skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Yeah the new Audi's are incredible!)

And they were trying everything to cut the balls of them, weren't they?

The Diesels aren't banned but they restricted their fuel-tank size. They also have to refuel slower than non-diesels (not by design but by regulation) and they have a new +30kg weight increase restriction just for diesels.

There might be more. I suppose its not a bad thing to try to equalize the cars for racing by putting handicaps (and thus leaving it up to the drivers skill) but I dislike the outright banning of certain technologies.[1]
You're not the only one. I am stoked for some nice WP7 handsets. I'm currently an Android user but the new WP7 UI looks gorgeous and Microsoft's response to the Chevron exploit was admirable. It appears that they generally understand the importance of a homebrew ecosystem coexisting with their IP.

My career path has me working at or consulting with huge companies who are typically entrenched with Outlook & MS Office and if Microsoft can provide a better integration experience than Android with a piece of hardware that rivals Android handsets I will definitely check them out when it comes time to upgrade. I'm hoping the Nokia alliance works out and starts providing some competitive hardware.
In case you don't get any offers here, try http://www.couchsurfing.org/.
Not only that, but you could run a business where all you did was modify cars for other people!
Comparing market share of Symbian devices to iPhone or Android is like comparing market share of bicycles to market share of cars.

Symbian OS has several version. The version that ships in volume powers devices like Nokia C1-01 http://store.nokia.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/productdeta... or worse. It's not the same product as iPhone or Android or even the old Palm OS shipped on Treo.

The share of Symbian OS devices shipping a version comparable to iPhone or Android is a blip on the radar. A drop in the ocean. And a peasant among Kings.
Funny, it really is. Or maybe I am just trained to recognize this pattern in places it does not exists. (We are talking about the black Qt on the body of the robot, no need to downvote)
I'd be interested to know more details as to how you were able to accomplish this. Specifically:

How long did it take you save up enough?

How frugally did you have to live to stretch your savings for 9 months?

Does your geographic location have a high cost-of-living?

What were you able to accomplish in 9 months' time?

Did you have to quit your job or were you able to convince your employer to take an unpaid leave of absence?

If you quit, how hard was it to get a new job?

Do you like this new job better?
Ask HN: Wanted: Elementary but surprising group theory result ...
Recently I was asked for an example from group theory to show its utility. Basically, I'm looking for something slightly interesting or slightly unexpected or rather useful that is otherwise not obvious, but falls out of some elementary group theory.

My first two responses were Lagrange's Theorem, that the size of a subgroup divides the size of the whole group (so the number of rotations of a cube divides the number of permutations of six objects), and the fact that a group of even order has a non-trivial element whose square is the identity.

But I was hoping for something a bit deeper than either of these.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

PS: I know this is not about hackers or entrepreneurs or startups, but I also know people here like a bit of math. Sometimes.
Only if the guys have big 1970's moustaches.
Really inspiring story. I can attest you and Janette were experiencing "the trough of sorrow".
Restricting power is a very good idea and I find it pretty agreeable (See: Group B). This is what they've been doing with the diesel cars in Lemans.

But restricting entire technologies is something else entirely and kind of frustrates me.
>by what metric?

sign of the first derivative.
Give Nokia a Break
F1 anorak - that article is years out of date. You can tell that anyway from the tech but when it starts talking about the new ruling for 2001....

Much of the core technology isn't that different, significantly because they first restricted and then effectively froze development a few years ago, but the engines aren't 3l V10s any more but 2.4l V8s.

In the time of the 3l V10s, from memory they peaked at over 900bhp. For a while they were revving to about 19,000, but as the materials science for this got increasingly complex they restricted it to about 17,000 on cost grounds - after all there's no real sporting value to everyone spending an extra $50m to get to exactly the same relative performances with little noticeable difference in outcomes.

The 2.4l V8s were about 750ish from memory when they came in; I've not heard more recent figures but due to development restrictions I doubt they're much different. The other interesting technology now is the extra hybrid power source and the large kick that can offer; interestingly it was very nearly raced (in a different form) by McLaren in 1998, though a late rule change that was suspected to be at the behest of another team banned it.

Otherwise - the core reason the engines are recognisable is that they're required in the rules to be so. Turbos were restricted then banned in 1998 after, at the design peak in 1986, reaching 1500bhp from 1.5l engines. They're quite likely to be back in a few years though, albeit in a very different form to their mid-80s incarnation. Turbines - what I suspect we'd actually be running otherwise, although indirectly as electric generators for capacitor packs - were banned even earlier. I don't think Wankel engines have ever been legal in F1. Diesel definitely isn't.

When we say recognisable though, I'm not sure people realise just how alien these engines are within the limits of a piston engine. They barely do anything below what would be red-line revs for a road car and generate almost no power until they're past 12-13,000RPM. Piston speeds are firmly supersonic and the elasticity of the metal needs to be factored in, yet I read once that the pistons were getting so close to the tops of the cylinder heads in combustion that there was a visible ring of clear metal in the combustion deposits because there wasn't space there for the deposits to form. The real shock though is the noise; we're all used to what a road performance engine sounds like, but a 17,000RPM V8 (and even more so a 19,000RPM V10) howls and screams like no road engine you'll ever hear, bike included. Animalistic, harsh, edgy and the sort of sound that lives with you; TV doesn't come close to capturing it.
Erasing master tapes of actual shows is one thing; not bothering to preserve promotional web pages for eternity isn't even in the same ballpark.
At worst, the established interests will refuse to license to you, because they don't want a competitor.

Hence patent pools, in which participants who are often direct competitors agree to license to each other and anybody else on the same terms.

Are you seriously suggesting that the creators of Android read Apple's patents, as a way of "catching up?"

I can't speak for him but I don't think that's what he's saying.

You're fixating on the common fallacy that the only things that can or should be patentable are things that cannot possibly be understood except by reading a thorough working description by the party that created it. This is wrong.

I have here on my keychain an instance of patent 4,864,898 "Combination pop-top can and bottle opener". It consists of a shaped piece of plastic with a little piece of metal, and it is completely obvious how it works just by using it. There is no hidden mechanism and nothing that needs explaining. And yet: this did not fall off a tree. This is not a product of nature but of human ingenuity lending greater value to this shape than the equivalent mass of plastic in a less intentional shape. It's that difference that a patent attempts to recognize as an independent thing that has economic value, not the textual description of the patent, which is an artifact of that recognition.

So, to bring that back around: the point is that without patents, any invention which is not either directly tied to the means of production or hidden in a black box loses the bulk of it's economic value and thus the bulk of it's reason for ever being created.
Don't forget MS still controls an army of developers, and is mobilising a lot of resources to help transfer skills from winforms/asp.net to win 7 mobile development. There will be plenty of apps development for w7 as long as the platform can reach some type of critical mass.
> Why do you think that time seems to speed up as we get older?

My theory: because each unit of time is a smaller relative percentage of our existence to date.

For example, to a 5-yr-old, one year is 20% of their lifespan, and seems to last a loong time. But to a 50-yr-old, one year is only 2% of their lifespan, and flies by.
It seems the owner of the project is "taipanromania" - Taipan, Romania (former communist country)
> and provably is unrelated

I've been told by a professional that "unrelated" generally means work that might be in a different profession - and that to a court, "computers" could be considered a single profession in this sort of case. Work done in the field of "computers" outside of work, and you work for a "computer" firm? Related. Ergo your employer owns the IP.

So yeah, don't depend on it. At all.

This is the advice I was given when verifying that I had the IP relating to my startup. To avoid any doubt, I got the IP signed over with a contract I paid a solicitor for. This cost money, but more importantly it helped that my former employer was willing to do this.

Thinking about it, this default is the sort of thing that stifles innovation. If the Government wants to promote innovation, perhaps they should change the rules.

Edited to add: I'm in the UK.
Secure your Dropbox on Mac and Linux
If the need is to limit power, then why not directly limit power: make a rule stating "no more than 600bhp" or something like that?

Improved technologies could still flourish. If a new approach could deliver more than the power limit, it might instead be re-tuned to provide better durability or better fuel efficiency or lighter weight.

But the FIA has interfered with any of these possible paths of innovation, because it's thinking more like a government and less like a group whose very purpose is to compete.
Cheating, Inc.
In fact I see it more as them picking up after themselves.
Outsourcing Relationship
After join an outsourcing relationship, your company has hired a service provider (virtual assistant). It's just like any relationship between employee-employer and you as the employer - set your goals, guidelines and the policies. The employee will listen, accept and do what you ask them to do.
Deindividuation
Aren't you a single founder? What makes you special?
Tumors of the Elder Gods
A new iPhone video accessory acts as a cameraman in your pocket
Poll: Do you blog?
I have a theory about the reasons why people blog (and why they don't). Please help me with this survey - I will publish the results as a post soon.
Yes, I blog frequently.
Yes, I blog but I wish I did it more often.
No, I don't blog because I don't have enough to say.
No, I don't blog because I don't have time.
No, I don't blog because I don't have any interest.
A Friendly, Talkative Hedge Fund Manager Who Makes A Lot of Companies Miserable
For most employees, it's the only recourse.
50 mph?

This thing scares me. I want one.
Management is the Disease
If you do blog, link to it here!
> Linux would have made a much better choice as a transitional platform from IRIX.

It would have, but this was 1998, so very few of us knew this at the time. I don't know if you remember the tech zeitgeist in 1998, but Linux was still a pretty hardcore geek alternative at the time, maybe like Vim today. NT had things like journaled filesystems.

You can delve into history to see what the Linux community was talking about at the time:

http://old.lwn.net/archives/
http://old.lwn.net/1998/1001/

"Intel and Netscape are now officially investors in Red Hat Software. A year ago such a thing would have been almost unthinkable. But times have changed."

"With this release, the GNOME desktop is reaching a usable state."

http://old.lwn.net/1998/1008/

"Expect that, with the introduction of pre-installed Linux systems from vendors like Gateway, IBM, Dell or others, the number of people searching out a Linux VAR in order to get a pre-installed Linux system will rapidly dwindle."

http://old.lwn.net/1998/1015/

"Oracle has announced that it will ship and support a Linux distribution."

http://old.lwn.net/1998/1022/press.php3

"Like sex in high school, everyone's talking about Linux, but is anyone doing it?"

http://old.lwn.net/1998/1029/

"140,000 Mexican school labs to be outfitted with Linux and GNOME." (That was the "Red Escolar" or "Scholar Net" project. Its failure is described in http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/08/45737: "RedEscolar, or "Scholar Net," has put computers in 4,500 schools, but fewer than 20 are equipped with GNU/Linux machines. The rest are running Windows 95 or 98.".)

So, from the standpoint of 2011, it's easy to see that committing head-on to Linux could have saved SGI. But, at the time, it was a risky decision.

They did actually start to hitch their wagon to Linux a year later: Scott Bekker "SGI Backs Away from Windows NT - Silicon Graphics - Company Business and Marketing". ENT. FindArticles.com. 11 Feb, 2011. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FOX/is_15_4/ai_55675...

Rick Belluzzo was the CEO who made the NT decision. WP says had been working at HP for the last 23 years, not Microsoft, but he did take a job at Microsoft after being deposed at SGI. WP also says his only degree is a BS in accounting from Golden Gate University, a vocational school, so he's probably not very smart.

Here's what he said about working with Bill Gates: "I was always surprised how much Bill knew. I wonder how you find time in the day to be on top of how many things Bill seemed to be on top of. Bill is so passionate about technology, and he really is in the right role to focus the vast majority of his time."

To me, that sounds like typical non-hacker cluelessness. So maybe it's not that surprising that Rick was blind to the finer points of technical risk, compatibility, portability, and how the free-software community worked. (He was also largely responsible for committing HP to Itanic, effectively killing PA-RISC.)
Winter Halts Drilling Into 14-Million-Year-Old Lake
Is anyone concerned about a backlash from ISPs over Netflix bandwidth consumption? Many ISPs provide a video on demand service, but instead of getting revenue for video on demand, they have to beef up their Internet infrastructure to support a competitor. I would think this imbalance would bolster their case against net-neutrality or justify charging for bandwidth usage, which could upset the economics that make Netflix profitable.
I have a Segway (a black i2!) This is something wonderful, and altogether different.
They seem to have survived pre-NetFlix, and there are Netflix alternatives...so I would say 'pretty valuable'.
Nokia's Windows Phone 7 concept revealed
From a pure engineering perspective I absolutely agree. I'm too young to remember the P34 or BT46 in person but the shock of seeing different approaches is definitely sadly missed.

In sporting terms though, I (sadly) think they've gone down the right general path. Partly for containing safety as there's no denying that some of the developments have been less than ideally safe to put it delicately - the idea of the combined evolution of an MP4 ground-effect car with the 1500BHP Honda V6 turbo, but with another 25 years of development, just wouldn't be manageable or safely driveable with the lateral G it could generate. Also though, for cost containment - F1 had spent too long going up expensive blind alleys that served no competition benefit.

This is a benefit of LMP racing though for me, which I love to watch. The diesel cars may sound a bit odd but the sight of a Peugeot 908, Audi R10 and Lola Aston LMP1 thundering through the Becketts-Maggots complex while picking their way through the GTs is just awesomely impressive, and you can continue to see genuine differentiation and innovation in the chassis.
That depends on you viewpoint. The OS itself is technically good (as in significantly better designed than android and friends).

On the other hand, Symbian has some generally good design assumptions (for example client-server division of almost anything) that are hard for programmers that come from other platforms/just don't care and thus it's architecture is often hacked around, which sadly includes many applications written by Nokia itself.
Sure, why not? You cannot count Android as "many".
Ok, you can, but let's not go there.
I have to say, they look pretty good!
Thanks for the feedback. We felt it was fitting and as mmcdan commented it is "non-threatening and inviting" which is what we want being a dating website. If it was a different industry I definitely hear you.
The real shock though is the noise;

I've been to one F1 race, sitting at turn 1 in Shanghai. There was a TV helicopter maybe 50 meters over our heads -- and its noise was completely drowned out by the cars' engines.
Thanks. Yes, when you initially register you put your zip + match radius, and also your age + desired match age range.

Great feedback on the design, I'll pass along to my designer.
Well, or there's Blackberry.
Even Kevin Butler, VP at PlayStation, retweeted the PS3 dongle key: http://twitpic.com/3xwe6h

Edit: OK, he's not really a VP. He's a character played by Jerry Lambert. The advertising company Deutsch/LA controls his Twitter feed. And check out the titles he gives himself in their ads: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgwNyb80L0s&playnext=1...
It works both ways: For every 10 LoC removed, you lose 10 minutes of HN time. After all, you wouldn't want to interrupt the kind of flow that's letting you get some refactoring in, would you?
Take a seat in the waiting room next to Audi.
It may be too late in the game to reply to this nonplussing nonresponsive response, but what the hell...

>What responsibility am I shirking? If you want the job, then you do the thing.

Was "shirking" too severe? You disclaim, patently and unapologetically, responsibility for the effort that will be put into applying for the position by applicants who will not get the job.

You disclaim that responsibility by saying in effect "it will be fun, and if it ain't fun, don't do it, and if you do it and don't get the job it might be good for your portfolio, or good experience."

Your choice here was between devising an application procedure that actively and consciously tries to minimize the futile endeavors of most applicants or devising one that does not but instead leaves the responsibility for that minimization entirely up to applicants themselves.

You seem to like the second choice, suggesting it really is not at all your responsibility; it's all on the shoulders of the applicant. You're not (the applicant will be distressed to hear) his mom.

Yet elsewhere you seem to want at least a little to acknowledge that there is something to be said, at least publicly, for taking the first choice: You wondered whether you were asking too much. You advised applicants only to do it if it's fun and so on. It seems to me that that's an example of trying not to be callously indifferent to the work of others.

I was merely trying to point out that that's not good enough. It should be obvious, I think, that this, your, strategy for minimizing wasted effort on the part of applicants is not going to work.

The alternative strategy of many employers is to impose the more effortful parts of the application procedure only late in the process and only on applicants they are already interested in. They do this even though it's more time-consuming for them. They take that responsibility. You don't, and shrug.

But let me do you the honor of citing you again: "so be it." I'm certain you have no reason to worry about this. I'm sure Reddit will get its rockstars and continue to rock.

And if you ever want a lesson in supercilious condescension (the "I'm not your mom" stuff is embarrassingly amateurish), look me up. I take payment in advance.

P.s. I didn't use the phrase "spec work" and if I had I wouldn't have used it to mean, in accordance with your bizarre and presumptuously corrective definition, "asking someone to do work and then paying them etc..." Clearly that's nonsense. Spec work is the work, not the asking. I did use "on spec", and used it as a standard modifier to qualify the meaning of "work" as work which is done speculatively in hope or expectation of gain. In this (hardly broad) sense you are asking applicants to do work on spec. Joyfully.
Thank you. Mubarak Ho!
The man who sold the sky
Not sure I agree. Who is not buying a PS3 because of this? Who has stopped buying games? Nearly nobody, and the lawyers are on salary anyway.

I take your point, I have yet to see an organized boycott. Nor would this by itself cause me to have any hesitation about Sony.

Yet, this taken together with some of their many other actions in attempting to control the PS, primarily removing the other OS option, has affected my opinion of Sony and what they are likely to do in the future. I'm not about to take a sledgehammer the PS3 I have now. Yet, when the next generation of consoles comes out, it will weight as one factor about which one I go with.
Who Is Marrying Whom - Graphic
30 interviews to land a job at Apple.
The spouse of a colleague was just offered a position with Apple. He had 30, yes Thirty interviews over the course of several months. This is amazing to me, but I would like to hear others experiences with Apple, FB, Twitter etc.
(Off topic anecdote)

A friend of mine has a father who had a file on him by the Stasi. In it they had a "scent sample". Someone had broken into his bedroom and stolen a piece of linen that he had slept on while he was in the shower one day. It's crazy to think that someone had/has the job of collecting "scent samples". And what a government would need that for, really.

< /anecdote>
Seriously? To me, the difference between $2B and $50B seems like diminishing returns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns). If you disagree, then I'd like to be you for a few days... ;-)
>Buying content within a window is essentially like an auction. The highest bidder wins. It's possible to enter the market, but to do so you actually need a lot of capital to bid and win content.

I think Amazon has sufficient capital to go to auction, also, in general, capital comes 'cheap', if someone has a business plan with a reasonable shot at success they can get VC money. If your expectation that a barrier to entry is purely capital costs, well...you better hope no investors want to back a competitor, there is plenty of money out there.

>Reed publicly stated that a major goal in the future is to pay studios more for content. And that's only fair as we increase the number of viewers.

Well, from a business perspective fairness isn't what matters, he should strive to retain as much of the 'pie' for Netflix as possible. His concession that he 'wants' to pay content producers more seems like PR, more likely he has no choice. It is good and fine to say you want studios to make more money on content, but I don't think history has shown either the movie or music industry care terribly much about how much profit their partners make, and they can drain any profit by increasing licensing costs anytime they want no? The more successful you are in streaming it seems the more you are exposed to this risk.
I suspect the best way to tell is to run some tests. Shouldn't be that hard to do.

(though, I wonder if youtube suffers when google dns is used. I could see arguments both ways)
Good job.

I'm curious why you list SF as the location, giving how well everything started out for you even though you were spread out geographically.
This could be very useful to anyone participating in tomorrows Music Hack Day in NYC.

http://nyc.musichackday.org/