skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What? sin(x) is still sin(x). Just because we have a different value for pi doesn’t mean we have a different sin function. sin(6.28...) = sin(6.28...), etc., etc.

Crucially, we still have exp(x + iy) = exp(x) * (cos(y) + i sin(y)), because we haven’t changed the definitions of any of these functions. If we did change the definitions of sin and cos, that’d really be a bummer, you’re right.

We still measure angles in radians. No diameter-ians in sight. Our old x or new y (notice, those have the same value) is just a different fraction of newpi than it is of oldpi, is all.

It amazes me that amalcon’s being voted up and aston is being voted down. People clearly aren’t thinking it through for themselves.
Wikinvest Already Tracking $1 Billion In Portfolio Assets
That's the whole point of opt out ... do something until someone really doesn't want it and then make them search to find out how to stop it.
a call button does not give the system adequate information to take the necessary action; If you press it and you get a lift that's heading down and you want to go up, you just wasted time.

One possible answer would be to simply not give an indication of where the elevator is, this would prevent instances of the user thinking that they are telling the elevator where to go from it's current position rather than telling then system where they want to go, but this seems like an annoyance to the other 99.9% of users that actually know how a traditional elevator UI works.

But hey, a lot of modern UI design held up as an example of mastery has that exact same drawback, but pandering to the ignorant is somehow more important than not screwing over the adept. I'm looking at you, OS X.
What size instances do you run for different types of functions?
I know that the project is old, but I've personally never heard of much being implemented using GNUStep. I was under the impression that it was an abandoned project, though I never bothered to check their homepage.

[I assumed that AfterStep was implemented with GNUStep, but I just looked at the dependency list, and it doesn't include GNUStep...]
The New Yorker had a fascinating article about elevator design a while back:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_...
Millions of carats of diamonds found in Zimbabwe
Steve Jobs Bans iPhone and iPad Porn, Becomes Christian Right Hero
monthly expenses of 200k? Wow, that is quite a lavish lifestyle. Just wondering what costs so much... that is more than 6k per day.
that's a good domain name, and hopefully someone will use it for good (TM). Based on the domain name alone, here's a couple of ideas that come to mind:

1) a blog about building websites/apps. I'd love to see something like A List Apart but more around interviews/tips rather than the issue-based system ALA has had for years.

2) a showcase site for design and (web)designers of today. Like what CSS Zen Garden did for 2004, but for 2010 and onwards.

Would do one of these if I had the time. Do give it out to someone you'll make good use of it.
Health care is like auto repair more than it is like purchasing an auto; you were born with this vehicle. I don't understand enough about cars to decide if I should buy Fuel Additive X that's being heavily marketed. Whether I buy it or not is pretty unimportant, because it's just for my car.

If someone is trying to sell me an angioplasty, how am I supposed to decide for myself if I need it? Unfortunately, guessing wrong about the necessity of an invasive procedure is more risky than choosing the wrong fuel additive. No consumer guide can answer that question - and if it can, it can just label itself "medical school" and I'll respect that. Let's say that some guide says "angioplasty does not reduce mortality except in the setting of unstable angina or myocardial infarction, so don't get it." The doctor could come back and say, "yeah, but you have diabetes and that guide didn't look at studies with patients with diabetes." (Stuff like this is true and critically important to understanding clinical trials.) Or maybe you have atypical vascular architecture so the guides don't address that. I'm basically trying to get at clinical equipoise. Clinical equipoise occurs more often than you might think; it's a time where well-meaning doctors can disagree with one another because there is not specific enough data (or none at all) to answer the question at hand. I don't see a guide handling that.

(Note that I'm saying nothing about whether or not patients can choose physicians intelligently - I think they do it quite well via word of mouth - but I'm referring specifically to the consumption of medical care like medicines and procedures.)
Once I saw an article on "How to Get a Rich Girl" one of these Maxim type magazines. I wonder if there were actually people reading it and thinking "yeah, I'm gonna read this and get me a rich chick!"
Happiness is not a Disease
Can anyone comment on the divorce situation? The seemingly huge requests by soon-to-be ex-wife? I mean, CA community property and all, but nonetheless, any insights/opinions? (for those of us not up on the gossip)
I'm using terminus font:
http://www.is-vn.bg/hamster/
What originally fired me up about this topic was this original post by daeken (http://danieltenner.com/posts/0018-how-to-lose-weight.html) and then going back to watching TV and sitting through some fast-food commercials... then it hit me like a truck and I had to write about it.
Things that would make those quantifiers very rich:

(1) Objectively assessing the severity of illness, regardless of what illness (or constellation thereof) the patient had.
(2) Objectively assessing the degree to which a physician's intervention improved an outcome, and the distance between the true outcome and the best outcome (and the null / no treatment outcome).

I think that those two make medicine qualitatively more difficult to quantify in a useful fashion. (Though there are lots of useless ways to quantify medical interventions and physicians.) If you think you have some good ideas for solving those two problems, you have the chance to become very rich; please contact me if so (seriously).
I've done something with javascript that I'm pretty happy with:

http://olopede.com/contact/

Basically, if you have JS turned off, you get "team (.AT.) olopede.com"

But, with JS (which most people have), you get the correct form of the email, plus a mailto: link.
Wedding Glassware
"One interface optimization would be to replace the up and down with a single call button. Passing elevators would stop and indicate which direction they were traveling."

You might want to ponder that one a second longer.
Yup, we’d be better off if we had a name for cosine that clearly implied "x coordinate", and a better name for sine that implied "y coordinate", (or at the very least, were shorter to spell and easier to say) and just did away with tangent, secant, etc. altogether, at least for basic pedagogy (1/sin(x) is almost always way clearer than csc(x)). Then we could make up a good name for the 2-argument arctangent function that inverts the function f(x) = cos(x), sin(x), and call it something much more intuitive than arctan2. Everyone would be much better off.
I'm not saying I agree with his decision, I was just pointing out that it was a deliberate and thoughtful decision :)
Ask HN: Releasing code as open source
I wrote an iPad app that was rejected by Apple with no hope of being accepted anytime in the foreseeable future. I've decided to move on and use the concepts for another project but in the event that others might find it useful I'd like to release the code as open source.

Having never done this before I'm not sure the "best" way to go about it; simply open up a public repository on github and post the code, or do I need to select a specific license, update the source to reflect this choice, provide documentation, etc.?

I'm sure there are no hard-and-fast rules but I'd like to do this in a way that is most beneficial to other developers out there.
cocaine is expensive

although since he is going through a divorce(I think), it's probably lawyer fees
I was just asking myself the same questions. Here's the best way I can explain what I do:

I use Linode as my VPS and have had amazing results. I pay ~$20/mo for their most basic VPS and I'm currently running a web server (lighty) and asterisk on it, both of which have very low activity levels (as in, I have one phone and a couple low traffic static websites), but it seems capable of running much more. I've had mail servers, databases, a Quake server, and all kinds of other random things running on it at the same time, and it just performs really well. Performance and uptime have never been issues. If you go with a VPS, definitely go with them.

For anything I want to test, I just build into ~/local. Including the latest python, ruby, etc. It's very easy to setup your paths so that you can have your own little OS for your user inside of your VPS. If I need to test something out that's hard to do on Windows 7 (my main OS), I develop directly on my VPS with screen and vim.

I've also become more accepting of using web services. For example, instead of installing blogging software of my choosing, I just use Tumblr (it's surprisingly flexible, and it has a supportive community). Instead of hosting files on my VPS, I just host them with S3 or Dropbox. Instead of running a mail server, I use Google Apps. You get the idea.

On the whole GAE vs Heroku thing:

My impression of Heroku is that it's really hard to figure out what they're offering. Linode tells me what to expect for RAM and storage, and GAE is very explicit about what their free limits are. With Heroku, I get the impression that if I'm wondering how the pricing will work out, I may not be the kind of customer Heroku wants.

I've used GAE a few times now, and I like it. If you stay in the path of what Google expects you to do with it, it seems pretty easy to handle. I plan on using GAE for new all my new web app projects, because GAE doesn't restrict features for non-paying users, they just put limits on how much you can use. Google doesn't want me to care about how many worker daemons and web server daemons I'm running; they just do the hosting and it works. If I blow up and have billions of users, I have confidence I can just pay Google to raise the limits and they'll figure it out without me ever speaking a word to them.

With Heroku, spending any less than $70/mo seems like it will place serious limits on what I can achieve, even if I have hardly any traffic. I know it costs at least $36/mo just to get one background worker; so if I want to code anything that uses background tasks, it looks like I need to sign up. If I want to handle two web requests at a time, I'm up to $72/mo. That is just silly expensive, given what my Linode can do at $20/mo.

I don't know if this is intentional and Heroku simply wants to keep out the riffraff who aren't yet ready to scale up; or if Heroku wants to bring in indie developers and doesn't realize how inaccessible their platform seems to be for the little guy.
Or whether "Computer Science" can actually be a science in the rigorous sense when it has nothing to do with the scientific method.
Then you might as well run Windows. Technically, OS X is superior to Linux in a number of areas.

Not to be a dick, but I always feel like these operating system posts are written by people who haven't ever written an operating system kernel. I wish people would just use whatever they want and stop taking pot shots at operating systems they really don't know anything about. This isn't really targeted at you specifically, Daishiman.
It would really help if you watched the video. As I've been saying, this post is in support of the video. I spent 45 minutes laying out all the details.

If you don't want to - that's great but you're comments have no context.
TKO In Tokyo: 3G iPhone Versus iOS 4
Facebook used to lose my session when I was using Adium to connect to Facebook chat. Haven't used the Adium/Facebook integration recently, but give that a look if it bugs you.
>"Both the subprime-mortgage business and for-profit colleges are built on giving loans to people who can’t pay them back."

I think they're missing the slight point that a college graduate will hopefully turn into a person who has a constant and decent inflow of income.
I've had Safari lose my sessions multiple times recently, including just now when iTunes lost my session multiple times while trying to edit account info. I'm assuming iTunes (on Mac) uses Safari under the hood?
> not worth the switching costs.

Well, it’s certainly too hard to practically switch, and so we won’t. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not worth the cost. We’ve apparently had π in its current form for for 300 years; we’re going to have to live with it much longer than that.

The way to actually make a change like that though, assuming we wanted to, would be to just make up a new symbol for 2π, and start using it. For a while, the two symbols would coexist, and then someday the π symbol would just start to fade out.

(Probably about as easy to change in practice as switching to metric dates and times, as the French tried to do after the revolution.)
The postscript mentions a paternoster, which I'd never heard of and is absolutely fascinating. It looks incredibly dangerous.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster

Example of one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXSnNzGJDdg
Thanks for pointing that out. I'll give it another go.
I would like to know more about the person who thought they should 'steer' the elevator by pressing the button which could lead it to the person's floor for pickup, and the specifics of the lobby where they were.

How old were they?

Why had they never observed, or been instructed by adults about, typical elevator operation?

Had they never seen an elevator, but had played video games? Was the display of the elevator's current floor close enough to the buttons, or perhaps stylized enough, to suggest it could or should be directly controlled like a video game character?

(Perhaps JGC was performing an experiment with a young child or recent immigrant?)

I think the traditional design was probably optimal at the time it was designed. As others have noted, a single call button adds unnecessary stops -- and at the worst times, when the elevator and lobby are most busy.

Many times there is no indicator of where a elevator car is. Or, in different buildings, variable numbers of cars, unrelated to the standard up/down buttons. So anyone with experience with a few different elevators will find interpreting from their location, rather than the elevator cars, the more consistent approach.

Apparently the state-of-the-art is to have buttons for every floor to be outside the car, in the lobby. Each person declares their destination with a press; as cars arrive they display or announce where they'll stop so the right people can board. But elevators are an old technology; so many buttons and such optimal grouping/scheduling were impractical when the current conventions arose.
There are companies in India where people are coders longer than five years (I was at one).

My gut feeling (inferring from conversations) is that the vast majority of companies do not perform work of sufficient complexity to require more than three years of technical learning. The only way employees there can then add value to the organization is by becoming a manager.
Why? The elevators in my college dormitory worked precisely like that. If the door opened but the "up" light was on and you wanted to go down, you'd just stare at the people in the elevator and wait for it to continue its way up.
Link to actual project page: http://www.cocotron.org/
Personally, I found myself wondering why I'd want to use a font from somebody that cared little enough about readability to use a font like that on their webpage.
Why Johnny can't code
"Finance" is a pretty broad word; the payment card market (at least until recently) has been pretty free of regulation, certainly of regulation that would prevent the sort of abuses highlighted in the article.

One interesting point is that the form of regulation that currently exists - the various laws and rules that led to the billion-dollar settlements - still don't have enough teeth (sort of like the "cost-of-doing-business" fines that gross polluters pay that are barely a day's worth of profits).
At one point in the article he makes the correction that it's technically a "duopoly" - but certainly not a free market.
This is said tongue-in-cheek, right? There are many people with usage cases that require different things. Hell, I'm a developer and that doesn't come close to describing my workflow.

Vim is totally worth the time, though.
Keep in mind that a homepage is not a landing page. The homepage serves many masters, the landing page -- on the other hand -- is laser targeted at moving a prospect who you know one very salient data point about exactly one step further in their relationship with you.

I'd point out the differences between my home page and landing page for you, but honestly I have so many tests going on right now I'm not sure what you'd be seeing.
FWIW, I'd try to avoid demonizing the ex-wife in this scenario (not that you are). I've followed her blog off and on during the proceedings, and honestly, her demands don't seem terribly unreasonable:

"The irony of this whole thing is that I don't want hundreds of millions of dollars. I think my ex-husband is brilliant and works like a demon and deserves his success and his wealth. But I also think -- after eight years of marriage and six kids (five surviving) -- that I am entitled to a fair settlement..." http://moschus.livejournal.com/140502.html

She's probably asking for somewhere between 5 and 10% of their combined assets, near as I can tell. I think the bigger issue in the divorce is one of pride, in that Elon doesn't want to give up any shares in the companies he's built... it's more than just money to him.

/back to work
There's also radians/sec, which comes up in network analysis. Radians correspond directly with things in the real world, like analog filters (cutoff frequency omega of a single-pole filter in rad/s=1/RC). Radians/sec are used because the math is a lot simpler. Switching to Hz puts pi into the equations, and switching to three-legged pi (thri?) would put 1/2 in the equations.
I agree. Friends always get a bye on the filter, but I'm way more likely to look at someone who has 150 follows and 50 followers than someone with 2k of each (which means they're just playing the follow me/follow you game).
Thanks for the reply maqr.

I've had similar successes with Slicehost. I've been wanting to look into Linode and Prgr, but 1) haven't found the time, and 2) can't really justify the cost of two VPS yet.

I'll definitely try out GAE for my clojure projects (I'm under the impression they'll work okay), and see if I can't convert some of my Django projects to see if they'll work there too.
Better yet: have you earned that million by creating many millions in value for your customers.
AsyncRecord - Non Blocking database access for Ruby
Just because we have a different value for pi doesn’t mean we have a different sin function.

Which is exactly what I just got done saying that I'm not saying. Reading comprehension, much?

To be entirely clear: All I was saying is that the reason we use radians in the first place (instead of, say, cycles) is that it fixes calculus. It has little to do with 2pi. It only relates to the comment it was said in reply to.
I fully support his right to make such choices. Plenty of people prefer to have no chance of encountering porn and if they have this control, perhaps they'll be less interested in controlling what the rest of us watch.

It bothers me when people equate private choices like Mister Jobs with government censorship. Its not. Censorship is using force to interfere with the speech and choices of others. All Apple is doing is offering one of those choices.
I agree with this, after having a linux dual-boot for four years on my last laptop, it got to a point where I didn't even remember the password for it. I've been happy with just using a cygwin shell inside of windows these days.
"There is also a suspicion that Jobs is simply acting out of self-interest, calculating that pitching Apple as the Disney of computing will be a smart branding move that will earn him enough market share to offset the considerable loss of interest from those who want to see porn on Apple's amazing machines."

There are so many things wrong with that paragraph I'm not sure where to start.

1. Jobs isn't losing customers because of the no porn policy. Show me data to the contrary.

2. Digital porn is most frequently consumed in the browser. Uhm, remember that most lewd of all apps?

3. There is no suspicion that Jobs is acting out of self-interest (ie in Apple's best interest). He's required to do that by law.

4. David Gibson is a terrible writer.
It's pretty shocking to see two amateurish blog posts about divorce proceedings make it to the nytimes. That's gotta suck.
Let's be clear. "Open source" actually means distributed with a license compatible with the open source movement. Unlicensed is not technically open source. (Semantics, I know, but it can make a difference - not knowing exactly what your application does it is hard to tell whether it is relevant).

If you care at all what happens to it, slapping the GPL on it and putting it on github are easy choices. Here are the instructions on how to GPL your code:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html

If you really don't care what happens to it (i.e. don't care if it is forked a zillion times) just slap it on your website somewhere - but personally I would still GPL it.
This demonstrates exactly why Gruber completely misses the point every time he tries to nitpick the Android team's statements about not using private APIs. While Gruber wants to make it about hollow point scoring, what the Android guys are getting at is that they've made a conscious design decision to have a clear distinction between what is system level and what is application level specifically to avoid getting stuck in this sort of situation.

Yes, your Android phone has apps you probably can't uninstall, but that's a distribution decision rather than something that was forced on them by technical limitation.
Recent developments in nginx.conf scripting
The trick to getting people to stop polluting is to remove limited liability and enforce property rights. If you have to ensure your business, your insurer will make sure that you follow their regulations and if you don't they won't pay and you'll go bankrupt. The property owner gets to sue the polluter, and thus they get compensated instead of the fine going to the government it goes to those who are hurt.
> Reading comprehension, much?

Yes, I’ve re-read your original post 4 times, and your intended meaning is quite confusing, because you’re talking about a different way of changing our notation than the link is, but without clearly stating that, and your notation change, which you criticize, is something of a non-sequitur in context of the parent comment and the article, as far as I can tell.

Thus, you seemed to be implying† that the new definition of pi results in messing up calculus. To clear things up: “We could measure angles in any arbitrary units we want, but using radians makes calculus work, and if we’re using radians, the circumference is 2 pi of them, which is why pi as a unit is not ideal, and newpi = 2*pi would be better. If we wanted we could have an angle of pi ‘diametrans’ in a complete circle instead, using our existing definition of pi ~ 3.14, but that would be stupid, because it would break all kinds of symmetries in calculus.”

†: This is apparently a misinterpretation though (mine and also aston’s, who wrote “a radian is a radian”), and you don’t actually mean to be implying that.