skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you write 2N do you mean "2 times N"? If you do, then your intuition is at odds with mathematics as generally practised, because 2*aleph_0 is aleph_0. Further, two times infinity is the same as three times infinity, and there is no concept of infinity being even or odd. Claiming that 2 times infinity is even can lead to contradictions and inconsistencies.

From that point of view, it would appear that your intuitions are not helping you. More, under some models of geometry it makes a lot of sense to say that parallel lines really do meet at infinity. It makes some theorems a lot easier to state, and easier to prove.

So you may actually agree with a lot of what I'm saying, but your arguments to support that claim appear, at least on the surface, to be wrong. It may be that you have some understanding of these "paradoxes," but your other statements suggest that your inderstanding is not that of current or classical mathematics.
Ironically, many younger listeners seem to prefer to lower quality of digital tracks.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/pe...
Be careful with Amazon Kindle refunds
"Returning Kindle Content
Any content you purchase for Kindle from the Amazon Kindle store is eligible for return and refund if we receive your request within 7 days of the date of purchase. Once a refund is issued, the item will be removed from Your Media Library and will no longer be readable on your Kindle. To request a refund and return, click the Customer Service button in the Contact Us box in the right-hand column of this page to reach us via phone or e-mail. Please make sure to include the title of the item you wish to return in your request."

Amazon Policy

I had some problems with the 1-click payment, bought some items by mistake and then I received an email saying that I'm not able to ask for refunds.

Can they do that? I'm starting to hate Amazon.
Announcing the Stable Release of Compass v0.10
The City of Founders Without Hackers
This is really nice and something that JQuery has fallen short on, JQuery has always been top notch for adding some JS effects to your page, but it fell down (you had to roll your own for allot of common stuff) when you tried to build large scale RIA apps. Two of the big problems where templating and clean module loading. So I always found myself using Dojo for the app architecture and then JQuery and JQuery UI for the wealth of code base available from the JQuery community. It gives me the best of both worlds but it does increase the complexity of the UI.
At least you didn't have to pay thousands of dollars to delete your data!
This is a great idea, and I'm going to do my humble part in pointing others in this direction. The mission statement says it all. Too often we make language choices along too narrow a focus and surveys like this will help tease apart finer grained distinctions.
you know what's similarly painful in nyc? apartment hunting. they eased that pain with brokers, and now at least you can find a place, even though it costs you a bit more.

someone needs to become a "broker" for engineers. find startups the talent they're looking for in exchange for x% of that talent's salary/equity/whatever.
The caveat is that this works now because most parents who pay to send their children to a private school do so to improve academic outcomes, and because getting into a good college is considered a very positive academic outcome.
That's the Jobs Reality Distortion Field for you; you get to sell the lack of a feature as a feature itself.
Wow. You are correct, and I apologize for calling BS on you. That system is appalling. I call BS on your school system... :)
ABC Four Corners (07/05/2010) Access Denied (Great Firewall of Australia)
Usability of iPad Apps and Websites: First Research Findings
BoomStartup to Announce the 10 Companies Selected for Its Investment Program
Oh, mine was pretty neat too. We didn't have a 4.0 scale. It wasn't a 5.0 scale either.. it was just kind of arbitrary. The AP and honors courses had a higher "weight" (1.1 or 1.2 instead of the normal 1.0). So it was possible to get i.e. 4.8 if you took four AP courses. But here's the kicker: if you took other 1-weighted courses, they'd bring your GPA _down_. So it was possible to take 12 courses, ace them all, and get a LOWER GPA than someone who took the bare minimum number of courses. This happened to me.
Imagine YouTube for Traders
There is a related debate in Japanese as to whether emails are events, which means you count them one way, or communications, in which case you count them the other way. They haven't been letters for most people in a decade, which is good, because that means you count them a third way. My ex-boss, however, maintains that they're "fundamentally equivalent to paper", so you count them a forth way.
Oops Designs…Goof Up Or Creativity? - Hometone
> Why not?

Because users are dumb.

I watch them make bad decisions all the time; they want to put a box of 60 categories here in the left nav of the page; they want to have a drop-down menu for every department in the hospital. "Asking" ten users how a user-interface should work, and you'll get ten incompatible and stupid answers.

The trick to using users to get good UI is to have a programmer watch them try a prototype (or using paper prototypes). Of course, the programmer has to be tied to a chair and have his mouth duct-tape'd closed so he doesn't try and help, but the fact is when he sees the "inputs", he'll optimize the layout correctly to suit them. Programmers make fine user-interface designers when they're properly motivated.
In my opinion that is the easy part, It is a testable skill (not trick questions). I always have a dummy environment set up with a skeleton app set up and once I am down to the last few quys I ask them to write something from scratch. Generally something simple like a CRUD screen that takes no more than an hour. I generally pair with them and work as a sound board to work out the problem with them. It is very natural and puts a real developer in an environment they are comfortable with. As soon as they see an IDE and no trick questions, the good ones tend to fall into a groove. The cool part is that I have learned so many tricks from many of these sessions.
BoomStartup is based in Utah and I invite anyone who is nearby to join us for the announcement! We applied to the program with our IActionable Achievement Engine startup. More Info - http://www.BoomStartup.com
Interesting, I guess it's a good sign to see this kind of article on a more mainstream site like developerworks.

The open-brace, close-brace style of parenthesis placement is not very nice, though, and not idiomatic; and "then" and "else" in his examples aren't exactly reserved words. Still, kudos for trying to explain syntax-case macros.

Syntax-rules macros have a beauty worthy of Scheme. Syntax-case macros have a power worthy of Scheme. That the author's examples were not beautiful was not helped by syntax-case itself ;-)

Andy, who hacks a lot on syntax-case macros and an implementation thereof...
I agree--this is just noise. The comment in the parent post saying "I run datacenters, and things don't fail" should be crossposted to thedailywtf. EVERYTHING fails. Plan for it.
No big deal. It _is_ incredibly ridiculous. Also, see the post by jfbillingsley above. he's a friend of mine. At least I got good things because of my school's terrible grading...
I am basing my startup with MongoDB and Memcached as my storage choices, rather than MySQL, for performance reasons. I can fit nginx, 2 instances of my tornado application, a small memcached slice, and mongodb on a single 256MB memory cloud machine, and am confident when I start driving a bit of traffic too it, I'll just need to bump it up to 512MB of memory to make sure I don't swap.

The real advantage will be when I get to the point of seeing real traffic, I can scale horizontally on inexpensive machines. I'll be able to maxmize all parts of physical machines, when I make to the move to maintaining my own infrastructure.

Honestly, I'm not sure why I'd want to use SQL at all, especially for a project in it's infancy. With many NoSQL implementations you can adjust your schema as you go, instead of locking yourself early into a schema that may not fit a few years down the road, and it becomes a very difficult project to make changes to it.

The caveat being that everything I'm doing works with with a key/value table. My data set and how I access it wouldn't take advantage of a lot of what SQL provides. So, if your application does benefit from SQL, then by all means use it.
That is a false dichotomy and you know it.

What you want, and everyone wants, is fair, unbiased testing of any medicine, regardless of origin. Peer reviewed science and FDA approval tests are not perfect, but in the vast majority of cases they are better than "centuries of empirical evidence." The placebo effect is very real; if people are paying money, betting their lives, and putting potentially dangerous compounds into their bodies (whatever the origin), then we'd like better than that.

Also, I would add that alternative medicines tend to fail by not working at all, whereas (what we'll call) lab medicines tend to fail by having unforeseen, unexpected, longer-term side effects.
Citation needed.

But seriously, as far as I'm aware (and I try to stay current on this topic), there is no 'medicine' out there with "centuries of empirical evidence" that isn't already accepted. There are loads of compounds that claim to be effective, but when tested they are found to be no better than placebo.

Even if a compound is found to be effective, it isn't enough to make a good medicine. The active ingredient needs to be identified, extracted, and stabilised in a product that allows doctors to safely control the dose that a patient receives. Skipping all of that work and just trying to take an uncontrolled substance is dangerous - you can't tell if the active compound has broken down, or just isn't present in a particular sample, or conversely, is present in dangerous amounts. Furthermore, the naturally occurring compound may have other, undesirable compounds included with it.

Modern medicine aims to control for all of this, and yes, the complexity can be off-putting compared to the simplicity of "natural" solutions, but there are good reasons for that complexity existing.
Don't beat yourself up too badly: the unions have already thought of this, and it is likely illegal in your jurisdiction. After you get past the homeschool exemption, which was a brutal battle to get approved in many jurisdictions, you'll enter a heavily regulated industry against an entrenched competitor who has a legal moat and a team of lawyers who will file papers contesting each and every one of the seventy three different approvals you'll need to open for business.

This is why actual private schools in the US require strong institutional backing (i.e. a church willing to subsidize them to the tune of millions) or effort commensurate with opening a new factory rather than a new salon.
There are people in the world who do not understand probability. Like the OP:

EBS is either reliable or not. You cannot be a little pregnant.

Even the OP's metaphor is broken! The saying "you cannot be a little bit pregnant" may be traditional, but it too is only an approximation. There are these things called miscarriages. They happen all the time, often before a woman realizes she is pregnant. Then there are the false pregnancies:

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

And these are just the common edge cases.
I agree and disagree with this article, this isn't a night and day difference any longer. When looking at analog devices the components that make up the device are important as they reflect the quality of the music produced. When looking at a digital platform, say a better laser, isn't necessarily going to produce a higher quality sound.
A la restaraunt- french for beginners and la carte plus lots more
Conservative law professor in general asks "What's the fuss?" and e.g. directly replies to Glenn Greenwald:

This one among other things covers the "Didn't recruit enough minorities" issue, which sounds bogus to him and me due to the law of small numbers:

http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2010/05/so-why-am-i-al...

This one covers the grab bag of "left-wing blogosphere" complaints:

http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2010/05/why-do-they-ha...

This one covers her position on same sex marriage:

http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2010/05/supreme-irony-...

"[...] she clearly believes it is a matter for the political process, not a constitutional right."

(Which is also where I believe it belongs.)

Note that she's lesbian, which the White House is making a big deal about the mention of ("It's a smear") to which the right is most replying "Huh?". As in it's not that big a deal with WRT her, e.g. she doesn't seem to define herself in terms of that and she's perhaps like Mary Cheney, it's just a fact of life for them.

The big, real issues as far as I see are:

She's not much of a scholar, more of a doer. She was Bill Clinton's Associate White House Counsel among other things, was a good Dean of the Harvard Law School (which they really needed) and currently is Obama's Solicitor General.

Before that last position she'd never argued a case at trial and she's never been a judge.

These are not automatically disabling things, but no one including herself really knows how she'll perform as a judge. For the left she's certainly a gamble, like Souter was for the right.
JK Rowling is a great example where big publishers can miss the boat. She was rejected by no less than 12 publishers for Harry Potter. Bloomsbury, Rowling's independent publisher owes much of their success to the Harry Potter series.
So, here is what I suggest someone does:

- A "drop it in and it works" wordpress like app that acts as someones homepage/social network interface so people can host their own pages

- - include oauth/openid in the app so the homepage can act as a central login too

- - drop pubsubhubub or something similar into the app so that people can share information with their friends and followers directly

- implement a central website to act as a "search" clearing house (search for names and email addresses which resolve to url's). All it will store is name and a hash of your email (with options to store more if the user allows).

- produce a "web bar" like the blogger one to go at the top of the web app - so people logged into their "network" get easy tools when on other peoples pages

All of this exists in parts already (oauth, pubsubhubub etc) so it's just a case of drawing it together.
I don't think I'm making any assumptions -- these outcomes have been seen, as I've said, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I am not going to respond to your second point... I think that is a point of debate that you're making out to be far more black-and-white than it really is.

There is further complexity than you are admitting in your last two examples. There is a broad-reaching social impact that schooling, or lack thereof, has. This is true locally as well as globally, as seen by what the Wahhabi schools produce. Would I oppose the Amish exemption? No, because the vast majority of students in this nation have access to basic education. Would I oppose a private school system that was teaching violent fundamentalism at the expense of basic education, if that system was the only option serving a large area of my country? You bet I would, and that goes for government or private systems.

Again: this is a complicated issue -- and no one should pretend otherwise. It is a false dichotomy to declare that our options are "state sponsored indoctrination" and forcible assimilation, or a free-market utopia where parents pick what school works best for them. A non-trivial number of people would pick the degree mill school given the choice: I am trying to figure out how we disincentive that option in an areas that don't have the social infrastructure to stigmatize that decision.
Nobody goes to reddit anymore. It's too crowded.
What FourSquare needs to do to fend off Facebook
Both Ubuntu and Firefox have stated that they're going to get rid of most of the vertical UI you mention.

http://jboriss.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/removing-firefoxs-st...

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/333

I'm hopeful they've actually communicated about this in private with each other, but maybe that's hoping for too much.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of the NAIS.
Is this a completely arbitrary use of the term "open" or am I missing something? What does it even mean in this context? How does using "open" systems address any of the concerns they mention. The moment you upload any data to a server that is not your own I don't see how any solution is any different to Facebook because the person with the datastore can do as they please, good or bad.

And a question: is it coincidence that popular products are always heavily controlled by a handful of peoples (at most) vision of their product and not "open" design by committee products?
What? It specifically says that you can, and even tells you how to start the process off.
Impressive feat. I guess that stat arb and whatnot is easier now because people are no longer leveraged to move the world and the margins can be a bit tighter. I would be interested to see loss days compared to a quarter of total gain/loss.
تماما كما كنت أظن I محمد خضر- السعودية | موقع قصيدة النثر
HP's Slate to be replaced by WebOS tablet?
Primary education (your source) is a little cheaper, for one thing. Regional variations matter a lot. And there are a lot of other factors.

According to the U.S. Census, U.S. public schools spent $9,138 per student in 2006. This varies from $14,884 in New York to $5,437 in Utah:

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/ed...

According to the council for private education, the average private school tuition in the U.S. for 2007-2008 was $8,549 at all levels, and $6,733 at elementary level. Non-religious schools were significantly more expensive than religiously-affiliated schools:

http://www.capenet.org/facts.html

It would be hard to directly compare spending because one school might offer more than another. For example, a private school in Orange County, California, may provide laptops to all students, expensive science labs, and fancy football fields (and would have to pay a lot for land), while a public school in rural Nevada may not have any of that stuff. That wouldn't prove that private education was more expensive or less efficient, just that the people in one region wanted different things and were willing to pay more for those things.
My OS X dock was always on the left, but the default positon was at the bottom. Later design changes actually re-inforced this decision as I believe the 3-D effect didn't work vertically.
You shouldn't ask users how the UI should be. You have to listen to there needs.
Then you have to translate this 'democratic' information into a UI design.

When a user wants a drop-down for every department in the hospital you could translate this into "I want to select a department as easy and quickly as possible".
Is there any way to set EBS to auto-snapshot on a specified time period through the existing control panel interface? Are snapshots possible through the API?
To get the fonts I like (Mac OS X style) I turn hinting off completely. Ubuntu seems to be moving closer to this as the default as time goes by, probably a smart move as there will be less and less people used to old-skool Windows font rendering.
Search Engines as Leeches on the Web (2006)
All of the stuff that would be needed already exists, it's just not being used yet.

- A standardized personal information representation = Social Graph API
- A centralized database with pointers to user profiles = Social Graph API
- A security mechanism = oAuth
- An information delivery mechanism = PubSubHubbub + Activity Streams
- Easy deployment = buddypress, onesocialweb and others
Blocking I/O: it's not just for pansies
Apple iPad accessories catch UK prices
1) i wish they'd post videos of their usability testing

2) 7 users seem like a small sample. I wonder what their ages and backgrounds were.
Hard drives suck just as bad. I have a RAID-1 built from three disks out of separate batches. Somehow, I wasn't paying attention to bad sectors the RAID software couldn't fix, and all the disks failed.

Cheap 1TB disks and cheap cloud storage like EBS means that it's now cheaper than ever to lose a shit-ton of data. (I didn't actually lose anything important, the corrupted areas were not important files. But still; three drive failures in a week!)

My fatal mistake, BTW, was ordering from Newegg. Apparently they do not ship OEM drives correctly, and they are almost guaranteed to fail. I was a little suspicious when I saw a raw drive in a plastic shell with some packing peanuts around it. When I had the drives replaced, they did not come from the factory that way!
This is by far the best, most realistic, and most useful spec I've seen. I would use this. Drop in easy ala wordpress is the key.
I agree with this 100%. It seems that an awful lot of companies like to pass the blame as soon as something unwanted happens. Yes, it may be the underlying fault of a service provider but, to your customers, you are the only company they deal with and it's your reputation that will be impacted no matter how many posts you put on your site and all over the internet.

Using service companies does not excuse poor customer service.
You might be more familiar with it than you think:

http://humanscience.wikia.com/wiki/Legend_of_Bagger_Vance
I think stopping thinking about and in terms of Facebook would be a good first step.
BuddyPress? http://buddypress.org/
My uncle lived to 106 and until he was about 102 he had more energy than me. Apart from his good genes (alas, he was an uncle in law), I think his two main secrets were:

1. He loved life. Really loved it. He kept active, doing the things he loved until he died.
2. He seemed to live pretty much stress free.
The interesting question is how much of JK Rowling's success does she owe to Bloomsbury? If she'd given up after her first 10 rejections and tried to self-publish would any of us ever have heard of her? I think a lot of people underestimate the amount sales and marketing work publishers do.
I'm on an iPhone/iPad/MacBook Pro. The fact that I can't have MobileMe on my domain makes it a deal breaker and Google's offering actually a step above.
> Drop in easy ala wordpress is the key.

Exactly.

And the beauty is that because the central search API is documented and, hopefully, the drop in code app is FOSS companies could host their own networks which support the API for those without the skill or inclination to set it up themselves.

But because it is open there is competition and an incentive to stay on the "right side" etc.
f ∈ Ο(g(n)) iff ∃c,n₀ ∀n>n₀ : f(n)≤c*g(n)

No infinity required.
Thank you for pointing that out to me. I think my opinion of BBC was too high. Have to be more careful.
If you're interested in infinity, David Foster Wallace's book Everything and More is an entertaining, witty introduction.

Edit - I'd love to know why someone downvoted this.
Oh, I did miss the joke, which is a bit sad considering that I agree with transhumanists that fighting aging is a noble cause.

If people no longer die so much of the diseases of aging, it might cause some problems, but I think they would be small compared to the benefits (few things compared to 100-150k dying each day after getting frail and sick).
Hmm. But would these folks really have the right incentives to find people good talent versus "a body"
An open alternative is necessarily decentralised, standardized and extensible.

Jabber/XMPP is a decentralized contact list with communication and authorization protocols. It is easily extendable with XEP's.

With a sleek web interface that anyone can host himself - this is an open alternative to facebook I imagine.
No, the iPad doesn't play Flash because Apple said so.

Linux doesn't play Flash (well) because Adobe said so.

Anger is directed at Apple and Adobe, respectively. Consistency obtained.