skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why not take that money and instead of tossing it to 'charitable' destinations use it to create an investment fund to help jumpstart people with projects that will create jobs and/or are aimed at sustainable living or 'green' technologies ?

That would be a lot more effective in the long run than it would be to just pass the responsibility for the spending off to some overhead ridden charity.
According to this article the one-word-question essay exam was one of the most dreaded part of the application to the prestigious All Souls College in Oxford. However, it was by no means the only hard essay part of the examination process. We learn that:

"First they have to take the exam. It consists of 12 hours of essays over two days. Half are on the applicants’ academic specialties, the other half on general subjects, with questions like: “Do the innocent have nothing to fear?” “Isn’t global warming preferable to global cooling?” “How many people should there be?” and the surprisingly relevant, because this is Britain: “Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants wear Nazi uniforms?”
Correct but unhelpful answer: only through inordinate amount of practice with solving problems.

A possibly helpful answer to the question "Why is it probably a good idea for most people to give up on this?":

A dimension R^n is only a collection of points each of which is specified by an n-tuple over R. This isn't hard to hold in your head, but it tells you very little about how objects behave in any given space. By "think in", presumably the inquirer wants to be able to predict the behaviors of objects. The trouble is that there are many more different kinds of objects and behaviors than one is naturally inclined to assume, because one doesn't normally think of his ordinary 3D intuition as an insanely complex piece of specialized hardware that it is. You can certainly learn to do in software small parts of it, one by one. You would take those n-tuples, and do some particular bit of math on them to get you where you want to go. This will be difficult, like all math. Gather a big pile of these small pieces, train them until they're fast enough, and eventually you've got something like a crude emulator. I would hazard that unless you are interested in deep abstract (as in, non-visual) problems of the relevant math branches, you won't have the discipline to carry all this out.
The whole point of my comment was that these [Apple-related] flames that are appearing in HN in the last 3 months or so are a great disgrace for this community, this is motive of the gross exaggeration in my comment, and the motivation of my 1st paragraph.

I thought about including a paragraph about how GNU handled the case but I just found that it could contribute to a flame war that I have no interest in participate, I'm not a fan of GNU, I do not want to defend GNU or the FSF.
My experience with the iPad :
My aunt (I'm French) came back from a visit to her son who lives in the USA and she was helpless because she couldn't understand why there was no way to add anything to her "computer" (she thought the iPad was an actual computing device, not a c.r.a.p.pliance) without erasing the pictures and videos of her family that was transferred to the iPad when her son synced his computer to it. She didn't ask my advice beforehand, she succumbed to the power of marketing and the novelty of getting something before its availability in France and bought it without thinking much about it.
You should have seen the look on her face when she came to understand that her device could erase all the videos and pictures of her grand-kids at a whim.
If it wasn't enough, she couldn't use the app store once she got back to France and will have to wait for general availability, even switching to the US appstore didn't let her. This is what a crappliance you don't actually own will do to you. You may have bought it but Apple still owns it.

THIS is what is supposed to be the future of computing, the device that will replace the desktop and laptop for the masses ? Job's full of it. The future of computing is a future where you can't even share your own data with your friends and where the manufacturer has a say on everything you do, even the installation of apps and what country you're in ? There is a reason why lots of people feel much stronger hate toward Apple than anyone ever did to Microsoft. I sincerely hope that the iPad will tank after the first generation and gets rolled over by Android, WebOS and whatever is in the work at MS. This device HAS to die or it will inspire a new era of madness if its model gets successful enough to be copied by everyone else. Microsoft is already joining in the crazy with the Windows Phone 7 that restricts you to its app market with no standalone app installation even though Windows Mobile used to stand for freedom.
The Economics of Immigration Are Not What You Think
For fans of Tao, his Google Buzz is worth following. http://www.google.com/profiles/114134834346472219368
I have some doubts if LGPL used by WebKit fails under the same restrictions that GNU pointed in the case of Gnu Go, LGPL does have some of the same requirements of GPL, I believe it does not and do not have the interest to push the subject further.

EDIT: And I'm sure that Apple lawyers checked the situation before.
"Venture Capitalists, who are these freaks?"

Answer: These are the freaks who took a nascent computer industry once dominated by a few mega-companies and, beginning some 40 years ago, made possible something that we today know as a "startup" by which young and otherwise untested whippersnappers might avail themselves of their capital in order to build vast new enterprises that have managed to transform all of world commerce and who, with their capital, built such a tremendous infrastructure in what we know today as the internet that young and untested whippersnappers can presume to launch new ventures under the illusion that no capital of any kind is required or, if it is, it can be so minimal as to come solely from a few friends or family members. These freaks are really nobodies in the grander scheme now that we have moved into an era where risk capital is no longer required to launch and build startups and where every young and untested whippersnapper will be more than willing to put up that $100K or $200K of his own money to take that whirl with some new and untested concept to see if it will fly. And if that young and untested whippersnapper should lose his money in taking that whirl, it is really no loss because only soulless people care when they lose money while those who are above mere money are too busy having fun.

I'm sorry - I would hardly classify myself as a sycophant for venture capitalists or other investors (my specialty is representing founders and their early-stage companies) but this piece is really beyond the pale. Freaks? Soulless? This really is pure garbage, whatever good points are otherwise hidden within the broad ideas that founders can and do benefit from managing their talents and resources wisely so as to lessen or avoid dilutive hits from taking in investment money unwisely. Whatever might be good here is, for me, lost among what I see as a mean-spiritedness in the presentation.
Pretty ironic when this happens a few weeks after Obama criticized the internet for giving too much information to digest.
"running on Apple products, but this isn't going to happen"

"This is why I... sold my Macbook"
Cinch is great! Bought it before the annoy-ware popup even came up!
Hehe, nothing like divorce case to make a billionaire plead poverty. If, God forbid, Melinda ever divorces Bill, I expect him to argue that those Microsoft shares are really not worth the paper they are printed on.
Most important takeaway for me is: "The hype around the iPad in Tokyo highlights what has become a sobering reality for a country once considered the technological trend-setter; Japan now frequently looks overseas for innovation."

Anyone has a theory as to why this happened? Japan seemed unstoppable so recently? Yes, their economy is in a recession for years but it seems such things have little effect on the American innovation engine (in fact innovation benefits when economic hardship acts as natural selection effects).
Covers the Great Salt Lake, and most of the upper corner of Utah.
We're upvoting it because everybody including Obama act like this is the first time oil spill is happening and there was no way to prevent it because it was so improbable, and also because once again we failed to learn from history.
Hot Bollywood Actresses in Red
This Weekend we bring to you an extravagant picture collection of Bollywood actresses in red. They are looking so hot and sexy in Red dress and saree.
Maybe he was just ignorant about the situation, recently here on HN, a community is well above the average of the Tech related communities in web, I have seen ignorance about copyright ownership and related subjects, so I prefer to believe that the developer was just ignorant, the Appstore model does nothing to educate this type of independent developer without any legal expertise and this type of situation can arise in the future as well.
One word. Innovation.
There were a couple of things that I noticed that I don't think are correct. I thought it was fine up through the first 3, more or less. One issue that kind of bugged me was that it seemed to imply that spaces cannot be curved. The video I think would suggest that the surface of a sphere is 3-dimensional when it's actually only 2. Calling infinity a point in the seventh dimension also bugged me.

Overall, it seems like the creator of it knew a little bit of math, and probably some physics, and extrapolated from there. More probable though is that their only knowledge of the subject came from philosophy, or epistemology.
The usual argument is that, to the extent that we believe that an organism can experience pain, it's preferable to minimize its pain as much as is practical, especially when there alternatives.
Rate this screencast of our startup - A student collaboration tool on Facebook
Apple and Microsoft's Tug of War - Interactive
Greenspun's piece on nonprofits is a hackjob written by someone who hasn't spent enough time around them to know much other than his own perception. The idea that the nonprofit world is filled with people who just couldn't make it in the corporate sector is a fallacy, plain and simple.
"Other industries are being shaken up by Apple’s latest export. Once solely focused on creating games for dedicated consoles like the Wii from Nintendo and more recently, for cellphones, the Japanese game developer Konami Digital Entertainment, released an iPad version of its popular Metal Gear Solid Touch this year. Capcom has followed suit, saying it will reformat its BioHazard 4 game for the iPad."

I'm not sure how porting a game to a different platform counts as shaking up the industry. It seems more like an extension of the companies' previous mobile phone strategies.

Also, just in case anyone didn't know, Biohazard is the Japanese name for Resident Evil.
I build my own fs in college, it was pretty fun.
SCENE II. The Forum.
You're right. I thought, even while I was writing that, that it was a weak example. Though I had Banach spaces in mind, not fourier series, and I have always had trouble with them.

Still. I felt I needed three examples. "Pick something not from set theory," I said to myself. I couldn't come up with a strong example. Maybe that's telling.

Unmeasurable sets, though. When I try to visualize one, I see the letter E because that's what we called it in the constructive proof.
alimony and child support
6 million cash
10 percent of his stock in Tesla
5 percent of his stock in SpaceX
(and he retains all voting rights)
and a Tesla Roadster (I really, really want one...)

I don't want to go through the trouble of normalizing this wish list into a scalar percentage, but it seems like a lot less than half of his assets...

Would you take the deal?
It's really an isolated Apple thing I suspect - it's not as if Japan has suddenly gravitated towards American or European products in a bigger way than before.

Asian tech cycles run a lot faster - in my experience people are willing to sink a lot more disposable income into gadgetry. My fashionable relatives in Taiwan routinely sink contract-free prices once or twice a year into phones just to stay on the bleeding edge - and these aren't tech geeks either.

It's no wonder that a culture/economy that treats technology as a fashion statement would gravitate towards stylish devices. Apple out-styled the likes of Sony, that's all.
I'm not aware of any reason to have the animal alive while you're breaking off its limbs. It just seems like the behavior of a sociopath to me.
Fake Battery Android App Avoids Friends' Playtime Requests
This is a screencast of our student collaboration tool. It's in beta right now and the first phase is built as a Facebook application.

It's a way for students to meet and collaborate with students in their classes, exchange notes and set up study groups. Professors can join and communicate with their students on Facebook without requiring them to be "friended". Both the students and professors maintain their privacy.

This is phase 1 of about 100 :)
Bavarian Motor Works
Thinking with his genitalia, perhaps?

Check out her biblography!

I'm the author of three published novels: the dark
fantasies BLOODANGEL and LORD OF BONES (Roc/Penguin) and
the YA supernatural thriller UNINVITED
(MTV/Simon&Schuster). I also have stories in the MAMMOTH
BOOK OF VAMPIRE ROMANCE 2 and ZOMBIES: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE
HUNGRY DEAD.
Godspeed, Mr. Gavin, Godspeed.
Because having historical context allows us to judge attempts to over or under play the current situation. Considering how many people have been freaking out about this "unprecedented" event, I think this is highly useful information.
Inbox - Yahoo Mail India
"I would love to see all"

oops.
JVestry,

1. You can't count IPs and internet users, and conclude 2 IPs per user. That betrays a vast misunderstanding of the nature of the internet.

2. Unless you have a very odd ISP, you and all of your neighbors are using public IP addresses. There are serious technical and performance challenges involved when ISPs use NAT to hide their customers from the internet. It breaks a great number of services that users expect to just work. In short, NAT is not a magical de-multiplier.

3. The authority that gives out IP addresses already forces companies to justify their use. There is waste, but not so much that this is a problem we can simply "manage" away.

4. There are rules against selling IP address allocations. So your "free market will fix it" argument is dead in the water.

5. Most routers can "publish" an IPv4 and IPv6 address? What the hell does that even mean? That's garbage nonsense talk.

In conclusion, your blog post is way off the reservation. Factually incorrect, complete conjecture, and just plain made-up gobbledeygook. It's obvious that absolutely no research was done before publishing this. For being so offensively wrong and poorly written, I'm flagging this submission.
I am going to second the fish smell. Google his email address and you find a twitter account the tweets the best craigs list w4m, wtf with that? How can you have time to run a valid business while combing craigs list for garbage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_spill#Largest_oil_spills

Note that that spill was about 3x larger than even the Ixtoc I spill. The scale is nearly incomprehensible.
I always wonder why more millionaires aren't building the next iphone or a new operating system. Maybe playing with AI theories.

I mean, am I the only hacker who dreams of being a mad scientist, where I can have teams of people working on all the many new idea's I have. I'm frankly pissed, I want my hoverboard. :)
Japan Plans a Moon Base by 2020, Built by Robots for Robots
Chemical properties search engine with MongoDB, Node.js, R and Python
Still for most startups - though outside the realm of this board - cleantech, life sciences, and enterprise hardware startups still require major VC and PE backing over their life cycle.

For example - Better Place - a provider of Electric Car Service Stations just raised a $350 MM Series B with HSBC as the lead investor. HSBC doesn't bring management expertise - but they did bring $150 MM of investor dollars.
I think what he's doing with Tesla and SpaceX are very important for the country and really the world, so I hope enough folks with deep pockets can step up to the plate and help out his/their cash situation. We need more companies/endeavors like Tesla and SpaceX.
Had similar experience with a friend. He got a product up and running but then his tech co-founder had to quit (personal reasons).

He reached out to me, and I connected him with a very good and experience web-developer (who had a full time job).

The web-dev went with him on a couple of interviews to help screen out potential devs and later did some followup on the project in the first few weeks.

Not sure what kind of deal they cooked-up between them. But finding an expert you can trust, that has a bit of time to advise and help you, might be a good idea.
If a Nigerian scammer was out to get the HN crowd, what you wrote would be a good start. Not that I think you are scamming, just found the similarity amusing.
Well, one cannot be sure whether it was really at about the BP rate, mostly because BP is being really cagey about what the rate of their spill is.

BP is not letting independent scientists send instruments to measure the spill rate, although they did let scientists look at a live feed from one of their underwater cameras. Estimates vary, but some scientists are saying the spill can be several times larger than that of the Ixtoc I.
Your filter sucks. Not from a fairness point of view, but from a you're-not-doing-your-job-very-well point of view.

In my experience, length of stay doesn't correlate accurately with technical skill at all. It's often quite the opposite - 3-5 years of experience at BigCo. with lots of TLAs means that you couldn't find a better job elsewhere. Ditto if they've worked 12 months in a crappy PHP shop and couldn't hack it. If someone's worked 3 jobs in 3 years, with growing responsibility in each position, and a mix of technologies, that's generally a good sign.

I've also seen awesome programmers, with crappy resumes (ie. badly formatted, with all of the good stuff at the end). If you're filtering on anything other than "do they sound like a good/great programmer", then you're missing out on some good people. Try other mechanisms, like networking and code screening if your workload is too high.
This is a rather long description of all the tools and methods used to create a search engine for chemical properties. I think it is interesting because for once it is a nice example of the integration of a large array of tools and software. Code examples, tips for a good MongoDB indexing, etc. are included.
Apply to launch at DEMO Fall 2010
Except, that will never happen before the support lifecycle expires. It would be devastating to their enterprise sales. One reason you buy Microsoft at a large company is because they promise support for 10 years. If they renege on that with IE6, it would get too much exposure and enterprise IT departments would revolt and MS would start losing ground in one of their last strongholds.
I think you can quickly operate a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World people
> Wait. You mean people thought they didn't?

If you rip the leg off an ant it keeps going as if nothing happened. Or if you cut an earthworm in half it behaves normally. So clearly not all animals feel pain.

The question becomes which ones do, and which don't. You can't ask them, so at best you watch their behavior and look for changes.

The trouble comes in when you try to distinguish between pain and suffering. Pain prompts an animal to change behavior. A worm being shocked will move away - but does that mean it suffers? Or just that it avoids the negative stimulus?

I can't give you the answer, but at least I can help you understand the question.
On a related note, I'm having a strong urge to buy the latest Sony Viao X notebook (netbook?).

It looks awesome, it's thin and light as hell, fast (with an SSD harddisk), and from what I've read it even works well with Ubuntu.

However, I just know that after a few weeks of using it the romance period will be over and it'll just be this "thing" sitting on my desk.
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The X-51A Waverider’s Record-Setting Hypersonic Flight
The tools existed for at least 5 years, mostly through reverse engineering.

Apache incubates a few MS file format utilities, some of which are looking for maintainers/contributors:

http://poi.apache.org/
> response to analgesics is damn convincing

It's not. It just means you blocked the negative stimulus, so that innate reflex you mentioned does not trigger.

It doesn't necessarily mean they feel pain.

Personally I don't think this question is possible to answer, so I behave as if all animals feel pain and I avoid inflicting it, except when I have no alternative. And when I have no alternative I try to minimize the duration and/or severity (giving priority to minimizing duration over severity).
That's a valid point but I don't think the answer is as simple as that. About 2 months ago HN had a submission about why Japan didn't invent the iPad (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197702). To me many of the points made in that post (totally different innovation cultures) sound like a better explanation.
Primer (film)
Sometimes, good fortune can also make people feel guilty

Fortune, which comes from Greek goddess Fortuna might actually bring both good and bad luck. Like, always only hearing the lottery winners stories and dismissing millions of losers, we take the good luck notion of Fortuna and leave the bad luck out of her.
It's law number 6 of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noahide_laws

> I am quite sure our ancestors did this.

Presumably some did and that's why the Noahide laws address this issue. And clearly some ancestors agreed it was a bad thing - and not just a little bad, but bad enough that it was listed in the core set of laws.
Cocktail Sticks Recipe
It's not so much that the information isn't there, it is that it still isn't there in a way that you can get at the relevant data quickly enough.

Keyword searches are bad for stuff like this, they'll turn up tons of irrelevant information. The needles are there but they'll be buried in a haystack of lesser size than the original one, but still formidable enough to make sifting through it a non-trivial task.
It would have been a lot worse if not for some very creative thinking.
Note that the range for the "barrels per day" number is entirely contained within the range for the BP spill, so it isn't really reasonable to say that they released at the same rate. This spill was 10 - 30 thousand. The BP spill is 5 - 100 thousand. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill)
Quick jQuery hack to fix position:fixed toolbars in iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch
Interesting how BP hasn't pointed at this yet in their press releases, if anybody has this sort of information it should be them.

From the talk page:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2011931961...
Potential title:

"How a 20 year old basement-dwelling runt came out of the tunnel $5 million richer"
Nothing to prevent any open source project from being ported to OS X.
Even BP is no longer claiming 5,000/day, which was apparently farcical from the start. The analysis by the Purdue scientist (cited on Wiki) says 95,000/day, latest figure.
Patents Now Getting In The Way Of Important Brain Research
Just to clarify: "why are manhole covers round?" is not a test of intelligence in the narrower sense. "Add the next number in the following sequence 1,4,9,16" is.