skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried setting 9=x^x^x^x^..., and by similar logic, we can take x^[both sides] and get x^9 = x^x^... = 9. Which means x is a ninth root of 9; I think we may as well pick the real root. However...

arc> (expt 9 1/9)
1.2765180070092417
arc> (expt (expt 9 1/9) that)
1.3656685405664577
arc> (expt (expt 9 1/9) that)
1.3957179500635313
arc> (expt (expt 9 1/9) that)
1.405994788813235
arc> (expt (expt 9 1/9) that)
1.409526784112037
arc> (expt (expt 9 1/9) that)
1.4107427255115605
arc> (expt (expt 9 1/9) that)
1.4111615739170247

This doesn't look like it's converging to 9. This tells me that you can't just say "N = x^x^x^..." and expect there to be an x satisfying that condition, any more than there's an x satisfying "3 = 0*x". Actually, that one's arguably solvable with x = ∞. A better example is "|x| = -2", or perhaps "3 = f(x) where f(x) = 1 if x>0, 0 otherwise".

So I guess the takeaway is that the function "x^x^x^..." is a kind of "decision" function, if you know what I mean--one that requires making some sharp distinction somewhere, like the absolute value and "if x>0 then 1 else 0" functions. The x^x^... function is actually a limit, and evaluating it requires deciding that it does approach a limit in the first place. You can't expect these "decision" functions, as I call them, to always be as robust and invertible as usual mathematical functions. This result is probably surprising only because the limit is implicit.
I was thinking I would have to set something like this up for my (non-reading, 3-year-old) youngest daughter. It ends up, there's no need-- she just memorizes the positions of the items in the Favorites list in IE.

In other words: this is all about psychology, not intellect, and the site looks like it does it well. Congratulations.
Show HN: Stylebot Social, share custom styles for sites
I did this project to allow people to share their custom designs for websites. In addition, it is integrated with my earlier project, called Stylebot, which was a Google Chrome extension that allows users to customize site designs and save them persistently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1716889)

You can browse styles contributed by other users and bookmark them for later use. You can install these styles as part of Stylebot or as userscripts.

I will love to get feedback and ideas on its implementation, UI and ease of use. Don't forget to check out the styles for Hacker News!

URL is: http://stylebot.me

Thanks!
I'm really pleased that you've been willing to stick your head above the parapet and say this. What you've said seems to me to be a common line of reasoning, but it always confuses me.

In particular, you say:

> Sadly, I'm not math savvy.

OK, that's cool, and I'm always willing to engage with people who want to learn.

> Obviously (x^x infinitum) is not the same as (x^x infinitum-1).

Given that you're not math savvy, that's a pretty definite thing to say.

> ... my answer is based on logical reasoning rather than mathematical proof.

Well, actually your answer seems to be based on intuition, and not on reasoning at all. You intuitively say that x^x^x^x != x^x^x, which is fair enough, and then leap to the conclusion that the infinite case must be like the finite case.

And there's a problem. The infinite case is not like the finite case. Similarly, the infinite sum 1/2+1/4+1/8+1/16+1/32+... insofar as it can be given any meaning at all, must be set equal to 1, even though all the finite partial sums are strictly less than 1.

> this doesn't seem like a very interesting "math paradox".

But your "reasoning" is wrong. Perhaps you've dismissed it as "uninteresting" because you haven't really understood it? That's fair enough - I don't have a problem with that, but it would be nice to believe that you realised it.

Let me just say again that I'm really pleased you expressed your thoughts on this. I'm sure you're not the only one, and I find it useful to hear the way people think about these things. I give lots of presentations and masterclasses on math to all ranges of ages and experience. I need to know the intuitions people are using. So thanks.
Some (constructive) criticism of the db so far. I do realize that it's (at the moment) manually curated, but I still think it applies:

* Twitter. One of the biggest websites out there right now, that also includes number of extensions only have 2 listed.

* Facebook has 5. Disconnect or Facebook cleaner is however not among them.

* Gmail. Lots of extensions. Most fall within 2 categories and fullfill mostly the same purposes. If these are manually curated, why not do some editorialization? Makes it easier for me as an end-user to chose, and ultimately find value in your extension.

* Reddit. It shows one extension and that is a general extension for blocking social link stuff from external pages. How about all the other extensions? Votes, Inbox-checker, etc? I found them via a quick google.

I guess if this extension takes of (and you make it obvious how to submit recommendations), you will need to automate more of the process, or you will be drowned in extensions people feel are missing. That and SPAM.
I agree /w what you're saying. But at the same time, speaking for the US audience, many of the really unique and breathtaking sights here are fairly played out at this point (How many awesome pictures of the Grand Canyon have you seen?) Whereas Kyrgyzstan and Peru are completely new to me.
My friends new Saas startup, Warhead eCommerce - sweet name, awesome product
The equation 4=x^x^x^x^x^x^x... is not solvable. Read the wikipedia article. x^x^x^x^x... either converges to a value smaller than 4 or does not converge at all.
Join the club. I read it as "$20 million dollar businesses" ...
They only explained why it would be illegal in the US. Gitorious is in Norway, so they want Sony to explain why it would be illegal under Norwegian law, which is the only thing that applies to them.
RDF/XML serialization of RDF graphs can be painful. I completely agree that other serializations like Turtle should be used in recommendations (e.g. R2RML).

But the RDF model is a wonderful thing. The use of URIs as identifiers for objects and properties makes possible for the first time to reuse knowledge and share data, linking APIs in the same way we are alreay linking web pages.

RDF semantics are maybe harder, but most people can start using RDF without caring about things like entailment.

I really think RDF has a future, specially since the steady growth of the LOD initiative. The revision of the standard is also a good opportunity to polish some aspects of RDF, for example, the use of named graphs.
Just for those interested in the relevant law... Sony sent a DMCA takedown, which is purely US law. But the EU has implemented EUCD (EU Copyright Directive) which, for practical discussion, does much the same thing. I think that is what they referred to when taking down the content.
I'm having trouble imagining a scenario in which this is not exactly what Paul Carr (the Techcrunch author) wanted. The whole article was designed to stir up controversy and get people's blood pumping. Because controversial posts drive traffic.

As far as losing readers they might lose a handful who were (a) already passively angry and (b) had this as their hot button issue. But 99% of people in the tech community know Techcrunch courts controversy at this point and have either chosen to accept that and continue to read or have already left. I don't think a lot of people are going to

So in the end Techcrunch wins this round (as they usually do on these things)
>"Maybe they were trying different approaches"

That is sensible, but can easily slide into an ends justifying the means. In other words, we know that the engineers were tasked with proving that Microsoft was copying Google. That's a different task than figuring out what the Bing toolbar does with data from the Google search page.

Given the low success rate, it is not implausible that the engineers pushed whatever ground rules there were (if any) in the pursuit of evidence. It seems to me that is the most plausible explanation for the uncertainty about whether it was 7, 8, or 9 cases.

To go beyond what is easy for the media to report, it is reasonable to expect that a company in Google's position has twenty or more full time engineers analyzing their competitor's products. The story about "torsoraphy" really only makes sense if Google has such a program. Seriously, is anyone surprised that Google and Bing analyze each other's engineering?

[WildSpeculation]
One or more Google engineers tasked with analyzing the competition discovered "torsoraphy" connection and identified its correlation with the Bing toolbar - however, keep in mind that Google has not claimed that the "torsoraphy" naturally occurred in the wild.
[/WildSpeculation]

[GoogleClaim]
Based on the "torsoraphy" discovery, one or more Google engineers hard coded web pages - presumably with permission from senior managers since a leak that it was done casually has such serious blowback potential - twenty Google engineers armed with laptops were tasked with creating top keyword rankings.The project was at least active for two weeks over the traditional Christmas Holiday[/GoogleClaim]

[WildSpeculation]
The Google engineers, surprised at their initial lack of success tried increasingly diverse and aggressive methods as time passed despite the diversity of IP's they used as they traveled over the Christmas Holidays. Being good hackers some even tried exotic techniques perhaps even creating manipulating existing web pages to influence the search rankings. On advice of lawyers, Google is not comfortable accusing Microsoft of copying in these cases.

A month later, Google plans to announce the Android Marketplace while Apple is going to proclaim that Rupert Murdoch is the future of journalism. Google is going head to head with the reigning PR champion of the world. They turn the experiment into a torrid story and release it on February 1.

Larry Page knows the difference between a Founder from Stanford and a former IBM'er from a cow college in Alabama. It's no match. Binggate drowns out the traditional eve-of-event Apple adulation. On the day of the events, the mudslinging is far sexier than "and it has a hundred pages" for the tech press.[/WildSpeculation]

How bad was it yesterday for Apple? Stories about Apple's triumph with The Daily didn't make the front page of HN. The tech press even found Microsoft more interesting than Apple yesterday. Binggate was Googles attemt to kill two birds with one stone.
Ten Foods, to eat with chopsticks or fork?
JavaEventing - An easy to use eventing library for Java
Dather is a central service to keep all your media from Twitter, Facebook
I also think there's a big difference ("ethically" - I'm thinking more in terms of an artistic/creative idea of originality than an academic or legal definition) between using content from a blog (or whatever) to make a search engine, and using content from another search engine to make a search engine.
I could see something with NFC being much more productive than this. Actually have a plastic card, and just scan that sucker to each other's phones. This is an interesting idea but still doesn't really get rid of the paper usage because people like to have something physical.
Hard to tell how many downloads because of the article (since our analytics can't reach into the Zune client) but it definitely sparked off some press.

As for advice, we picked up just great overall tips on SEO and generally running a small startup from patio11. I also went through a ton of bookmarked threads on things like pitching to TC which really helped
Here's a more complete list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Case_Western_Reserve_Un...

With that said, being able to name two is better than most. Ask your average developer who famous (in CS circles) went to Yale, Columbia, Princeton, UIUC, etc... It's pretty rare that there is any association at all. Off the top of my head I don't know if I can name two of equal prominence from any of those schools (although I'm sure if I searched I could find some).
I seem to be the only one that keeps scratching his head thinking ... what is the problem here?

I have no issue whatsoever with Bing analyzing the data sent by opt-in users that is further processed to help increase its search relevancy results.

I would not care if Bing even sent Google synthetic and organic search terms directly, to analyze and make use of the results.

Remember, Google uses you (the searcher) as a product that is sold to the real customers: the adwords and adsense clients.

Google scans the net of content that they do not own, and makes an enormous amount of profit in return.

Google owns nothing. You owe Google nothing.
There is a correlation between child rearing and benefits-seeking (at least in the UK). Your costs appear to go up exponentially in this instance, however the benefits don't always follow.

Also, some parts of the UK are significantly cheaper than others -- i'd argue that you might be successful keeping yourself stable in the north or middle of england, but you'd struggle in london or it's outer reaches.

One more thing- people don't 'opt' to be in this situation usually, so they are quite likely to enter into it with a reasonable chunk of unsecured loans and such that'll suck up the money.

So, sure. You can be a college grad who's not yet got anything but student loans, and happily enter in to benefits to support you whilst you build something interesting... But as soon as you need to go anywhere or spend any money to further your goals, you might find yourself pretty stuck.
Letter from Mayor Curley to MIT President Compton, 1948
This is probably my favorite WYSIWYG CSS customization tool. It has allowed me to increase the value of websites by 10 fold.
I agree that a lot of the standards surrounding RDF are ugly. I've always particularly disliked the RDF-as-XML serialization, which took two fairly simple ideas (triples and XML) and combined them into a complex mess. This is why I always hate parsing RSS 1.0. Also, the full generality of OWL just confuses me: It seems to be Prolog done badly.

But just as with XML, it's possible to ignore the cruft (XQuery, XLink, XML Schema, the current SOAP flavor-of-the-month), and just use the useful bits. A similar argument could be made about HTML: For every HTML 5, there's an XHTML 2.0.
Little US action as industrial spying surges
> I sometimes get the feeling that the HN crowd is a bit (understandably) myopic and focuses too much on simplistic websites.

i disagree with the simplistic notion. but i'd note that it focuses on software because that is YC's wheelhouse. this is a niche website, for sure. you will certainly find other somewhat similar sites more oriented towards various other things.
Detecting bias (or how to pick experts)
Why I Love Startups
It would be like mobile chat roulette with a lot less dicks... well depending on which part of town you roll to.

It sounds great, but I'm not sure how pricing would affect subscriptions?
Is anyone else tired of these types of welcome pages? I'd like to know what it does before signing up.
Piece of paper in my wallet. I got the idea from Bruce Schneier, he says we're pretty good about keeping track of other pieces of paper there, and it's more secure than many other alternatives for frequently changing passwords.
That's not a tax.
It diverges for all values of x >= 2, iirc.
Why should I want my employer to 'love' me? There are several things I want from my employer, but none of them are anywhere near 'love' and especially not the sort of 'love' that this hints at.

Primarily, I want my employer to provide a structure within which I can do my work with a minimum of hassle. I want to be paid well and regularly. I want no surprises when it comes to health-care or other benefits. I want, within reason, to be able to put my job aside for personal matters that I deem more important - we usually call this 'personal leave' in the US. I want a comfortable, arms-length working relationship where I can work hard as needed to get a job done and then leave.

I do NOT want my employer actively trying to become my friend. I do NOT want my employer asking me to share my taste in music with the rest of the office, nor do I care about everybody else's tastes. I do NOT want "team-building" exercises or structured activities which are meant to help me work better with people. I definitely don't want my employer to 'love' me. To hell with that.
Let's define x^x^(x...) as a closed form equation:

y=x^y

By simple substitution, y=x^(x^y), y=x^(x^(x^y)), and so on. But the closed form is easier to reason about. The equations given are equivalent to nonlinear systems of the form:

y=x^y
A=x^y

where a=2 or 4.

A little manipulation (logs are base x):

y = x^y
Assumption: x>1 (log is not defined for all values if base is <1)
log y = log x^y
log y = y

Which is only true if y=1, * provided that x>1. But y is taken to be not 1 as a premise, and then x is derived to be greater than 1. The proof thus assumes a contradiction; naturally, it's not difficult to prove a contradiction if you assume one. The trick here was to hide the assumption in a strange equation.

* - Actually, on further review, this turns out to be false. Everything else was correct, though, and as it happens log(sqrt(2)) 4 != 4, so this still shows the flaw.
Are there any conditions on how you can use the data? In other words, can you re-sell it?

I am aware of two companies in that space (selling nutritional data). Both are expensive, and one doesn't return emails. There are definitely companies willing to pay for that data.
Everything you need to know about your CPU
One of the most important parts of a computer is the central processing unit or CPU. This is the component that makes all computations possible, and performs four basic logical operations that complete the fetch-decode-execute cycle of a computer.
Jacques brings up an excellent point about how Google regards copyright. Here's IP of Microsoft directly from Google:

http://books.google.com/books?id=-ANomF3oARkC&printsec=f...
There are other things unmet: for example, support in career progression, clothing, etc. Again, this is fine for a short period (as it was designed for) but imagine living for a year on benefits, where there simply isn't any budget for new shoes, or any kind of enrichment opportunities.
I tried it with the message "What's all this about then?" and it barfed due to the single quote.
thank you so much. I was interested in the article, but couldn't continue reading past the labels. I'm surprised that forbes.com (ostensibly a reputable magazine) has gone with a "2leep" style layout.

Adsense "clickbombs" everywhere and completely unreadable.

This is 'content farm' quality at best, which is a shame because it seems an interesting article.
This has not been overturned yet! I hate misleading titles.
I would disagree with #5 on that list. In my experience a request from a boss will most likely be misinterpreted (to some degree at least) as an attempt to spy on you.

Also, many people are starting to learn that keeping your professional and personal networks separate is a good thing so having a blanket statement of "boss's should friend employees" is a little misguided.

In either case it will create an unnecessarily dilemma for the employee. And its worth noting that there is a growing list of people who have lost their jobs because of Facebook.
I don't see why this has anything to do with an infinite progression. The problem is that he has a system of two equations that are not consistent.

Replace the x^x^x^x... with "y". Now you have:

2 = y
and
4 = y

OMG, 2 = 4!

Not every two equations can be solved with the same assignment of variables.
what's wrong with bookmarks?
Mubarak is not Egypt's Prime Minister.
Could you provide a use case for this tool?

It seems to work, but its value isn't plainly clear to me. (I'm sure you had a cool reason to create it -- I just want to know what that reason was!)

[edit] Based on the use case provided, I think that a very simple change could be made that would increase the value tremendously: generate, as well as the code, a randomized link that can be more easily sent to others through text message or email.
I see your point. In the case of Hipster I absolutely agree. There was no clear message about what the company planned to launch. In this instance I think it's a bit different, since well, you know it's ecommerce, you know it's software and you know it's coming soon.

If you're interested I can have them show you a quick shot of the interface so you know what to expect?
And that's the point of it. But like any other similar thing, it can be an addiction, and when you consider choosing between the lottery or a meal this week, there's a problem needing addressing.
We're diving into NFC - although still doesn't solve even half of the problem.

And something physical? Like cassettes? CDs? Newspapers?
I’m not USian so I have no direct experience, but the reviews of the Verizon iPhone4 are showing about half the upload and two thirds the download speeds that users are getting on AT&T. Is AT&T’s coverage really bad enough to warrant that drop in speed?
How to Setup a Failover Server on EC2
If you're just looking to prove out a concept and see if there could be any interest/traction for it, I would feel comfortable going ahead and scraping (but be smart about it). To me that means: know your target (big corporate sites vs JimBob's autos), throttle your requests (both the frequency with which you scrape and how rapidly you fetch pages), and how obvious it will be where you got your data.

But from your Q's it seems like you're looking at whether or not this is a longer-term viable idea. Hopefully some smart people will comment with experiences/facts on the legal subject.

All that legality may not matter so much if you can position yourself as a clearinghouse where these other parties just have to have a presence to survive, instead of a competitor?
No feeds on The Daily
Let me get some popcorn.

Any ideas of what will happen next? How far are we until some home users with outdated ISPs be blocked from the internet?
Norway is not an EU member.
Apologies for the support delay. As mentioned above, we have seen overwhelming growth lately and are training support staff to scale up right now. Feel free to mail me directly if I can help.

For inotify, the biggest limitation we run into on Linux is that the default system configuration limits a user to watching a relatively small number of folders (6,000 I think, and that includes all subfolders recursively.) You can change this in sysctl if you like, and we may add this change to future packages. In case your curious, the SpiderOak directory watchers are tiny C programs for each platform, and are open source.

FYI -- We've definitely seen high CPU use when syncing hundreds of thousands of small files (source code etc), but this has been greatly improved in the latest beta, which just went out yesterday.

Thanks very much for the feedback.
I am not sure if the submitter was the creator or not, but I found a couple of issues that I thought were sort of prohibitive or at least counter to the intentions of the site (it should "just work").

1) The font choice when hovering over "Edit" or "Set up" on a button is REALLY weird. I'm a 31 year old dude and it took me a few seconds longer than it should have (i.e., zero seconds) to parse it

2) "Search" seems to default to http://google.com (which is fine, except that using Google Chrome, for some reason http://google.com doesn't work for me. I need to prepend a www or use google.ca - seems as though the automatic country based redirect is broken?). And there doesn't seem to be any way to edit it. So the most prominent, and probably most used, button is broken immediately.

Nice idea, probably needs some review on implementation.
Ahem, oops. :( That was a silly basic error, sorry.

EDIT: my Norwegian is non-existant but as far as I can make out they have their own equivilant (to the EUCD and DMCA) implementation of the WIPO treaties.