skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is this guy trolling? First two paragraphs sound to me similar to what some of my math untalented friends said about it in highschool. "Power to understand and predict" is not limited only to those who can manipulate abstract symbols - for some reasons it seems that such abstract manipulation is the best way to do it now.

The second paragraph is even worse. This guy have simply no idea what he is writing about. 'Assigning meaning to set of symbols' is just abstracting unnecessary details and focusing on important information in problem, 'blindly shuffling symbols according to arcane rules' - um, calling math 'arcane' is a clear indicator of person's lack of understanding. Rules are not arcane, everything has explanation (proof) and is derived from other things in logical way (and as far as we know, world acts logcailly) - some of the are axioms, which seem to be abstractios of most basic properties. Also, 'shuffling blindly' is in fact spotting patterns in things on different levels.

Sure, explainig things on more intuitive level, using e.g. graphical representations is sometimes really helpful. However sometimes intuition doesn't work, and how do you graph 3-dimensional manifold embedded in R^4? Or finite field? Also, I can't imagine of other way of doing math that would be consistent and useful other than the one we are using now.
Although if you're using Vim over SSH from a Windows box, the :set paste command is useful to know.
I don't see a new Linux version coming...
:set pastetoggle=<F5>

Wack F5, middle-click paste away.
Unless, of course, the system clipboard is on a different machine than the running copy of Vim. This is useful advice, you really don't have to be so negative about it just because you aren't in a situation where it's applicable.
We actually built our own IRC client with persistent history: https://github.com/danlarkin/subrosa Such a relief to be able to pick my own client.
"I've never seen English with umlauts"

Nobody cares.
Hard to image it being convertible debt if the amount he is asking for is a fixed 6%. "Yes Mr. founder sir, we'd like convertible debt with a cap of £333,333 and just to be nice guys we'll introduce a floor for you of £333,333."
Prediction - Facebook Movies by 2012
This seems like such a hugely expensive policy to enforce for what problem exactly?
Sure, that works great if you want to reach for the mouse.
Timely is great for Twitter engagement except when you run a marathon
Good point on my wording, thank you. I will change that to make it less confusing. As for middle-click, I really don't want to use the mouse. I don't use it for pasting anywhere else, so why would I change that for Vim?
It's not ridiculous at all, it's very veridic. It's a basic advertising technique to link the product to some desirable value or quality. In the automobile's case, independence, which is already, in Western cultures, a trait of males and strongly linked to virility. They don't sell just the product, but the image that comes with owning it, the famous "lifestyle".

Edward Bernays is considered the father of modern PR and propaganda. Not a coincidence, he is the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He was the first to theorize the manipulation through the subconscious. And sex is one of the subconscious' most powerful forces. He participated in the US effort that succeeded in swaying the US public opinion away from isolationism and into the First World War. Not accidentally, this propaganda effort heavily featured virile imagery: young strong men as soldiers (which, incidentally, are the most expendable members of a society). Modern advertising is nothing more than applied propaganda and follows his ideas.
So assuming this is for real they're going to tell the government so it can pwn us but not tell Google so it can fix it.
From their FAQ (http://oxygenaccelerator.com/accelerator/faqs/):

When do I have to pay the pre-seed funding back?

Don’t worry, we really don’t want you to hand over the keys to your house or car – this is a soft loan. Our interest is in your success and therefore will only look for the loan to be repaid when it makes sense for your business. This will be done on a case-by-case basis.
Related question: Do solar panels save more energy over their lifetime than they save yet? i.e. including manufacture.
Micrsoft Overpaid for Skype...by $4.5 Billion
I find it a bit funny he says you won't be able to borrow against it, but went on to refute that saying several of his friends made offers to lend him the money.

Having a solid network of friends and contacts does have quantifiable effects.
Sensor developed by MIT engineers can detect tiny traces of explosives
Well, what's a worse precedent? Being technically innocent of infringement since you skipped a single bit on the end of a download or the court ignoring your intent? Intent has been the cornerstone of many copyright infringement defenses. It would seem a bad move to claim that intent is irrelevant at this point.
Sorry, but this is terrible advice. Yes, you should make sure your site won't break if it's slammed by a large crawl. Yes you should hide destructive actions behind posts, not gets. But, robots.txt is insanely useful. If I didn't have a robots.txt file, google/bing/yahoo would index countless repetitive non-important files and my site would suffer in search engine ranking. In our case, we host GPX/KML files and textual cuesheets for driving and biking. If that stuff is indexed, our sites' relevant keywords are "left", "right" and GPS timestamp fragments like "0z01".

So, use it wisely, but don't abandon its usage altogether.
Apple providing LGPL webkit source code for latest iOS 4.3.x
How to paste in vim commandline after :

<ESC>
(normal mode)
q:
(fully vim editable window of :command line history)
(edit one of the command lines, yank and put all you like)
(or edit the new blank command line at the bottom)
<ESC><ENTER>
(to execute the current line, or)
:q
(to quit without executing)
(normal mode)

Notice the symmetry of q: to get in, and :q to get out (if you don't execute).

q/ and q? to edit and execute search history.

[edit formatting]
First evidence that gorillas pass on traditions
Learning From Failure And Scratching Your Own Itch – with Michael Mills
I assumed the whole scenario was made up until I read the article, yet what I presumed didn't bother me.

Does it really matter if the situation is fictional? It was still an emotive advert and weather the characters were made up, or are real people who I don't know, it doesn't matter to me because the point was still clear.
Facebook already has deals in place with mobile operators. For example, Simyo, a German E-Plus reseller, allows its users free access to a special restricted Facebook site 0.facebook.com. They write it's good enough for status updates and messages.
Dirvish is really nice (if you know how to fire up a text-editor)

I run dirvish at my backup server and it fetches the data from other servers over ssh. So I have a central place to configure and monitor my backups.

(I guess that everyone at one point was about to restore some backup, only to find out that this specific server stopped pushing it's nightly backups ... somewhere last year)
Can I buy this without creating a PayPal account?
with skype all they do is look at unique logins per financial quarter, so in your scenario (and I assume it is common, because I have my own family members doing the same thing) it will count as a single user

perhaps they should adjust their terminology and refer to them as 'accounts' rather than 'users'
You are ignoring the facts, Microsofts stock price assumes they are not going to generate incremental profits from their new businesses such as Bing, or the Windows phone. I won't comment on whether I think that is accurate, but it is simply what the current valuation implies.
Literary references aside, I personally would prefer the submission title to provide some context and description of the content, it would make it much easier for me to scan the front page.
While I'm sure the "content provider" would disagree, in many cases it's perfectly legal to make a copy of their content - the laws in place only prevent redistribution for a certain time period.

Personally, I'd be ecstatic if there was some organization set up that is manufacturing high-quality archive copies of books, music, film and the like, and storing them with the date of initial publication, as well as the date they will enter public domain (where it is known - not the case for living authors) in various locales. Then have a site live-tracking the release of that content.

There's a site that keeps getting linked every year that posts things that would be public domain this year were it not for US copyright extensions, and something like that with accurate PD status and archive copies would be marvelous.
That's how I do it too. It's really neat.
I went back as far as I could, and Facebook never released total registered users. It wouldn't be relevant since fan pages, product pages, apps etc. are all in the same namespace, and there would be a lot of spam and dev accounts

I remember reading a blog post where somebody tried to calculate it by enumerating user ID's, but he didn't come to a clear conclusion.

the FB key numbers are 650M active per month, 50% of that active per day. I wish other companies were as simple and transparent with their own stats PR - instead of nonsense like 'messages processed per fortnight', 'total logins', etc. etc.
On my Mac I've started using Arq: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

Before that I tried Mozy, iDrive, and a straight Time Machine backup. After multiple external HD failures and frustrating experiences with Mozy and iDrive (100% CPU for multiple weeks on end, extremely slow upload), I've been quite pleased with Arq.

On my non-Mac machines I just use s3cmd sync: http://s3tools.org/s3cmd-sync. I guess I could use JungleDisk, but why layer abstraction on something as simple as a file copy? :)
Founders Conference: Investor Panel [video]
Zeus Source Code Leaked
That's a FAQ, not a legal contract. Is the contract for a "hard" loan ? As Chekov said, don't put a gun on the table in act one if you don't intend it to shoot in act three.
What does Skype's patent portfolio look like? Could this be a way for Microsoft to shutdown other video chat services or at least extract a hefty license fee?
Ask HN: Low pressure programming jobs?
Hi folks,

This might be precisely the wrong community to ask this question of, but here goes. I work as your standard Java/Oracle programmer in the finance sector. It's a good job, good benefits, and I'm lucky to have it. However, the constant go-go-go nature of my company and my team are starting to wear on me. There are tight deadlines that we never make and end up putting out a half-baked product with all the features and none of them done well. We work late hours many days because of completely unnecessary demands by management. The yelling, midnight phone calls, and complete intellectual boredom are driving me nuts.

Now I know what you're thinking: "So what? That's not that bad? You should work at MY company." Frankly, I hear you. However, programming is not my life. I'm intellectually exhausted when I come home and have no drive to pursue the things I TRULY love (unfortunately, those things do not pay). Yes, in the end, coding is a wonderful hobby and interest but mostly just a job for me.

Perhaps some of you wish you could change places, but for my sympathetic readers: do you know of any programming jobs/industries where there is less pressure/demand on us?
So that's around $33k USD.

They're only looking to be paid back if you reach profitability.

6% equity to get a $33k loan and some sort of training/advising for 13 weeks at their facility, and office space afterwards? Could be a good deal, especially if you have a new business that requires medium amounts of capital costs to get started. If you're getting something manufactured and your first run/prototyping/etc is going to run you $15k, it might be good to do that on their dime. If it works out and you get profitable, you pay them back and they've got their equity. If it fails, they're out the money.

Could be good, depending on your circumstance and the specific terms on it. I could see lots of cases where that'd add far more than 6% chance of success and value to the business.

Edit: Gosh, a lot of reply comments. To clarify:

-You should always, always read the terms carefully in any important contract you're going to sign, and strongly consider hiring a lawyer to give it a once-over.

-In this particular deal, you'd want to make sure the loan isn't personally guaranteed and what the terms of calling it are.

-I could see times where I'd be ecstatic to take this. Lots of brand new companies would have a much higher success chance and EV with 94% equity, $33k cash in the bank, and $33k in debt with flexible repayment terms than 100% equity, $0 cash, and $0 debt.

-Money's worth a lot, and people often underestimate how much it's worth. Especially for an unproven, speculative venture.

-It might or might not be a good deal depending on your specific circumstances, and the exact terms of the loan. Again, read contracts carefully and strongly consider hiring a lawyer to look it over.

-As always, consider not making flippant comments on Hacker News? It's kind of tiresome to get ignorant and flippant replies when you're trying to do a neutral, factual analysis.
This was eventually added to ICQ but probably too late.
Ranger - file manager
long, long time is well defined: IE7 being still relevant.
(IE8 has support for display: table-* properties, so it gets much easier).
Jon Meredith on Modeling Eventual Consistency Databases with QuickCheck
Visualization of cultural color semantics ("Interactive Colours in Culture")
What we have here is a failure to define our terms.

Math is the manipulation of abstract symbols according to abstract rules. If you don't like symbols, you don't like math. If you are illiterate in symbols you are illiterate in math.

The word is often used imprecisely, though. Because so many real-world problems can be translated into math, there is a temptation to equate "math" with "any problem that can be expressed in math". Thus you frequently see poetic statements like "my cat is great at solving differential equations", or "music is math because it's all about harmonic series and Fourier analysis". But these things aren't literally true. You can put a bucket under a flowing faucet, and it will collect all the water, but that isn't really integration. The bucket isn't doing math.

And being ignorant of math isn't the same as being stupid. As the OP points out, you can get a lot of quantitative reasoning done without using math. A classic Fun Fact About Math is that it took thousands of years to invent the number zero. And it's true. But that doesn't mean that the ancient Egyptians used to waste hours staring into newly-emptied buckets and baskets in stunned amazement, murmuring "what on earth is that" to themselves in Coptic. People understood what "having no objects" meant long before there was a symbol for "the number of objects in an empty basket". It was the highly abstract symbol "zero", and the highly abstract operations involving zero, that had to be invented. [1]

It's worthwhile to recognize that interpreting the real world in terms of abstract symbols, and vice versa, is a terribly difficult skill that requires lots of practice. (In my case, I was well through grad school before many bits of physics clicked.) And it's worthwhile to recognize that you can often do without math: You can reason quantitatively without it. Birds do it! Bees do it! But don't pretend that you're doing math unless you are actually doing math. The abstractions are the math.

---

[1] Or, rather, discovered. Although we'd better stop there, because I won't be able to cope with the ensuing philosophical back-and-forth.
On a mac, you can use :r !pbpaste

If you're ssh'd somewhere it's a different story. I've seen some things about sharing clipboards across shells, but I've never bothered to set it up.

Also, copy-pasta makes for bad code.
I find it humorous that the Programming Languages list only covers imperative languages that are roughly similar in design.

Scheme mentioned here, http://code.google.com/edu/submissions/ucberkeley-parallelis...

The following link, http://code.google.com/edu/languages/index.html#_java_racede..., is even more fascinating. It shows how to detect race conditions in concurrent Java programs. What does it use? JChord? What is JChord built on? Datalog implemented via Binary Decision Diagrams!

Yet no classes on Logic Programming.
Louisiana and DC happiest, California and West Virginia Unhappiest States
It doesn't say anything about not having to pay it back if you don't reach profitability. Their answer to "Do I have to pay back the pre-seed funding?" is "Yes".
men performing sexual favors for men in exchange for money... right?
How Teens Understand Privacy
Christopher Ryan's blog post is low on examples, compared with that Wikipedia page about the book...

>>About 90-95% of known societies engage in war. [Etc.]

This is a sensitive subject for people with (political) axes to grind, so I'd prefer better references for the claim that Pinker is totally non serious?

(I was surprised to see that Eskimos had extermination wars?! You would think the population density made organised conflicts impossible?)

Edit: Clarity.
I specifically mentioned Australia. Though I have observed trends for IM market share vary a lot more in different countries. So it's probably true that there is still some country where ICQ dominates. By the way, isn't AOL IM still the main game in the US?
That's certainly my concern. I have somewhere approximating zero faith that they will continue the Linux client, considering Skype themselves have essentially abandoned it, and the prospects for the other two I use, Android and Mac, seem rather dim. We do have 30 years of MS history to go by here, after all.
Zeno of Elea got ever so close to 60 but never quite made it.
> This "Math" consists of assigning meaning to a set of symbols, blindly shuffling around these symbols according to arcane rules, and then interpreting a meaning from the shuffled result. The process is not unlike casting lots.

> using concrete representations and intuition-guided exploration.

Is it just me, or are these two lines very much at odds with each other?
I started with a 50/50 partnership five years ago and would seriously rethink it next time around. I did it at the time because it was my first go around at starting a business and both of us had no idea what we were doing (basically the "fear" element that Mark mentions in this article). Everybody we knew told us not to go 50/50, but we pressed on anyway for lack of any other option.

Where it really hurts is in decision making. Things that would take a single founder a few hours or days to mull over can take weeks, months (or even years) to decide. It kills the speed advantage of being a startup. We ended up bringing in a minority partner a couple of years in, but that didn't help since the other two partners were still equal and there was no clear decision maker.

There has to be a clear leader, despite equal stakes. In my case, we had an awkward conversation about who should be CEO that went nowhere, and it has hurt us ever since.

Mark's post also mentions risk profiles. Right now I am married and have an inexpensive house, but my co-founder has two kids and a new house. Despite best intentions on his part, we have very different risk profiles which impact our decision making.

On the flip side, it is great to have the support of someone else there when you're going through the ups and downs of startups. My first go around I doubt I would have been able to get as far as I did without that, so I don't necessarily regret it. However, next time around will be a different story. I'm bookmarking Mark's post so I don't forget this lesson again.
Thanks for the tip! I also learned you can do:

:a!
<paste like normal>
<C-c>

and that will paste with properly formatted text.
Http://techhogger.com/its-a-big-deal-Microsoft-buys-skype.html
fixed price of investment deals are inevitably doomed by the problem of average pricing. only startups that find it a good deal will take it and by rule of nature they are the ones with the least attractive prospects.

(ycombinator can defeat this by continuously manufacturing holy water - just like the old vcs did. the halo effect makes an investment from yc both more valuable and variable than the fixed price on offer)
Key Updates from Live Coverage of Senate Mobile Privacy Hearing
It sounds like your management sucks. Have you looked into quantitative hedge funds? Smaller funds are staffed by really bright and motivated people who dont generally add undue pressure.
Almost all incubators aren't worth the time/equity given up.

My startup applied for YC and (having not made it) will not be pursuing any others. We may apply for YC again, not for the money but the experience and the alumni.

Experience and Alumni.
I completely agree with you. Facebook could of became one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world overnight. Maybe they will get the chance to buy it off of MSFT much like how eBay sold it off. Probably not.
See http://www.appelsiini.net/2008/11/introduction-to-marker-clu...
Caps happen to be a good form of typographic differentiation in cases where other forms of emphasis (such as bold or italics) are unavailable. But, some people may feel otherwise.

The Romans used caps. In fact, that was all that they used.
Vim can actually access the system clipboard (and, on Linux, the X clipboard). It's accessed as the * register (or + for the X clipboard). So, for instance:

"*dd
"*p

or

"+yy
"+P

And so on. Very convenient (and also much faster than Ctrl+V). On Ubuntu, this is only available in the Vim provided by vim-gnome or vim-gtk (even when running in a terminal).
Did you stop reading right there? Here's the next line -

> When do I have to pay the pre-seed funding back? Don’t worry, we really don’t want you to hand over the keys to your house or car – this is a soft loan. Our interest is in your success and therefore will only look for the loan to be repaid when it makes sense for your business. This will be done on a case-by-case basis.

It makes it sound like the loan is to the business - with limited liability, you don't have to pay it back if the business fails.

They say they're flexible on being paid back, and do it on a case by case basis. Anyone doing it should read the contract/loan terms very carefully to make sure there's no personal guarantee and what Oxygen's rights to call the loan are. But assuming the contract terms match the general vibe they've got on their site, it could be a good opportunity. Again, depending on the specific terms and circumstances.
Skype Confirms: We're Coming to Xbox, Outlook, Windows Phone & More
I have been using google talk but recently switched to skype because my wife got an iphone and google talk does not work on it. Skype on iphone is really painless to use and call quality is also very good.
Web programming job for a college. I'm at my 3rd one right now and it remains consistent that it is definitely a less stressful environment where you have a lot of free time to research whatever you want. The tasks received are pretty straightforward and you can get them done with time to spare working on your own side projects.

I'm somewhat lucky that my current boss tells me to work on my own products to allow me to continue learning in my free time.

Everything really depends on what you're looking to do I guess. I'm currently in transition, looking for more of a security/networking role, so where I'm at isn't quite doing it for me, but I'm not complaining as I can spend my time refining my skills.

I guess this would be the place to say: the grass is always greener...