skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I must say, this article also strikes me as mental masturbation. He puts introduces concepts in a way that is academically very disjointed, but the juxtapositions might seem plausible to a casual reader of popular science books, eg,

> The basic Schrodinger Equation which describes the electron in the hydrogen atom approximately (the electron is a spin 1/2 particle which is exactly described by the Dirac Equation) is <LaTeX of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation>

Having studied quantum mechanics, I think, if anything, this article highlights why physicists occasionally state that no one understands quantum mechanics. The concepts simply cannot be adequately compressed into manageable English sentences, but the trained mind can genuinely operate on the problems using the symbolic language of math, then return to English to express the results. It's sort of like flipping from one programming language to another: they might all be Turing complete, but no one is implemented a sed VM in browsers. For that matter, I wonder if native speakers of highly iconographic languages like Chinese are able to approach such challenges.
Mixpanel is hiring for lots of positions - frontend, backend, ops
As a startup founder based in Chicago, "Amen."
Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Williams
The Rockstar Startup Team
Interesting that they mention integration with Netflix, which (last I checked) doesn't support Chrome.
It is probably not situational when the candidate offers to conceal his hair on the job, and you in effect respond by saying "cut your hair or no deal". Even police departments have had to back down and allow Sikhs to wear turbans.
I have always wondered why browsers haven't led the fight against excessive user monitoring, especially Firefox. Rather they abdicate this responsibility to plug-ins that do not have widespread adoption.

I told people to switch to FF because it was a safer experience and certainly a better browser. Now we have a lot of bullshit methods to continuously track users. Where are you now supposedly superior browser?
Obviously, France and Britain could have just launched straight across the border into Germany then and there, but then wouldn't they have to face the entire Soviet army? Having just taken out Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and half of Poland, the Soviets were as clear a threat as the Germans. I guess the question then becomes what would have happened if western Europe stopped Hitler at the soonest possible point of advantage and WWII was against the Soviets.
Contribute to the Azimuth project
Among the smart folks around here, I bet there are several that could contribute with sound articles on the science/engineering side, or improve the usability of the site.
More background information:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week301.html
I don't believe that people who make more money are always delivering more value.

Then why are people giving them money? What makes you think that you (or some regulator or something) could do a better job of evaluating their worth.

There are plenty of terrible CEOs who destroy the value of the companies they manage, yet still receive huge salaries and bonus packages

I think this is a case of the normal human inability to assess the risk of rare, significant events (and hence our overreaction to terrorist attacks, child abduction, etc.). While the kind of thing you cite certainly happens from time to time, I submit that it's much rarer than many people seem to perceive -- the very fact that they make big news is evidence of how unusual it is. The hiring of a CEO is a very significant decision that is attended with a certain amount of risk. On one hand it's important to be able to attract the best talent available, but on the other hand the calculated risk may crap out.

Eliminating the risk of losses due to contract buyouts is (obviously, at least to me) not the solution. I know that I'm not capable of doing the job that my company's CEO does; I don't know anyone who is. Even if I were technically capable, I don't think I could handle the responsibility she shoulders, keeping us all profitably employed. I think she earns everything she gets.

I'd say looking at the ridiculous increases in the CEO-worker earning gap over the last few decades it has been warped by factors other than deservedness. ... there are plenty of great teachers/engineers/others lower on the totem pole who earn a relative pittance

I think that much of that can be attributed to the fact that the market is not free to assign value as appropriate. For one thing, we have protectionism preserving low-skill jobs. While the value of an excellent CEO really is increasing, the value of a low-skill assembly worker is not. But tariffs (caused in part by the demagoguery of greed, I might add) prevent us from getting rid of those jobs, which would eventually lead to greater availability of high-skill jobs.

In the specific case of teachers, the mismatch of contribution to compensation is explicitly their own fault. The rules that their unions demand we adhere to disallow us from compensating better those with greater value. The same is true of other unions (which tends to correspond to those lower on your totem pole).
You can start a new startup from technology or from a market need. Start with market first, the question you should be asking is "who needs to communicate privately, wants to pay for it, and was not able to do that so far in a satisfactory manner?". Once you figure it out you might realize that most of the "it's impossible to do perfect, hence no point in doing it at all" concerns while generally valid do not apply to your target market. And from there it's perfectly doable and might be a good business too.

edit: doesn't have to be about email either - the need is first and foremost. it could be well just a private messenger platform.
Tell HN: I'm ready for a Gmail replacement
Lately Gmail has been slower and slower for me. It's not that I have a lot of mail, I'm at 10%. It's just lagging. Today it's been especially bad, with Gmail taking 10s of seconds to load. Downloading attached PDF files also takes 10s of seconds. Opening emails is slow. This both from the office and @home. (Is it possible my account has been erroneously moved to a remote datacenter?)

I'd be ready to pay $5/mo. for a better service that actually depends on me being satisfied.
WebSockets in PhoneGap Projects
Geek Rebellion: What Good Startups Have in Common with Arcade Fire
> Why does one interaction or “observation” appear to collapse the wave function and another does not? To be sure, there is probably some hand-waving explanation of this seeming problem with quantum mechanics in the advanced physics research literature. But really, is it understood? Probably not.

Actually, this is quite well understood.

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

http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf
Find a popular plugin, add a feature to it. Less talk, more code. You don't need/get to ask permission; it's the blessing/curse of working in OSS.
Yes, if you load in all your content through AJAX/AJAH or some other form of client side process, google won't get that content when crawling your page. The best way to see what search engines will see is to load the page in a browser and then use "View Source".

There are ways to help search engines find your dynamic content, however, which typically involve creating static versions of the content in addition to your more user-friendly AJAX versions. Google outlines some methods for doing this using specially formatted hash tags here: http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/index.html
Article specifically says the Soviet spade was NOT folding.
Devils advocate:

Any newsletter service will provide these stats and more (e.g., MailChimp, Constant Contact, Bronto). What extra value can Mixpanel add?
That is my Minecraft username.
Thoughts on Redis, Not Enough Thoughts on Alternatives
Ask HN: Which analytics solution do you recommend? 
Am trying to decide the analytics solution (client side) I should use for my startup thats about to be launched. A bunch of options seem to be available - Clicky, Mixpanel, Crazyegg, Google Analytics, Chartbeat, reinvigorate.net.

Which one would you recommend and why? Should I use just one solution or a combination? Any other solution(s) I should consider?

Can you also recommend best practices for a key-value store based server side analytics platform?
Redis: the deficiency is the persistence
Ghostly Image Reveals Ice Age Rivers
I think he's quite right about that.
Make sure to look at the full prices for all the apps. Many of those (Chargify and Uservoice, for example) will require integration into your application. When that 3 month trial price runs out, don't get hit with sticker shock when the full-price plan kicks in. It's very tough to just walk away when you've already integrated a service.
I'm very surprised that nobody has mentioned the domination of modern banking over our present society.

Most of the major nations of the world currently pay a fee to private banks for the privilege of circulating their own currency. Our current debt-backed money system is unstable and serves to exacerbate and deepen the gap between the rich and poor and lodges an enormous amount of power in the hands of a few men.

I believe that should humanity ever squirm out from under the thumb of 'big banking' we will view the stranglehold it has had on us for the past few hundred years as a great systemic evil to which we collectively averted our gaze for a long long time.
Maybe not, but the idea that 51% of people voting in the USA can enforce their will on all 300 million citizens is pretty scary to me…

Luckily that's not quite how it works - we're not a direct democracy. But, even when a majority of representatives attempts to exert their will on us citizens, the scope of their will is limited to the powers explicitly granted them by the constitution and they, within those powers, are further restricted from infringing on our natural and enumerated rights.

Certainly, a reasonable argument can be made that the legislature does push the limits with regards to their powers, particularly with respect to the commerce clause, and we do more arguing in defense of our individual rights than I think should be necessary, but all-in-all we're not doing too bad. In any case, we've so far only needed to use our first three boxes [1] in the defense of liberty. I wouldn't consider it a failure until we find need for the fourth.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty
Why Vietnam's net censorship doesn't work
"Is there an API for HN / is it ok to scrape HN?"

Comment from PG: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721105
The two ads I had to click to hide and the sharing toolbar on inc.com are all more objectionable than dreadlocks.

As tptacek has written, is there even a controversy here?
I'm not seeing any of the book titles. I'm just getting a link to Slate.
I was actually thinking about the absurdly high cost of high speed tracks (tens of millions per kilometer). But yeah, oceans are somewhat of a problem.
This is so true.

We are a dev shop with a lot of experience with .NET. For our most recent web project we decided to take RoR for a spin. Things that would take an hour in .NET took us days. Not because RoR is lacking, but because we just don't have as deep a knowledge of Ruby or Rails.

Having used both, I can't think of a compelling technical reason to choose one over the other. I personally think .NET has a nicer tool chain, but RoR's tools are more than adequate.

Go with what your developers want to use.
Of .NET startups, plentyoffish and stackoverflow come to mind, and both appear to scale nicely. NET is not really my cup of tea, but if it's what you are proficient in then go for it.
The last time I used the openJDK on ubuntu was version 9.10 and then JGoodies LaF looked abysmal. Well, by abysmal I mean that the openJDK inserted spacing between most components and the sun JDK looked consistent with the rendering on Windows and AIX.
> My wife and I also have a say, though we usually take the advice of the doctor. So, between us and my doctor, yes, 100%.

You and your doctor decide whether the pharmacy has a given drug? You and your doctor decide how many doctors there are in your area? You and your doctor decide what equipment your hospital has?
They would look at the vast regions of the world that are peaceful, and think we are foolish for being so trustful of our neighbours.

"Why is Washington not afraid of New York raising an army and marching on the capital?", they would say. Until the last couple centuries, that's something you'd have to be afraid of. Yet, that's something that people today would think is preposterous.

I'm an optimist. I happen to think this is a trend that will continue.
One of Foundry's current investments is a toy company.

http://www.smithandtinker.com/

It's a bit of both? The product and the glue?
I find it funny that you appear to have visited neither site.

Linode pretty clearly uses ColdFusion, and Chunkhost looks to be built on Rails -- look at the source HTML for the 'members login' page for both sites. Linode has lots of 'CFM' and 'CFIDE', and Chunkhost has the telltale 'javascripts/' URLs.
Good thing it's not an actual possibility then, since changing the US constitution would require a two-thirds majority (so to speak - technically it could be a much lower fraction of the population, but for practical purposes it's true enough).

Mind you, short of re-instituting slavery very few laws arise to the level of specifying the whole course of anyone's life. Democracy is a flawed system, to be sure - as any member of an unpopular minority can confirm. But we have yet to identify any reliably better alternative, and may never do so. After all, if there were sufficient agreement on how to identify good and wise candidates to be benign dictators, there'd be no need of their services.
Yowza. This surprises me. I thought Ev was interested in running the company and building a legacy, but this looks more like a plan for a big exit.
Yuk. Why does it introduce a new global namespace for "named templates"? In other words, why:

$.template("foo", ...);

When what I mean is:

foo = $.template(...);
HTML5 introduces a new attribute on the script tag called async
Ask HN: How many of you are yet to get #newTwitter? Raise your hand.
I am still waiting for the newTwitter. Anyone else in the same league ? Just wondering why it is taking this much time, while I am very active twitter user.
That was true when it first came out; the version shipped with Ubuntu was the 1.6.0_0 version of Iced Tea, which had all sorts of problems. The latest version is fine.

For anyone who's curious, OpenJDK was (if I recall correctly) originally a fork of the early JDK7 code line, but with everything JDK7-specific stripped out. Originally it was fairly buggy, so the initial Iced Tea builds of Open JDK6 weren't really usable for production work, but since Open JDK6 was released most of the bug fixes that have gone into the official JDK6 have also been ported to OpenJDK6, so the current version is now fairly stable and should be comparable in quality to the official JDK.
In all honestly I would think they might be an occupational hazard for someone working as a mover, no?
It's not as simple as that. For example, religious freedom laws don't allow Rastas to smoke ganja, nor Sikhs to carry their swords onto planes.
Thank you, added that.
A fairly large fraction of "terrorists" are engineers. Do the same predictions apply to them?
I'm sure the mongrel2 ecosystem would appreciate your efforts.

In particular, the wsgi handler[s] are kind of in a state of flux, so improving one of those would be pretty dope.

If you ever felt like learning C well and then moving into m2core, you could even work with the one and only zed fucking shaw :P
Why the downvotes? That's a perfectly reasonable suggestion.

Java is attractive because it's mostly sane, and it's backed by The Enterprise in a big way. Sure, if Google, RedHat, HP and IBM gets behind a fork, it could work - but I can't really see what RH and HP has to gain there. They both need to keep support for Oracle Java to stay relevant. IBMs primary interest in Java is consulting - and the consulting-money going to stay with Oracle Java. Google has a lot of stuff in Java, but they're by no means married to it, except for Android/Dalvik. I'd bet they're more keen to push something like Go (or even Scala for that matter).

But without the enterprise backing, Java is just a pretty dated language. Scala, on the other hand, is a very modern language by most measures, and it will integrate seamlessly with your Java legacy stuff.

Sure, it doesn't solve the problem of depending on the JVM, but if Oracle kills Dalvik, getting a good open source drop-in replacement to the JVM is not going to happen. If not, well, then we have Dalvik :)
Smoking plants and carrying weapons represent health and safety concerns for the people surrounding them. Dreadlocks do not. There's a huge difference. Don't even pretend that carrying a weapon is similar to having a certain hair style.
Flags are a penalizing factor in the ranking algorithm, I'd not want to put too much info in the FAQ to help people game the system / gang up on others.
4 Great Ways to Give Your Old Computer a Second Life
Geeks Versus Hipsters
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty

Interesting link, thanks for that.

My view on governance has evolved as I've gotten older - these days I don't believe in one best form of government, and I think people should generally live under the government that they wish to.

Thus, I prefer to see rights reserved to the smallest groups of people practical to make a decision. I'd prefer a lot more decisionmaking to happen at local levels and state levels in the USA, which gives people more options for where they want to live and the kind of government they wish to live under.

Large scale, broad legislation almost always winds up with devil's bargains that don't quite suit anyone really well, special interests working in coalitions... it's bad stuff, in my opinion. Of course, everyone agrees with this for policies they'd like to see happen at a local level, and disagrees for policies they think everyone should follow. Drug control - local or national? Well, people who want decriminalization would prefer it locally decided, which makes it effectively almost legal. People against think it needs to be nationally decided to be effective. Labor laws? Pro-labor people want it national, people against want it locally decided. I'd prefer almost everything is locally decided, but of course, most people will argue that their favorite policies really have to happen on a national level that everyone must follow.
They also invested in a company called Sifteo that is a Toy/Web combo. They are one of the leading investors in the kid tech market it seems.

Smith & Tinker actually pivoted away from toys and are now focusing on micro-transaction based web games.
And the article title asks someone to fork Java.
Actually, Sikhs can carry the Kirpan in most public places in both Canada and the US. You are correct though that an aircraft is not one of these places.
My Belkin router spews both of its MAC addresses onto the screen to anybody who hits the admin website, before authentication.

Getting to my router with an attack is a little less trivial since it is no longer on 192.168.1.1. Also I'm not sure if there's an XSS attack that an unauthenticated user can fire, as any attempt to do anything is just giving me a login box which itself doesn't have an XSS. But this is my 90 second security analysis, if I tried harder I'm sure there's something nasty somewhere.
It's good this coincided with me ordering some care from the care factory. HP hiring a no-name for CEO was more interesting. These things don't impact hackers on a day to day. Let's float up the revenue sharing tidbit and discuss that.
I think Playstation is actually a separate company (SCEI) from Sony TVs. Although given the way Sony Music sabotaged the Walkman division, I wouldn't be surprised if SCEI tried to sabotage Google TV.
With all of the freemium articles lately this is a pretty decent aggregation of the arguments. I would like to have seen more information on what did not work for others, but I understand that information may be hard to come by.
So, if I feel successful, content, well paid, respected I should leave my job? I don't think so!
Twitter CEO Evan Williams Stepping Down
I guess it's quantity not quality with NewScientist. They write a bunch of articles in the hopes that one of them will break.
what is bothering me in all such cases is the emphasis of the religious grounds for the things like long hair.
It sounds like a guy insisting on long hair because of religion would have more "right" for it than one who'd just happen to prefer his hair long. Why such preferential treatment of religion?
shrug va_args has to be written once, and once you get it right, the performance penalty should be much smaller than a memory access.

Also note that Power based architectures have been doing this for a long time.
"Lack of success on the web"? Besides the obvious "Stack Overflow, Myspace, Plenty of Fish" answer, observe that many --- perhaps over 50% --- of the largest company sites on the web are .NET, as are retail banking sites, trading firms, brokerages, etc. And, obviously, something like half of all enterprise web apps are .NET.

If that all seems like it trends corporate for you, well, that's obviously going to happen when your platform costs money.

All else being equal, would I start a new project on Microsoft's stack? No. But if I was really strong on ASP.NET and completely new to Django or Rails, I'd stick with ASP.NET. It works, it works at scale, and it's far from the hardest stack to code for. I might even suggest it's better than PHP, all else being equal.
Yes, the Louis Roederer, please.

I've been a linode customer for about a year now, and I am still staggered at their service quality.

They provide exactly what they say they will. Most other virtualized server providers heavily over-see their service, and expect to make up for it with people paying for idle servers.

Linode's support is amazingly responsive -- it is very much like having a personal account manager at your beck-and-call.

They also know what they're doing. One day, I wanted a feature in the DNS panel that was supported by RFC, but not by their web interface. A day or two later, it was there, and worked flawlessly.

Small disclaimer: I've never used chunkhost, so I can't say anything good or bad about them.
I think this is a great idea and I thank the organizers for putting this together. That said, the savings can be a bit misleading. The value for an entire book is listed when only 2 or 3 chapters of the book is included with the bundle. I don't think the organizers are trying to deceive anyone, but just something to be aware.
It depends on how smelly they are. Hopefully this is not considered a trolling comment, but, in all seriousness some dreadlocks reek and some don't. It depends on how long they have been in, how they were formed and the persons individual preference on how they maintain them.

It also depends on the job - a company hiring in house legal representation who may end up in court eventually shouldn't be criticized for wanting a "cleaner image" in the court room. Someone hiring a programmer? Who cares...
If you are running a lot of different types of offers or campaigns other than just email it can be nice to have all of your stats in one place. I can't think of any other reason to use this over the tracking provided by any of the ESPs out there.
I used it with Chrome yesterday just fine. Maybe your Chrome doesn't have Silverlight correctly installed, for the on-demand video? For the video that's what really matters, the browser is just a container at that point regardless of which browser it is.
Sorry, I can't seem to open your link. Has it expired?
Larry Summers and the Subversion of Economics
And don't forget the barbaric men from the South and their backward ways.