skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are already some great answers to this question.

Math begins with intuition. We don't memorize facts in order to build intuition -- we explore, discover, and synthesize. Formalism is an impediment to the early stages of this process. The most blatant example is set theory. Nearly everyone has a basic grasp of naive set theory and hardly any layperson has a basic grasp of formal set theory.

Just as an aside, many of the most interesting things in mathematics are extremely counterintuitive. It also turns out that our intuition is broken and leads us to say crazy things. Again, set theory has clear examples.

Back to the point, the things you memorize help to organize your untamed mathematical data. I seriously doubt that you'd have any good results from memorizing something about which you do not have intuition.
I bought one for a very particular reason, it acts as a router for up to 5 devices. As a freelancer I am always on the road. The wireless hotspot was $300 with no contract and the Tab was $500. So for $200 more I got a tablet. Given that the kids also play pbskids.org and disney.com games we where holding out for an android tablet that supported flash. That said, I am extremely happy with the Tab, quality wise I think it is as good as the iPad, the voice recognition is far better than the iPad and the 7" form factor makes it easier to type on the virtual keyboard.
I agree it's not cool to block out browsers like that. Is that what Grooveshark is doing? I didn't test it in Opera.

But then again, maybe they _did_ test it in Opera and saw it didn't work, but couldn't justify fixing it from a cost perspective. So, would you rather have the thing just be all broken or have a sign saying "This is broken in your browser, sorry"?
Hardware that’s waiting for 2.3 to come out.
It's nice and probably uses way less system resources, but it definitely isn't as "polished" as the Flash version was. Not sure if that's a limitation of the HTML5/JS/CSS combo or if they just need to work on it more. It's mostly just little things, like missing visual fade transitions or a UI that doesn't look like it's been repeatedly bleached. But they add up to a noticeable difference, I think--the HTML5 app just isn't as vibrant.

That being said, I always thought their Flash app was amazingly slick and polished, so it's a tough act to follow I suppose.

EDIT: Plus if they are going to go this far with HTML5 it'd be awesome if they could cut the Flash cord entirely. Not sure if that's technically possible though.
> difference between harassment and offensive

I've read somewhere that using the words "offensive" or "offended by" puts the emphasis on the person who has expressed concern about the situation. It focuses on the negative: "what can we do to be less offensive?".

The article I read suggested using terms like "unwelcoming" or "exclusive" instead--as it puts the focus on the community. This allows us to focus on the positive: "what can we do to become more welcoming?".

So rather than considering whether this is a question of harrassment or offensiveness I find it useful to think of actions being "welcoming" or "unwelcoming" toward members of our community.
I got a "Sorry your last action could not be completed" message when I clicked the paypal!
"Assange's, yours and Winer's stances all assume that the states involved won't change their methods in response to informational insecurity, and will instead continue business as usual. This is a strange assumption."

Please read Assange's manifesto, I posted the link for a reason. The whole point of Wikileaks is to force states to "change their methods in response to informational insecurity" and make their functioning less efficient. Armed revolution isn't popular these days, and this is a bloodless, scalable, and morally unassailable (well, for normal people's morals, anyway) way to attack the functioning of a government.

------

Also, I just learned about this: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/03/wikileaks-cables-rev.ht...

Let's see what the outcome will be.
Chrome constantly runs tests against thousands of the most popular sites to make sure they render right.

It's not the developers' jobs to make their sites work with Opera (especially when it works in IE, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari). It is Opera's job to make sure they render sites comparably to other leading browsers.

If that means they rip out their rendering engine and replace it with Webkit, so be it.
I am amazed that mobile advertising works. Are there people who are genuinely interested in the ads or do they click them by accident?
It seems to me that the actual writing of things in ink on paper makes them more real to your emotional mind, which is the point of the system. (Your mileage will almost certainly vary.)

If I didn't have to wake the family up to rummage around for a notebook, I'd start right this minute.
The Startup Programmer
That +1 was not so much for the comment itself, but for not folding yourself into Halifax. I had the pleasure of living in Eastern Passage, Dartmouth and Halifax a couple of decades back, and every one of the old cities and towns has its own feel. (And yes, dammit, I miss the area. It's like living in a small town, except that there's one of everything a city should have handy.)
Good point, I wasn't thinking.
Thanks, I had put an email in the email field, I just assumed that was available from accessing someones profile. It's also in the about field now.
The majority of the work I do, I do alone, and Git has become invaluable. Sure, it's possible to work without source control, but I really, really don't want to.
Your email address?
Groupon also turned them down, so what does that mean?

I guess we'll just have to wait and see, huh?

Secondary markets don't mean anything, let's see if the big investment banks, pension funds, and the real market movers are going to appreciate Facebook's tiny margins and slowing growth.

Again, I don't have the numbers, and no one outside of direct involvement with Facebook (or Groupon) does either, but with the numbers being thrown around, Groupon has so far demonstrated much more capability for running a fast growing, profitable, high margin business.
I graduated my high school with a 4.7. They add in the 'bonus points' for taking AP and honors classes after the division, not before.

Oh, and everyone over a 4.0 was reported as valedictorian.
"while investors reportedly signed a check for close to $30 million for a niche blogging site called Tumblr"

Last I checked, Tumblr was on the 100 most visited websites list. That's pretty good for a "niche" blogging site.

This story is pure sensationalism, most of the companies listed have proven business models or at least substantial traction.
Can you replace it with HTML/JS too and remove all dependency on Flash?

I'm not an iPad owner, but I'm thinking it wouldn't hurt if iPad owners would use your site from the iPad, too.
If you really believe there's no use case for ChromeOS I think you're interacting with a very small subset of people.

I'll be the first to admit it probably isn't appropriate for power users. But most users aren't power users and those people are plagued with level upon level of complexity and bugs that inhibit their work.

I'm in charge of an IT department and the 5 most common complaints are all related to issues the Chrome OS should, in theory, fix. And that's just business users.

Think about home users who have to deal with virus scanners, malware, adware, errant programs running in the background, system updates and so on. Not to mention the simple cost advantage (Even academically priced Office still costs $100 in itself).

Finally Microsoft hasn't maintained Windows as well as it should have. So you have a shell that's been around since 1993 that is constantly getting new stuff tacked on to it. If you deal with it for long enough you start to see these flaws very clearly. Things like Wireless connections failing for no good reason (which are fixed with a simple right click and repair) or explorer grinding to a halt simply because the user tried to access a resource that wasn't there.

So there's plenty of use case here. Whether Google executes well enough is another story but there's definitely a need.
Fascinating and awesome and how do they do that? Must. Read. Source. And. Paper.
Bebo Getting Ready to Be Sold, Again
That is astounding. I wonder what they paid? Widevine has raised a lot of money over the years. They have a good position in streaming media content protection, but mostly it's DRM for Flash.

It means they're taking GoogleTV pretty seriously, though.
No, Craigslist is more convenient and better than any other thing like it, because they refused to listen to every idiot that told them they need to be more innovative, or that they should fill up their space with ads and "user interface". Their infrastructure is rock solid. What should they be doing different?
haha fair enough. maybe im just paranoid about how the minds of people work as ive seen it. We use turitin at our university to check originality of work of students. That takes a document and matches it against a huge database of their own that they maintain. Students can't use that service (unless they pay the fee which they mostly don't although I know a few who have done so) because they would look at the areas that have been marked as unoriginal and would make a few changes to make it go undetected.

at least that's how it goes. The system I have right now so far also highlights which areas specifically does the style change and in what way and by what percentage. It's being built keeping in mind a user base that should be able to get information with just two clicks . So it shouldn't be too hard to change the style here and there to game the system.

But I do raise hands in acceptance of your viewpoint here and call a truce (yes drama much) until I actually build a product before really making a decision on everything. But I do honestly value your input a LOT. thanks again :)
Wrote my own web server. Which runs my own web framework. Which runs my new webapp a friend and I wrote yesterday. Writing a simple web stack isn't hard. Writing a full featured, secure, and reliable stack is more difficult.

I mean we are mostly all people who make stuff here. I am slightly offended by your attitude that ZS is some how showing us up and we need to prove what we did this year.
"Flatlined" means "dead" in common parlance, not "holding steady as the absolute ruler in classified ad space". Idiots.
Keep in mind that the $2B estimate is the run-rate meaning the current period's sale (Quarter or Month) multiplied to estimate the entire year's rate if the same rate continues.

Their current period's revenue is extremely high due to this season (with the year ending) carries high demand from businesses to make more $.

Realistically they are said to have an estimated revenue of around $850M so with their 50% cuts, take in $425M and after wages, expense and taxes, they are probably profiting somewhere around $100-150M
Milton, is that you?

I found your stapler.
I agree:

"The chief evidence, according to industry experts and analysts, is the way venture capitalists and established companies are clamoring to give money to young companies, including those with only a shred of an idea."

This just seems inaccurate. All of the companies mentioned in the article (and most of the companies that seem to get funding) at least have a functioning product or service. You still have to actually build something.
If you're having trouble making sense of it, as I did at first, here's what I've learned:

* You enter a list of "tiles" in the box, on either a square grid (four characters per tile) or hex grid (six characters).

* Upper case letters (like "A") represent pointy sides, and lowercase letters (like "a") are convex sides. You can use A through D.

* Numbers 1-4 are "flat" sides, which makes sense as they have no case.

* A hyphen seems to be a second kind of whitespace that has to match itself, unless it has some other special meaning.

* The program, while running, searches for a way to fill the entire view area with a consistent pattern, though not necessarily filling every grid cell with a tile. Sometimes it finds one quickly, and sometimes it struggles for a while.

The shapes of the "pieces" are strange-looking enough that I didn't realize at first they are simply a function of the input.

Very cool!
Ask HN: What did you do this year?
mikeryan's question (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967727) was rhetorical but mine isn't. So, what did you guys do this year? Building things, picking up new skills, traveling, learning to ride narwhals ... everything counts.

I've had a terrible year in terms of productivity. I picked up some much-needed web development skills, built some toy projects that never left ~/Source/ and buried an old project that was going nowhere. That's pretty much it. Now I'm finally starting something big; perhaps some of you could inspire me :)
In that case, you could get an iPad (with or without a keyboard dock). Then you get all the functionality of ChromeOS (fast start, no viruses, web browsing) with all the benefits of iOS (apps, accessories, cases, portability).

This is the main reason why I don't see a use for ChromeOS - it's not out yet, and it only does one thing - web browsing - which I would argue is easier on a tablet like the iPad.
If a bunch of rich, private investors take a haircut if/when a bubble pops it's not going to effect average Americans at large like the NASDAQ crash did. We can thank Sarbanes-Oxley killing IPOs for this; not sure if that's net good or bad, probably bad.
It seems that the new trend in "co-working" in NYC at least is towards startup focused spaces (e.g. Dogpatch Labs, General Assembly). Granted, the turn over may be even lower than the average co-working space (no numbers, but at Dogpatch NYC it's 6 months+ before you need to start looking for other space - there is actually going to be a fairly large turnover in the next month or so) but there is something to be said when everyone in the space is working on a company rather than just projects. It'll be interesting to see how these spaces develop, but from my experience at Dogpatch NYC, personally, I find them to be a great place for an early stage company.
It's incredibly convenient. The people I know who have been scammed on it were all trying believe in something that was too good to be true. If by "doesn't innovate" you mean "doesn't 'upgrade' their interface to the latest Web 9.0 technologies every six months," that too is a selling point for everyone except the edge cases who populate HN et al.

When I go to Craigslist I see the same familiar, endearingly cluttered interface that's been there since I was in my teens. The search bar is conveniently located up top, it's fast, and it works. When I go to one of their competitors I see a bunch of corporate logos and some bullshit like "Experience an open marketplace powered by Vast." You're telling me this is better? Oh wait, it has check-in!
Opera is the Amiga of web browsers.
s/like/liken/ ?
Is there any way to make a grooveshark desktop version that uses this same html5 interface? I love how the next/prev buttons on my mac work with that interface (using gs desktop helper)
A few weeks back I purchased a book called The Dictionary of Concise Writing by Robert Hartwell Fiske. So far it has served me well. Here: http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Concise-Writing-Alternative...

It's a fun book to skim when you have nothing to do.
Great job. Having done something similar for a prototype (using JS to control Flash players), I must say that it takes a great deal of work to get it all nicely. I'm assuming that you're using ExternalInterface to communicate with the player?

Also, is there any reason why you guys didn't replace the Flash with HTML 5's <audio> tag for browsers that can support it? Security issues maybe?
I believe they send encrypted audio through the flash player? That might be the reason they have kept it through all revisions.
Left my job to make Forrst (http://forrst.com) full time. Generating meaningful revenue and growing the team. It's been an adventure.
The first serious infowar is now engaged
Early this morning, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed reposted a tweet from EFF cofounder John Perry Barlow. "The first serious infowar is now engaged," Barlow wrote. "The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."

Barlow is no stranger to theatrical overstatement; this, after all, is the guy who in 1996 penned "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" that opened with the lines: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Barlow was wrong about sovereignty. Despite its name, "cyberspace" runs on physical infrastructure that sits in various governmental jurisdictions, and when sites like Wikileaks start irritating those governments, sovereignty is quite powerfully brought to bear.

-via @ARSTechnica
Wireframing Effectively on the New 970 Grid System
Perhaps not every person in the world likes the IPad.
One of the companies I work with has been trying to staff up so I have been doing some interviewing. The company's needs are relatively modest: demonstrable skill in a couple of production programming languages (C++ and Java, say), demonstrable ability to design programs and data structures when given a specification, a basic knowledge of algorithms and performance analysis, an understanding of production operating systems that goes beyond having used an editor running on a Unix system editing, compiling, and then running a "hello world" program, demonstrable skills in one or more real-world application domains, some basic knowledge of hardware, an reasonable understanding of parallelism and concurrency, some basic knowledge of networking, and so forth. It is very hard to find candidates who really can demonstrate a level of skill commensurate with the great credentials they provide in their resume.
Had my 2nd child. Quit my job to work on my startup full-time. Had a very 'lean' summer. Finally closed a great round of funding. It has definitely been an interesting year :)
Our copy writers don't always get the why's exactly correct for this stuff, so I apologize for them for making it seem like Opera isn't modern. In reality, our current temporary lack of support for Opera is entirely Internet Explorer's fault. It took all our available resources to get the site working reliably in IE there was none left for Opera. Which sucks because Opera is /fast/ and standards compliant...but it has very few users.
With the caveat that Mike Arrington is not an objective third party as regards Jason these days, I recall him mentioning that Calacanis was regularly taking modafinil so as to not need sleep. c.f. http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/03/at-my-wits-end-jason-calaca...

I realize this may result in "I don't get tired" but for my two cents, chemical augmentation isn't really the same thing.

Or maybe that's a more accurate description of Olympic athletes than I'd like to admit.
Billing these days is very easy if you're willing to pay a little more to outsource all the hard parts.

If you can code just download the paypal nvp sample code for something like website payments pro and you can easily have a clean, professional looking (no handing off to a third party site) billing system in a couple of hours.
Anyone know how to sign up as a SOLE volunteer? Ironically, I cannot seem to find the answer via a web search.
This is a general question and not specifically to you: how successful is he? I have him mentally associated with netscape.com and a bad digg clone, and some time on the VC side of the table - so for people like me who don't know the background there, what did he do entrepreneurially and how well did he do for himself and his investors?
If Facebook and Groupon both went public on Monday, Facebook would have a higher IPO. But in the space of a year or two, Groupon would have the higher market cap. Facebook's valuation is based on a lot of hype and not very much revenue potential. Groupon's valuation is far more likely to survive sober, realistic analysis outside of the Valley echo chamber.
I'm not familiar with SimpleDB but I believe it is similar to Windows Azure Table Storage.

I'm curious to know if you have to actually retrieve the items from SimpleDB in order to send a delete query. Or can you construct a query which says delete items that match the where clause?
yeah its from a place similar to flippa - im not worried about whether or not the posting is credible
Celebrities will call you for a price, selling their fame online
Yeah, besides being first mover and the associated brand recognition, I don't know what competitive advantages Groupon really has. Especially when sites like http://www.sandiegosaves.net/ are able to "aggregate" the deals from all the daily deal websites.
That doesn't mean that the companies aren't overvalued. I think the David McClure quote puts it decently:

“I’m not saying Quora, Foursquare, Square aren’t eventually worth a lot of money, but the price to pay to get into those games is kind of amazing — $50 to $80 million?” said Dave McClure, founding partner of 500 Startups, a technology incubator in Silicon Valley. “These companies are in big markets with proven founders, so maybe not absolutely crazy but certainly eyebrow-raising.”
You could use a single-site browser like Fluid: http://fluidapp.com/
If bridges were like software, as soon as a drunk driver ran through a bridge's guard rail the designes would have to follow up with a post that started, "We had some downtime from an accident, here is what we're going to do about it..."
And now this author gains a bit of enlightenment as to why Unix command line jocks love their shell script files.
and some might argue, stifling innovation because of their unwillingness to monetize

You get water for free* from your tap but that didn't stop marketers from convincing everyone to pay $2 a liter or more for it.

Good for Newmark for taking the road less traveled, I doubt they are in danger of losing their crown any time soon.
"Pointing to outliers and using those as examples of good decisions doesn't seem very wise."

It's wise if you are an outlier. And Groupon seems to be an outlier to me.
Wanting Everyone to Win
Ask HN: Facebook stock derivatives
I just read that there is currently a pool of 'private derivatives' being traded for Facebook stock.

If Second Market has created a thriving marketplace (albeit amongst accredited investors) for non-public stock trading, is there a ripe market opportunity for a derivative-spinning marketplace?

How easy is it REALLY to create a tradable derivative? Is the paper only as good as someone views it - a la 'federal reserve notes'?
The responsiveness is a much nicer feature than visual transitions and the such, and for a start of a new but similar design I quite like it.
No border guards as far as I know... And I should double check as I'm supposed to claim some land for a couple groups of people.

North Dakota, eh? Yeah, I got over the mortal enemies thing when I realized how few of us are in Silicon Valley.
So, I've been crawling Craigslist for a while. It does appear that it is slowing down somewhat.
Yep. Just tell me who you want it to, what you want me to do, and that you want it to be anonymous and I'll do it!
Would be cool if they let me mark items I'm interested in so I can come back to them later.
Fun with R Infochimps package: animated blog post hit map
How many devices do you need?
Yamla Pagla Deewana Movie Review, Wallpapers
Yamla Pagla Deewana is an upcoming comedy film directed by Samir Karnik, starring Dharmendra, Sunny Deol, and Bobby Deol in the lead roles. The whole Deol family is coming together after their last sports hit, Apne (2007). The film has completed shooting and is expected to be released on 24 December 2010, close to Christmas.
yeah i know them . wow according to the number of responses
i guess this desktop market is dead