skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point is, everyone has a "standard model" in their head about how all programming languages work. Kind of like how the same system of DNA works in all species. We extrapolate that model based on our exposure to different languages. Being exposed to only OO languages can lead to false assumptions about the over-arching framework of language, but such is the same for strict functional, procedural, or declarative exposure. As exposure to new ideas increases, the underlying assumptions dissolve into a better understanding, and the knowledge helps inform the programmer not only on the new language but on the old languages as well.

For example, I started my journey into programmerdom with JavaScript. Going to C (strict C, not C++) was a major mind-f*, and I didn't make the transition well. When I went to Java, I became much more productive. Learning the finer details of how Java tracks references and performs parameter passing, I suddenly understood C a lot better. Once I knew C better, I realized a metric ton of flaws in my JavaScript. All because greater exposure to language informed my underlying assumptions about what language means. The jump from Java to C# enhanced my understanding of event-driven programming (merely because of how C# provides syntactical features for delegates separately from the class system). I then realized I understood WIN32 events in C a lot better. A similar experience followed my forays into F# (failed attempt into functional programming, but not unproductive), back into C#, into C++, back into Java (briefly), back into JavaScript (this time with the knowledge of first-class functions), and then into Scheme (finally a successful foray into functional programming).

A parallel can be drawn from almost any feature in one language to another feature or application of features in another. It's the essence of Turing completeness, we can emulate any system in any other system (yes, albeit not efficiently).
Google To Take On Facebook With “Google Me” Or Just A Rumor
On the other hand,

"When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions."

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
PETER
This sounds familiar.

MICHAEL
Yeah. They did this in Superman III.

PETER
Yeah. What a good movie.
shrug Aggregation isn't bad in and of itself, especially since Quora just opened to the public, but he probably shouldn't reproduce something explicitly marked otherwise.
Agent Provocateur - John Brockman (1997?)
Especially with economics. It's impossible to determine the causes of the current situation, though everyone loves to attribute successes to policies they like and failures to their opponent's policies.
It's the connection that all your push notifications come down by. GMail push, Google Talk inbound messages, etc. They piggyback any number of things onto it.
I did a little googling, and found plenty of articles on Android's Marketplace having malicious software, but only articles along the lines of "Researcher says IPhone Data Model Could Lead to Malware" (http://www.pcworld.com/article/183741/researcher_says_iphone...) for the iPhone.

As far as I can tell, the iPhone has only been hit by malware when jailbreaking is involved. Maybe I'm missing it, but considering that minor infections in the Android market have made headlines, I imagine I would fine something for Apple too.

P.S. I'm hardly pro Apple, I have a Droid. I'm just saying that the probably do check for this sort of thing, because it's impossible in my mind for some one not to have tried to submit malware to the App store.
me: "It assumes the lib is in a maven rep"
you: "Gems assumes that the gem is available in a Gem repository. I see no practical difference."

Hm, I can't figure you out. Your statement is missing the point. I don't know if you see that point and are cherry picking on purpose or if you don't know both ecosystems. I've done a lot of ruby, a lot of java, and a fair amount of clojure. I frequently run into very common java libs that are not in a maven repo. It's a common occurrence. I can't think of any significant ruby lib that isn't in a gem repo. The two situations are not equivalent.

"Nowhere in any post did I say that Clojure the language is as easy as Ruby."

Again, this is literally correct, but I feel you've implied it. You're like the Karl Rove of comp sci. The original comment was complaining that the clojure noob experience appeared painful. You then said that the java classpath was no worse than gem_path.

This is both wrong (the need for class loaders is one example of why, and my highlighting of the ease of use of gems is another), but it's also clearly implying that using libs in clojure is as easy for a noob as it is in ruby land.
You can claim that you weren't implying that, but if that's the case then your reply was meaningless. Again, this is Karl Rove style hair splitting on your part.

Let me be clear then. The noob experience in ruby is much better than in clojure. Do you disagree? I've taken your statements as implying that, but you claim to have never said it explicitly, so now I'm asking you outright.
Maybe your 'poor' friend is smart enough to know that $5000 is not enough to start a new business.
A friend and I had kicked around a startup idea where you would take a picture of your receipt with your phone and upload it to our service. Then it would do OCR, and at the end of the month, you could easily reconcile your statement with the receipts you took pictures of. One benefit is that you don't have to trust the credit card company, or the merchant you buy from, which is a problem of your proposed system.
Aside from selling corporate whiteboard-secrets? (I kid, I kid...)
I've thought that a component that might contribute to greater comfort in a small, shared home is soundproofing. I seek myself and I think other people seek a certain amount of separation -- I mean the ability to be by yourself, at times. For a bit in additional materials and/or better construction, the ability to go into a room, shut the door, and be unaware of what others in the house are doing, would be quite valuable.
I'm just about a math retard, so 99.9% of that went right by me. My only question is this. Pi is supposed to be an infinite number: 3.14... So what would Tau be? Is it also infinite or finite? I didn't see that addressed -- or I somehow missed it in my concentrated skim. TIA.
I don't remember the exact details but there was a story making rounds about a company that sent out $25 average-looking invoices to large and very large companies, with each invoice saying "Invoice for nothing". Most companies didn't pay, and still these fellas made a LOT of money on those few that did. The best part was that the scheme was 100% legal.
How to peg 7 cores with doSMP
Venture Pimp: Appswell wants to build your iPhone app idea
Well, 192.1% estimated as of last year.... Their apparent recovery from the Lost Decade a few years ago is now realized as being just another external bubble induced bump and they're well into their second Lost Decade.

You may not be an economic expert and maybe have a bias against this sort of thing, but most anybody should be able to see that this was a horrible mistake.

Almost certainly a terminal one for the Japanese people, or as Kenshiro of Fist of the North Star would say, "omae wa mō shindeiru" ("you are already dead").
Made In CSS; iOS icons and more
Will definitely _not_ be doing that, but I should add reassurance to the faq/terms/privacy so people know what's what.
Crisis of Capitalism
Microsoft Planning to Implement Kinect-like Features in Windows 8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing
Right now, the going rate on 30-year T-bills is a little over four percent (http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/domestic-finance/debt-managem...), so it seems like the people and institutions that loan “us” (i.e., the United States government) money are fairly confident that “we” will not default.

(Granted, a lot of US debt is held by foreign central banks that are not purely driven by return on investment, but presumably if the Bank of China really thought the US was close to default, they would not be so inclined to throw their assets in our direction.)
> infinite number

The term you're looking for is 'irrational.'

And tau is also irrational.
Their tau is just two times pi.
If you could somehow find a loophole within the scope of Apple's public APIs - Then sure... You could do something malicious.
Is this a parody or for real?
Both Pi and Tau are irrational (what you call "infinite", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_number) and trascendental (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_number). They are also believed to be normal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number), but there is no proof of this.
Does he get the work done? If the answer is yes, what's the big deal?

The hours you work don't define your professionalism, at least not this century.
I think there's just too much luck. With basketball or American football, any team can still beat any other team on any given day, and the Celtics made it to the finals instead of Orlando or Cleveland, but LA still won the championship (but still needed 7 games to do it). It's a good blend of giving you hope for your small-market team, but also making wins actually mean something.

I watched all the US games in the World Cup this year, and I never came away thinking that the US was actually better (or as good, yay ties!) as the teams they played. And, in fact, they seemed to be the better team against Ghana.
You are correct. The multiplier becomes 18!
It's not "cheap" for a license, but I looked into this company a few years back when I was thinking about getting into the space, and it seemed pretty reputable. Haven't reviewed the documentation in great detail; however, it still might be worth a look. http://creditengine.net
> People project patterns onto data when in fact, they don't exists.

So, the patterns we see in the Ulam spiral can be completely random?

We observe patterns. Human brains are really good in finding them. The problem is finding patterns in past data may or may not provide useful insights into future data.

With the resources being dedicated to this problem, I find it highly unlikely I could be able to offer any helpful advice that would prove more helpful than what already exists.

It would be hard enough to predict the market if the only factors influencing it were signals coming out of the companies we trade. Predicting what other algos may me doing in the space we are trying to examine and the influence their trades exert in its future is... Well... I won't try.
Stallman on Being a Hacker(video interview)
> Low interest rates were a big part of the problem - the price of money got below the cost of inflation.

Except that they didn't. They did get below the price of housing inflation, but that's in part due to lax lending standards, which were basically forced by regulators.

Fannie and Freddie didn't help by lying about the quality of the loans in the pools that they were selling. Not only did that screw folks who bought those pools, it screwed up everyone's market risk evaluation because their lie hid the fact that a huge fraction of the loans were going to folks who didn't have a prayer of paying back.

Yes, "everyone knew" that there were a lot of those loans, but the statistics, tainted by Fannie and Freddie's lies, said that things were a lot better than they actually were. Some folks thought that the stats were "optimistic", but few thought that they were as wrong as they actually were.

After all, who'd have thought that a GSE would commit fraud....

FWIW, the senior execs at Fannie and Freddie during this time were prominent Dems, some of whom launched Obama.

McCain actually tried to rein in Fannie and Freddie during this time, but got his teeth kicked in by Congressional Dems. (One could argue that McCain's efforts, in 2005/2006 were too little too late, but ....)
Most of the people in poverty in America right now are materially better off than almost everyone 500 years ago, and most of the poor in America remain better off than most of the people in say Afghanistan.

Or even better off than most of the people in America, 1960.
D'oh.

Don't know how I didn't realize that, given that my response got messed up so that my "corrected" version read exactly like the one I was confused about...

Please disregard everything I said, in that case. :)
It's real (see my blog post about it: http://math-blog.com/2010/06/28/forget-pi-here-comes-tau/).
Exactly. Once could say you can write all of perl in perl by using eval().
But the most important parts were not struk down. I am still legally not allowed to chat with my coworkers over IRC, or use an internal nopaste service to discuss code snippets over chat.

There's a reason why free software is better than the stuff developed at big companies -- the government doesn't tell them what tools they can and cannot use.
Also, one of the significant measurements of a country’s debt is the debt-to-GDP ratio; you can alleviate this measure of pain by reducing debt or increasing GDP.
It would be cool if he offered all the courses as a single download via torrent or perhaps a mail-order DVD.
I don't think technology helps the unskilled all that much. Consider the knowledge it takes to use a shovel vs. a backhoe.
Are there any tips for word or character count for a banner ad that we should keep in mind?
Tesla IPO: Tomorrow
SICP vs The Necronomicon
Except that in this instance the "substance" craved is money. Microsoft actively neglected to support standards until it started to affect the bottom line. Pretending that they were clueless to how difficult they've made web design and development is foolish. If there were any epiphanies they were had while staring at a balance sheet.
Oh wow, I'd never seen that before. I thought about hiking too but I've never been so I don't know what it's like.

I also thought about suggesting sailing for a couple weeks, but I was worried about what liability there'd be if some startup team got lost at sea. :)
Sure, but the article doesn't use eval.
Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_marketing#Econom...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107.ht...
Talk to the company. Find out why they haven't fixed the issue. Talk to an actual engineer at the company. Maybe they are working on it but are having a hard time resolving the issue properly.
Ask HN: Am I on the right track?
I have reached a point in my project where my product is functional, and am starting to focus on the UI to make it usable.

I've taken it slow the past couple months, as my wife was pregnant. I haven't registered a corporation or anything. My daughter was born last week, and now I'm looking at what the next steps should be after I get through the newborn induced sleep deprivation stage.

I don't have a co-founder, not even sure how I'd look for one or if I really need one. I now have a wife and 2 kids and like many Americans am upside down in a house, so quitting the good paying day job isn't an option.

The product is www.unscatter.com. The monetization plan is to get in on Bing's advertising platform once I have enough traffic and corporation registered, and also to start selling features on top of the hosted search solution. For example, domain hosting so the search page could be at search.yourdomain.com. Other ideas would be a monthly fee for letting users upload a logo, or to remove advertising.

It seems like my plan should be polish the UI, register the business the identity, then start trying to get users while working on creating the features to sell.

I'm avoiding looking for investors because while I'm convinced my plan which includes future search indexing and complete support for enterprise class customers is an obvious no way to fail scenario, I should probably at least prove I can get customers first. I'm avoiding looking for a cofounder because I know even less about finding one of those, and what I should look for in one. I think this post is just looking for others to validate I'm on the right track, and the nagging doubts on if I should start focusing on investors or co-founders can continue to be ignored.
Q: Which Denny's should I go to?
The one on Main St or another one?

Idiot replies: The KFC on State St is the best.
Tau is an awful symbol in my opinion.

If the people who support double pi as the true symbol they should be writing papers with a definition of double pi and truly proving to the mathematical community that pi is the wrong definition. I personally think pi*D is a perfectly sane way to describe pi and that thinking in 180 degrees is just as easy as in 360 degrees.

Once the math community is convinced good luck with engineers and physicists and then the general public.
'Identity ecosystem' to replace passwords, draft strategy suggests
Rands in Repose: How to Write a Book
I bet. I'm glad my wife didn't test me on my camping abilities. She'd probably have left me in the woods.
There's no evidence to back up this assertion. Many economies that don't have reserve currency status do just fine (e.g. Switzerland, Norway, S.Korea). The expense of US overseas deployments far outweighs the benefit of having a militarily enforced reserve currency.
Project Cybersyn:

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

Discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190508
Change your standards (really).

In my experience with start ups, developers rarely come in early. Some of the best developers I work with come in at lunch. This is because they are night owls and work better at night.

Not understanding that pure-bread developers work differently is denying the basis of your product.

It sounds like, on a personal level, that you want your co-founder (who is technical) to be more like you. Well sorry, that's not going to happen. You need to understand that you wanted to work with him in the first place because of who he is and what he is capable of, not what time he gets up in the morning.

As a little background, I am a developer. I do however, wake up at 6:30, and I'm at my desk at 7:50am. This is before any other developer (and more times than not before anyone else has even shown up). I'm not like most developers, this is my personal choice, and I understand that.

Demoralizing him and berating him will further his cause to be dissonant to "business." This includes coming in later and later over time, not wearing "professional" clothes, or being hard to work with.

My heart-felt advice is to apologize for being a prick to someone so important to your product, your business, and your success, and set a road map for increasing co-founder communication and understanding. You chose him because he was different. If he had the same skills as you, you wouldn't need him.

So first apologize to yourself, forgive yourself for being close-minded. Then apologize to him, and the interns. It takes a big person to be able to do that. It won't be fun.

Then have a candid, non-confrontational conversation with him. Figure out where the communication ended (I guarantee this is your issue). Remember, you're in this together.

If he doesn't come in early enough for calls or presentation, do it without him. Ask him to give you the materials or knowledge you need to do it well. Maybe do some of the things you think he should. Try to help him do his job better, which may not be looking professional, having sane work hours, etc. If hes an engineer or developer, his job is probably building the product.

You may be surprised that the cool helpful guy you met is actually still there.
That depends on how big the difference between the two chess players is. But the question is, would it make grandmaster chess matches more interesting if we removed a random piece from the board? This is essentially what the current refereeing system is doing with soccer.

I am baffled that anyone could think that introducing random unfair judgement by a referee improves a sport.
It looks good. Some quick observations:

- Help tooltips: It would be nice if you could provide more online explanation for every option/functionality in the form of tooltips or such.

- Internationalization: As you are eying for white-labeling your site, it will help if the interface was easily translatable to non-English languages.

- SSL: In Firefox, going to https://zferral.com/ gives a security warning, indicating that the certificate belongs to some other domains.

Good luck!
The difference is that "cursor: pointer" means (by default) that the target will initiate navigation away from the current page. All other elements follow OS conventions as a matter of presenting a common UI grammar to the user.
> Unsourced claim here: saw somewhere that about 75% of the cost of medication goes to advertising. We're taught to believe that it's the R&D that's the expense, but it's not; it's advertising.

A huge fraction goes to marketing. However, that includes doctor education, free pills for poor people, and so on. Which of those do you want to give up?

The amount that goes to nd-user advertising is relatively small. Since at least some of that gets folks to go to the doctor to fix something that they didn't know could be fixed, and thus improves their lives, I'm not convinced that it's bad. Then again, I think that the goal of a health system is to improve health, not control costs. (Hypocondriacs do their thing regardless of advertising.)
I think that complaint work where much better if focused on a less successful company. Do you know of any large but failing companies that use this approach?
Is this true? My grandparents were poor in 1960 yet had a big house and a decent car, a coffee maker, a big yard, etc. Why are poor people better off now? Because they have the internet?
Actual quote, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/Story?id=5782924&...:

GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?

PALIN: They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.

GIBSON: What insight does that give you into what they're doing in Georgia?

PALIN: Well, I'm giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with all of these countries, especially Russia. We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it's in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.
I think real. Although I didn't read all of the article I think the main thrust was that since 2pi appears in so many places in math that a constant based on the ratio of circumference to radius rather than diameter would be more appropriate. Realistically I think there are better ways to spend your time but ....
Note that your equality \(e^{i\tau} = 1\) implies only that \(e^{i\pi} = \pm1\), hence is strictly weaker than Euler's equality (which picks a sign). I think that you might have meant \(e^{i\tau/2} = -1\). (Is there a way to do LaTeX properly here?)
To be fair, even though I disagree with them, they did try to show through their examples why they believed pi to be wrong.
shut up and happy tau day everyone!
Don't listen to your customers
Title should say "Tonido Ad"

I dont see any real arguments here except "cloud services can go down"