skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm actually surprised to see anyone even compare Ubuntu to Chrome OS in terms of maintenance. The idea is that you don't want to teach how to maintain anything. You don't want to describe anything. Do you realize how easy it is to break something in Ubuntu? You can't trust user to not do something bad, you assume it to happen. This is what Chrome OS is for. Secondly, ChromeOS isn't meant to be a laptop replacement in the sense that it's a laptop in of itself, it's suppose to change how we use things. In other words, Amazon MP3 downloads will go to the Amazon Cloud Drive and played off the Amazon Cloud player. Everything is on-line. You maybe be seeing things in transition, but the idea is that Google is diving head first into getting there.
But the single request will still be faster. Try it.
Ask HN: Who are the green users?
Hey guys...

I 've been a user here for yrs.. but I did not come here for a while, and now I see that there are green users..

When I checked out their profiles, they look like a relatively new users, but I am not sure about it.

What is that change that PG made, and why turned those into green? :)
Awesome — you'll have me as a customer as well when that launches. :)
You have a law that states:

---

(that) any official in a position within a government body, whether elected or appointed, which regulates a particular industry, area of industry, or the laws and compliance of said industry, may not take a position within any company that benefited directly from any regulatory or oversight decision of the oversight body within the last 5 years on any case where the stated company or organizations competitive status with respect to monopolies, anti-trust, or anti-competitive business environment was considered.

---

This would mean that anyone who was in a position of oversight for a given industry and who had to consider, directly, regulations which may or may not benefit a particular company may not accept a position with that company for at least 5 years after their departure from that official position.
New Android GUI editor is awesome
I've been watching the IO but the current presentation on the new GUI editor is really exiting.
Looking forward to Al Franken's reaction to this one.
I would like to know when and how phrases like "that sucks but," "that's just the way it is," and "that's the name of the game" were first introduced to the language. These non-justifications are like a poison that kills our curiosity and our ability to question what's wrong with the world.
Ask HN: How can I try and get my company acquired in a talent acquisition
Quite a longterm HN user here. Throwaway for obvious reasons. :)

We're a small company (two people) that has developed quite a few mobile products on different platforms. Think iOS, Android and BB playbook.

All of our apps are heavily polished, very user friendly and look great.

We're currently finishing a really nice Android project that we're pretty excited about. Seeing as a lot of the big companies such as Google, Microsoft, RIM are investing heavily in mobile, what would be the best way to get the ball rolling? Or is pretty much the only possible way to get acquired in such a way to wait until they contact you?
The headline reminded me of this similarly tragic tale:
http://goo.gl/3r5VC
The box that makes you go ^-^
Probability 1 is as guaranteed as anything probabilistic can reasonably hope to be, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, it isn't. This is the reason why in mathematics, we say that "possibility 1" means that an event is "almost sure", which is different from a "sure" event.

For instance, you can play a game where you roll a dice over an over again. You win if you get 100 times a 6 in sequence. If you play this game without any time limit, your possibility to win is exactly 1, which means that you can be "almost sure" you'll win in the end. However, you can't be sure, because there is still the possibility that you don't get 100 times a 6 in an eternity.

Note that this only happens in infinite probability spaces. In finite spaces, "almost sure" and "sure" are equivalent.

Also note that the same holds for "probability 0" which means "almost impossible", not to be confused with "impossible".
It depends on how everything plays out.
My first sensei used to say that success was falling down 99 times and getting up 100.
if I don't pick up a win and end up being a corporate monkey? Then it cost me my 20s and all the experiences most people enjoy during that time.
Having fun with Festival and Node.js
Every now and then I contemplate a system where, after leaving office, former high-level government officials are provided with a generous pension but subjected to a 100% tax on any income whatsoever from non-government sources. Obviously such a system has plenty of disadvantages - but apart from those, I wonder whether it would help the revolving door problem at all, or whether cronyism would persist even without financial motivation.
Do sane email clients (like mutt) even have urgency levels?
Best Practice does not mean Great
Exactly. It's probably just more FUD to discredit WikiLeaks.
People change jobs all the time. The folks in government commissions are probably from that industry and when they do want to change jobs, will probably find work in that industry. It is a bit unfair to cast aspersions on people. It is also interesting that to stop this would require something akin to a non-compete policy which is typically frowned upon in HN :)
A hoax, but very well done.
This is the first thing from Google I/O that has me truly excited.
There appears to be a bug in recent versions of Chrome that erroneously disables hardware acceleration on machines running OSX with ATI video cards. It seems that they decided to blacklist multisampling on these machines because of a driver bug but ended up disabling all hardware acceleration.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=82104
If a slave can continue serving reads whilst partitioned from a master that continues to accept writes then you cannot guarantee consistency. If a slave cannot serve reads when partitioned then you aren't available. If a master cannot accept writes when partitioned then you aren't available. See this excellent post from Coda Hale on why it is meaningless to claim a system is partition tolerant http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/.

One love.

- Lil' B
In the sharded case, at any given moment each object will still live on exactly one replica set, which will have at most one master. You can do operations (such as findAndModify http://bit.ly/ilomQo) that require a "current" version of an object because all writes are always sent to the master for that object. You can also choose to accept a weaker form of consistency for some reads by directing them to slaves for performance. This decision can be made per-operation from most languages.

As for trade-offs: Relative to a relational db, there is no way to guarantee a consistent view of multiple objects because they could live on different servers which disagree about when "now" is. Relative to an eventually consistent system, you are unable to do writes if you can't contact the master or a majority of nodes are down.
I wonder why they went with many <div>'s, instead of a single <div> with JS controlling the background-position and clip?
The Problem with Sencha Touch and PhoneGap
Why do you feel you have to trade off having happy "20-something" experiences for being an entrepreneur?
To get an animated feel for how this works, add a user CSS to outline the border. I use the "User CSS" extension for Safari

http://code.grid.in.th/

Then add this CSS:

#hplogo div { border: 1px red solid; }
There's pausing and overlap in the animation
I consider "geek" an insult.
Actually I think that roughly was my point. :-)

You can’t get an exact answer in general by using fixed-size floating-point numbers, as your pseudocode does. The number of bits of precision you need to get an exact answer is going to depend on the input value, presumably linearly.
#5: The source is easy to find.

Does this mean that all apps' source is accessible, or just Palm namespaced applications?
"Where's Google's suite of content creation apps that "non-techy" people can explore to express their creativity?"

On the internet
Use the Amazon AWS Free Tier[1] and setup OpenVPN[2]. Clients for all major platforms are supported. If you need to protect iPhone or Android traffic, use PPTP or IPSec and you're set.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/free/

[2] http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source.html
Beyond Emotion: Designing for visceral allure | UX Magazine
Flash would be a good basis for the kind of thing I'm thinking of. Adobe's already solved a lot of the sandbox issues that would arise, and the language runs faster than JS. In theory, you get each flash player to open 4 or 5 netconnections to other players, get a running pool propagating and distribute the connection list so no one central server is taking the strain of hooking up the peers, you can have filesharing or even distributed processing in the browser. Processing is more interesting to me because it hasn't really been cracked yet. The security overhead to date has been too high. But that, or a java program, or even something written in Unity, could do some amazing stuff with virtually no back-end overhead.

Keep the good work going. I'm interested to see how this will evolve.
I think those two issues are orthogonal to consistency. In ACID, consistency and durability are two different letters and CAP doesn't even mention durability. Are you referring to another definition of consistency?
Note that you can optimize this by removing the "(1-c)^n" part, because its absolute value is smaller than 0.5 for big n, so it can't influence the (rounded) result.

This trick is especially funny when performed using a hand calculator. For instance, just calculate the powers of the golden ratio and observe numbers like "xxxxx,0000yyy" "xxxxx,9999yyy", which become closer and closer to integers.
can't wait to break this out next time it comes up in an interview!
Actually, you need just Z ring enriched (if this is right word) with sqrt(5). So instead of one float, you use pair of integers of arbitrary precision. So

(a,b)+(c,d) = (a+c,b+d)

(a,b)/sqrt(5) = (b,a/5)

(a,b)(c,d) = (ac+5bd,ad+bc)

2phi = (1,1)

F(n) = (2phi^n - (2-2phi)^n)/(2^n*sqrt(5))

[edit] As ot said, the right word is "extended"
Who is surprised?

The committee that granted a trillion dollar bail-out of a few companies including Goldman Sachs was staffed with plenty of current/former executives from Goldman Sachs.

The FDA and agencies involved for approving bovine growth hormone (later found to do freakishly hideous things to the poor cows and increase by incredible amounts the contamination of the milk we drink from infected utters), the Round-Up-ready patented corn seeds, and aspartame just happen to be largely staffed by current/former Monsanto executives.

The FDA and agencies involved in inspecting the food production in the states and making sure that it remains uncontaminated and safe and regularly inspected have reduced the number of inspections by something like 85% and the contamination rates increase, while under the watch of agencies staffed largely by current/former executives of the few main companies being overseen.

The US government is beyond corrupt and beyond any possible reform and nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn that almost every office and committee appointment in the country is a matter of the wolves guarding the sheep. It has been this way for decades and they are now so brazen about it that you can look at every single person in every single job and do a simple search to trace the truth of their position and appointment back and nobody gives a damn.

I mean, seriously, we let them give themselves a trillion dollars. We let them poison our food supply with largely untested and unproven chemicals. We let them cover up and manipulate right in front of our faces and we do nothing. After thirty years of looking the other way on all of these things, what on earth could possibly ever even remotely raise our eyebrows and make us do something other than participate in the attention-occupying busy-body bullshit of "durr durr republicans are stupid and evil" and "durr durr democrats are stupid and evil" my team versus yours bullshit?

Maybe if the government and corporations decided that it was just easier to require that all births be sponsored to make sure they can be cared for until adulthood and then those sponsored children become indentured servants for their sponsor company until the age of 40 . . . maybe . . . MAYBE we might possibly take our eyes off Dancing With the Stars and the football game long enough to do something other than pull the red or blue lever according to the team we've associated ourselves with and demand that we have choices that aren't part of the game and won't be part of the game and will radically change things.

It won't happen in my lifetime. I know that much.
Note beforehand or in brackets at the end that the [sic] was not added - wherever you'd add "emphasis mine" if you'd highlighted part of it.
Not surprised at all.

What will the implications be when we effectively have that power as a SOC and that SOC is embedded everywhere. That will be in the next 10 years to be sure.

The problem I am seeing with all of this technology is that only one things has really proven 100% true; that the Office of Total Information Awareness is no longer a secretive government agency, but has become a fully distributed service woven into the fabric of our lives.

How can one expect to live outside the eye of technology ever again? One cannot.
Good point...CAP and ACID are not overlapping concepts - in fact, you kinda have to throw out ACID rules when you create a Dynamo-inspired data store
Your analogy is a bit off there. You're comparing no kitchen (in a world where most people don't cooking) to limited creative avenues (in a world where most people don't create).

A limitation is not the same thing as a complete absence of potential.

After correcting your analogy, I can think of situations where landlords do not provide full kitchens---for example apartments, or temporary vacation condos or business suites.

You can technically cook, but you can't cook very much.
PDK application are compiled C++, so you only have object code. Most of the apps HP ships on device are JS apps, so source is there. A developer can choose to only ship minified/obfuscated source code if they want, but there still has to be something for V8 to parse and execute.
That doesn't sound very different.
.NET is not a "VM".
I'd love to know how you progressed from "possibly" to "probably" there.
Yeah, it's wrong to cast aspersions on people who go to work for the government and act as extended arms of the industry and corporations they just left. Like the many Goldman Sachs people on the committee that authorized a trillion dollar bailout for companies that primarily included Goldman Sachs. Or the Monsanto guys who ran the FDA and other government agencies and made sure chemicals like rBGH, aspartame and others (from the DDT/agent orange corporation) were given a green light. There's nothing going on there at all! Why golly, it's just government in action! And the guys from Raytheon and GE certainly have no vested interest in agitating national fears and military spending at all.
When you round you'll always get the exact integer answer, even using the precision of the golden ratio I gave in the code.
The greater the concentration of power, the more likely it is that it will be used for personal gain. And the less likely it is more meaningful competition and choice to exist.

This can only happen when people don't have a choice. If a government is bad, people should have a way to remove their property from its domain.

Cities and towns should be able to become part of a neighboring state or start their own. The Swiss have this ability and can change cantons and create new ones. Its rarely used, but its always there if needed.

And if the people had to approve many actions of the national legislature (again, as they do in Switzerland), ridiculous actions are less likely.

Of course, results are what matter and Switzerland has the highest incomes in the world and the least involvement in stupid wars. It must have something to do with the difficulty in spending other people's blood and money without their approval.
جدول دور ال16 دوري ابطال اسيا 2011، دور ال16 ابطال اسيا
> The closed form complexity is not the same (not sure how it could be)

I disagree. Both variants are more similar than it may seem at a first glance. In essence, the question here is which of the following calculations is more efficient for big n:

a) the power function for arbitrary precision floating point

b) the power function for 2x2 matrices of arbitrary precision integers

Assuming that we can ignore the initial effort to calculate the golden ratio (can we?), Binet's formula is based on a), while the article's best algorith is an application of b).

I'm absolutely undecided which one works better, mostly because both kinds of power functions are working essentially the same way, with a complexity of O(log(n)).

Also, the precisions required for both cases seem to be quite similar.
Interesting Adam. You need to be clearer to your audience, who are presumably technical, what the product actually is.

If I read this correctly, you have refactored WebKit into an embeddable layout engine that can composite offscreen. It includes the javascript engine so it is able to render browser shots better. You also can send this bitmap to a 3D pipeline.

The selling point needs to be brought to the fore. While Internet Explorer is embeddable, it doesn't offer as good HTML5 compliance as webkit.
I would recommend changing the name if you are this early and only just starting to take off.

I might be willing to sell you DroidDoc.com if you were interested :)
How do they pull of the battery thing? Browsers seem to consume the most energy these days, so where is the advantage compared to "normal" PCs?
where does the $2 CPM come from?
So what if you are Anorexic
It seems to be built using GWT (Google Web Toolkit) which churns out client-side JavaScript from a Java codebase.

It makes sense since they probably had a Java version written for Android.
Check out this slide deck from some HP security researchers for a JS-based darknet presented 2 years ago at Blackhat:
http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/HOFFMAN/BHUS...
Sweet! Thanks! I'll play around with it!
Captain Crunch with Steve Jobs. Spaghetti with Paul Graham.
Just tap on the “Just Type” search bar and enter “upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart” (the classic NES Konami code!); an icon appears that lets you toggle this mode on and off.

Wait, really? If that's not a joke, then it's kind of cool.
And yet, there seems to be no shortage of buy-in for them.
The leak looks wholly unintentional. No conspracy theories necessary.
Overall I agree, preferring a ReST model with JSON. I do use java and i'm not particularly excited about JAX-RS (never used) or EJB3 (have used) . If I recall properly, then EJB3 merges with hibernate which I have used a lot, so it's not a bad choice. I use the gson parser for object<->json mapping. Overall, I think this is a solid style because it enforces MVC and scales nicely for everything but seo.
You need to hire a sales team to contact the companies and inform them 500 or 1000 people would like a deal. Sell the companies on the deals.
In a free society, you make your own choices and live with the consequences.

But when government has its fingers in every pie, we all have to "make our will known" about every freakin' pie.

And then watch as it is ignored because there are way too many pies for people to notice everything everyone is saying about every pie.

But each pie is of special concern to some well-monied interest and they will make their views known to those stuffing their pie holes.
Brogramming
Funny stuff from two Facebook engineers.
Thanks for the response. Many of the other comments are now putting this into context.

However, realize that if I were to switch to your service I might see a huge disruption in our business' income. Even 30 days could be tough for some considering Paypal makes our money available instantly.

We bring in approximately 80% of our income through Paypal, and have rolled our own subscription management service. We are also actively looking to migrate that to Recurly in the 3Q of this year.

In that context, how would you differentiate yourself from Recurly and the others (Chargify etc) ? If it is regards to having your own payment gateways, that's great! But I'd be seriously worried about fraud since Paypal (and other payment gateways) have extremely mature fraud protection programs that have matured over many many years. I'd love to hear further how your offering matches up against that.

Thanks!
1. Ares
2. Cards
3. Notifications
4. Just Type
5. Exhibition
6. OTA updates
7. Gestures
8. Synergy
9. The WebOS community
10. WebOS Internals
I responded before reading the full post, stick with what you know and do restful json, couchdb is also worth looking into for prototyping. As long as your interfaces are clean you should be good. Also consider security.
People rationalize why what's good for them and their allies is the common good. (A person who believes they don't, well, that's evidence against them more than it's evidence in their favor.)

I agree with your first two paragraphs.
While I think there's a market here, I wonder if the Chromebook will feel enough like a separate appliance to make inroads. The iPad feels like something different - a Chromebook just feels like a laptop. To me the marketing feels too much like a laptop that can only access the web than something completely different that is compelling to the average consumer.
Google ships Mono with Android 3.1
The Community Reinvestment Act seems to be a pretty likely stimulus for the mortgage crisis - incentivizing "anti-racist" behavior rather than good lending practices. Worse yet, the "considerable pain" you're trying to avoid gets worse over time -- as central bankers reduce interest rates (read: print money) to jack up growth until it gets too fast then pull money from the market (read: increase interest rates) to slow down a "bubble", the yo-yo effect amplifies until pop.

Pine beetles in BC are an interesting point, as it seems like it is precisely the lack of ownership over valuable forest land that is preventing the type of extensive research we would need to protect that resource. While research outcomes are entirely uncertain, it seems that ownership and the forecast loss of value is a pretty solid motivator for solving problems.
I had to look that phrase up.
Something fell through the cracks
Is there a better document that explains how the GC works in the latest Java 6 releases (particularly Hotspot)?

I'm doing some GC tuning these days - and there seems to be a lot of false/stale information out there. Something this readable, but accurate, would be helpful.
Of course the opposite of ACID is BASE: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1394128
Let me guess : by taking up 100% CPU? Irritated me the whole day.
Agreed. Infinite might not be the best word choice, but this site scales as easily as possible, and as well as the Facebook and Youtube API's.
> You can translate a text from any language to any other language without losing its meaning

You can't translate poetry. Sure, you can find the equivalent words between the language in which the poem has been written and the language you want to translate into, but the original meaning is lost. I can give you countless examples, but the easiest it would be for you to pick a poems' book written in a foreign language (I assume you already know a foreign language) and read it in original. And then read the translation in your native tongue. They aren't quite the same, are they?