skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you like that kind of surprise you might wish to revisit cos^2 x + sin^2 x = 1. Try it with x a complex number. Why on earth does that work? It is not as though a complex number makes sense as an angle. More at http://lydianrain.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/summoning-cthulhu...

You could also look at Chebyshev polynomials

T_0(x) = 1

T_1(x) = x

T_2(x) = 2x^2 - 1

T_3(x) = 4x^3 -3x

It is easy enough to find recurrance relations and plots on the web. Notice that all the graphs go from -1 to 1 and illustrate that the polynomials are strangely well behaved in this range, oscillating up and down between -1 and 1. Why is that?

T_n(x) = cos (n arccos x)

There is this nice trignometric formula, but since cosine is always between -1 and 1 it makes no sense to try using its inverse function, arccos, outside this range. On the other hand the polynomials have no implied restriction on x, so if you have a calculator, such as a Common Lisp REPL, with full support for complex numbers you can use the trignometric formula outside the -1 to 1 range and observe it agreeing with the polynomials.
I should be able to determine something similar to this in a few years time from RescueTime, with the added bonus of how long I wasted on certain activities.
Ask HN: Please review my hobby project "Test V6"
A tiny freebie service to help you get an impression of how well your audience is equipped for IPv6: http://testv6.stdio.be/ - would be thankful for the critique. (edit: specifically - the feedback about using img and 302 responses. I am curious if it has more impact than the iframe).
It may never happen. You might never need to use raw continuations when writing user applications. They'd be something you more often used through some library that depended on them. E.g. I never explicitly use continuations in HN.
From engadget's review - "It should also be noted that the browser on these phones is equipped with Flash lite, though we had lots of trouble getting videos to play on many of the sites we visited (Engadget included). If someone was hoping to convince us that Flash could work on a device like this, consider the job unfinished."
Web Application Frameworks - A Comparison
It seems silly to blame active SETI for giving away our position. (I'm looking for that image that shows how far some famous radio signals have reached over time, but I cant find it.)
The Business School Essay
Writing a good business school essay is essential if you are looking forward to a corporate career. With more young people opting for corporate careers, business schools are becoming quite selective in taking in prospective students.
do you know what type of BOP they are using? And why it might not be working?

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

Wikipedia says there are 2 types. Could be there is some sediment somewhere causing a mechanical failure? Or maybe some hydraulic fluids need to be heated up?

If it is going to take months to fix it using methods that have never been tried at those depths, it seems that spending some time trying to make that device work would be a good investment.

Also, can we get a temporary stackoverflow ( no pun intended ) for engineers working to solve this problem?
Ah, nostalgia-hit. I still remember sitting in class and watching the teacher arrive at that equation step by step, and when it was there it was just about the most mind-blowing thing I'd ever seen.

"You mean all that messy junk we've been learning actually combines to form something... simpler?"
I had a Commodore-64 and a library card. I was born in '82, though.

Anyway, my point was that Dijkstra's just being a grouchypants when he says that BASIC permanently ruins people's minds for programming. Not even C++ could do that.
Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

You can see it clearly on the left of the banknote in the article. My favourite however is the use of it on the musical notes on the old Elgar £20 note.
Whitehead and Richerson, The evolution of conformist social learning can cause population collapse in realistically variable environments, Evolution and Human Behavior 30 (2009) 261-273. http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/RedNoise.pdf

A lack of independent decision making seems to put the society at risk. The Recommendation Age (crowd sourcing opinions and decisions) may not be a good choice for long term survival.
Even 'real' phone companies don't have to meet standards for international calls. And if somebody cuts a cable - Skype's IP packets are likely to route around a problem quicker than an East European state telecoms company can negotiate a pairing agreement with another cable provider.
Red Hat wins Texas showdown
A little side note. The author says:

The best online image editor I could find, still doesn’t achieve feature parity with Paint.NET, which it is obviously inspired by.

I think that the aviary.com suite is well past that point.
Yeah my parents were like that. The only things they did on the internet were pay bills and check their email (using Outlook web access, which not only works in IE6, it works a lot better than in Firefox).
I don't think it is Monday morning quarterbacking as much as it is adding a datapoint to a set with apparently too little data in it in the first place.
It's not patents that are broken, it's America that is broken. The goal of capitalism was to create a society in which people could come together and create something bigger than an individual. The result has been exactly that -- corporations that are massively more powerful than the individual and systems so expensive and complicated to exist in that only corporations can take full advantage of them.

In this environment, those corporations that are already huge have the upper hand. Until we can create a system in which individuals have power, the patent problem will continue to exist, as will the problems with health care, the tax code, property rights, environmental sanctity, and on and on...

Patents are just one symptom of a broken system. Fixing the patent system won't fix America. Any changes to the Patent system are sure to benefit exactly the same powerful organizations that benefit from the broken system. Nothing will change until we change the focus of Congress from the corporations to the people.
It's scary that voting is a right that comes by just having a certain age.
The Weaver, the Princess and Goldman Sachs
Funny, that's why you couldn't pay me to use Thunderbird over GMail. Incidentally, if you are interested, there are ways to manage multiple accounts, though they're a bit clumsy. Basically, you can have GMail download your other email accounts through POP (or have them forward to your gmail account). Then in gmail you can create a rule that automatically labels email from that account appropriately and create another inbox to handle just that mail. Finally, it lets you set up an alternate sending address, and you can set it to always reply with the same email that the original was sent to.
In other words, continuations provide necessary infrastructure for adding various constructs to a language, but they're sufficiently general that you're unlikely to use them directly.

Also, the first edition of _Essentials of Programming Languages_ has a great chapter on turning an interpreter into a compiler using continuations (Chapter 12). I hear it got cut from later editions, though.
That's the power of the status quo.
I would say the thousands of nuclear detonations we've done (global weapons tests) have probably sent a fair number of powerful signals. No information per se (other than "we like 'splosions"), but those are likely unmistakable indicators.

Of course, there's also these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_SETI#Realized_projects

(but their argument seems to be: "don't keep doing that")
The big question is, can India's government really enforce this?

From what I know, the answer would be: Yes, whenever they want to.
Yes, I know about the continuation monad. But that continuations have to be encapsulated in monads is telling.

I have found a discussion about this http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/message10560.html
A couple of hundred light years isn't that far in galactic terms. Also, the signals will have attenuated greatly by then. The likelihood that TV and radio signals will give us away is actually pretty small.
api.viglink.com added to my hosts file
The Talents of a Middle-Aged Brain
Pardon my ignorance, but why don't all browsers auto-update to the latest stable version, even without user permission? Because I feel like the one thing that really holds back web techniques are old browsers (IE6, IE7, Firefox2, etc.)... Imagine if everyone already had CSS3 and HTML5 right now?
That is if you approach the requirements from the implementation point of view. In theory continuations aren't really that much more complex than Gotos.
Well a hitch or bind function delivers more than just ability to create quick closures. It lets you define the functionality you want in a named function, allowing for code re-use and more readable code. Also I'm obviously not using the library just for bind.
At my studio back in Sydney we had several San Pedro cactuses (they contain mescaline and are identical to Peyote in effect) growing on the balcony. One night after taking everyone out for drinks we went back to the studio and got into them. I was lounging around talking with one of my business partners about how we didn't think it was really going to kick in. A bit later we noticed that conversation had drifted to talking about reverse entropy and why it was impossible to observe time going backward . . . at that point we knew it was working.

About twelve hours later my girlfriend dropped by (it was the next day) and I was jumping around the office telling everybody to look at my hooves. It wore off about four hours later. After a solid hunk of sleep I got up feeling ridiculously mentally refreshed.

I enjoy infrequent controlled use of hallucinogens, I find it a great mental recharge and also a pretty good time. I live in New York now and I was quite happy to see that San Pedros are even easier to get ahold of in the states than the were in Oz :)
I get it that your ideas are presented with good intent, but since you preface your idea with 'I'm not in the industry' I'm guessing that all those bright minds that are in the industry and that have studied this stuff for a long long time have discarded that particular idea on its lack of merits long ago, or they're working on it right now.

It's pretty rare that an outsider with knowledge gleaned from the (very much dumbed down) media will come up with a solution in a case like this.

The problem with being an outsider is that if you think of a 5000 feet long pipe as a simple straw that you're going to cut off somewhere and attach something new to while it is merrily arcing it's way around the ocean based on the exit force of the oil escaping from it that simply grasping it might require the development of a bunch of new tech and attaching a new chunk of pipe to it (assuming no significant leaks below the point where you've picked it up) is probably not that simple either at the depth we're talking about.

It could be quite a while before they manage to do that, so I'm guessing their first priority is to get the outflow under control, everything else is of much lower priority.

Deep sea stuff is very difficult, and a mile of standing water is a heck of a challenge.

Kudos for creative thinking though :)
Yes. And at least BASIC doesn't give you the illusion of a "powerful language".
Zen and the Art of Design
The continuation based approach to web-servers could be interesting for you. And some parsing techniques get easier with continuations, too.
All risk could be removed if an app could only use a specific version of a library I guess (even a bugfix micro release can introduce regressions). However, adding support for 3rd party libraries would add quite a bit of complexity to the app store, since each app would have to include information about which external libraries it uses, and when downloading an app, iPhone OS would also have to download all the external libraries, if not already installed.
Encounter With Gorillas | Dos And Donts
If I might ask, what windowing systems do you have experience with? While its true that desktop Linux has been lagging behind in a lot of areas it seems that a lot of innovation in window managers is happening there. Having multiple workspaces each with its own reasonably sized set of windows really eliminates the need for expose for me. Well, thats how it is at work where I use a default GNOME workspace.

One the laptop I'm using right now I'm running a window manager called Awesome (its a silly name, I'll agree) that actually assigns one or more tags to each window and displays a set of tags to the main screen at once. Mostly I just have one tag per window and display one tag at a time and it ends up working like multiple workspaces, but sometimes I'm working on something where I want to toggle another window in and out repeatedly. Since Awesome has a tiling as well as a stacking mode, when I toggle the new window in all the other window rearrange themselves to accommodate it And using a tiling window manager makes it easy to do everything with the keyboard instead of having to use a mouse though you can use your mouse too if you really want to. Thanks to that and vimium I'm not sure I've had to touch my mouse yet today.
> US should seriously consider doing something similar

As should all other powers. The possibility of backdoors in computing equipment means that all software in critical functions needs to have been a developed in an environment where the country can have a reasonable assurance that there are no backdoors.

The same probably holds for processors.
Obviously, I meant Christianity was a reason John Lennon died. Pants weren't.
The article assumes you need faster than light travel to make aliens potentially dangerous. You don't need FTL. Relativistic travel is dangerous enough. The time of danger will approach when we start to develop relativistic spacecraft. If we can do that, then we could also develop weapons using that technology. Once we reach that point, we become dangerous enough that aliens might be interested in wiping us out.

The problem with relativistic weapons, is that there can be no Mutual Assured Destruction if societies that resemble the current human civilization are involved. High relativistic velocities can preclude detection with significant warning time. If the first strike can be coordinated to completely wipe out the enemy, then there is no chance to launch a retaliatory strike.

If intelligent aliens already uploaded their minds into their starships, then it would be safe to deal with them. A civilization composed of such sentient starships would be impossible to wipe out in a preemptive strike, so there would be nothing we could do to them, and there would be no reason for them to fear us.
In light of this disaster, I hope we can have a more reasoned debate on the floor of congress than "Drill Baby Drill".
Same here.

I used to be a big supporter of the local green party but since they've gone against windmills due to the 'visual pollution' I've turned away from them.

They're now effectively causing the deployment of more nuclear power in the mid to long term. Meanwhile the Germans have outdone the rest of the world in both deployment of solar and wind power.

Wind power is there now on average 6.5% of all energy produced, in Sachsen-Anhalt (sp?) it is over 40%!

The sad thing about this oil spill is that is is a double whammy, not only ecologically is it a disaster of enormous magnitude, it also hits the region that is still recovering from the hurricane disaster only a few years ago.
Haha, but don't take it badly. I was just mentioning that you can use it for other equations, since you mentioned it like a pre-programmed special case.
This obviously is a joke. I mean, a bell rings when the baby is ejected. :)
This is a perfect example for "correlation does not imply causation"
Why can't you implement COM cross-platform? And the same with DirectX? Both of these seem pretty well understood and the object surface can be implemented without knowing the internals (although with COM the internals and the surface go hand in hand, although object layout and such is well documented).

Unless there are specific patents or Apple like TOS, it seems like this stuff is fair game. We shouldn't let laziness allow us to say something is not cross-platform.
The reason I subconsciously did it was that natural numbers have an inherent structure to them. You can describe all natural numbers using only the objects 0 and succ, where succ = (+ 1).

An interesting fact is that this is sufficient to express + and :

a + 0 = a
a + (succ b) = succ (a + b)

a 1 = a
a * (succ b) = a + a * b

One way to look at structures (like, say, natural numbers) is too look at what really defines them, as in, what is absolutely necessary and sufficient to define them? In this case, 0 and succ is.

Note that I'm not saying you're wrong, everyone is entitled to their own definition of beauty. Isn't that the beauty of it?
Mayweather vs Mosley Live Stream
This oil slick is larger than the state of West Virginia.

"Drill baby drill," indeed.
For the next few decades at least, there is no realistic replacement for oil. We need to understand why the safeguards that should have prevented this didn't work, and like with every disaster learn how to do it better the next time.
The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory: Why Almost All Happiness Studies Are Wrong
If you are going to do this please add a link to something to educate a user on how to upgrade and why as just pictures like yours come off confrontational and would probably leave casual computer users (who are the ones that can actually upgrade their browser) confused and probably irritated.
Great. Now I'm going to spend the rest of the morning trying to figure out whether you can really do it that way.

[Edit: Ah yes. The formalism goes like this: Consider the above series. By the above argument, it differentiates to itself. QED. ]
I have to say I feel skeptical about this.

In some situations (servers) we just don't care about how long it takes to do this part of the boot: my SMTP/HTTP/SSH server in the basement has been up 155 days. I think it only goes down when I loose (residential) power.

I'd rather have a correct startup than a fast, subtly incorrect startup. I expect that this would introduce a lot of concurrency-related bugs, and make dinking with startup scripts into something of a Black Art.
Cassandra and Hive have to count for something as well.
I know people who took LSD innocently in the wrong environment and they're sectioned under mental health. Use with care.
Ubuntu 10.4: How to place the window close button on the right again
An Evolved View Of The Participating Preferred
Thanks to LSD? Perhaps to mental issues that already existed?
Yeah, got mine on Thursday morning and I'm loving it (though I'm coming from a krzr that was literally falling apart). love the Facebook integration with SenseUI
I suspect that the show put on by Congress and Goldman Sachs will end up a wash for the banks and the people. No one will get punished and Congress will say, "See, even the worst of the bunch -- Goldman Sachs -- was within the law, so all the other banks must have been too."

At that point, all cases against the banks will be dropped and we will happily return to the status quo.
And the three most common operators.
That's a good question, actually. The answer is: Yes and no. Scheme, Emacs Lisp, Common Lisp and Clojure are all different, certainly. For example, when you look at programming texts, you realize that there really is a "Scheme" way of doing things and a "Common Lisp" way of doing things, which aren't always the same. That being said, if you learn one dialect, that will probably make learning another much easier. If you're new to the Lisp thing, I'd learn Scheme.
When was the last time you heard of fake Cisco routers coming from India?

EDIT: The difference is probably due to different emphasis on and effectiveness of enforcement.
I'd use PLT Scheme: http://www.plt-scheme.org/
Science education vs. research: a zero-sum game?
That just strikes me as being a bit of a dick. Of course it's up to you what you do on your own sites but still. What about the people (like the one mentioned in this article) who would need to pay for a new computer to be able to upgrade? Why should someone who doesn't really care about computers pay out large sums of money every few years just to get a new plastic box much like the old one?

By all means ignore IE6 compatibility and even display messages informing your users that things probably won't work quite right. But intentionally shutting them out is just silly.
Wow. That $100 bill sure is ugly. I get tradition, I get that being green is what makes the Dollar the Dollar, but there sure must be ways of preserving greenness and some traditional elements without making it so ugly.

The Euro banknotes have many of the same security features [1] and they aren’t ugly. Kitsch, maybe, but rather that than this. (Quite astonishing, actually, that Euro coins and bills are in general not ugly. Considering what a giant clusterfuck those discussions between the different members of the Eurozone must have been.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_banknotes
Apple Kills Lala Music Service
So what's All Marketers are Liars about? Few sentences on content?
I think this is a misrepresentation of the actual results. Human efforts to clean up underminded the natural bacteria and fungi that consume oil. But it's still a huge, massive mess.

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

What I find interesting about this is this bit:

Despite the extensive cleanup attempts, a study conducted by NOAA determined that as of early 2007 more than 26 thousand U.S. gallons (22,000 imp gal; 98,000 L) of oil remain in the sandy soil of the contaminated shoreline, declining at a rate of less than 4% per year.

That it's even measurable as percentage per year seems like it's getting better, by both human and natural means, at a rate faster than if left to its own devices (with my lay understanding, we'd be talking geologic or evolutionary timescales here, right?). Huge messes take a lot of effort and time to clean up.
Flash includes a ton of controls: buttons, scrollbars, text areas, etcetera. It has its own scripting language and memory environment that is separate from the HTML page and its DOM/JavaScript environment that contains it. There are ways to shuffle data and events between the two, but that means going out of your way to do so.

So if you're going to have a Flash-y data visualization component, say, it's easiest and most natural to have the controls for it (buttons adjusting parameters, display of those parameters, navigational controls) made in Flash too -- just expand the content rectangle of your Flash component out and drop in the controls.

In HTML5, the 'environment' of the <canvas> object is that of the surrounding HTML page. Adding buttons and other controls around the edge of your visualizer is most straightforwardly done by using "native" HTML <button>s and other such elements.

So it would be surprising to see <canvas>-using pages end up being done in a way where the <canvas> is essentially the whole page — it would require more programmer effort — whereas in Flash that's by far the easiest way to do it.
I find this easy to accept:

lim_{n->inf} 1 - 1/10^n = 1

But I'm not quite sure if I agree that 0.999... = lim 0.999...

edit: according to Wikipedia, they're today defined to be equal. While convenient, it's not obvious to me.

edit2: ah-ha! I just remembered the proof that had once upon a time satisfied me: there is a number between any two distinct numbers. there isn't one between 0.999... and 1, so they aren't distinct.
Just because something is "developed" in the US doesn't mean that all of the developers are US citizens or even based in the US. Outsourcing makes it incredibly difficult to ensure that no backdoors, malware, etc. are inserted into source.