skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By that reasoning, a lot of math is a "convention".

The link between exponential and sinusoidal functions is of fundamental importance in many fields--obviously anything dealing with complex numbers, which is not just math but physics, electric engineering, computer graphics, and so on... and the complex definition of e^x is really the only way to define it such that it retains all its important properties in a natural way, revealing the link between trig and exponentiation. Euler's identity is fundamental, not conventional.
As I said elsewhere, that's not enough. I wrote a Scheme compiler in a class with Kent Dybvig way back in the stone age. I used Scheme in my AI classes in the same degree program.

What I need - and what I suspect will take a lot longer - is an actual situation where continuations solve some problem I've encountered. That's when I'll get them, but not earlier, in my experience.
The Business Case for a Dislike Button
It is actually far from just a convention. It has everything to do with the Taylor series of the functions e^x, sin x and cos x.

e^x = 1 + x/1 + x^2/(2!) + x^3/(3!) + ...

If you substitute ix for x, you get:

e^{ix} = 1 + ix/1 + (ix)^2/(2!) + (ix)^3/(3!) + ... =
= 1 + ix + (-x^2)/(2!) + (-i)x^3/(3!) + ...

You can also derive the Taylor series for sin x and cos x, which are:

sin x = x - x^3/(3!) + x^5/(5!) + ...

cos x = 1 - x^2/(3!) + x^4/(4!) + ...

Therefore you can see that e^{ix} = cos x + i(sin x). Of course, I haven't shown how to derive the Taylor series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series) for these functions, but I have to stop somewhere.

I hope that I have shown you that this isn't just an arbitrary convention, in fact far from it. The formula is so beautiful also because of the many intricate relationships between all these elementary mathematical concepts, including complex analysis, trigonometric functions, series, etc.

It should also be noted that this is just one of the many (in fact, aleph zero many) different ways to prove this equivalence.

Edit: Some formatting corrections, sorry, new here.
Despite my copious use of credit cards[1], this is one reason I really like to use prepaid SIMs. Shame that there's only one semi-viable prepaid data option in the States; the rest of the world is generally better.

[1] Then again, I don't generally allow auto-rebill to my card.
I wouldn't say it's "just" a convention. That implies it's arbitrary. It might look arbitrary, but it's not: for example, d/dx ((cos x + i sin x)/e^ix) = 0, as required. This doesn't hold if you pick (say) e^ix = cos x - i sin x.
It's not spam, the underlying concept is one I've been talking about for a long time. The disclaimer is that I do, in the post, talk about my company's solution to the problem.
NASA Images of Oil Slick
Need of Essay Tips
Every student is requested to write an essay every once in a while. And most of them could use some valuable essay tips. Ok, so maybe you already know that every essay should be planned, that you should begin with an introduction and finish with a conclusion,
Perfectly Write In God's Vineyard: Pay Attention, DO
US should seriously consider doing something similar since FBI is already warning about fake Cisco routers which could (i.e. most likely do) have backdoors.
Link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=740
I barely know Erlang, but that tutorial was still interesting: gives a glimpse off how CouchDB works. I have always just used CouchDB as a black-box.
Our "gas prices" are essentially the same as anywhere else.

It's our "gas taxes" which are lower.
Probably my favorite equation, and the proofs for the formula are quite nice too.

Perhaps interestingly, I have a friend who accepted this, but after proof upon proof could not agree that 0.999... is exactly equal to 1. He eventually conceded, but it was a pretty long period of time to that point and it wasn't through proof.
The Aftermath of a Successful Article
From what I've read, the leaks are occurring from the remains of the drill pipe/casing. That was 5000-ft long, vertical, and connected the Deepwater Horizon to the blowout preventer on the sea bed. As the rig sunk, the pipe detached and tumbled/bent/kinked. Those kinks are where the leaks are. How much was leaking on day one, and how much is leaking now, may well be different.

IMHO (and I'm not in the industry, but here goes) the solution of least regret is to not try to stop the flow at the sea bed (at least not right now today). The better solution (and a complicated one) is to cut that pipe, try to connect a new (non-kinked) pipe, and take everything that well shaft is sending at the surface. Separate the stranded gas and flare it off, then dump the remainder into as many tankers/barges as are necessary and haul it to shore for processing. What I am suggesting is costly, but I'd be willing to bet that most of the pieces to do this are currently available.

Forget about trying to stop the flow, instead take the flow and do something with it (other than dumping it into the Gulf).
he knows what he is talking about. the only problem -> there is no longterm future for splinternetssss http://tinyurl.com/yeg6bbg the model apple follows? change -> make money -> change again -> make money -> ... problem? as change accelerates it becomes nearly impossible to hold on as a company. the real model apple follows? selling rotten apples from an ever growing tree of disruptive technology.
We chose to work with Viglink because their technology doesn't interfere with the user experience at all.

If middle-click is broken, then it does interfere with user experience.

The fact that it took 4 months for someone to really notice this is a testament to how unobtrusive it is.

Others have noticed it prior to this, Shamrin is just the first to blog about this. This is a horrible line of discussion, btw - to attempt to downplay your customers issues with "well, no one noticed".
You're absolutely right. Strict evaluation requires proof of termination. I should never comment right before bed.
Swords slices through cinder blocks
Interestingly - this equation contains the 5 most important constant in maths.
Review: HTC Incredible
Hopefully some of the changes I've made to my server will help the site stay up this time... ;)
Microsoft says, HTML5 Is remarkable but Flash Is Still Important
I believe that's a feature of Fish.

http://fishshell.org/index.php
But from reading the article

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870442350457521...

the acoustic control just activates the blowout preventer, and the dead-man switch should do the same thing. But I don't know anything beyond reading the article.
I can't resist not showing this clever derivation of the e Maclaurin series.

I referenced the fact that

e^x = 1 + x/1 + x^2/(2!) + x^3/(3!) + ...

Now, one of the many equivalent definitions of e is that it is the only real number for which this holds:

d/dt (e^t) = e^t

This means that e^t is a real function which is so smooth, that no matter how many times you differentiate it, you always get the same function (it turns out that it is the only such real function)

Now, we know that e^0 = 1 (since x^0 = 1, where x != 0). Therefore, in its Maclaurin series, the only term not depending on x should therefore be 1 (otherwise e^0 wouldn't be 1).

So know we know that e^x looks something like this:

e^x = 1 + (something)

Now we can ask ourselves which this question: since d/dx e^x = e^x, what must also be in the e^x series, if 1 belongs to it? Well, whatever differentiates to 1, so now we know that

e^x = 1 + x + (something)

(because d/dx (1 + x + something) = 1 + x + d/dx something)

Now we can again ask this question for our current form; what must we differentiate in order to obtain 1 + x? And thus we get

e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2 + something

This way, if we write the two (equivalent) series this way:

e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2 +
d/dx e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2 + x^3/(2*3) +

And we can complete it with the infinite Maclaurin series.

Now this is less formal than it should be and it would probably make the formalists cringe, but I hope you get the idea. You can actually apply the same principle for sin x and cos x, except in their case, they're actually mutually derived from each other. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader (oh how fun it is to say that after reading this phrase countless times)
The biggest thing I dislike about web development is the available client-side programming languages.
I wonder if they do stuff like this every once in a while to make it seem a bit less nuts when they bill you $850 for overages.
A Faster Feed Apart - Rebuilding the backend of AFA with Diesel, Redis & more
Business Checks
Business Checks at great prices mailed directly to your company. Prices about half of what your bank charges with the same great price for reorders.
Evolution of the Indian Space Program
Last year the government banned imports of Chinese handsets without the International Mobile Equipment Identity, or IMEI, number, again citing security reasons such as the use of stolen handsets to make terror or hoax calls.
Chinese manufacturers cloning IMEIs? Never!

The big question is, can India's government really enforce this?
Isn't there an orgasm-by-wire already?
How could you possibly circumvent it? Hacking the HN servers?
The iPad 3G Teardown
The New York Times is not happy: http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/98559/

"[...] Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano acknowledg[ed] even as late as Thursday afternoon that she did not know if the Defense Department even had equipment that might be helpful."
Sure, why not?
That is what library versioning is for. One app uses X version, Y app uses another. The worst case scenario is that it would be just the same as the current static library memory usage we have now.
If pi == 6.28 [1] then we could have a more elegant version

e^(i*pi) == 1

[1]: http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.pdf, http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.html
Car body repair - Auto Smart UK
Auto S.M.A.R.T is a company based in Harlow, Essex. Offers a complete bodywork, alloy wheel and interior repair service through both our dedicated workshop and, for your convenience, our fully equipped mobile workshop.
May Emerges, Lynx eats my Dev System
The "More images" link gives additional detail and some basic annotations:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/event.php?id...
What makes your game social?
How much funding do you need?

Please drop me a line at nleschov at gmail
Heh. You couldn't pay me to use GMail over Thunderbird. Thunderbird may not have the fancy conversation stuff, but GMail has no reasonable way to deal with the four separate accounts I use for various things.
I keep reading this, but I'm yet to see any stats - and the stats from my site don't support this at all.

Can you cite?
Have you looked at Outlook 2010. They have a similar conversation view. Outlook also gives you the ability to respond to mail with a phone call (Google must have this capability with Google Voice, but don't see it).

Another feature I like with Outlook 2010 is to see all correspondence from the person I'm currently looking at (email, meeting invites, chats, etc...).

There's also this cool thing called Quick Steps, where you can construct macros in Outlook. This is useful when you need to have specific workflow around email that you can put together in one click (like, when responding to legal, I need to send the reply, delete the original email, send another email to my manager, and send a note to OneNote).

And of course Outlook has a webclient, so I can access it from anywhere too. While Outlook is heavyweight, feature-wise, its pretty complete, and offers some other things that are hard to beat.
Student convicted of hacking Sarah Palin e-mail account
Good move. China does not seem to hide the fact that they are interested in 20th century espionage via hacking and everyone knows they are an impressive police state that monitors everything.

The U.S. should definitely make the same move, but well, then there is that whole mess with China owning most of our debt...
While China bans something it's unfair trade, it's interesting to see something like this and everyone think it's good move.
Of course Maher, and the upvoters, only consume and encourage things that are always completely safe.

WRT the upvoters, none of you ever wanted to go into space or thought that the space program was a good idea. Right?

Snark isn't a basis for good policy.
Zazzle has a similar copyright problem to Youtube
Zazzle does a great job of leveraging the long tail, but it has a problem with copyrighted material, how can sites prevent this rather than just playing a never ending game of 'wack a mole'?
How about harnessing space-time geometry? In other words, why not use a birthing chair so gravity is assisting?

http://www.google.com/search?q=birthing+chair
Even if this WASN'T a mistake, could any communications company seriously justify this cost?

It's like the old b.s. voice / data scam. Amazing how you can have unlimited data plans at $10, $20, $30 depending on your carrier and phone (which is a whole other scam) but unlimited voice was always expensive. Why are they even billed separately?
Apollo 11 launch at 500 frames per second
Yello "Touch Yello" (2009) - 1 Мая 2010 - Музыкальное видео для меломанов
But for people who placed themselves ideologically to the right of center, the correction wasn’t just ineffective, it actively backfired: conservatives who received a correction telling them that Iraq did not have WMD were more likely to believe that Iraq had WMD than people who were given no correction at all.

There is this thing called "commitment fallacy" - once you make up your mind and express it you are much more likely to defend that point later on, compared to not having expressed it. Perhaps reading through a text that plays into your beliefs creates an "internal narrative", which in turn evokes the false commitment. Interesting.
I'm sorry, but this just made me literally laugh out loud:

"The mother is then spun around and around at a speed the gynecologist has predetermined will be sufficient to dislodge the infant (or as the patent states, "the fetus"). The apparent maximum g-force for the machine is 7."

Priceless.

I want to see this in action.
Debatable, I suppose.

I think the inclusion of 1 is pretty significant, in terms of the contrast between 0 and 1. Maybe that sounded strange -- oh well, I'm not a mathematician by any means. :)
> No saving for retirement?

That's referring to private retirement savings.

It doesn't include Social Security which is most/all of retirement income for a large fraction of retired people. (The rest also get SS but get more money from their savings.)
While were at it, text messages work out to be something like a million dollars a gigabyte of transfer (at least in Australia I don't know if the US is still so backwards).

Now you would think the marginal cost on each text message would be so small that they would just throw them in for free as a deal sweetener? Unless I don't know something about the costly way they are sent? I'm guessing it's just so much of a cash cow for carriers.
Part of the beauty in the original equation is that it contains every object thought to be elemental in arithmetic and moreover, it contains every one of them exactly once.

It contains 0, 1, +, , ^, which are sufficient to express all of elementary natural arithmetics (unless I'm mistaken) -- all natural numbers can be expressed by adding enough ones to a zero (0, 0+1, 0+1+1, ...), and if I recall correctly, + and aren't enough to state all the truths in natural arithmetics so ^ is needed.

There is a very interesting paper on this called "The saga of the High School Identities" by S. Burris (http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~snburris/htdocs/MYWORKS/PREPRI...)

Moreover, it contains three very attractive (if not the most attractive) mathematical constants we know. There is so much we don't know about their relationship. We have no idea if any of these numbers is transcendental or not: pi + e, pi − e, pi*e, pi/e, pi^pi, e^e, pi^e. We don't even know if half of them are even irrational or not (therefore, we don't know if pi is just another facet of e, or maybe an entirely different object!)

So to see all this (and more; one could say so much more) in one equation so terse is so surreal a feeling.
China is the foreign nation holding the largest portion of the US debt, but they hold less than 10% of the debt.
I bought my Mom a Skype WiFi phone. Now she talks to her sisters in Korea hours at a time, and it only costs $12 a month. No need to turn on the iMac. Just turn on the family room lights, and the Wifi router comes on, and she uses "the other" handset.
For those who haven't been following this story, here's a timeline overview with some pics, and the contact info of a few orgs where you can volunteer if you want to help with the cleanup:

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tech-transport/gulfofmexico...
You should always ask if they agree that 1/3 = 0.33333... then you just need to add them up :)
Accusations are layered thick, but proof is not to be found in the article.

From experience I can tell you that many comments which look fake are genuine. I was concerned when I found those on competitor's apps but then I had plenty of those myself after getting few hundred reviews myself. In other words you can't just look at a review and say "I feel this review is fake". It doesn't work like that.
If we balanced our budget, the debt could be a weapon in our favor.
I'm pragmatic about the consequences, if they feel this is the way forward, more power to them. But I'm hostile to the way it was done and to the 'apology' above, that's simply not how you go about things like this.

You brought the 'legal angle' in to it, I don't think that that has any place here at all, whether it is legally enforceable or not is not a factor at all.

If they want to do it, sure, they can but if they do it without alerting their users, in fact are going out of their way to make sure the users do not notice that's simply sneaky and counterproductive once it is - inevitably - discovered.

The fact that they did not seem to have any plans at all to disclose it belies their statement that this is 'just an experiment', as does the period it has apparently been live.

If someone feels they should apologize for this they should at least make it real, not just say we won't do it again, they should hit the 'undo' button to show they mean it.
No, my own browser.

On the wire, it's just headers followed by \n\n followed by body the size of Content-length :-)

HTTP is a child's play.
Oh cool, a Skype WiFi phone. Can you make a suggestion please? How much did it cost?

I've to have my mom use the computer with the USB mic, and it usually turns out to be a big hassle.
The main photo at the top of the review is not the Incredible but rather the HTC Supersonic.
I've had the Incredible for 2 days now. My very brief review: feels nice in the hand, great Google integration, sweet camera, many functions take one more step/button-press than on the iPhone, calls work.
Engadget's review is better: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/19/droid-incredible-review/
>All industry efforts must b employed

I'm honestly not sure whether she's just talking about cleanup or about further drilling.
Ironic that at the same time a fossil fuel disaster of this scope is occurring, there are folks in Massachusetts still fighting to prevent offshore wind turbines because of concerns over the ecological impact.
I like to urge on the death of IE6. For my paid work I often don't have the luxury of ignoring IE6. But for my side projects, I often specifically check for IE6 users and offer them some kind of "go away" page. My thinking is that I want to make the IE6 Internet the "boring" Internet. If everyone's interesting side projects didn't support IE6, then after a while the general public will catch on that their IE6 browser is crippling them. Meanwhile, the enterprise IE6 users aren't affected because they are at work and wouldn't (shouldn't?) be visiting silly side project websites anyway. ;)

Here's what alphabetclock.com looks like when you view it in IE6:

http://imgur.com/J7809.png

I helped my wife launch a dessert baking blog at chocochichi.com. Here's what that looks like in IE6:

http://imgur.com/py8rn.png
> 0, 1, +, , ^, which are sufficient to express all of elementary natural arithmetics (unless I'm mistaken)

Well, personally I don't favor zeros in equation. What's the point of 1+0=1 ?

Leaving 0 on the right side looks so unbalanced.
Real madrid news
Completely false dichotomy. Deep sea drilling, while an important part of world production, is not essential, and certainly in no way necessary for spaceflight. Furthermore, spaceflight's biggest disasters are roughly on the scale of plane crashes. This looks like it's going to impact most of the gulf coast, with significant losses to food industries.
It depends on what you mean by "dead". [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html
I know people that still use really old computers. If you're trying to sell something to them, they aren't your market. If you think they care that your website looks like absolute crap on their computer, they don't really care. These aren't people that generally look at computing as anything more than something they grudgingly were forced to do. They know their computer is old and expect things not to work on them. It fits into their perception of computers being useless anyway.
Your whole arguments falls apart when you realize I was addressing Neanderthals as our closest cousin, and not just any other animals.

Once you realize that the caged animal has more in common with you than any other specie, you start to put yourself in his place.
Advanced JavaScript: Compose function
The main photo is the Windows Mobile powered HTC HD2. I'm not sure why the author of the post included not only a picture of the wrong hardware, but the wrong operating system too.
There's not a whole lot to cite, estimates are fairly rough since many analytics programs are javascript based. I can point you to the Firefox "Popular Extensions" section (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:1/cat:a...) NoScript is #5 at 354,158 weekly downloads, and the NoScript page itself which claims 65,864,095 total downloads (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722). Then there are the corporate offices where javascript is disable by IT, or even worse, I've heard of cases where a business uses a proxy service that switches out .js files with empty files, which not only gets rid of the JS, but it also means that noscript tags aren't visible since JS is still enabled.

Whether that's significant or not is a matter of opinion. Most estimates I've seen are 3-6%, but should be taken with a big grain of salt. For sites I've worked on I tend to see about 2-4% of users using Google Chrome as their browser, for comparison.

I realize this doesn't help much.
Webpipes - command pipelines for the web with Node.js
yes it is done as an experiment but don't you think by using CSS3 ... you don’t have to regenerate images every time you change the text, pages will load much faster because you don’t have to download separate images .
i can say by css3 in some portion we can replace the images.