skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> you're saying is that the spring can't distinguish between the setup on the right and the setup on the left.

Correct, because according to the balance, both setups are indistinguishable.

The dark secret of spring balances is that they measure (and display) force in only one direction. In stasis, the net forces on the balance are exactly zero N since there are equal and opposite forces acting upon the balance (true in each setup), yet the needle moves because it is measuring the movement (stretching) of the spring inside the balance (which at one end is anchored internally to the balance casing, and the other end is anchored to the string/mass).

So, as for the setup on the right, the left-hand weight is pulling on the balance with weight 1kg (9.8N), and the right-hand weight is pulling on the balance with weight 1kg (9.8N), but since the balance only displays forces in one direction, it will display 1kg (in this case it doesn't matter which direction it is measuring because the forces are 180 degrees from each other).
You should probably use the same tactics that were used to prevent people from building a MySpace killer. :)
Google Music to Arrive Before Christmas?
The question is should the documentation shipped with perl document the features available with that distribution, or should it document the features available in the wider Perl culture?

For example, Moose has always made an effort to cooperate with the native Perl object system. The documentation in the perldoc's for object oriented programming isn't wrong. The skills you learn from perltoot and companions will transfer to Moose, you'll know how the underlying implementation works. Is this the right way to learn Perl's Object Oriented programming? That is an argument the Perl community itself is having[1]. As that argument is resolved the documentation is updated.

If you think about this in startup terms. Moose as a project is 4 years old. Would you invest in a startup that had an exit strategy that was targeted for than than 5 years? Moose has just recently (in the last year or two) reached a dominant market position when compared to the existing competition (Class::MethodMaker, Class::STD, etc) but still is adopted by only 5% of the total market (that is we have ~1K direct downstream dependencies out of about 20K distribution on CPAN). It would be premature to expect the industry to recognize let alone promote Moose as the de-facto standard. However it would be an excellent bet that sometime in the next few years that will happen.

Of the "Modern Perl" distributions out there Moose is one of the most consolidated in it's scope. Things like Catalyst have been gaining new competition (Dancer, Mojolicious) in their respective markets. It's interesting to watch things that appear to my untrained eye like market forces play out across the adoption of various CPAN modules.

To circle back around, perl documentation needs to strike a careful balance between what they can guarantee exists (bless $ref, __PACKAGE__) and what the community accepts as best practice (use Moose;). The documentation needs to intentionally be less dynamic than the fashions of the community. It must be conservative enough to provide continuity so that someone who happens to be on a perl-5.8.8 box (released 3 months before Moose, and still the standard on RHEL if I recall) doesn't learn a whole different set of "best practice" modules than someone on a 5.10.1 box. It does however need to be updated as things like Moose take over the mind share and prove themselves out. When only 1 in 20 modules you run into will likely involve Moose, you'll still need to understand the native solutions. When that ratio changes, the balance will need to change too.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/980751/should-i-learn-per...
It's probably still too early on in these non-board-game-like game-AI competitions to do serious comparisons, but one thing that'd be cool to figure out in the future is how many components are resuable between these kinds of problems, versus requiring different strategy or hand tuning / hand feature extraction. For example, could similar bots do well at both Planet Wars and Starcraft (http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition)? If not, are there parts that can be shared (e.g. factor out high-level strategy versus low-level unit control)? Etc.
I'm not familiar with the Google Code site. Could your provide a link?

I've downloaded my kit from: http://ai-contest.com/starter_packages.php

Also, for what it's worth: http://ai-contest.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=405&...

I suspect I'm having a goofy Java issue, but that's likely a personal bias.
That was my first thought as well. 3 chiefs and one indian? That's an obvious problem.
Inspired by recent videos that visualized various sorting algorithms w/audio, I decided to create a Radix sort video using using Python:

http://rasterburn.org/~sgt/stuff3/radix/

(YouTube link, although video is laggy so I recommend the previous link): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ8QKkei7QY)
Okay, so I thought back to my physics days some more, and the real understanding of the problem lies in understanding the definition of tension. The scale is actually measuring tension in the rope.

An informal definition of tension: cut the rope at any point, and determine what force needs to be applied to the one of the cut ends to keep that part of the rope in equilibrium. That force is the tension in the rope.

So in the second example, just measure the tension in the rope.
Nokia N8 to launch September 30, three days earlier from Nokia Online
You are the hired help.

You came in looking for a job.

You will go out looking for one.

The legal fees for selling you stock in an S-corp are negligible, buy-sell agreements and employment contracts should already be in place...or there are none. In which case you don't want equity anyway.

There is nothing in your description which speaks in favor of staying.

The owners are just burning through OPM before they go bankrupt.
But COBOL on Crank just sounds better. Add Jason Statham typing away and well...you have something (not sure what exactly).
(disclaimer: Agile consultants ruined the software group I work in.)

Making good software is hard, and anyone claiming to have a magical process that guarantees good software is selling snake oil. I can appreciate your wanting to make a buck, but would also seriously appreciate it if you could find some other industry besides software development to go screw up.
Ask HN: review my site: somebodybuildthis.com
After lurking on hn for a while, i decided to make my dream site exist, so here it is-- a site where people can post their ideas and have people with time build them.

I'd appreciate any feedback or criticism, thanks!
Coincidently I'm reading Ernst Mach's "The Science of Mechanics" at this very moment. It includes a lot of analysis of setups like this.

As for this problem: consider first the weights. Each one's downward force is 1 kg, due to gravity. There must also be exactly 1 kg's force's worth of tension in the string, because if it were less the weights would be moving down and if it were more the weights would be pulled up. Because the system (is assumed to be) not moving, we may replace the right side weight and pulley wheel with a fixed anchor for the string, in which case there would be no doubt that the spring balance displays 1 kg. Argument from symmetry says the scale would also read 1 kg if the left side were anchored and the right side free. Because the system in unmoving, it really makes no difference whether the opposite side of the scale is fixed to an anchor or balanced by a free weight: it will read 1 kg in all cases.

This is very similar to a Car Talk puzzler that their physicist consultant clarified: is it worse to be in a car going 60 mph that hits an unmovable highway overpass wall, or to be in a car going 60 mph that hits an identical car perfectly head-on that is also going 60 mph? The physicist's answer was that there is no difference: in both cases you experience an identical impulse going from 60 mph to a stop in the same time.

You may be inclined disbelieve this on the idea that the crumple zones in the car-to-car collision make for a "softer" collision, but consider this: define the point at which the bumpers of the two cars as "the origin". Assuming the cars and the collision are perfectly symmetrical, each car is going to crumple up on its respective side of the origin identically. Suppose the force starts small and ramps up gradually as the crumpling occurs; each car will be pushing the other away with the same force. An unmoving highway overpass barrier would resist with the same force.
what about people following orders rather than waiting?
I'm the first to admit that I have a bit of computer nerd hubris: I constantly and secretly think to myself that I do the most complicated work in the company and this quote supports this self-aggrandising, vain and stupid thought.

I need to stop taking myself so seriously.
How Rich ARE You?
Check out Joe's Goals. http://www.joesgoals.com/

What's your edge?
It's only happened to me once, but it did happen, and the person who did it was regarded by others as petty and power-hungry. FWIW, I was brought back to do a bit of work later, and the number 3 guy in the place heard my story and was basically shocked that HR had handled things this way.

How this happened was I'd handed in my notice already - 2 weeks. But... I wanted to know if I was going to get my remaining vacation time as pay or not. I'd started before there was an 'hr handbook', but there was one in place. I wrote to HR and asked, and was told "it's in the handbook". I wrote back and asked what page it was on, because I couldn't see it in mine.

I got an email back saying something to the effect of "here's your vacation that's owed you..." and that was it. 10 minutes later the guy in the same cube as me said email to me bounced. I watched him send and it bounced back saying 'mailbox invalid'. An HR rep from our building came to my desk another 10 minutes later with a box saying "I have to escort you out of the building now". She was nice about it, and didn't seem to want to do it, but did it. So... the project I was working on was left in a broken state, client emails to me bounced, and they had no clue what was going on. I left, set up my own shop, and what do you know - that client decided to jump ship and stay with me instead of being charged twice the hourly rate for the kind of service they were getting. Basically, they considered their business too important to be cut off by phone and email from the people doing the work solely on the whim of one HR person.

Yeah, that was my rant. Again, only happened to me once, but it happened, and I've seen it happen to others.
Also applicable to structural engineers. When I was still practicing I remember calculating what a single thread of a bolt could withstand (something irregular was being done, cant remember) for a structural piece of a replacement section for the truss of the sky dome.
'Jailbreak' Bacteria Can Trigger Heart Disease
I'm pretty sure everything is just simple addition/subtraction. Watching the video, neutral planets don't have any growth. When you get a planet to -1 you take control and are left with 0 ships there. (In the video green sent a fleet of 50 to a planet with 4, green took control of the planet and had 45 ships there)
Doesn't your contract specify the legal minimum?
If scale reads zero, then that means there must be no force on the scale. If there's no force acting on it, that's much the same as if it wasn't there to start with. So, if you were to remove the scale (effectively cutting the string) the weights would stay in the same place, floating in mid air.
You need to network. Its not just about working on other people's projects as it is about being genuinely interested, and part of a community. Go to venues and conferences, or connect with people here, reddit, twitter, or irc. Its slow, but its a great way to understand what others are doing and be able to tell them what you're doing. Loic Le Muer, the founder of seesmic, has some good advice: http://bit.ly/91NzmR
I haven't seen specific info yet. Your best bet is to download a starter package and run the game locally.

I've only played with it a little and my impression is that growth rate is an integer that's added to the planet's population every turn, but only occupied planets not neutral ones. (So a planet of yours with a population of 138 and a growth rate of 5 will have a population of 143 next turn (assuming no increase or decrease from friendly or enemy ships).)
Spheres with uniform density behave exactly the same as mass dots.

Mathematicians can cook up giant numbers without blinking, like Graham's number. If that makes anyone feel good, then good for them. Somehow, all the quotes I read from Dijkstra leave an arrogant after-taste in my mouth.
Take Heed, Tech Giants: Edison’s Failed Plot To Hijack Hollywood
That's not necessarily true. I've run into this sort of situation in the past (never worked for them, just seen it), and the attitudes of the non-technical people towards the technical ones tends to be one of "they're just programmers: they're taking my brilliant vision and merely transcribing it onto the computer, like a typist!".

These kinds of people, who believe that building a successful software company is 99% inspiration and 1% perspiration tend to be egotistical and clueless. I bet they've never heard of HN, and even if they read this thread would be convinced they could find yet another poor 21/22 year old sucker to employ for under market rates. The unfortunate thing is that they're probably right about the latter.
New self-assembling photovoltaic technology that repairs itself
Interesting how complex it is to determine the accuracy of the missiles. Multiple Patriot missiles fired at each Scud, several possible outcomes, the Scud can break apart making multiple targets for the Patriots.
A blog and a novel are different things entirely, and he's written many novels.
Like you say, 3D matrix transforms are already included in the low-level graphics APIs that are increasingly being used to accelerate element compositing in modern browsers. So why not make this functionality available to web content creators through CSS?

When you're on the GPU, rendering a quad with plain old scale+translate is just as fast as rendering it with a full 3D transform (with the important twist of potentially increased texture sampling and edge antialiasing requirements, of course).
I do mind the idea of a cashless society because then there will be no way for anonymous purchases. It's like saying: "I don't mind being set on fire just so long as they make provision that I won't get too hot. Uhhh.. yeah. We'll get right on that.
Do you know how they fixed it? I can think of a few ways, but I'm curious which they used.
Steve Jobs "never had any designs. He has not designed a single project"
Income and Infidelity
Apple CEO Steve Jobs to be honored at Vision Awards 2010
A desirable property of techniques to improve task success is that it is actually implementable by the people carrying out the tasks. Formally proving the correctness of CRUD apps leaves something to be desired here. (To say nothing about formally proving the correctness of the browser and underlying OS, which is probably a necessary pre-requisite of proving the correctness of the CRUD app.)

One of the reasons statistics took Japanese manufacturing by storm is that you can, and Toyota does, teach everything you need to know to justify pushing the Big Red Button to someone with a high school math background. ("Here's a graph for the stat of interest. For each production run, test one and put an X on this graph. If you see three Xs above this line, the process is out of control. Anyone in the factory who sees this, even the cleaning lady, should immediately walk over and push the Big Red Button, costing us hundreds of millions of yen. You will not get in trouble, indeed, we will praise you for diligence. Why does this work? Stats 101 lecture.")
http://nanochess.110mb.com/chess4.html

Much older than this article, but same idea.
The hardest part of resetting my sleep schedule is actually sticking to it ... I almost always end up staying up later and later and before I know it it's a total mess again.
Relevant: http://cs227b.stanford.edu (General Game Playing)

GGPs can pretty much play any game with no continuous or unbounded variables, i.e. any game with a finite number of states. Popular examples include tic-tac-toe, checkers, and Connect 4; here's a larger list: http://code.google.com/p/ggp-base/source/browse/trunk/ggp-ba...

Planet Wars could be played by a GGP, assuming some bound on the number of ships that could be created, but standard approaches like UCT, which don't take into consideration similarity between states [1], would fail hard against a specialized player.

[1] For example, if UCT saw a good move in a given state, it wouldn't apply that knowledge to the adjacent state in which only one ship is in a different location.
Convicting one for the sins of others?
How about for headlines and URLs?
Sorry, kids, no jobs here
I agree, though "We got the missile but missed the warhead. That has to count for something." strikes me as a little off. Pretend Saddam Hussein has ordered his team of crack experts to use crappy engineering as an active countermeasure. They just beat you. Do better.
If anything it seems to suggest that repression would be a
successful strategy if it could be managed.

Eveolutionary memory repression would be a bit like feeling no pain: increased risk to get hurt again.
In the case of a 3-body solar system, they wouldn't. But as soon as one of these mass dots tries to land (or stand) on one of the other mass dots, you'd see a difference.

If you say that this violates the assumptions of the basic model, you're right. But if you look at all the craters on the moon, the model assumptions are violated pretty often - the trick is recognizing when you need a different model, which is always easy in retrospect, but can be difficult to anticipate.
Okay, then it was to pad the js file to 1024 bytes, because 1024 bytes is more interesting than 1014 bytes.
Maybe true for Dijkstra, but not for most working programmers today. Generally you work on a layer of the software stack and manage maybe two or three orders of magnitude. What's below is effectively instantaneous, and what's above is just an arbitrary length of time.

Of course, the hardest bugs are the ones that cross those boundaries.
Pedantry: The kg is a unit of mass, not force. You want Newtons.
It's being run by UW undergrads - I think it's just for fun.
Can I just adjust you last sentence:

Start simple and then keep throwing out stuff you don't need.
A bridge that depends on all rivets being perfect is a bad thing. A proof that no longer holds outside of its domain of application is still useful.

The trick is to recognize when you need one and when you'd rather use the other.
I think that's reading a bit too much one-directionality into it. While true, it's the amount of force that's at issue here - not the direction. If a second 2kg weight were added to the "anchor" end of the spring balance - it would either register -1kg (if it's built to do that) or break or lock up givinging invalid or useless readings.
Of course - assuming the balance isn't anchored anywhere else, this would set the whole system in motion, and it would all fall apart ratherquickly.
Yep, that's true. I just thought that is was interesting that the shape of a planet doesn't affect its trajectory under the laws of gravity alone (i.e. no collisions etc). It's also true that physicists do use explicit approximations often, for example in statistical mechanics, or by using a linear approximation instead of an exact quantity. That's similar to calculating the asymptotic running time of an algorithm instead of the exact number of steps it takes (except the limit in the physics case takes some quantity to zero to get a linear approximation whereas for the algorithm we take the limit of the input data size to infinity).
An interview with Anders Heljsberg (2003)
I think he's assuming you are attaching the scale with the middle of the connecting-cable as the mass to be weighted and then pulling upwards on it..... which would make his description correct for that problem - but that's not the puzzle posted here.
In the first picture, the weight pulls down with 1kg of force, and the ceiling pulls up with 1kg of force. If it didn't, there would be an imbalance, causing a net acceleration downwards.

In the second picture, the first weight pulls rightward with 1kg of force, and the second weight pulls leftward with 1kg of force. The situation is exactly the same as the first, except with gravity providing the second force rather than the inter-molecular bonds responsible for maintaining the rigidity of the ceiling.
Is Multitasking A Recipe for Multiple Failures?
Don't bring up marker felt don't bring up marker felt.
Works for me.

How about never do something that isn't making the team run faster? I don't care what the books or the authors say, agile is about optimizing your particular team for your particular situation. There's not a one-size-fits-all cookbook.

The only caveat I'll add is this: many times people won't believe (or do not understand) that certain things will actually make them run faster and have a happier team. So you have to have an open mind. If you already know agile sucks, it's probably going to suck. If you already know that agile means TDD and everything done a certain way? It's probably going to suck a lot. In fact, the ones that think they know agile (and love it and are willing to tell everybody they hear about it) are usually the ones making life miserable on everybody else. I'd much rather have honest skeptics. With skeptics you can try something and decide whether you like it or not. In the "agilistas" minds, unless you do it perfectly, you are sinning against agile and it's no wonder you are struggling. They can be impossible to live with. (and they've lost track of the big picture)

Or as I told one team, I've never had a team fail because of the way they decided to do (or not do) story points. Don't get hung up in the weeds.
Which is attempting to conflate Trader Joes with slavery by placing them within the same document, and leading off with the death of a single person at one of their suppliers. While neatly sidestepping any actual information, and going to great lengths to cover things which could be construed as related, without ever saying anything directly against them.

What's the point of the article? An attempted smear-campaign-by-proximity? If they're doing something wrong, why not include that instead of rambling about the problems of other chains in the same business?
One of these days the Apple.com homepage will be in Comic Sans and the transformation will be complete.
The structure and layout look nice, but you need to seed the site with more content. I'd suggest that you use a bunch of friends to start with, and go from there.
The Effect of Clouds on Climate: A Key Mystery for Researchers
> build software that people want to use instead of
> software that managers want to buy

Yes, I remember, I learnt it the hard way between 2000 and 2002...
Is HBR in your comment Harvard Business Review?
I don't know, how do infographics affect information retention?
Also doesn't detect stalemate.
Bonus: CSV supports sharding.
I thought that the experience of developing the GPS network (where all the sattelites and ground stations must be time co-ordinated to within 10+ decimal places in seconds) would have helped them with this missile system.

A GPS satellite travels much faster than a missile, and is accurate to within meters, so the tolerances are much higher (and the system was designed prior to patriot).

There is a definite 'not invented here' syndrome amongst defense contractors - I doubt they share any information, research or solutions amongst one other, which means the US tax payer foots the bill each time one of these contractors must independently develop and implement a system that has likely already been built in another part of defense.