skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are two standard rebuttals.

One is that the thickness of the vessels wall (hands-breadth) is not taken into account in the establishment of 3 as the value being used for pi despite this being mentioned right there in the text, this apparently gives a value of 3.1414 for pi.

The other is that 1 Kings 7:23 reference uses a special rendering of the term line (Hebrew numbers are expressed using letters) such that the ratio of line to ordinary line and the rendering in the text give the actual value as:

3 * 111/106

This gives Pi accurate to 0.00026%.

This all seems quite ex-post-facto but Hebrew has a strong tradition of numerology and this "special" variant of the word line is used only 3 times and always referring to circular objects.

---

Example references: (short) http://msmvps.com/blogs/coad/archive/2010/05/14/pi-in-the-bi..., (longer) http://www.bibleprobe.com/pi.htm, (several refs) http://www.math.ubc.ca/~israel/bpi/bpi.html, (with alternate based on "hands-breadth") http://ldolphin.org/pi/index.html though I'm not sure on the original source.
It's been almost a year since I heard anything about RockMelt...
Windows Server 2008 R2 as a Desktop OS
Are Windows IT managers the iPad's next growth market?
My understanding is that there are few dozens of quality programmer like him at Google, where he doesn't stand out the same way he would stand out if he worked in a group with fewer high profile programmer. I don't think on Google scale there are too many programmers who are indispensable.

Just guessing, of course.
Maybe they look at the metatags to find what software you are using. If you are using WP they probably will categorize it as a blog.
I think that would detract from his primary focus, which is teaching the subject. If he had to spend time maintaining a server, managing accounts and sending out DVDs in the mail, there won't be much time left for teaching. If he had to hire someone to do it for him, he couldn't offer the service for free any more.
Just because he misses his own deadlines doesn't prove that he is slow or a bad developer. Especially in the beginning, a lot of unforeseen problems can occur during development. Very few developers (if any) get the estimates right. Perhaps he also decides to pursue specific problems (ie if you are close to the deadline, you could either decide to release shoddy code, or miss the deadline - would you prefer shoddy code?).

Also, about the intern: the intern wants 9 to 5, your technical co-founder wants 12 to 20, and you are siding with your intern? Priorities? Get another intern who also prefers 12 to 20, or can get stuff done on his own.
check out shoeboxed.com i think they have this as part of their service. great idea nonetheless.
"You can't even include background images in GMail." Thank goodness. The people who use background images in email where the background is a notebook paper or similar are troubling.
Is it like converting from Queen's system to metric system in U.S.?
Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS
Sorry, I'm rescaling the image right now to roughly 800x600 to keep down on the memory usage of the process. Based on what I'm seeing today I think I can raise the maximum picture size and not rescale if it's within that size. Thanks for giving it a try.
This type of tool puts the capital E in Big Freaking Enterprise. Not only do they not have decent APIs, to the extent that they do have APIs at all they're written in whatever the best practice was for Java architecture astronauts 10 years ago (I say that with as much love as I can muster, having been one), and the API is not laid out according to programmer utility but rather according to ossification of business practice and/or the whims of twenty-something Congressional staffers who would not know a program if it bit their Blackberry.

Basically, it is the same story as almost all enterprise software: abandon all hope ye who enter here.
As correct as Cory Doctorow is, his rhetoric is pretty bad. There are far better ways to convince someone instead of just repeating your original point in slightly different words.
Yeah, I am in the process of doing one -- just waiting to add the "non-monetary" campaigns into the mix.

Once we push that to production (tomorrow) I plan on creating one.

Thanks for the kind words and feedback.
Unprofessional is a weasel word to say "I don't like this behavior but I don't have a good reason."
I love the idea, but I think a better conversion would be 2 pies = 1 taue. :) Twice as much pie on Tau Day! :)
Meg Whitman Ad Draws Fire From Internet Startup
My dad fell for that. Twice.

Man I hate those people.
I remember a few months back some guys here on HN forming a startup based on this concept. Can't find any links. Maybe they are YC funded as well.
It also hasn't seen any use in production, unless I'm mistaken.
This bugged me throughout my maths degree.

In particular complex analysis and Fourier theory would be less of a pain in the arse without all those factors of two.

Statistics too, heck anything which uses some calculus.
Glad to know it worked on glass whiteboards - would you be willing to share a pic? I like the idea of preserving the subject line - make it easier to organize the photos when they come back (my camera doesn't let me give them meaningful names). Great idea! Thanks for trying it out.
Maybe it's just me, but it would be nice to have the documentation say that it is nice enough to automatically open a browser window/tab to the appropriate location. I spent a good 5-10 minutes trying to figure out how I would view what it's doing in the browser, and finally just installed the gem to figure it out...
If you're referring to Max Levchin, he was a key early founder and made a lot more than that. But there were probably HUNDREDS of later employees who made more than about a million and THAT'S why PayPal spawned so many startups.
Yeah, I had trouble with those "portable IE6" implementations too. But IETester seems to be a lot closer to the real thing, at least as far as I can tell.
Free market economics is the only defensible system on the grounds that any other system will necessarily infringe on individual freedoms. A free market in itself is morally neutral, what I meant is that a free market is the only system that does not rely on forcing individuals to act 'for the greater good'; sacrificing free people to the ideals, beliefs or whims of others is what I consider immoral.

Agents in a free market system act independently, pursuing their own benefit; be it corporations or individual consumers. Yes they interact in the sense that it takes two (or more) parties to trade or make contracts, what I mean is that they act for themselves and not coordinate on a mass scale to make the resulting system in a certain direction. Agents exhibit behavior that consists of simple profit-seeking rules, which in turn generates a system dynamic on the macro scale. Their independence lies in their freedom to behave in their own self-interest, in contrast with a centrally planned economy where individuals are told to do or produce as is deemed fit by the central command.
A useful survey of algorithms--

Top 10 algorithms in data mining
Knowledge and Information Systems archive
Volume 14 , Issue 1 (December 2007) table of contents
Pages: 1-37
Year of Publication: 2007
ISSN:0219-1377

This paper presents the top 10 data mining algorithms identified by the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) in December 2006: C4.5, k-Means, SVM, Apriori, EM, PageRank, AdaBoost, kNN, Naive Bayes, and CART. These top 10 algorithms are among the most influential data mining algorithms in the research community. With each algorithm, we provide a description of the algorithm, discuss the impact of the algorithm, and review current and further research on the algorithm. These 10 algorithms cover classification, clustering, statistical learning, association analysis, and link mining, which are all among the most important topics in data mining research and development.
Or physicists/engineers will do their own thing, as seen by using j = sqrt(-1).

Also, uppercase gamma is already used, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_function
Government ( 1/2 :-).

That's certainly the case right now; since the start of the recession, according to the BLS government jobs have increased by 590,000 and 7,960,000 private sector jobs have been lost (http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/06/026620.php)
Even if you don't use node.js, you should check this page out for the design alone -- it's stunning.
I don't want to start a long post rehashing what has been already said, but there's something I want to tell about programming schedules : everyone is so bad at them that there are many jokes about it, like these:

Hofstader's law : "it always take longer than you expect, even when taking into account Hofstader's law"

the Cargill's law: "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."

And this hilarious Douglas Adams' quote : "I love deadlines, I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

Then I'll conclude with this anonymous word of wisdom: "Confidence, n.: The feeling you have before you understand the situation."
Young earth and downplaying evolution is one thing. But this is downright CRAZY!
I gave some very good reasons why the developer should be coming in at a reasonable time.

It seem this hit too close to home with many of the developers here.
Discover has had a little Flash app for generating one-time-use numbers for many years now.
So would you recommend me to "dump" Python and use JavaScript for any future web apps i might build or is there not much difference?
These arguments are assuming that tau would be a total replacement for pi in all situations. Why not just keep using pi in situations where you are doing calculations with torque?
Thanks for the suggestions. I had thought of a couple of things: simple 90/-90 rotations, removing red eye was one of them - I have to figure out an automated way of doing that. Thanks for checking it out!
brillant new tool for the toolbox.
You're making the assumption that not showing up at 9 means the guy is not motivated - which clearly is probably totally unrelated. Help him strive by staying open-minded.

Something that will be beneficial to you: learn about Non-Violent Communication (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1892005034). You're clearly making a lot of evaluations/interpretations, instead of checking the facts.
> mpjamesmoore: @doctorow "let the consumers decide what they want" is my position.

What a hypocrisy.

Determining what consumers wanted was the goal of having public consultations. It worked out that consumers didn't want what the (heavily lobbied) government officials wanted, so whatever the public said was quietly ignored and they proceeded pushing for a bill that they had.

"Let the consumers decide what they want" my ass.
Homeopathy for politicians
Right now I'm reading Scalia's opinion, in which he's tearing Stevens apart. For example:

That JUSTICE STEVENS is not applying any version of Palko is clear from comparing, on the one hand, the rights he believes are covered, with, on the other hand, his con­clusion that the right to keep and bear arms is not cov­ered.

I've never read a set of opinions in which one member of the court so clearly slams the opinion of another (although IANAL, let alone a SCOTUS expert). Does this signal anything about the future of the court, or about the Chief Justice's leadership?
Because we have the internet, and most books with "Sysadmin" anywhere in the title are garbage beyond entry-level.

There are a few gems out there about system engineering and longer-term good practices, but anything else is a waste of time.
Being "resigned" to it and "wanting" it are two very different things.
Resources to sketch your site's User Experience
Thank you for the example. Looks like something could be tweaked to do better on that kind of picture. Would you be willing to let me use that as an example for trying to improve the algorithm? Thanks again for trying the service.
I had already removed the generator meta tag from the head section. After waiting for next few months, I tweaked it again, and changed to phpBB.

:(
Rosenhan experiment (1973)
Why can't we dispense with the annotation completely? BC/BCE counts backwards, so let's just say 1970 or -1970.

edit: posted this before I saw Groxx's reply below
I'm not sure how this is newsworthy - they're basically just detecting texts with certain words in them. It sounds impressive, sure, but so does credit score when you describe it as an algorithm that can predict if people will get into financial trouble.
That page was last updated in April 2009. Looks like the project's in deep freeze (or is being developed elsewhere).
The biggest downside to the Nexus One is the screen; it is almost impossible to use in direct sunlight and the PenTile subpixel layout makes everything look like it's been resampled. Anything bright with a straight edge over a dark background ends up with a red dotted line along the left edge. It's most noticeable in text.
So this is a bit weird but, I recognize my old guitar teacher from there! I used to take lessons from Dave Wood back when he lived in NYC and can easily say if you have him involved in the project you are headed in the right direction. Absolutely amazing teacher!

It's not the prettiest site out there, but it's definitely easy to navigate. I would consider making the menu a little smaller, and the page flap in the top right is kind of annoying.
It's a sixty line JS file that's been online for less than a day. I don't think API stability is a major concern at this point.
Agreed. Also one of the best uses of a custom font-face that I have seen thus far.
If someone accuses me of spreading FUD, while they are intentionally cherry picking at best, then I'm going to respond. It's my nature to respond to personal attacks against me.

Oddly you don't find him foolish for the FUD comment, just me for responding to it.
(from your 'about' page)

Your customers shouldn’t have to be a member on Twitter to get the most recent news you’re posting, or be a member on Youtube to find your videos. Use Unscatter to get those messages and media to all your customers, and get a hosted search as well.

This is your value proposition. There are too many different content outlets, and it's not obvious which one will get traction for any given company or message. Setting up accounts and then trying to establish or foster fan communities on umpteen different websites is a major time suck. You obviously want to go where the eyeballs are, but since few outlets will tell you much about their demographics your identity is lost among the crowd of other brands with the same idea.

two ideas (which you may already have...):

One: help me deploy as well as aggregate. I make a cool 60 second video commercial I hope will go viral. I have fanbases or likely targets on YouTube, Vimeo, and Something.com: can you push my content out there for me? If the answer is yes, and if you can help me audit its popularity, then 'unscatter is my marketing department'.

Two: users have the same problem - to keep up with everything I like, I have to wade through a ton of stuff that I don't, on various different sites. So I either have 20 different logins, or I am helplessly dependent on one feed reader, or social networking site, or whatever to help me aggregate and filter it. I hate signing up for new stuff because they want to update me via facebook, or email, or have me follow them on twitter or whatever...WTF? Let me decide which channels I want to use. Trivial stuff I'd like twitter updates on. Interesting stuff I'd like to see show up on my facebook wall. Important stuff should reach me via email. Critical relationships can make my phone ring.

Maximize discoverability for outgoing communication. Maximize classifiability for incoming communication.
Minimize brand alienation by being a discreet broker.
Thank you. Definitely bookmarking this.
I had a recent experience that was similar in some ways to Vignesh. Being the business guy, I hired a developer (employee level not co-founder) to write a software program for me. I ran into some of the same issues as Vignesh like lack of motivation from my developer. He had taken the time to educate me about how difficult it might be to estimate how long it would take to get the software built and so I understood that it wouldn't be reasonable to judge performance based solely on results. I also didn't care what time of day he worked. However, where we ran into issues was that he was never motivated enough to put in at least 20 hours per week like he originally agreed to. Instead he would give me a maximum of 10 hours in a week and often only 5. It was very frustrating because I was expecting on him to at least meet this standard, one which he had control over. That frustration came across to him at times and only made his motivation level even worse. The relationship only got worse and worse over time and we finally ended up parting ways.

The one thing that I am very grateful for is that before I got too far with working with him, we had a written agreement signed and in place that stipulated what would happen in case of certain eventualities. This made parting ways a lot less messy than it could have been.

One other lesson that I learned is that it's critical to understand what motivates the other person. If you can't understand his motivations and what's important to him, then you shouldn't be working with him. It's a big, big problem to have a co-founder or a key employee who lacks intrinsic motivation to get stuff done.

As a related question to the HN crowd, how many hours per week is it reasonable to expect a developer to work? Is 20 hours per week too much?
This was one of the less obvious uses of sarcasm in recent memory.
> but Java 7 will be very telling for how Oracle is going to proceed

Considering how the Java7 milestones / OpenJDK developments are going right now, I think you're going to be disappointed.
Thanks! Yes, I'd love to add some cache tests (and more mobile tests in general) to Browserscope. Looks perfect for it.
Ask HN: How do you manage your dev database among multiple developers?
My co-founder posted this question on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133639/how-do-you-manage-databases-during-development) and got some good advice. I wanted to get the HN community's take on the question and see if there were any other thoughts:

In your agile startup, how do you handle a multi-person development team where each developer is making changes to the DB schema and everyone needs to have a current copy for local development and testing? What SCM strategies do you use and/or what software to replicate the database? Do you have a central development database?

Thanks for the thoughts!
I could be mistaken, but I believe it runs an entirely new windowing system as well.

Edit: It does indeed run a new windowing system, but details are scant on this blog entry: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-ch...
Actually, I thought the article winds up making the opposite argument from what it thinks it is making.

To be clear, the blame for this situation for this lands on Sun. It isn't Oracle's fault that Sun withered away to the point where it needed to be acquired.

The article seems to show that Oracle is doing just fine by ignoring Sun's open source assets. This line in the article "They also need to start to think more seriously about how Oracle can contribute to Sun's open source products, and not just the other way around." needs substantiation. If I were Larry Ellison, I see no reason to do that right now. Especially when Sun's contributions to open source didn't do them (Sun) a world of good in pure financial terms.

The other interesting statement is this one "The problem is that Oracle is naturally trying to optimise its acquisition of Sun for its own shareholders, but seems to have forgotten that there are other stakeholders too". As a public company, Oracle has a fiduciary obligation to protect its shareholders interests. It has no such obligation towards the open source world at large.
"Not really, there are several projects and average size of a team is quite small. In my case we were five people working on a quite large project and no one could compensate for my time. I knew I had to get something done in a week time and I will figure out how to do it. If needed, I had be there 24 hours, but otherwise I am my own boss."

Somebody needs to meet with the higher ups at the company during regular working hours. It just wasn't you. It also depends on what your project entails. If it was all internal, you can easily get away with working on code all day without having to discuss it with customers.

The situation with a startup is different.
You take that back :P
Clickable link to Stack Overflow question & thoughts:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133639/how-do-you-manage...

plus the other similar thread on Stack Overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/988426/how-should-you-bui...
Another good one: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2005/08/term-sheet-series-wr...
I was simply trying for some precision in terminology, and I think we're mostly there, but your politics might be showing.
Not exactly, since there is only one constant to convert (not many units) and the conversion factor is very straightforward (2 pi = 1 tau instead of 39.37 inches = 1 meter). But yes in that many people would have to change their ways.
Yeah, really. I don't want that shit showing up in my inbox.
I am sure you are going to reach out to lot of "Programmers" with this :).. especially because of the "zombie" mention there; its so real.
as well as

normal hours + Not productive = Dead Weight
That is really a personal preference on how you like to develop web apps, but from my observation, a lot of new projects that I have been exposed to are forgoing your traditional server side web layer (e.g Struts and Tile in the Java world) and using a CMS to do static templating (pushing static HMTL to a web server) and JavaScript widgets / JSON for the dynamic stuff that communicates to REST services on an application server.

They are then using server side languages they are comfortable with (in your case Python), to implement JSON services.

It is less "dumping" Python and more using Python to emit and consume JSON.
I believe I already felt that way... In olden days of IE5 when I'd tease Netscape users - Why would you want to drive a Ford, when you've already got a Porsche parked in the garage?

And now I hope that era won't repeat.
Anyone know of size limitations on this storage? I am in the middle of writing a jQuery plugin and storing data in cookies which have the 4KB size limitation (which resulted in me having to "chunk" the data across several cookies). This looks like the perfect alternative!