skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe, but are we going to do away with PACs, which are essentially corporations, also? If people want their influence to be heard and heeded they will just find some other place to put that pressure. My point is that this in and of itself is not what actually causes corruption and abuse, there is also the ability of the state to grant privilege and reward arbitrarily in response to pressure.
Maybe -all- the corporate bookstores will tank. And then the little indies with their low overhead and innate charm could fill the welcome void.

That'd be good. Cuz: you can't browse through hundreds of books at Amazon, and make those amazing discoveries that change your life. And you can't pick something on a whim and take it home to read that evening at Amazon. You can't talk to a human being, or meet other readers at Amazon.

Only the little bookstores ever have that oddball stuff that bigstores will never carry that you can pick up and smell and leaf through and take a chance on.

Corporate bookstores weren't an improvement, they were a symptom.
It is also a matter of being clear about some terminology early during discussions, if one says for example that the set of integers is countably infinite and that the set of real numbers is uncountably infinite is easier to understand.
When you factor in the time and effort savings from the extensive polish/integration work that Apple does, plus the 'style' bonus value, Apple really isn't that much more expensive.
Hell, the iPhone is only a whopping $0.25 more than the Droid over the 2-year life of the contract. The iPhone is easily $0.25 more awesome than the Droid!
Wave Gadgets are HTML/JS. I was concerned that an external source (i.e. App Sales Machine) would not be able to affect the contents of a Wave Gadget unless there was some direct user-interaction with the Gadget inside the Wave.

Any experience Wave Gadget builders want to chime in? Is this possible?
Interesting to see people who think that SDK was not planned from the very start.

And there was no luck involved with the iPhone—remember, the thing was in the works for 2.5 years before being revealed.
High focus on something you want to perfect is hardly a luck.
how about, "hrm... here are two almost equivalent candidates, oh wait that one sued his last company and ruined their rep"

or... what if the HR department of some big company doesn't hire people who have sued their employers?

I'm just making things up but I have a feeling there is some potential situation where it would cost me.

Also what do I gain from it? Vengeance is one, not really a good reason. Helping out the probably not so huge number of other people who might get conned by them in the future is the other.

That reason is pretty decent, but weighed against the personal cost to me, not so much. Also you need to factor in if these future employees would even find my warning. I did a little SEO testing with this already and it wouldn't be that easy to create something easily discoverable.
MyContextualAds : Twist & Tweet Contest
Seven Great Blunders of the Computing World
Google Maps for the Indoors
I think both our units are off.

If the units represent 20-30 cents per car per mile traveled, then my question is, what manner of gold and silver is used in constructing Texas roads?
He died in the Denali National Park:

"Wild blueberries and soap berries thrive in this landscape, and provide the bears of Denali with the main part of their diets. Over 450 species of flowering plants fill the park, and can be viewed in bloom throughout summer.

Unfortunately, the spring and summer months are short."

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

Edit: his journal was called "Beautiful Blueberries."
Public officials are rarely prosecuted for acting improperly. Usually it's only in cases of personal gain (corruption) or outright criminal behaviour. You don't throw people in jail or chop off their heads simply because they were overzealous and bent/abused/ignored the rules. Hopefully, there are some reprimands and some re-education. Maybe some people need to be fired or demoted, but prosecution is really unnecessary and a collosal waste of resources.
Yes, especially the last sentence. But don't skip ahead. It would be like listening to the punch line of a joke before hearing the setup.
Not sure why anyone would use this -- it looks about one step away from using HAML directly ...
We're happy to work with any maintainer who wants to start a new language, maintain an existing language, or revive an outdated language.
I have a strong (probably unusual) standard when it comes to computer modeled science: if explanation requires software or data that I don't have access to, I completely disregard it. That might sound kind of crazy given the state of science and my chosen profession, but (maybe because of my chosen profession) I know that a complex system can tell you whatever you want it to tell you. It won't be the truth, but it will be "convincing" to most people. If the research really mattered, someone would reproduce it with independent software and data anyway.

I think this is a good solution to the problem. If most people only believed in reproducible science, there would be pressure on authors to use software and data that can be shared, or no publisher would carry their article. Seems easy to me.
Dave was an awesome mentor in Techstars, really engaged and helpful, despite being crazily busy. I'm really looking forward to following his adventures in startup-land, and can't wait to see what he comes up with next.
Realtime map of world's marine traffic
I agree that this in itself not the cause of corruption, but there is also one other difference. Suppose that a Public Company put to shareholders a motion to support a Presidential candidate's fund and 51% vote for it would you consider it right then for the Corporation to go ahead and donate the money?
Tetris 'helps to reduce trauma'
The first time I saw the proof I was not satisfied because I wondered why you couldn't use the same exact argument to show the integers are uncountable (and back in high school I didn't grasp the quick answer, 'because only reals have infinite digits, any particular integer only has finite digits').

I remember Mark Krusemeyer at MC took a more satisfying approach. He first showed the power set of integers was uncountable, then showed the one-to-one / onto mapping to the reals (and then some bit about power sets of power sets as a way of finding ever larger and more infinite sets).

For whatever reason, thinking of the size of power sets seem a bit less abstract than the size of reals, maybe because it feels more discrete and computer science-ish?
> ... what should be the relatively easy stuff.

Volunteer time, interest, ability, and resources aren't fungible. Find us a willing cadre of developers to work on Pynie and I'll accept that writing and maintaining a full Python implementation is indeed "relatively easy".
Mac OS X Toll Free Bridging Internals
I didn't vote you down, but I find it completely unnecessary to write an apology and it's a little annoying to read one for a mistaken downvote, as this adds nothing to the discussion. It's just a mistake. It happens. The voting is anonymous (to all except pg and a few others perhaps). If you want to apologize, try to find a way to send a private message. I'd say you got downvoted for cluttering up the discussion, which ironically I am now also doing. Oh well, hope this helps anyway.
Actually, having an infinity at the end of every line on the complex plane just gives you a simple disc. To get the projective plane, you have to associate antipodal points, like associating +/-infinity on the real line to a single infinity, but for every line that runs through the origin separately. But in topology, whether these points are 'at infinity' or not is arbitrary, because the complex plane is indistinguishable from the unit disc, until you start adding some more structure to it like a differential structure.

And trust me, you do not want to be doing any sort of calculus on the complex plane with anything other than a single infinity. Conformal mappings really don't work well without that simplification. And with that simplification, everything is magical and you can integrate rainbows to get unicorns and candy canes.

Nonetheless, your point is valid, it's possible to have more than a single point at infinity. However, regardless, it's more conventional to think of infinity as a particular point with some unusual properties, and in these cases with multiple infinities they're all basically the same. You don't have classes of infinities the same way you have classes of infiniteness.
Yes, but that probably isn't enough of a savings. We don't have a toucan's digestive system, and can't process large amounts of fruit quickly through our digestive tract like they can. It's a case of starving with a full stomach.
I've been doing something like this for a LONG time when I have long running jobs and want to run down to the pub for a beer:

# dosomething;mail -s "Job is done" XXXXXXXXXX@mobile.att.net

That way I can be anywhere and just wait for a text message on my iPhone to let me know the job is complete!

Isn't *nix great?
Electromagnetic Pulse Gun Stops Cars(video)
Thanks, I will check out that book.

I definitely wasted a lot of time and emotion on this. But it felt quite good when they actually paid :)

If I did end up in a similar situation again, regardless of what precautions I took, I think I could at least attempt to pull the same thing off with very little time/effort, having the knowledge of the process that I do now.

Btw, once I realized they weren't paying anytime soon, I of course did go ahead and find another gig (which actually paid).
Interesting observations.

I'd like to write this up - I might later - I don't have time now - here's some material from Feynman ...

Take successive square roots of 10. As you get further and further you spot a pattern, that when e is very small, 10^e ~ 1+c.e for some constant c.

Now take 10^(i.e) where e is very small and i=sqrt(-1). Then 10^(i.e) ~ 1+c.i.e. Take repeated powers and you end up moving in a circle. Following that we end up with the formula e^(i.t) = cos(t)+i.sin(t) where t is a real angle.

None of that works if you don't basically take the reals for granted. Or at least, it's very hard.
By overpowered, I mean that a model that allows the idea of something having infinite precision leads to apparent paradoxes. For instance you get constructs like Gabriel's Horn that have greater surface area than volume, or the case of choosing a random real number between 0 and 1: the probability of picking any particular real number is (approaches?) zero, yet some number will be picked.

But in the case of the Cantor argument specifically he seems to be encoding an infinite amount of information in one number simply by extending the digits after the decimal point. It's almost like - cheating, or more specifically an "exploit" allowed by what I call reals being overpowered.

(Here I have to make an aside: the value Pi, which is actually a computable number, can also encode any amount of information because any number will appear at some point in the expansion. But you'd have to indicate where in Pi your number starts, and your index values would (on avergage) be so large as to consume at least as many bits of information as it would to simply state the number you want.)

In the physical world, when you do something like measure the voltage on a capacitor you can only measure it to within a certain accuracy & precision. If you wanted to make an analog computer that uses different voltages to represent different values, you'd be limited by the accuracy and precision which you could measure it.

Note that, even if the voltage is infinitely variable, your ability to differentiate those values is still limited, so you still do not have infinite precision. (In Turing's paper on computable numbers, he makes the case that even if a human brain can have infinite states, there would at some point be a threshold of similarity at which the brain couldn't distinguish two similar states from each other.)

So my claim is that real numbers imply the ability to measure something to infinite precision, and that that is contradictory to physical experience.
>I kept looking for insight in this article and not finding any.

It's in the last sentence: Disclosure: Long AAPL. This guy stands to gain (in reputation and wealth) by talking up Apple's value. That doesnt mean he's necessarily wrong, it just means that everything he says needs to be viewed through that lens.

Also, Apple makes up the vast majority of his tech stock coverage: http://seekingalpha.com/author/jason-schwarz/articles/latest
So let us look at just what you can fit into a 32 bit floating number. I know you can do reals in other ways, with arbitrary precision libraries, but the point is still the same. Anyway, the 32bit float. The fact that I have a limited amount of precision, means that errors exist as a result of truncation and rounding. For details search google (the main reason for my float example). The cumulative effects of these can be large enough be represented within the given amount of precision. Since we now have a proof that those numbers are innumerably many, we should develop techniques to deal with it, rather than just add precision.
I would say that the solution to sqrt(2) is the expansion (to however many finite number of iterations you run it for) of the bits produced by the Turing machine that computes sqrt(2). Sqrt(2) is a computable number, so it exists both in my system and in yours.
I loved loved loved learning the diagonal proof in college. I've done it for friends occasionally, as a demonstration of the idea that math can be awesome.

There was one guy in the class who simply wouldn't accept it. He kept saying, "But so then you add that new number to the list!" I didn't know that he was representative of a whole larger set of people.

I just posted this to his Facebook page.
While I'm loath to quote xkcd, http://xkcd.com/137/

For people like text: Essentially not doing something because someone, somewhere, who might at some point give you money might be offended is a bad idea.
In cities where subways or other types of rail transit do not operate 24/7, use the cars (or different cars) to move packages in the off hours.
I think SeaMicro is targeting commercial workloads, not HPC; that immediately excludes GPUs as competitors. It could be somewhat cheaper and lower power than a Nehalem cluster, but I also don't see anything revolutionary.

Their patent applications have some technical details:
http://www.pat2pdf.org/pat2pdf/foo.pl?number=20080320181
http://www.pat2pdf.org/pat2pdf/foo.pl?number=20090216920 It looks kinda like a cheap x86 Blue Gene...
From a pure math perspective, the limitations of computers are irrelevant.
This is basically what I used to do as well, except just to my normal e-mail account.

Love *nix :)
A valid concern shared by many, but I can't see Apple not being prepared for its CEO's eventual retirement. I think it's safe to say Jobs has shaped the leadership of Apple with people he trusts, and while there's not going to be any one person with his traits, there are enough minds that share his vision to carry the company long-term.
Boil it, if you've got the means. The army disparages this practice, saying boiling doesn't destroy all toxins. Maybe not, but it'll destroy some toxins, and at the same time get rid of the tannins that render foods like acorns unpalatable.

Boiling doesn't get rid of tannins. Native Americans poured boiling water over ground acorns to leach out some of the tannins.
> Actually, having an infinity at the end of
> every line on the complex plane just gives
> you a simple disc.

Er, judging from the rest of your comment you must simply have misunderstood me. For every line through 0 in the complex plane, take a point and define it to be at both ends of the line. That is doing as you say, associating antipodal points.

And I do do calculus (well, equivalent procedures) on such objects. It's clear from your comments that you know about these things - trust me that I do as well.

So we're agreed that the concept of infinite sized sets and the concept of "points at infinity" are different, and for teaching about "infinity" it might be useful to separate them explicitly.

Interesting observation. Thanks.
I just looked it up: http://code.google.com/p/imdbotty/source/browse/trunk/gadget...

It seems that the html is server-side preprocessed before being displayed in the gadget, if I am correct in assuming those are template tags. So that would not be a limitation.

I wanted to install your tool, but it is an inconvenient tool to use if you a lot of apps. Why don't you just pull the app ids out of the sales file and generate the dictionary that way? Tnen it would work well with multiple apps.
You used Lisp to make that comment.
Passive solar glass home: watching the sun move
Are you offended at the idea that a mathematical thing called a "real" exists, or offended at the idea that somebody thinks real numbers actually exist in the real (no pun intended) universe?

Because nobody thinks real numbers actually exist in a usable manner; whether the base of the universe is "ultimately real" or "ultimately discrete" is an open problem, but also irrelevant since we can't get to real values (if they exist) with infinite precision thanks to the various uncertainty principles.

Ultimately, there really isn't anything to "agree" or "disagree" with when it comes to the reals; they are just a definition, and everyone who knows what they are talking about know they don't actually exist. See also the Axiom of Choice; really there isn't anything to "believe" or "not believe" about it.

(I say "offended" and "believe" but I am not trying to put words into your mouth. I am not satisfied that either of them describe your tone, but I needed something. Please do clarify if those are wrong.)
My guess would be that the petabyte of storage is the selling point and the fact that the ratio of CPU's to storage is pretty high means it can probably act as a high performance low cost SAN or something like that. With 512 CPUS that's one per 2 TB drive per processor. Seems similar to a Capricorn Tech's approach, http://www.capricorn-tech.com/
Well it's silly. You have to figure as mobile devices advance so will desktops. Sure being able to have a computer in your pocket on the go is nice. But no one is ever going to be going to work and working all day on their iPhone.

You could create a docking system so your iPhone could be hooked up to a real keyboard, mouse and monitor. But that is silly with current differences in power between laptops and mobile phones.
Shares in a corporation are a contract(read: agreement) that you have with that corporation and the other shareholders. If you think that donating to a campaign or cause is always wrong, you can seek out companies that do not do that, and only agree to invest in those types of companies. If you think that there should be a rule that any political donations must be approved by a shareholder vote then you can seek out corporations that have that in their shareholder agreement (not that I think that there are currently any in existence).

There are many corporations out there that have a specific 'agenda' that they support with their profits. Some of them are totally ridiculous (see the Trijicon story: http://defensetech.org/2010/01/21/update-on-bible-scopes-us-...), and some of them are worthwhile(Aid to Haiti), but this is my subjective judgement of those causes, and anyone else might view them differently.
He's launching in 7-days. A successful launch does not a successful startup make. I've had several successful launches myself. Still punching the clock at my day job, though.
I can't believe this has been spun as just the "Internet generation". Vitamin D deficiency affects almost everyone, not just "kids on that damn Internet!" Most of us work inside, spend our leisure time inside, wear sunscreen when outside, etc.
It seems to me that syntactic sugar is the crutch that language designers throw to their users when they won't/can't give them macros. I think the idea behind the quote is not that it's bad in an absolute sense, just that it's a second best solution.
Chrome OS: Did You Think it Wouldn’t Have a Media player?
The Aleph Numbers are the terms to describe the types of infinity to which you are referring:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number
Where I am most companies (from my experience) log on to their bank or other service provider using custom software.
>...destroyed the performance.

Interesting point about APIs. Did you try doing one O(n) pass to dump the list into a secondary format? Just walk the list, creating a new list of your own with the new field and then walk it again to do cycle detection? That's two O(n) walks, still O(n) and should take like an hour to implement. I'm assuming you can get some unique ID for each node from the API, which seems reasonable.

Could you give some more insights into the scenarios where you don't know the size of the data? I agree it is an interesting algorithm and I would like to have a better grasp over use cases.

>you wouldn't have a linked list to start with

In my mind I don't typically turn up linked lists in the wild, just relationships which means graphs and some of them have a structure which maps onto a linked list. I find myself thinking more about the general problem of cycle detection in graphs - a linked list is after all only a special case of a graph. Any relationship-centric data can be scraped and end up with this big pile of data where you want to find cycles.

I guess my thinking was colored by the start of the article - "It's a classic interview question: Given a (singly-)linked list, determine whether or not it has a cycle."

If the question had said, given an immense linked list or in constant space or without knowing the size, I would have thought differently. If someone gives me a linked list, I assume I have the whole thing.

I work with large databases fairly regularly myself. These usually come from some data collection effort (e.g. scraping) and I end up with a pile of data I need to make sense of. In my experience, identifiers are typically a relatively small amount of data compared to the rest. Just as a concrete example, I'm currently forklifting about 4.5M entities in 22GB, with the largest set of identifiers coming out to about 250M. So, with long identifiers that means about 2GB of identifiers for the largest entity class - a relatively easy to deal with number.
yes, i understand the technical tradeoff.

my point is that telling your users they aren't sensible quickly becomes tedious (and tends to annoy them).
If he can launch something successful in a couple of days of coding well good luck to him, unfortunately that's not the case for most startups, unless your going for a minimum viable product that in most spaces isn't going to attract more than some feedback.
Well you had Sam Ruby. But then burned him out...

If you can get Jim Hugunin involved then I'm sure you'll succeed. Actually you should reach out to him in any case, because he has more direct understanding of experience in making Python work with VMs than anyone else out there. Even if he isn't interested in putting out effort, I'm sure that any pointers he gives you will prove very helpful.
Mozilla has taken on the responsibility of providing a free-software solution for browsing the web

..and in so doing they have intentionally crippled their browser's ability to play one of the most widely used video formats. To some of us, this sounds like a dumb move. Hence "get with the program", that program being the one where you attempt to build the best software for browsing the web.