culture magazine, similar to Scientific American or Popular Mechanics, but on different subjects. You wouldn't say that "Popular Science is not a real astrophysics journal" is a mark against the magazine, I assume.
Nice. The potential of Kohonen maps is shown in the context of a dynamic audio manipulation tool in this software that I like, where it's referred to as a 'metasurface': http://www.audiomulch.com/info.htm
Why is that a problem? If I aspire to a better life, why should I be prevented from doing it so that my fellow countrymen, who by your admission do not aspire to a better life, can have a better life? People should have the liberty to improve their situation. If they happen to be born in a poorly governed country with little or no chance of success, they shouldn't be forced to stay there just because they were born with aspirations.

There may be problems with the OP's argument but that's not one of them.
My wife and I both recently posted negative reviews at businesses that were advertising with Yelp. Neither review (which were both fair and truthful) ever showed up on site.

edit: Just to clarify, I spoke to Yelp about it. The reply I got was "[The] spam algorithm can filter based on how established user is. [Your post was] not deleted & can re-appear on biz page. Still live on your profile."
I stopped using Yelp and uninstalled it from my iPhone when I read the article last year.

Yelp's business model doesn't sit well with me. Even if the allegations of good reviews disappearing for businesses who don't pay up aren't true, the idea that there is a service out there that you don't want but you're almost forced into paying for since it's affecting your business directly feels to me like paying the mafia to 'protect' your business.

If Yelp really does want to help both businesses and consumers, give businesses the ability to respond to reviews for free and don't artificially alter results, be like Google and let your algorithm work. Make money selling ads.

It reminds me of the whole GetSatisfaction drama with 37 Signals from a few months ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=540540). This type of business model where you provide a business a "service" they didn't ask for then try to charge them for it will never go over well.

[Edit] FWIW this page, found below in relme's comment (http://www.yelp.com/myths) directly answers every one of my concerns with Yelp. If it's true then great, sounds like they're doing things well. I find it hard to write off all the complaints as fictional though.
Yeah, the ones I haven't heard of are all Mac OS specific. Not a surprise, since I prefer Ubuntu.
Why does it seem all forums are PHP based? Is "making a forum" the Hello World of PHP?

Are there even any good non-PHP forums?
I'm not sure when he was trying to get his number, but I got a 512 number when I signed up a few months ago. I think I could even pick among a bunch of 512 numbers.
I've tried to do that quite a bit, but since PG changed the rules for flagging last year, it hasn't been nearly as effective.
Audio White Paper - BIG-IP v10.1 An Integrated Application Delivery Architecture
My perception is that submission quality is roughly the same, but average comment quality has been dropping. Maybe the solution is to make comments work more like submissions, e.g. new top-level comments start out dead and need two upvotes before they go live. This is essentially how all new stories start out, and it seems to be working reasonably well.

Also, part of the issue with scaling is that there are some types of comments that are fine to post when the userbase is small, but that aren't ok to post as the userbase grows-- even if they add value in some way. So the problem isn't just coming from new users posting bad comments, it's coming from old users posting the same comments. So maybe some sort of radical experiment to try to refocus the discussions wouldn't be such a bad idea, at least to see how it goes.
A Matlab/Octave example of inv being slower and less accurate:

>> A = randn(100); x = randn(100,1); b = A*x;
>> tic; x1 = inv(A)*b; toc
Elapsed time is 0.142381 seconds.
>> tic; x2 = A\b; toc
Elapsed time is 0.000736 seconds.
>> max(abs(x-x1))
ans =
7.1054e-14
>> max(abs(x-x2))
ans =
4.8406e-14

Edit: Actually this is a warning about timing stuff. The inv function hadn't "warmed up". On a second run both times drop, and the difference is much smaller:

>> tic; x1 = inv(A)*b; toc
Elapsed time is 0.000737 seconds.
>> tic; x2 = A\b; toc
Elapsed time is 0.000471 seconds.
Gaussian elimination. Remember where you subtract multiples of one row from another, in order to get zeros below the diagonal? That way you can back-solve a system of equations by reading off solutions starting with the bottom-right corner.

The result of carrying out the elimination steps is a triangular matrix with all zeros below the main diagonal. Call it U, for "upper".

The elimination steps themselves can be encoded as a matrix, rather than describing them in words. For instance, "subtract 2 times row 1 from row 2" is the matrix:

[ 1 0 0]

[-2 1 0]

[ 0 0 1]

So, to solve the system, you can perform elimination on A x = b, which gives you two matrices (U, and the elimination steps L). In some sense, you've factored A in to L and U.

Example:

Using Strang's terminology, let's call the matrix that "eliminates (i.e. sets to 0) the (i,j) entry" Eij

So, to solve a 3x3 system A x = b, you want to do elimination as: (E32 E31 E21) A = U

I.e.

1) Take A and subtract some multiple of row 2 from row 1, to put 0 in (2,1)

2) Take the result and subtract some multiple of row 3 from row 1 to put 0 in (3,1)

3) Take the result and subtract some multiple of row 3 from row 2 to put 0 in (3,2)

Now the goal of elimination is to get an uppper-triangular matrix U. I.e. if you were solving some system of equations in x, y, z, then because U is triangular, you could just read off the answer to z. Then plug that into the equation for row 2 to solve for y, then plug that into the equation for row 1 to solve for x. That's back-substitution.

BUT, let's return to our operations. We have:

E32 E31 E21 A = U

(E32 E31 E21) A = U

inverse(E32 E31 E21) (E32 E31 E21) A = inverse(E32 E31 E21) U

I A = inverse(E32 E31 E21) U

Now, it just so happens that the inverse of (E32 E31 E21) is lower-triangular. I.e. all entries above the diagonal are zero, so let's call it L.

I A = L U

A = L U

LU-decomposition. Or "factorization", since we've factored A into two matrices: L, and U.
A useful argumentation technique.
As far as I know LU decomposition is more than a constant factor faster than inversion. And it is numerically more stable.
Professionally, I've been doing mostly web UIs, bunch of JavaScript. Personally - I've always had a fondness for programming language design, theory, and implementation and (naturally) am working on my own compiler. I've also picked up a bit of an interest in machine learning and distributed processing, mostly because of where I work now.
I strongly disagree. I think the means is excellent--spending effort on something that she would appreciate is really hard to beat.
Forums are PHP-based because everyone supports PHP deployment. Most people who are going to run forum software don't have a lot of money for sophisticated setups, or even a simple VPS, so you're generally stuck with whatever your shared host provides. Very few shared hosts provide support for anything besides PHP.

PHP, for all of its troubles, is still the easiest, cheapest, and fastest to deploy, and for that reason will keep a strong foothold until something matches or beats it in that area.
MediaCore: Free Open Source Video, Audio and Podcast Publishing Platform
She has no reason to do otherwise with me. Our definitions of "friend" may differ.
Ask HN: other mathematical link/discussion forums?
What are your favorite math/science link/discussion forums? Not too many come to mind: Hacker News, Stack Overflow http://stackoverflow.com/ , NuclearPhynance http://www.nuclearphynance.com/ , MathOverflow http://mathoverflow.net/ . I feel there must be some other big ones that I just have not heard of yet.
There was a discussion in France, where the did not used to have a pay per loan system in the libraries and some people wanted to introduce one. I do not know however, what came out of it..
Interesting .. looks like *nix 'file' command reads from start to end, so it detects it as JPG.

[09:55:38] jliew@ssdstrdev1:~/malcode
$ file some.jpg

some.jpg: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01

[09:55:45] jliew@ssdstrdev1:~/malcode
$ file some.zip

some.zip: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract

[09:55:47] jliew@ssdstrdev1:~/malcode
$ cat some.jpg some.zip > concat

[09:57:14] jliew@ssdstrdev1:~/malcode
$ file concat

concat: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01

[09:57:21] jliew@ssdstrdev1:~/malcode
$ whatis file

file (1) - determine file type
Yes, we're taking your stuff. Don't worry it's for your own good. If it's not then it's at least good for society. Look, we're taking your stuff here's a list of excuses just pick one.
For entrepreneurs in search of a co-founder
Also, related question- would you consider the old newsgroups world (I guess as filtered through Google Groups such as http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/topics ) as still being worth following?
I would love to see a kernel density plot of comments by point value, hypothesis being that there are a lot more low-point submissions than there were before. I see a lot of un-thought-out off-the-cuff comments lately: knee-jerk anti-Chinese sentiments, top comments with obvious flaws in reasoning, speculation, or just plain immaturity.

I know people have been saying this for years, but this is the first time I'll say it: I've been avoiding reading news.YC because I don't feel like I learn anything from the comments anymore. I'd really welcome a return of PG's orange-names experiment, but with a gradient instead of a binary grouping (to avoid tribal sentiment).
As unfortunate as the situation may be, wiretapping/spying/searching will probably always happen at high levels of government regardless of the law. I don't know of any way to stop it, or that it's even possible to see if it would subsequently have been stopped.
Debugging a turing-complete full-fledged programming language is the same as debugging markup? Interesting.

I thought the whole point of Sass, the topic of this discussion, was to introduce more powerful programming concepts to CSS?

So which is it, is CSS already as powerful a tool as a programming language thus making Sass completely useless, or does it lack the capabilities of a real programming language, thus making it much easier for designers to use with proficiency?
So are there any similar services which do offer business owners a chance to respond for free? If not, wouldn't this be a good opportunity for a startup? You could probably advertise yourself as the 'dont-be-evil' version of yelp.
Beware Of Start-Ups, Like Zillow, Boasting Of IPO Plans
Stainless is great for manually testing multiple logged in accounts.
http://www.onlinecollege.org/2009/10/19/100-incredible-open-...

http://www.mathpuzzle.com/

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/
Android’s Next Challange? iTunes
Paul, have you considered re-implementing the orange-names experiment as a gradient of gray-to-orange, to avoid a tribal sense of "grays versus oranges"? Or is that not-obviously-scalable?