skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as my later career, it's been my experience that rote manipulation without conceptual understanding can solve your problem, and that the converse isn't true.

Appealing to symmetry or applying Green's theorem (e.g.) will save time over "mechanical processes". Also avert mistakes and be more comprehensible.

{if you don't know what I mean: what's ∫sin x · cos^55 x · abs|x|^131 · x^444 ·
exp(-x^2) ?}

Moreover only conceptual understanding allows the development or use of certain things, like SVD, wavelets, eigendecomposition, game theory, theory of distributions, topology, single-crossing curves...

I'm hesitant to endorse any paradigm that aims to make math more intuitive, since at the end of the day that's a lie.

Is it a lie? It sounds like maybe you just didn't experience the intuition personally.

math ... will contradict your intuition

To me the point is to re-ground intuitions in true mathematical facts. For example I intuitively think of the reals as transcendentals ∪ algebraics or as the completion of the rationals, since I learned counter-intuitive things about the reals that disfavour the "possibly nonterminating decimal" view.

paradigm ... pace

Great distinction. Grand changes are often proposed when small changes might do.
Paul Graham could learn a lot from L. Ron Hubbard.
Baby Googles: The answer to the Chocolate Factory dominance?
I think if you were to release a new book, you should target it at $7-$12, rather than $1.

The hurdle of paying anything at all, is likely to stop many from going any further and on the opposite side, the people who are probably likely to still pay (they read your free book / know your rep) - are probably quite happy to pay a higher price than $1. Therefore limiting your price to $1 would lose you money.

e.g.
Free price - 335,000 downloads - $0 sales.

$1 price - 26,000 downloads - $26,000 sales

$7 price - 13,000 downloads - $91,000 sales

- This is ultimately why you would have to experiment with pricing and see the effect on your sales cycle. Often a higher price yields a greater profit, as the number of sales doesn't drop as much as expected.
If you are a smaller site can you even get into any of those programs though?
IIRC, another drawback of enabling this is that you reveal your browser history. On mobile device right now so not easy to find article to cite but should be avail via a quick search
> I suppose that's true. But why should less active users have as much of a voice as more active users? Would that necessarily lead to an improvement in comment quality?

Because users who don't upvote because there's nothing good to upvote are still active users.
Colorless Food? We Blanch
my favorite:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/we-are-all-talk-ra...

".. a story about strawberry jam test .. Their scientific question was simple: Would random undergrads have the same preferences as the experts at the magazine? Did everybody agree on which strawberry jams tasted the best?... "
No, quite the opposite! We picked an industry that was making money for others, and which we were interested in, and it turned out to be a fast-shrinking industry (who wants to pay for audio broadcasting products when they can get YouTube videos for free!) and at was one of the numerous reasons why the product didn't work out. There were others for sure, but this was a factor too.
Or maybe there was an alias to grep that was 'grep -v grep | grep $*' or something like that.

And they use ack for File searching cuz it's way better.
Artsicle lets you rent artworks before you buy them.
I thought it was an interesting business model. Here's the BBC news coverage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12790787
Very creepy indeed.
I am also going to use this as a manual. I use the market-first approach for any app i want to build while i wait for the "EUREKA" moment when the great idea strikes and by then i would have money to build it.
Impressive guy, didn't know he used to be in physics Phd program. Changes my perception of him a bit ...

The most interesting thing to me was:

he had a mathematical formula to keep abreast of [an internet bubble]. It involved looking at every Internet deal worth more than $100 million in a three-month period and measuring the growth of each firm’s income–if the firms in more than half the deals had a PE higher than their growth rate, it was a bubble. He has wiggle room here: ultimately the market needs to define what a bubble is, in the same way it’s defined a recession.

Without commenting on the formula itself, it's extremely interesting to think about Milner's motivation for publicly sharing that tidbit. It's true meaning is drastically different based on how 'deep' his game is.
How To Change Your WordPress Database Prefix
Not as-such, but the data is still there to be recovered, depending on how motivated you are. :)

http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlo17/howto/undelete_ext3.html

It took him three weeks to develop it for ext3, so you might want to give yourself a week or so to add in support for ext4's changes: https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/New_ext4_features

(Also, note the second-last item on the list of new ext4 features. :)
Mysterious tools behind Engadget move?
You can try GLTerminal

http://ldopa.net/2006/01/14/glterminal/
This is a very subtle distinction.

You say "...it's suggesting that rather than searching for a need you want solved and framing it in terms of a realistic goal and whittling it down to a compelling product, you should be identifying someone else's need and building that product."

But "framing it in terms of a realistic goal" and "whittling it down to a compelling product" both sound like code to me for "making something that other people want / need".

One key part of customer development is that creating a new market (for something that you exclusively need) is extremely expensive. You have to educate your customers on why they need your product and push against a massive amount of resistance.

I think it's pragmatic then to accept that working with an existing market in some shape or form is inevitable. So, why not embrace it? I think that's the market-driven approach.

You can still come up with novel and fun ideas that you own, but ground them in an existing market that you've researched.
The people who got paid for the ammo they bought, which was paid for decades ago and probably not in any official books any more anyway.
What are the benefits of the government outsourcing so many defense contracts like this?

These types of situations with middlemen and lowest bid seem ripe for corruption and substituting poorer goods for the desired ones - seems like the taxpayer is getting ripped off at the expense of the middlemen and defense companies.
Upload it to the AppStore for $1.99 just to test the waters.
Fair enough, but the whole Dash is used once you search for something or click a category. Filling up empty space just for the sake of filling up empty space isn't such a good idea after all.
I can't remember where I read it (it may have been Wikipedia) but the shape X-37 was based on the shuttle which is why it's the current craft that's being developed by the military. There was another craft prototyped but it was too costly and time consuming to test out a completely new shape.
I enjoy stories like this.

- Iteration of a product to continuously improve the system while reducing costs.

- Realizing that a users choice can make the system more efficient (using lower wattage cfl bulbs) and acting on that.

- Second derivative waste product used to provide 500 additional jobs.

- Realizing that once you have a customer channel open they are susceptible to additional sales of a different nature (soaps, etc).

- Generic product improvements on the side to help manage core business (cheap smart card readers)

- Environmental goodness

Lean product development in a lean environment. Well played.
I heard about this back when it was released. IMO a much more interesting reading. I heard the guys behind it have other projects.

That kind of book provides a view on the events never before available. It's a condensed testimonial about a globalized/globalazing society and its many cultures.
A little bit of backstory here: http://www.slashfilm.com/tron-next-day-flynn-lives-revealed/

Last year, before Tron Legacy was released, Disney shot some footage
that didn’t appear in the film, but will show up on the DVD release
that hits in April. Some of that footage became Tron: The Next Day
(Flynn Lives Revealed)...
Or it could be more complex than that, like for example people getting stuck in the area where they found their initial success.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
The computer visuals were great. One thing that I caught, being the complete nerd that I am: if you look closely at the terminal that Sam sits down at before going on-grid, there is a copy of top running. It reports the system uptime as a few days (9?) even though that system was supposed to be up for years.

Rebooted Tron for a kernel upgrade?

The rest was great though, and I smiled too. I wonder if the author knew how his terminal footage was going to be used...Cillian Murphy's actions were entirely plausible in context.
Show HN: UpdateSiteNow.com helps you update your website by email/SMS
UpdateSiteNow helps website owners update their site easily, more often and from wherever they are.

It means that website or blog owners...

only need to be able to send an email or SMS to us

which also means...

they don't need to write or change HTML code or deal with a CMS
they don't need developer or webmaster help
the changes are not a part of the main HTML of the site so there is no danger of bringing the site down

Many websites are not updated for months on end. This is especially true for corporate and brochure websites. Companies don’t tend to do this because of external dependencies, time and costs involved in the simple task of updating their websites. It tends to get put off and they tend to do a single major update in “one shot”. This way, companies and website owners miss out on keeping their visitors updated about what is really happening in their company. UpdateSiteNow changes that.

I would love your feedback

URL: http://www.updatesitenow.com/
If you ask me, their ethics were an extension of the USG.
Recycled Island
Once upon a time I tried to tell my mother about the problem of expert calibration, saying: "So when an expert says they're 99% confident, it only happens about 70% of the time." Then there was a pause as, suddenly, I realized I was talking to my mother, and I hastily added: "Of course, you've got to make sure to apply that skepticism evenhandedly, including to yourself, rather than just using it to argue against anything you disagree with -"

And my mother said: "Are you kidding? This is great! I'm going to use it all the time!"

- Eliezer Yudkowsky, http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...
Library for tree/graph search?
I notice that a lot of "hard" problems I am interested in or come across need some type of tree search like alpha-beta pruning, or beam search, or a similar algorithm. However, programming them seems like repetitively coding the same things and it is also pretty easy to make mistakes. It seems to me there should be a library that implements these algorithms, and all I should be asked to write is

1. a coding for the solution, i.e., how to get a more specific solution from an incomplete solution. This will give the tree/graph structure.
2. Given a partial solution, how to get the maximum/minimum cost, and perhaps an estimate of the cost.
3. An Initial solution/partial solution.
4. Maybe some sort of a verification solution.

I am sorry I haven't given any specific code, but I think I have explained the problem. If I can write code for the functions described above, shouldn't I be able to run a number of tree/graph search algorithms easily? Is there any user friendly library/framework that supports this easily? I'd love it to be in Python or C/C++, but would be interested to hear any suggestions.
To ask a stupid question - what does the SB in SB Nation stand for?
Show HN: jsgif: A GIF player in JavaScript
Yes, Chrome now includes a native PDF viewer - http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/11/pdf-goodness-in-chrome.ht.... Works quite good, too, and is much faster than the Adobe Acrobat embedded reader. Though, usually when I click a PDF link I want to download it instead of viewing it in my browser.
Ah, right you are. Thanks.
If they are active, then by definition they are involved in the site (though not necessarily by voting, they could also submit stories and make comments).

If they're not active, why should HN assume otherwise?

If there really is nothing good to upvote, then I don't see what the adoption of the system you propose will do, as the extra proxy votes won't be used (there's nothing good to upvote, remember?).

The other major problem with your proposal is that it will be very open to gaming the system. Users could just create sockpuppet accounts to give their primary account the votes of the sockpuppet accounts.

Of course, even with the present system users can create sockpuppet accounts. But at least with the present system, voting from the sockpuppet accounts has to be done manually rather than automatically being aggregated in to one account by HN itself.
The strategic CIO’s new role in innovation
What a terrible interface.
Данон Сердика
Отрасъл: Производство на мляко и млечни продукти, без сладолед
Лицензи и сертификати: Големи данъкоплатци и осигурители Производител на храни Сертификат ISO 14001 Сертификат ISO 22000 Член на GS1
Членство: Българска Стопанска Камара
Общи събрания: Последно - 20.04.2010
Продукти и услуги:
Оторизирана да изнася продукти от сектор “Мляко” от България за други страни-членки на ЕС от 1 януари 2007 г.
Предмет на дейност: Производство, внос, износ, търговия и разпространение на хранителни продукти, внос на индустриално оборудване, необходимо за развитието на хранително вкусовата промишленост, транспортна дейност на територията на страната и в чужбина, както и всякакви търговски и промишлени операции, свързани директно или индиректно с предмета на дейност
The Lean LaunchPad at Stanford -- Class 4: Customer Hypotheses
UnixLite seems to be an experimental unix written in C++.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/unixlite/
What makes someone an expert, though? Is it credentials? Experience? Status in the community? Very often, that's the problem: the popular media often will deem someone as an "expert" when they really have little idea of what they're talking about, but are good at providing soundbites or generating controversy.

Even among experts, there is often little agreement in some important fields. You mention monetary policy, yet economics is notorious for having huge disagreements among freshwater and saltwater economists on basic fundamentals. Let's not even get into the pseudo-science of nutrition. Salt will kill you! Cholesterol bad!

Fundamentally I would narrow down the problem with expertise into two broad issues:
a) Much expert knowledge is taught and/or acquired in a very narrow & deep manner, there's very little integrative or synthesized world views, and so it's hard to communicate across these intellectual bulkheads and discover expert beliefs in a narrow discipline may make no sense in a broader context

b) Science and politics do not mix, even though we try to constantly. The results are usually disastrous.
The Register has had some really good coverage of this plane over the past year:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/x37b_secret_launch_o...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/04/x37b_ski/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/07/2nd_x37b_in_orbit/
This almost sounds as if it's a bug, say, an int that flipped over. Wouldn't an unsigned 16 bit int of milliseconds flip over after some 8-9 years?

On the other hand, it's a bit hard to believe that IBM Security Systems would miss that... So while perhaps plausible, doubtful.
I was trying to view the description of the entire process (using this link http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ahoover/CS285/FinalProjec...) but I get a 404 error.

I don't know if this is only for me, but I found a report regarding this project here

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sequin/CS285/PROJ_06/A_Hoover/AH...
>"Is it printed one-sided or two-sided?"

From the first photo it appears to be one sided
Only if you continue to resolve registered domains to the local registrar.

You don't have to resolve them that far to see if they are not-registered (or when they expire) just hit the main registry for the TLD you are interested in.
Yes, something is clearly not working in the education system: students are not learning "DO THE WORK". Sure nifty gadgets can help - but only if the student is going to do the work in the first place. I'm not talking about "difficult aspects", I'm talking about the very simplest of tasks, like starting an online at-your-convenience quiz, or handing in a homework assignment with no more content than "I'm confused". I'm talking about students who do so little that if you gave them 100% on everything they do submit they still won't break a 50%.

No amount of specialized gear will help an athlete if he won't move when the game begins.
I didn't download their full report, but other sources reported it as in their final report (not produced on April 1st).
Building Publish / Subscribe Apps with Tropo and Redis
Here is a twelve volume set consisting of the entire edit history of the "Iraq War" entry on Wikipedia.

http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/
Getting to Know Americans
I don't understand. The difference between "ads" and "advertising" appears to be one of targeting/focus. It's hardly a revolutionary insight that the more targeted the ad the higher the conversion rate. And the author appears to be taking issue with how banner and adsense ads look. But he doesn't say how a more targeted ad should look, other than "simple". Basically marketing puff for the firms he mentions.
Agreed. Video or I say it doesn't rotate!
Simple; they would need to be published in journals, or have bibliographies, or have a cite record. "Scholarly" isn't really a subjective term.
Glad you like it. Let me know if you have any questions about it. I'm one of the founders (CTO).
Sports Blogs
If I were a rock star I would be too busy doing drugs and getting laid.
Introducing Alphagov
Javascript which adds a few dozen bogus flack queries to the one in which you are interested and only presents you with the results for that one?
Looks nice and definitely a site I would use. My thoughts:

* Include more airports (US).

* You state your problem is "I've got a week.." but your UI forces you to supply a relatively broad, non-specific date range. I would use it for "I have next weekend free" or the "3rd week in April free". I think a more traditional date picker option would be better here.

Good luck!
Frontrunning really isn't a big problem anymore. They were caught, got in trouble, it's basically over. Notice the sources from 2007.
1. Local PC clone companies used to reign but these days seems the big boys like HP, Dell, Sony, Acer have recaptured the share. The market for tech has gotten large enough that it seems to be more brand-driven than spec-driven.

That's the main difference between mobile devices today and the PC wars of the 80s. The market (thus far) is no longer interested in low cost custom builds, they're looking for an all-in-one experience. Though perhaps there is room for both approaches in the market, and there won't be quite a winner-take-all scenario here.

2. Mac OS was NOT a piece of shit, though I guess it depends on your priorities. For those that loved it, it was brilliantly designed and useable. They (mostly) forgave its Windows 95-esque brittleness.

3. Saying that every appliance includes a PC doesn't say much about what the computing experience will be like. I personally don't think my fridge and toaster will have much more power than they do today, because I can't see the utility in that (adjusting my fridge temperature from work? eh?).

But I do believe that smart phones & tablets will be the predominant mode of "mainstream computing", given how quickly the iPad is growing.
The registrars that got caught stopped, it's not really that big a problem anymore.
AT&T secretly hikes early upgrade prices, non-iPhone prices
Startup Quote: Matt Mullenweg, founder, Automattic
Nothing against bioremediation. But wake me up once they release large quantities of those algae into the waters around Fukushima. I am not holding my breath.

Also, this algae seems to only help with one kind of isotope, so it is hardly "key" to cleanign up.
Unknown band's album illegally downloaded 100,000 times. Or is it?
> but a short-term oriented market based system just can't do it

How can you know for sure? There is no such thing as a free market system in the United States. The incentive for private research is very low when all companies have to do is wait for subsidized research coming out of universities.
Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there.

- Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt)

http://startupquote.com/post/4338469386
Upvoted for the private island idea.

If you're anywhere NYC, you could perhaps check out the Adirondacks. The camping season isn't open up there yet, but if you're looking for peaceful tranquility, peace, time to reflect, and the inspiration of a glorious nature scene, then I highly recommend the private island campsites on Lower Saranac Lake.

They're muni-run camp sites, so the costs are very low -- I think we paid $22 a day. The one catch is that they fill up quickly, and they're hard to get.

There are island camps with single occupancy, which is to say that there is only one camp site on it. And there are larger islands that are multiple occupancy, though we did the math, and even on the most crowded of them, the campsites are spaced quite far apart, and you will have at least an acre to yourself (approximately). We chose the single occupancy, and loved every second of it.

It's made much better if you own your own canoe or fishing kayak, otherwise boat rentals are fairly high. You CAN take a taxi out to the island and have them pick you up, but I wouldn't do this at the very start of the season or the very end. There isn't enough traffic there until peak season starts to ensure that somebody would be around if you got hurt, or were mauled by a bear or something.

This link has plenty of detail: http://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/24496.html
Android has only been outselling Apple if you do not count iPod touches and iPads.
The Content Tailor
As for optimizations, that is a quality of implementation issue with regards to compilers, not a language issue.

This is a lie.

Because C++ is such a poorly designed language, it is extraordinarily hard to make a (relatively) correct, let alone high performance compiler. Language complexity matters when you're writing a compiler, and C++ is every compiler writer's worst nightmare.
There are 3 key areas of risk when doing a startup
1) management risk
2) technology risk
3) business model/market risk

You could take a risk in a all 3, but for many people it is appealing to reduce some of the risk. In this case the author is saying reduce market and probably technology risks.

When I started my company we decided not to take technology and business model risks so we started a consulting company. The model is simple, if boring but it allowed me to learn without my mistakes being completely fatal and generates a good amount of cash to fund more risky ideas. The downside is it isnt as exciting. Now that I think I can run a company Im willing to take business model risks, but using technology that is proven.

Most of the YC startups dont seem to take risks in all 3 areas either. Typically just management and maybe business model.
Rustock Aftermath: Assessing Collateral Damage