skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good place to start: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpstyles/460987802/
But which school of economics should the politicians follow for their introductory economics class?
Let me offer a couple of other ways to view this.

The most important point is that higher dimensional space is very roomy. There are many degrees of freedom, many directions.

Take the first puzzle, the inner sphere that is bigger than the outer ones. One factor is that the 2 by 2 by ... by 2 packing isn't very efficient. It's not even the densest packing in 2 dimensions, less so in 3, and it gets dramatically less so as you go up. With 10 dimensions it is really inefficient so there is a lot of space in the middle.

As far as the "cap" not having much volume: this wasn't explained very clearly, what he meant. Picture a circle with radius=1 centered at the origin, and then look at the piece cut off by y > 1/2 (hope that prints ok, I mean y greater than 0.5). That piece has a certain fraction of the total area. Now picture a sphere at the origin, radius 1, and the cap cut off by y > 1/2. That cap will have a smaller fraction of the total volume. Going to higher dimensions, the fraction gets smaller and smaller.

But rather than meaning the sphere is "spiky", this is a result of more degrees of freedom. There are many more caps in many more directions on a high dimensional sphere. So each cap has to have less of the volume. Spikiness is really an absurd way to think of it.

With practice, I've developed some ability to visualize four dimensional space. Its overwhelming character, as I said, is that it is infinitely and somewhat frighteningly roomy. This would be even more so in higher dimensions.
Ask HN: What is a shopping cart and why wouldn't I just write my own?
Hi HN-

I'm having trouble understanding a very basic concept. I build an online store, and since I'm a programmer, I let the user collect their items in a table associated with their session id. Then, I compute the order total. My server goes to the payment gateway server and charges the credit card. Then I ship stuff. What is the purpose of a shopping cart and why would I pay for a 3rd party one? They all appear to require some kind of programming, but if I already know how to program, why wouldn't I just build my own?

Note: I'm not being a smart-ass, I really don't understand what I'm missing, but I'm obviously missing something. Can someone explain what a shopping cart is to an e-commerce newbie?

Thanks for any help,
Karl
Wordpress hack get total post retweets
Monocubed: Drag & Drop Images To Make Them 3D (Chrome)
Not all startups are created equal, and I suspect most of the people disagreeing with Jason's post aren't doing the same kinds of startups he's thinking of: VC-backed "swinging for the fences" startups. Or at least aren't at that stage yet.

That's awesome you're able to start a company, work from home, and be with your baby, but if you're the founder/CEO of a startup with millions of dollars of VC funding and dozens of employees things are likely very different.
No problem, I jump the gun on this one a lot and I apologize for that, if it was not your intent. I just get the crap beat out of me by grammer nazis all the time and if I could fix the issue I would, but no amount of people pointing it out is going to fix it. I have worked and worked at it for years (it's one of the major reasons, I post). But just as I will never, no matter how much I stive to, know my right from my left, or be able to accurately estimate the elapse of time, I will also overlook and substitute wrong words in written form. It's really, really frustrating to be intelligent with a language disability and I get really pissy about it some times, for that I am sorry.
Yes, but the scene of crime in this case is still available for the police to look at, and the dead body doesn't go anywhere.

The position of the body can in most cases show if the victim tripped or was pushed. Tampering with the body after the fall leaves even more clues for the police to find.
I wonder how it might compare to Tornado (http://www.tornadoweb.org/)
I agree with you that teaching matters little at Research I universities, at least for full profs. It does, however, matter to the army of adjuncts working there, as well as to profs anyplace besides Research I schools.

At Research I schools, the incentives for inflation are mainly about avoiding non-research work. An actual conversation I was involved in:

Student: "But how can you fail me? I'm graduating, and I won't get my math minor!"

Me: "A math minor is a signal to future employers that you can multiply two matrices by hand when asked, and perhaps even write a proof. You haven't demonstrated any ability to do those things."

Student's father: "How can you fail my daughter? She worked so hard for this!"

The dean's office: "Some student's father is complaining about you! Give her a retest!"

Student's father, about a month after she failed the retest: "When are you going to give my daughter a retest and a passing grade?"
Why, if the resulting products are performant and capable?
Facebook's data export is broken
We had two kids within the lifespan of my second startup (the first I actually founded, and the first VC-funded company I worked at) from 1998-2001. It was hard. Erin got the short end of the stick. Still digging my way out of that hole.
Whenever I have a Rails app that I'm not sure where it will go or how much effort I want to put into it, I deploy it on Heroku.

It's dead simple, just runs (most of the time), and is zero cost until it starts getting substantial traffic.
dream host is good for about 10 visitors, after that you'll have to go to a VPS. I like rimuhosting- outstanding service for about $30/month. You get access to a virtual server, not a web interface, so you get a root account with a terminal.
One of my co-workers is color blind. Of course, I did a little with him in SQL Server. He said

-- This line (green)

'and this line' (red)

look almost the same. And

SELECT (blue)

OBJECT_ID (Magenta)

Look nearly the same! Crazy talk!
Well I just googled this: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36226444/

Another way to escape federal tax liability (up to ~$90,000 income) is to live outside the US 11 months / year
That doesn't really stop him from the recreational murder of X prisoners, and replenishing his inventory with X Kiwis before heading to Parramatta :-)

(I have the Australia Almanac and it's full of interesting tidbits. One of them was when I read "The English met with the Aborigines during a time of hunger .. 5 men where eaten". I shook my head briefly at the inhumanity and went on to read .. then paused, and re-read the passage again. Turns out, the English ate the Aborigines.)
You can definitely write your own shopping cart if you want, its just that its a problem that so many businesses have solved before so you'd likely just be wasting time reinventing the wheel when you could be building up other aspects of your business, finding clients, marketing, etc.
Ah, but this presupposes knowledge of their values. One person's busybody is another's good samaritan.

You also seem to be describing the US Congress.
It is easy to underestimate the difficulty of creating the right incentives.

In the 1940’s, the paleontologist von Koenigswald was searching for early human remains on Java and decided to enlist the help of the locals in his search by offering them “ten cents for every piece of hominid bone they could come up with.” Unfortunately for von Koenigswald (and for his findings), he discovered too late that the locals “had been enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones to maximize their income.”

From http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/when-youre-...

(The story is from the book A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is one of the best books I've ever read. The amazing thing about the book is that it is in fact a short history of nearly everything.)

Combine the difficulty of getting incentives right with the inherent problems of Government and a dangerous mix results. For example, every time a subsidy is created, a special-interest group sprouts up dedicated to preserving the subsidy in perpetuity, long after it has outlived its utility.
It's up for debate if it's a bug or a feature but yes, that's an issue that anyone releasing code needs to consider.
As someone who specializes in mobile marketing I can tell you for a fact that you're assessment is misguided.

Please refer to: http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/emarketer-mobile-users-o...
gevent runs most of the protocol implementations written on top of standard socket and ssl modules. For example, pure Python mysql-connector works fine with gevent.

There's also a mysql driver for gevent implemented as an extension: http://github.com/mthurlin/gevent-MySQL
I once heard Richard Feynman give a talk where he mentioned that in grad school he would challenge the pure mathematicians to give him their hardest, most abstract problems, and he'd often solve them by thinking up a physical analogy about which he could reason intuitively. So in his case it wasn't a matter of ignoring his intuitions, but finding the right intuition, that actually corresponded correctly with the math.
Actually, the bottom 50% of earners pay ~3% of federal income tax.

http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/top10-percent-income...

People become eligible for more federal benefits as they earn less so it may net out to less than 0%, but I don't have a citation for that.
You really need to see the graphic on her homepage to appreciate this story even more: http://tarathetiger.com/
Then they would have to share it with the contractor under the terms of the GPL. The contractor could then release it further. More likely though, the contractor would be brought in to work on the project and the military would argue that it wasn't distributing the code.
In what way is the presence of a Mac App Store making the Mac less developer-friendly?

If anything, the creation of yet another possible revenue channel only makes the OS more friendly to me, not less.

"Back in my day, we had to roll our own blitter if we wanted to do anything serious" could also be said, but that doesn't mean modern graphics libraries and hardware are less developer friendly. Eliminating the need to do repetitive grunt-work is always a good thing.
This story seems too cute and oversimplified. Did it really take an economist to figure that out? I'd like to see the real story, does anyone know have a reference?
Does anybody else not have the export feature yet?
The URL is the next great music format
Find some place that offers Passenger Phusion. Makes hosting a breeze.

Also, if hosting/scaling becomes an issue, you might look at running your app under JRuby and hosting it using a Java app server. There's some overhead in learning about configuration, and such, but it can solve certain problems.

I've been using Railsplayground as a staging server, and while it works OK (though there's near zero load on it) I had stuff break because they decided to upgrade from Ruby 1.8.6 to 1.8.7. Plus, there's no `screen`, for example, which makes things a little harder than they need be.

Not being root means you have to live with other people's decisions.
So, we lop off some precision and call it correct because displaying extra decimal places would be a "pain?" Not sure I'm following your logic here; if my balance is $10.0000005, wouldn't it be wrong to change that to $10.000?

If you want to do this correctly, then there should never be a balance that has an amount under the minimal unit. Then it doesn't matter if you use a BigDecimal or an int.
Dire Warnings for US States: 2011 Will be Painful
good point. I didn't think of that.
Being a student is easy. Learning requires actual work.
WETA Digital uses Ubuntu Server on their server farm and desktops:

http://jordanopensource.org/freeplanet/article/ubuntu-linux-...
It's (still) stupid arguing that NoSQL systems are crappy at proving the things RDBMS systems provide. (Because they are, and no one has ever said differently, it's akin to yelling at a Bugatti Veyron (yeah, I went there) for being so bad at flying.)

I'm not using CouchDB because I needed relationships and the RDBMS features of SQL Server but decided at the last minute 'Ehh oh well, let's just try this fancy NoSQL business, I'll rewrite all the RDBMS features into my code'.

Believe it or not I'm using CouchDB because I want to run map/reduce on a bunch of JSON! Astounding, right!?
Personally, that's the approach I'd prefer, because then all my data is on the drive, which I can take out of the system when the power supply fails, to recover my data. If the OS has silently migrated some of my data onto an invisible chunk of flash, I can't recover without that flash.

(If the OS is just using the flash as a cache, OK, but why? It's slower and more expensive than RAM.)
Clearly I meant that it was a murky area morally.

Also I don't live in Florida.

I also never said that I thought I was protected from prosecution, so I don't know why you're so eager to prove that I am.
This USA Today article says that 47% of people payed no Federal Taxes. I think the more interesting number is that 40% make a profit on the federal income tax.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2010-04-16-e...
Ginzametrics (YC S10) gets Faster Processing, Notifications and Easier Setup
It is very infrequent that the whole crew is a part of mutiny. Captain usually has at least a few adherents as well. Kind of hard to explain away disappearance of the captain and his clique.
Gigapedia account
please somebody help me, i cant register on gigapedia if somebode has account on gigapedia , then you can invite me to join it, my id is mmanzoor_2006@yahoo.com
The official docs recommend Paste. We've had apps in production running on Paste since 2007. At the time, neither mod_wsgi or uwsgi were around. Certainly it may not be the best way to run in production, but it's not for development only.
Good point.

Plus, historically, at the time, New Zealand was not a penal colony like Australia. But home to the English gentry.
There's more to this "strategy" than a browser. Don't forget they have a huge suite of tools for authoring web content, for instance.
Given where the founders are from, and the fact that they're seeking funding, it seems like it's exactly that kind of start-up it could become.
Hmm, this is well-written yet downvoted to -2. I think grandalf is right.

School is supposed to be about knowledge, but more and more it's becoming about going through the motions to get an overvalued piece of paper. You could take those many hours you would waste in school and put them to more productive use: building cool stuff, learning about more important things, etc. There's not much school can teach you that Wikipedia can't. I think having an impressive portfolio would be way more valuable than an Ivy League diploma.

I dropped out of college after two years. My parents gave me what was left of my college fund (about $20,000) and I lived off that for a few years. I have yet to hit profitability, but I think I will. And I know I've learned more on my own than I would've learned in school. And if I had to, I think the stuff I've built and the skills I've gained would make it easy enough to get a decent job. Maybe you could make a similar deal with your parents (they give you the money they would've spent on college and you live off of it for several years).

You definitely need to solve the money issue somehow. If you don't have it, you're liable to get stuck in a dead end job. And you definitely shouldn't do this unless you've got what it takes to educate yourself and do good work without someone forcing you to.

Probably the most important thing you get out of school and college is interacting with other smart people on a regular basis. Find some other way of doing that and you should be good.
Wordpress get posts outside of loop
For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance
What do you consider substantial traffic?
Google is your friend.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-a...

About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.

Also, the irs.gov site has tons of data with various breakdowns.
(Disclaimer: I don't have kids, and none of my close friends do. This is purely from observation.)

I think one thing that deserves more scrutiny is how hard it is to have a 'regular' W2 job and have a baby.

I've seen a few parents become entrepreneurs after having kids not because they want to work less (ha!), but because they want/need to work at odd hours, in odd places, with babies on their laps, without any heat/ politics/ favors/ specially negotiated deals at the day job.

In the US at least, any kind of unconventional work set-up can be kind of a pain in the butt (working from home, working 4 extremely long days, etc).

Having a kid could be a second great reason to have a start-up, in some cases.
Dalvik is not the only VM on a phone, and Android is not the only phone with a GC, nor is it coded primarily in Objective-C natively.

Pretty sure he was speaking 'in general'.
It's interesting that they tried the tactic of micro-regulating every aspect of the ship captain's business and that didn't work as well as broad incentives.

Today, this micro-regulation is politically popular as voters can more easily comprehend the direct effects of regulation as opposed to the indirect effects of broad incentives. For example, we force drug companies to perform very extensive clinical trials for new drugs and this makes us feel safe. But simply increasing the liability drug companies face for producing harmful drugs may be more effective and would certainly be a lot cheaper (as much as 90% of the cost of a new drug is meeting FDA requirements). But I doubt voters would feel as safe in a regime of broad incentives even if it worked better.
Another dimension to multitasking.
To me its only an indicator.

There's a ton of stuff on similar level that does matter and it adds up.

Phenomena like knowing O(n) of basic algorithms and data structures. Understanding basic file formats and how they are implemented. Basic knowledge of network protocols and their building blocks. Basic knowledge of assembler. Understanding how IO happens and how your use case is bound (IO or CPU). Knowledge of character code pages, etc.

Nothing of the above is necessary to program in high level language. But if you want to do it well they can't possibly harm you. Or you will get involved with a vendor product that was written by someone who didn't know the above and you will be forced to reverse engineer the goddamn thing just to get your job done. :)
There was a similar system (on demand render farm "in the cloud") on WAM!Net in... 1999? the more it changes, the more it's the same :)
Ooh, CATO wrote a blog post with some token criticism?

They're still gonna line up behind the banner when it matters.

90% of everything Cato did during the Bush years was just the opposite, supporting the republican party and/or undermining the democratic party. Then they throw in a little 10% of criticism to make it look like they're principled, and people like you just fall right in line.

If you vote for republicans, you're a republican. Period. Here you are saying your plans are ignored by 100% of democrats, excuse me? Obama cut your taxes, and Republicans are the ones who time and time again ramp up government spending and deficits, then leave it to the democrats (Clinton, Obama) to clean up the mess.

And, yeah, you're increasing your visibility, but it's all tea party crazies. To these people, "i don't like government" is a synonym for "i don't like obama". There is no deeper principle there than that. Good luck with those guys.

Unfortunately, in American politics, you have to pick a side. I'm sympathetic to some bits of libertarian philosophy but I'll oppose anything that enables the Republican party with my wallet, my vote, my phone, and my shoe leather.
"Getting acquired by Google" is almost a dead metaphor in 2010. I don't know if it's to be taken literally anymore, but Google are probably most known for acquiring software companies.

What other big software company acquirers are there? (Not to be imply that there aren't any.)
The advantage here is the usage of Libevent which makes it only listen when a eventlet sends back a message. It's essentially using the same tech (event wise) as NGINX.

Because it's using event's it has not blocking IO. But is limited when the tasks are CPU bound
PayPal site outage
Are there any official sources for that number? All I've ever been able to find are articles like this one: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-a... where everything is "according to projections by the Tax Policy Center" or similar groups. And, the explanations given in that article are less than compelling to me. For example, they focus heavily on the "family of four making as much as $50,000 [with] two children younger than 17". I'm a little skeptical that such families actually make up 50% of US households. (Just consider that you'll pay taxes for 50 or 60 years, but if you have 2 children, you can only be in this category for 15 years or so.) They are also throwing in stuff like credits for "buying a new home and upgrading an existing home with energy-efficient doors, windows, furnaces and other appliances". But, again, there's not that many new houses bought, and the people buying them are mostly not families of 4 making under $50K. Nor are those families running out to spend thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars on home upgrades. Finally, this argument also ignores the fact that most of the social safety net programs are paid for from payroll taxes, not income taxes.
See, this is what I don't understand. Building a shopping cart is like 15 minutes of work if I'm already building my own e-commerce site, isn't it? Are 3rd party shopping carts for non-programmers? I mean, as far as I can tell, it's literally just a session-associated table of items. What else is a shopping cart besides that? Why would I spend 2 days reading the "Zen cart" manual and API when I can finish my home brewed shopping cart in 15 minutes? Again, I'm not being a smart-ass, I really don't see what I'm missing. (thanks for your reply)
Long term, what are the options for hosting once an app grows? At some point, does it become a requirement to bring your server in-house and do your own hosting and server maintenance?
One other thing people forget to consider when creating intellectual property of closed source or open source is that copyright does not last forever.

Every piece of intellectual property you create will eventually belong to the public domain, albeit after 75-100+ years.
AdGrok (YC S10) announces Groktoberfest
I suppose the investigators would look for inconsistencies in 'the story' as told by different parties. If 'the story' is true then additional detail will be forthcoming and generally non-contradictory between accounts. If its all a cover-up then individual suspects will invent different details and give themselves away. 'We know at least one of you is lying.' At which point someone will betray the conspiracy for favourable terms, and the police will have a real witness. Maybe also this is the reason for a 'captain's log' - if that went missing too then there'd be even more suspicion.
That's one of the things about classified systems. They might violate your patents and your copyright, but how would you know if you don't even know they exist?
On a transcript, some schools put the average score of all students in each class, right next to the score that student got for the class.
Show HN: a compiler from Python syntax to JavaScript syntax (like CoffeeScript)