skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not just about eigenvectors, though that is the coolest part of it. The "magic" part is that PageRank is also about stochastic processes, which use the Ergodic theorem to show that their PageRank exists at an arbitrary scale. Therefore it doesn't matter how big or complex the link structure on the web gets—it will scale.

See this:

"For any matrix A = [cP + (1-c)E]' where P is an n×n row-stochastic
matrix, E is a nonnegative n×n rank-one row-stochastic matrix, and 0
=< c =< 1, the second eigenvalue of A has modulus less than or equal
to c. Furthermore, if P has at least two irreducible closed subsets,
the second eigenvalue is equal to c.

This statement has implications for the convergence rate of the
standard PageRank algorithm as the web scales, for the stability of
PageRank to perturbations to the link structure of the web, for the
detection of Google spammers, and for the design of algorithms to
speed up PageRank."

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/379557.html
From the quote at the end of the article: "The continued dominance of the command line among experts [...]" -- is that even true anymore? I certainly live in the shell, but looking at my younger co-workers who are in their 20's, they hardly ever use the command line.

The IDE is the new command line, it seems.
There have been several studies/tests reported online where a parrot or a blind choice and then letting that investment sit outperformed "professional" traders so I guess all kinds of obscure analyzing methods can only get you so far.

At the end of the day you are always looking at historic data and from there you are trying to predict the future...
For research sake, I think it's worth to try. As for whether it's going to be implemented, it needs to be analyzed and planned properly. Don't make children think it's so easy to earn money.

I think the problem with nowadays education is they are very bounded with curriculum. Schools shouldn't be a place just to learn, but also to have fun, socialize, make friends.
"Started as Caml.NET, with a ﬁrst preview release of F# compiler in 2002/2003."

http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/apl/2009-2010/slide...
I wasn't making a claim about subsidies. I was just saying I don't think your comment was relevant to the article because of a misunderstanding about the article's use of the word "honor".
While I have no problem with the OP down voting tl;dr I do think as a comment its an important pointed stick:

First off to remind you that most people hardly read anything - either through lack of time, lack of attention span or just that they only read stuff they agree with. If you want to get a message across you need to meet the needs of these people too. This is a lesson I learned a long time ago in the work place.

Secondly - for those who do read - sometimes you start reading something and your eyes/brain glaze over. Rambling, unpolished prose etc. all do this to me. By the same token there are texts that you start reading - just to see what it is about and are compelled by the authors carefully constructed prose to read to the end.

And of course sometimes as a comment tl;dr is just funny....
> init script

Doesn't seem very sensible to me. Why should the programmer write this, and not the packager or sysadmin? As I programmer I already have to deal with 2949832 platforms, isn't it the packager's/sysadmin's job to make sure it integrates into your specific system provided that the programmer writes general usage instructions?

> Honor the TMPDIR environment variable.

Funny. My software used to honor $TMPDIR until a sysadmin complained to me that it shouldn't, and should honor some other my-app-specific env var/config option instead. And he's a competent sysadmin.

> Don't work around the limits that have been put in place
> on systems, they are most likely there for a reason

My experience is that the limits are very, very often not there for a reason and the administrator didn't even know about the limits until my software hits those limits.

One good example is the file descriptor limit. If too many clients connect to my server then the fd limit will be hit, but instead of raising the limit it would seem a considerable number of people to go my support forum to ask what's going on. I'm considering increasing the limit automatically on the next version just to get rid of the support emails.

Another example is the stack size. A major user accidentally set his system stack size to 80 MB. My software creates a bunch of threads but after a while it runs out of virtual memory address because of the huge stack size. We found out about the 80 MB stack size after a while and we had to explain to them why that was a mistake. They fixed it afterwards but we wanted to avoid support questions like this again so from that point on we hardcoded our thread stack sizes to 64 KB.
UGG Cardy Boot Dusty Rose
Your secret is to pretend the next 10 years will be the same as the last 10 years?
The aim appears to be more about stopping children being born with defects caused by the parents' drug use, and stopping children being born to unsuitable parents.

Tackling world overpopulation will be achieved by far more controversial methods than birth control of a minority group...
Ah, one of these again.

I wrote a simpler one a couple of years ago (http://code.google.com/p/spawntool/) myself. All it does is read commands from stdin, one per line, and keep a desired number of processes running until all command lines are exhausted. Simple.

I wrote my own because I got tired of all kinds of substitution and quoting issues with xargs. With spawn I only need to generate the shell commands and instead of piping them to bash I pipe them to spawn. Also, this means I can easily review your command line generation with less (so that quotes etc. are good) until I eventually switch to sh or spawn.
Embedding and especially code formatting are excellent ideas! Thanks for pointing those out! I'll push them forward myself
Pew: 85% of US Adults Have Mobile Phones, One in Ten (High Earners) Own Tablets
Thanks for the feedback! I'm not sure how fine grained it'll be, but I promise we'll think hard how to do resourcing "properly".
We don't have tasks at the moment :(
Facebook Like Greasmonkey Script Lets You Like Anything
Uggs On sale
What do people think about your country?
Pew Research: Rise of the 'Apps Culture'
OK, but the distribution of company sizes is a only a good metric if you take a dictionary definition of "entrepreneurship". Yes, you can call a country which has a bunch of old-fashioned mom-and-pop book stores "entrepreneurial" in the sense that the risk/reward of the businesses are concentrated (high variance) because they are individually owned. But that's not the disruptive, innovative entrepreneurship that interests HNers. I think there's a broad range of HN-style entrepreneurship that shouldn't be characterized as shoot-for-the-moon but would not at all be measured by distribution of company size.
> SysV IPC

Which I find incredible stupid. The system should have support garbage collection of shm files from the beginning. It's almost impossible to write software that properly cleans up things like Unix domain sockets, FIFO files and shm files when killed by SIGKILL.

The best solution that I've found so far is putting garbage collection code in the admin tools. When you run the admin tool for querying the status of the server, it'll check for stale resource files and delete them.
Thank you very much, I looked for a calculator like this but they were all too complicated. I'll update the article to include this.
Also, please show number of desks available at the "at a glance" page. http://desksnear.me/workplaces

Right side can be reformatted to present more information.

So something like "20 @ $30" would be useful.
Moreover I think that since these people can't express their nastiness directly, they go and "retaliate" on target websites.

I never read comments under the articles linked here because I know they are polluted by a lot of useless noise, so I just read comments here on HN. But it could be interesting to see if nasty comments related to HN, like the ones mentioned by the OP, appear in other places as well (not that we can do anything about it, anyway).
Excellent points! We didn't have that much time to do the demo data creation so we're going to do it on background when we get back our code ownership from Rails Rumble :)

Also we didn't have time to do any caching, but it's a good way to learn the bottle necks :D

Thanks for the great feedback! Much appreciated!
Thank you, I downloaded the Bayesian method paper linked in the article and was going to read it, I'm very interested in a probably optimal stopping method (obviously). I'm only afraid it'll fly over my head, despite my having a bit of stats background.

Thanks again!
Thanks for the feedback! We made it since it solves our own problem: how to see who is doing what at a glance
Ask HN:Can you please critique my web app?
Google Groups: no more pages and files
Science and research take time. And there is no incentive for companies to take a long term outlook on things. Everything is measured quarterly.
I know I submitted this before but I haven't had any reactions or feedback so I'll try this again. This is a personal project of mine that I did during my free time. I'm kind of not sure of the design/ui so I would like some expert insight from you guys. Can this be a helpful tool to you? Thanks in advance for your time.
So you only love Ubuntu's UI breakthroughs so long as they don't get paid for their work?

I think the article linked here is too extremist. I still believe open core can be done in a manner that satisfies everyone. On the other hand, I can't think of any good examples.
Was actually from MeFi, I believe (and I agree that it's a fantastically succinct observation):

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent
Not might, they can. Don't work on non-work projects on work computers.
And the areas that refused to change are the most flaky parts of the infrastructure. No authentication of the "From" field in email? Well look at all that spam. No 3-way handshake for DNS? Well look at all that DNS cache poisoning.

The problem is that once the insecure infrastructure is "good enough", nobody adopts the improvements. See also: NAT vs. IPv6.
I am in the same process as you and also thinking of Luxembourg.
Alternatively have you considered Switzerland (and some specific cantons like Zug ) in your research ?
It's not as idiomatic as with Acme, but you can program text transforms in any language with Emacs too. Just use C-u M-| (shell-command-on-region).
Researchers Using Rat-Robot Hybrid to Design Better Brain Machine Interfaces
I admit I don't know many people over 100. My grandma is 90, but I never asked her if she wants to die. From what I've read, I would have expected a positive outlook on life to be a character trait shared by many old people.

I guess nature has also made it so that it becomes easier to die. As I said, if your physical health is dwindling day by day, perhaps there is a point when it doesn't seem so much fun to be alive anymore. Also if all friends have already died, perhaps it becomes lonely.

All these are just more reasons to feel sad, though. What if we could become 80 and still feel fit?
No worries - I'm just asking :)

So does the app allow to share status between people working on a project and see a timeline of projects ?
Seems easier than the situation in medicine. I have fewer moral qualms about testing experimental educational techniques on students than I do about testing experimental medicine on patients, especially if the students (or the students' parents) are compensated by an amount that make them willing subjects.
Thanks!! We're glad you liked it!
Sorry about that. We didn't have enough time to polish the demo -> real account switch.
Thanks! We're really glad you like it! :)
Nike Dunks 2010 For Sale
If green Japanese entrepreneurs believe that you shouldn't take a risk with someone who's failed and thus can't learn from them and are more likely to fail themselves, isn't that their own fault?

Regardless of this, Japan's economy will begin to recover when the government stops interfering with interest rates.

If the market set rates, marginal businesses would fail, making room for new companies.

And savers would have more incentive to save, making more capital available for businesses that stand a better chance of generating returns that justify the higher rates.

More viable business mean more capital returned to investors and more capital for investment.

These low rates are really a subsidy for mediocre investments. And we all pay for this subsidy through inflation and dumb idea bubbles.
There's only so much resources on each physical host - when you hit the resource usage of an additional Linode, you've effectively used up the space that could have gone to another customer. So you have to pay their rent as well.

Although this really doesn't make that much sense for bandwidth... but when you look at the raw price for bandwidth it's not all that bad anyway.
You should not price based on costs because:

a) customers do not care what your costs are, they care what their perceived value is.

b) costs are cratering, to the point where costs at the margin are so small it is difficult to measure without counting out picodollars (don't use picodollars!)

c) low prices do not necessarily make customer acquisition easier -- prices are a signal (of quality and probable business continuity among other things)

d) businesses have care thresholds for money and all numbers under a particular threshold are identical. If for a certain group of customers the care threshold is $50 / month, picking any price below $49 is insane.

e) pathological customers are disproportionately attracted to the cheap options

f) if you compete on price, you're forever at the mercy of anyone who is either more efficient at cost structure than you or anyone who is stupid and willing to burn money going after your market
Does he study children? The parenting schedule I have heard before is

(1) Young children are compelled to act by rewards/punishments.
(2) Older children are compelled to act because they respect their parents' directions, even if they don't understand or agree with the directions.
(3) Young adults choose to follows their parents because they understand and agree with the directions.

The point is that young children are just not cognitively able to appreciate adult reasoning. Yes, it's great if we can get 2nd graders excited about multiplication tables, but that's usually not possible.
yeah, its disruption that creates wealth, not doing things the way they've always been done. Its not the scale of an enterprise or even growth in the number of employees.
"The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason" - T S Eliot
Stop the Signature File Insanity
Xerox suits decided it won't sell.
Ask HN: Subdomains vs Directories for Account has many Users
I am making an app where several user work towards a common goal grouped under an account. What would be a better structure for my urls?

* Subdomains: some-team-name.app.com

* Directories: app.com/some-team-name
Great work! Only thing is I'd have something on the top left to go back to the front page. It took me a little while to find the home icon on the top right.

Is the gantt chart from a UI library, or created from scratch?
A joke which has as part of it's humour a reflection on how there is a tendency to glamorize the past. A joke designed to purposefully downplay that critique.
Seems like a better name than Splendid Bacon.

Yummy Maggots: "Splat your bugs before they pupate".
Kiva - Loans that change lives
PayPal robbed my bank account
PARC didn't make products for sale, it was a pure R&D outfit.
How the Enigma cipher was broken
Agreed, there should be some better way to see which of sysv ipc resources are actually in use currently. All of these are supposed to be persistent (you can reattach to a shared memory segment later on). Considering that they are persistent, they need to be cleaned up just like another much more common resource: files on the filesystem. There is no built in support for garbage collection of files either.

I find the whole key and id thing to be a somewhat weird part of sysv ipc too, but it does allow you to consistently reattach to existing resources and avoid some collisions, but it just moves the identifier collision management from ints to key_ts, or with ftok(3), to file paths. See the NOTES section for ftok(3).

However, I didn't design this stuff, I just manage and maintain it.
The fine art of opportunism (2007)
I've used subdomains for years (the '@' above should be a '.' I believe') and have recently switched them all over to path names.

Subdomains were all 'hot' 10 years ago, but these days people seem to be comfortable with having a path in the url.

Subdomains look a bit more consistent (going from the 'small' to the 'large', user domain tld) than pathnames but that's personal preference on my part.

If you are going to use Google Analytics then you'll be pleased to know that if you use path names that Google will not get confused when counting uniques (using subdomains there is a lot of double counting).
Ask HN: Will time off / travel help my hacker ambitions?
Hello HN.

I'm currently a full time software developer around 10 years into my career.

For a long while now, I've been dreaming of trying something a little more entreprenurial - maybe starting a web application or (distant second preference) moving towards more of a 'freelance' model where I can have a little more flexibility in how I work.

The problem is that, as of today, I'm feeling pretty tired, burnt out and am losing my enthusiasm for technology. For the first time in my life, I don't think I would have the energy or motivation to deliver on a side project. More worryingly, my creativity has also ebbed a little over the last year so I'm not seeing as many business opportunities as I always have done.

I think it's just a minor case of burnout.

Simple question really. Do you think that if I bin off the job and spend six months travelling, relaxing, pursuing some other hobbies, do you think the passion and drive will eventually come back and allow me to build a business?

I'm lucky enough to have maybe 3 or 4 years of living expenses in the bank if it all goes south, but at the same time, looking at my finances (a few years away from paying off mortgage etc), I would rather keep my head down for another few years on the daily grind if I didn't think that entrepreneurial spirit was going to come back to me.

Though this is obviously very much down to personality, any comments and personal experiences appreciated as I'm at a bit of a crossroads.
You're probably aware but, I'm getting "You'll need to be giving me a valid URL, matey." using the URLs provided.
I would love a screensaver that works like the Origami slideshow mode on the iPad, only for my desktop machine. I would imagine it'll be an interesting challenge using Core Animation and what not.

Bonus points if it can use photos from iPhoto!
All I know is that Red Hat, SUSE and Debian (the other 3 biggies that matter) are not rip offs or tweaks of other distros.
Auto Transport Greensboro, Shipanycar
Do you mean like Growl? (http://growl.info/)
Buy Nike Air Max 95 Black Varsity Red
Gotta love the SEO'd page title
First impressions of Adobe Acrobat X
So, if I understand this correctly, stripping it from all the decorative wording, it would go like this:
1) FB apps can obtain ids of one's friends
2) once having user's id you can obtain his name
3) ...and see the data that he (that user) has set to be visible to "everyone"

Personally I only find first point to be controversial, the other ones are rather obvious for anyone who uses Facebook.
Is the written form of the talk already published somewhere?
Cheers! Just a heads up :)
It's an odd sensation to see those desktop screenshots - driven by decades-old software, yet totally familiar...

The hardware may be long obsolete, but Smalltalk is thriving! Pharo Smalltalk and the Seaside framework are at the cutting edge of web development.
iamstarting - http://iamstarting.com/?cat=3
it is at least a little more surprising considering MS is still pumping out this trash

Microsoft is a huge company.

I doubt Office Marketing and Microsoft Research coordinated their release of a marketing video and GPL code, respectively.
How is all of this reflected (if at all) in the account history on the paypal website?
Again off topic.

What percentage of HN users apply to YC?
Porting Competitive Advantages
Buy Kitchen Cabinets
Kitchen Cabinets are our business. We sell discount kitchen cabinets online. You can buy cabinetry unfinished, RTA and assembled from Mid Continent, Marsh Furniture, High Point, Norbridge.
Pilot Stands Up To TSA And Refuses Full Body Scan
A little confused about your mention of 24 thousand dollars a year. Are you saying one should build a business while they're still young so that they can eventually achieve $24k/yr income? At first, I assumed you meant this income would supplement other forms of income later in life, but then you said "you can do whatever you want" so now I think you meant it would be your only obligation...

Please elaborate?
Back in the day on Usenet, civilised people never used a .signature longer than 4 lines, and often two of those were some form of ASCII-art divider. It's good to see that etiquette lives on, at least somewhere.
Up on pg's site soon, I imagine.
You're speaking out of ignorance.

First, Facebook can and does police what people pass to third-party ad networks. When the FB platform first launched app developers did what you're describing.

In mid-2008 Facebook amended the TOS to prevent people from passing in PII to third-party ad networks. Apps that did this got banned.

In mid-2009 Facebook again amended the TOS to prevent people from passing in their friends UIDs, and apps doing this also got banned. In addition at least two ad networks were banned from ever advertising on the FB Platform again.

This nonsense from the WSJ is about passing your Facebook UID to third-party application, which (unlike the two cases above) happens automatically for every developer that has ever used any ad network.

Your Facebook UID is not private information. The only information one can get with your Facebook UID is the information you've decided to make public.

Now, you can argue that Facebook has incentivized people to overshare and not realize the consequences. That's fine.

But this article is 100% not about developers passing personal data to third-party ad networks, unless you somehow consider your Facebook user ID personal data. A stretch, considering until a year or so ago it was part of your profile URL, and still is for many people.
The Square Grid - New CSS-Grid
Ugh. Yet another PayPal disaster. I'm gearing up to go live with a new Mac application in about 6 months time, and I had planned on using PayPal as the preferred payment method, as it seems to come with the least headaches. But it seems you can't go a month without yet another PayPal tragedy popping up on HN.

Is there any other payment service out there that doesn't have as many problems (especially with customer service) as PayPal? Or better yet, is anyone on HN creating a startup to handle credit card payments that I could use instead of PayPal - ideally, it needs to be dead simple to use - I'm thinking less than 20 lines of ruby, or 50 lines of C to use. Anyone working on something like this?
pok good point but even ascii cant represent meditative, religious, or otherwise universal truths, not to mention that finishing the text file (or even getting close) would have such a cultural impact that otherwise normal history recording would be shifted.
Google checkout?