skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Penn & Teller just did an episode of Bullshit! on a related subject, parents who are paranoid that their kids might get abducted. See

http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/previous_episodes.do?episodeid=...

The episode is widely available over bittorrent as well.
It's probably worth clarifying this, the basic idea is relatively simple (if you know calculus).

Consider the curve x=y^2. This curve is just a parabola, rotated 90 degrees clockwise, and is completely smooth. No angles, no jumps, no nothing.

You can parameterize this curve in the following way:

(x(t),y(t))=(t, sqrt(t))

This coordinate system is singular at t=0: sqrt(t) has no derivative there. But the curve itself is smooth. This is the type of singularity Einstein et al found.

In this simple example the singularity can be removed with the parameterization (t^2,t).

A standard result of GR (I think Tipler proved it) says that gravitational waves always have this type of singularity. But it's really not a physical singularity, since you can change it's location by changing coordinates.
Two and a half years ago, I (effectively) owned nothing except the contents of the two suitcases that I brought to the US with me. That wasn't liberating, it was just inconvenient and annoying, and I had to start reacquiring stuff immediately so I had places to sleep and things to eat.

Then, a few months ago, I was forced out of my home by a fire, taking only the bare essentials. Most of my stuff was undamaged, but due to the reconstruction work I couldn't get at it for a couple of months. That,as it happens, also sucked.

There's definitely something to be said for having stuff.
China's children buckling under the pressure of their parents' deferred dreams
Or you could put a simple tracker on the page...I'm surprised that someone there couldn't think of a better approach to web stats than Apache error logs...
Math envy.

Why do hackers focus on it so much? It has only very remote relevance to normal programming.

The beautiful idea I see behind the Y combinator is that of formalism. Once you describe something in mathematical terms, magic can happen. But this would be much better illustrated by a good introduction to analysis or algebra. Even number theory has some cool results, and it's easier to grasp.

In my second course at university, the teacher proved by contradiction that 1 >= 0:

Assume 1 is negative, 1 < 0
Multiply both sides by 1, so that 1*1 > 0*1 (multiplication by a negative flips the inequality)
1 being an identity, this implies 1 > 0, contradiction

That was one of the few Wow moments I had in my education. Short and to the point.

(that proof above is not really satisfactory, especially without the context and the axioms, but it served its purpose well five years ago)
The key to using yelp isn't to just read the first few reviews, but to find reviewers that either match your tastes, or have observations that appear to be particularly trustworthy. That can sometimes be determined by reading the user profiles and other reviews.

I wouldn't recommend anyone just reading every review on yelp. You have to come up with some sort of filter.
Ask HN: Movable Type or Wordpress for personal blog?
Goals for the blog: my personal space to store thoughts/bio about my company. It will be a professional feel; not have pics of my kids, etc. It will feature anything from tutorials to rants to startup stuff.

I want a clean feel that can be posted to from Windows Live Writer.

I want to be able to easily integrate Disqus or IntenseDebate.

I want to host on my own domain

-----------------------

I think all of the above are available/equal in WP and MT. What I don't know are the intangibles.

Any advice?
That's awesome, congrats!
We were lucky enough to get Outalot onto the new york Thrillist, I agree with fallentimes - it's great exposure. We saw about 3000-4000 new visitors, many of whom were engaged enough that they even bothered to create accounts.
It seems like this type of article shows up at least once a month recently. There's nothing really new here.

I have to ask though, given that most M&A's don't end up working out is google's failure rate really any worse than anyone else's?
I remember reading about the infrastructure hell with both Google and Yahoo. I think I've read stories from founders of companies acquired by each. It seems to me Ev (of Blogger.com and now twitter) wrote or spoke about these same issues.
That's what the test is for. In a law it's a scam because requiring professors that teach in person has absolutely nothing to do with learning law. You learn law from studying books and then practicing (apprenticeship). Not from professors. The same is true with almost all professions.
I've worked in one growing small company, and one internet giant. From my limited experience I've noticed that as companies get bigger:

- they gain engineering throughput. Given enough time more stuff gets done in the larger company.

- they gain latency. It takes longer to get a single feature out.

- they lose creativity. Solutions tend to get more boring, and exciting new things get swept under the rug. Powerful levers that allow single developers to be highly effective become frowned upon.

The key things appears to be the way a simple question is answered: "We need to implement X and there are two ways; the risky design that requires a small number of developers, and the safe way that requires a large number of developers. Which design should we chose?"

Every manager I've ever worked with wants to chose the safe route because it's safe, but only those in large companies can afford the number of engineers.
The thing about Google money is that a dollar Google gives you is worth one dollar.

Personally, I would evaluate "Google" money based on the numbers.
i like wordpress mostly because the community is larger. MT is also fine, and you can get the job done with either.
Yes, I am interested.

I like your videos. Very well done. We can discuss via email.
mjm@cs.umu.se is probably the best mail to use.
Very good post.

I'm already doing what he suggests on Monday and Friday. Monday's are for client meetings. Any work done is a bonus. On Friday, all work stops after the first beer. Hopefully, that's after 6:00 p.m.

I have learned one other thing that seems counterintuitive. My customers do not hold me to the same standard that I hold myself. Sure, they want it done right and on time. But I was driving myself nuts working all hours making everything perfect. I exceeded their expectations, but at a price. Also, they often weren't ready for me, adding to my frustration.

So I learned to relax and have a little more fun working on their stuff. Still top quality and always on time, but it took me a while to learn to "not go nuts" on everything I did.
Twitter SMS shutdown explained
Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja: A sneak peak
Better reporting of the result:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080813-bohms-bummed-w...
Excellent. You will be hearing from me. (We have to redo all the videos because of the major improvements we've made to the system since then, but thanks)
Indeed. From the perspective of a developer, I can see not wanting your baby to be ignored in a corporate bureaucracy. But investors don't normally think that way. I don't know what founders are "supposed" to think here, but if it were me I'd take the money and find a new baby if I had to.
The Golden Goose Called SMS
How far do "we" take it? Who are "we" to parent other people's kids?

Ultimately it's up to the parents of the individual kids to decide how far _they_ take it with their individual kids. Parents have different parenting philosophies. And that's good--experimentation and variety is what leads to learning and understanding what works.
Excellent message - the safe path is the truly dangerous one. Challenge leads to growth and growth staves off the true dangers of passivity and stagnation that bog us in the deepest of physical and intellectual mires.
Well I am divorced and don't have kids, so the world is my oyster ;-)
Thrown to the Ad-Wolves... or, Learn from My AdWords Mistakes
Yeah you would think Google would learn its lesson by now.
The linked article is a little confusing. Here's a better description:

Pairs of quantum-mechanically entangled particles seem to know at once what is happening to each other. Experiments show that even if this signalling is not instantaneous, it must be really, really fast.

This is from Terry Rudolph's commentary:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7206/full/454831a...

The Editor's summary is also good:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7206/edsumm/e0808...
one todo, I think, clarify your website for the obvious questions, so people don't have to download the demo and watch screencasts to get something out of it:

- what is the benefit of your algorithm and code over Lucene/SOLR? quantifiable metrics, e.g.precision/recall-wise? What natural languages does it parse/work best in?

- what kind of analysis, in layman's terms (Layman: somebody who's implmeented Lucene, sphinx, the search engine, not CMU sphinx, MySQL fulltext search, not an NLP researcher) From the company name, i would assume anaphor resolution is included, or something related, named entity resolution.
Yeah thats why I'm not that big on online reviews, because most businesses are now savvy enough to know that they can game the system
Frameworks serve their purpose well, but at a price. They became popular with the advent of broadband and more client memory, both of which they use.

How will Javascript frameworks fare as more apps move to mobile devices and wireless networks? Only time will tell.
Building Static Websites with Webby
Please don't give up! I just tried your geography demo, and I'm no expert, but I was very impressed.
Use our Angel Funding Convertible Note Template
Twitter stream of Chinese journalist nabbed by security
I use Twitterrific on the iPhone and SMS. I like SMS's because they're pushed to the phone, so I know straight away when somebody tweets. I read/tweet from Twitterrific. If (when?) Twitterrific can do push notification i'll be fine with losing SMS, but until then i'll just have to check for new tweets myself. I'm from Australia, one of the countries that just lost SMS's.
The researchers found that when each photon reached its destination, it could instantly sense its twin’s behaviour without any direct communication

Isn't the problem explaining, scientifically, sense and direct in that context? Without that explanation, I don't see how without carries any explanatory weight.
Valleywag, Monitor110 and Telling It Straight
to rot away under mountains of management and infrastructure/policy hell.

I missed where exactly the article said this. I imagine if you're looking at a Google acquisition and you care about your service, nobody is stopping you from asking "how will this integrate into Google's MapReduce/BigTable? Where will I be in the Google corp. structure? Will I get engineers working with me on my product, or will I be farmed off to other products?" Weigh the answers to this as part of yoru consideration about whether this acquisition is good or not.

I think the founders are more to blame for not understanding what an acquisition by Google involved, not whoever@Google they were dealing with for not spoon-feeding them.
Couldn't you measure the state of the entangled pair and record it? Then take one particle and walk it over the next village. Assume Bob and Alice have both agreed to look at their particles every 3 seconds. If the state changes relative to the last state, that's a 1. If you see the same state twice, that's a 0.

So would that be 1 bit of information every 6 seconds, or am I totally screwing up the quantum reverse tachion stream?
I had two thoughts when reading this:
1) Mythical Man Month...
2) If I was Apple would I have released the SDK with iPhone 1.0? Probably not. iPods became a market leader without a killer (externally developed) app. Why spend the effort to package-up the SDK, when it's not going to be key to your offering?
Sharing 2999 Songs, 199 Movies Becomes ‘Safe’ in Germany
I'm not sure if it's fair to pick out specific cases with the number of acquisitions Google does ... sure, some aren't going to be perfect - some founders won't understand Google infrastructure, others will lose interest in their products, etc.
Here are some others to look into, as I do not like any of these:
http://cactuswax.net/projects/failhouse/
http://drupal.org
http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/
Startup Stages:  Idea to Revenue
TCP-Planet: A Reliable Transport Protocol for InterPlanetary Internet
I don't know what founders are "supposed" to think here

Founders are supposed to take into consideration their product's role after acquisition when they're talking about getting bought out?

This isn't rocket science - once you sell your company to Google (or whomever), you don't own it anymore. That's why you get all those shiny coins.
I like this idea a lot, an interactive lesson when you can type code and see it run is going to be a great learning tool.

The problem is it's not entirely Javascript, it's Javascript with some of their code sprinkled in. I'd like them to explain that some of their conventions aren't Javascript.

It's also strange they say using var is good practice but then don't put ; at the end of lines. It seems like they have the basics really nailed but need a few other people to review their material.

I'm going to be e-mailing them a mail with a few of my suggestions.

I'd love to see this go further. Their app is a great place for people to learn in.
The Google Black Hole: Why companies disappear after Google buys them
Ironically I bet a lot of that is because of all the illegal content on YouTube. They needed it to remain pretty separate for their lawsuit defenses.
Bionic Humans: Top 10 technologies
The editors of Nature should know better than to put a headline like "faster-than-light information transfer" on there, since that is exactly what isn't going on.

Um, this part seems to imply so... "the researchers found that when each photon reached its destination [some 18 kilometres apart], it could instantly sense its twin’s behaviour without any direct communication."
Almost exactly the same as in India. That's why people here in US think that everyone in India is smart _and_ hardworking. Well, the truth is that they encounter only those people who have survived all this. There are countless millions who suffer.
No. Once you measure it, it is no longer entangled. Also, you cannot set the state to whatever you want. You can only measure different properties of the particles.

It doesn't really make sense. Think of it as, there's probably something really intuitive happening, but physicists haven't figured that out yet. Instead we only have really complicated formulas and unintuitive metaphors. So don't think that necessarily things "really change" when you measure them. That's just the simplest assumption we have right now that makes the formulas workable.
How is many-worlds a scientific theory ie how is it testable?
It's an interesting writeup of the effect of distance on download speed but I would say it was more 'expected' than 'surprising'.

I would have been a lot more surprised if download speed increased with distance.
Photosynth is still a work in progress. It is dazzling, but what is it for?
No. At least as described in the article Alice and Bob both learn the same string of random numbers at the same time, but they aren't able to pass messages to each other through the channel.
Okay, so because he made unspecified errors in a book he cowrote years ago, we should not believe what some other social scientists have researched. After all, Murray has cited them!

but calling her a socialist is typical political name-calling.

Apparently you don't 'know who Barbara Ehrenreich is':

http://www.dsausa.org/about/structure.html

She is a a member of the Democratic Socialist party. Her Wikipedia page mentions that she's a socialist before it mentions that she's a writer! Calling her a socialist is like calling Obama a Democrat -- a radical redefinition of name-calling, though it does please me that merely identifying someone as a member of a leftist party is considered grievously insulting.
The key is, this "sensing its twin's behavior" only works if you interfere with the twin in a randomized way. You can't set one particle to a 0 bit and have the other one sense it. So you can't use this for sending information.

It's hard to explain this in the space of a comment. You might try Wikipedia -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
It's more like, right now we have two rather bad explanations for basic quantum mechanics. There is the "particles change when a human measures them" explanation, and there is the "there are many worlds and we can usually only observe one" explanation. They both explain the same set of formulas that have been verified many times by experiment. Depending on what you want to do with the theory, it may be more intuitive to use one formulation than the other. Hopefully at some point in the future it becomes obvious that one of the formulations lacks the explanatory power of the other, and then scientists can cohere on one.

Like epicycles as a scientific explanation of how the sun revolves around the earth. Somewhat off topic but interesting reading -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle
There is definitely something new here, although the linked article does obscure what this is---read the actual paper or see my other comment.

Why do you think there is an important connection to many-worlds? Many-worlds is an interpretation of quantum theory: the experiment tests quantum theory itself, independent of your interpretation.
Why does it take a hacker to figure out how to convert a .doc file to an open format?
Artistas y expertos del área llaman a los profesores a sacar a los niños de la sala
Apple's dirty secret?
HN: feedback on my "find places to play sports" site (sportsity.com) 
http://sportsity.com

I would welcome any feedback on the idea (does it scratch an itch), site usability, features, etc.

Use Case: I [moved to, am visiting] [Denver, Palo Alto, Pawtucket]. I want to [run, play pickup basketball, throw a frisbee, etc.]. Where do I go?

Thanks for your help.
Whew! There is good news after all. Sure looks like my childhood pool still has its high dives:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&i...
Using email instead of SMS is not a terrible idea. I wonder how many twitter users (overseas) know how to check email from their phones.
Live in a more rural area. Buy a place with a big yard.

That buys you isolation, not freedom.
I don't think it's that. For example, when I'm roaming, my carrier charges me 40p/SMS and 20p/MMS. You can perfectly easily send text messages by the latter. I think they're just trying to encourage people off the (presumably) older and creakier SMS infrastructure onto something fitter for purpose. Don't forget the SMS started off as a useful tool for engineers to test things; the carriers were taken by surprise when it took off with customers, so I bet the infrastructure they rushed into production to handle it is a mess.
So if you have a pair of entangled particles A1 & A2, can the observer close to A2 quickly determine if A1 has been measured? I understand that you can't transmit information using a single pair of particles, but what if you had a pair A1 & A2 and a second pair B1 & B2. If one side can immediately tell that A1 was measured before B1 or vice versa, it seems like that transmits a bit.
I grew up in New Orleans, lived there for some of my adult life, still have much family there, and return frequently so I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the place. The message of this city comes through loud and clear to me: have fun.

Now that doesn't (always) mean acting like a drunken idiot in the French Quarter. It basically means enjoy yourself. If that means getting drunk, fine. But it may also mean hanging out on the porch and watching the sunset, having a fine meal with friends at your favorite restaurant, going to mass on Sunday, fishing for nothing in particular in Bayou St. John, or visiting the lakefront with your dog. But don't take anything too seriously, don't work too hard, and don't sweat the small stuff.

New Orleans tells you that by far the most important thing in life is not whether you're rich, attractive, skinny, or powerful. It's how much you enjoy the path you're on. New Orleans admires poor and happy far more than any other place I've ever lived. Rich and happy is good too, but not all that different by the standards of the place.

Hmm, maybe that's why I'm not all that rich or successful despite living in New York for the other half of my life. :-)
Many worlds is testable, though I wouldn't recommend it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide

Edit: :)
Ask YC: Resources for learning about revenue models?
Does anyone have any useful reading about the fundamentals of generating revenue? My understanding is limited to choosing subscriptions vs. advertising, or a combination of the two.

How do you make money off of advertising? What are the advantages and disadvantages to both? Is there one that is better than the other depending on what stage your company is in? Is it as simple as asking potential users what they would pay for it?

Thanks very much.
It's interesting--Google has the best reputation among techies and AOL probably has the worst reputation.

But so far my experience has been very positive. I still have near-absolute control over the development and creative direction of the site.
Thanks for the feedback!

Omitting semicolons early in the guide was an intentional choice. We wanted to ease people in to the JavaScript syntax gently, so we decided to start without semicolons. (We introduce them in the "good habits" section, and use them in all our examples thereafter.)

In JavaScript, omitting semicolons will occasionally get you into trouble, but usually isn't a big deal. (I personally always use semicolons, and use jslint to verify it.) Omitting "var" before variables, however, can be really nasty because it affects scoping, so we felt that was important enough to introduce sooner.

As with all educational material, it's a trade-off between simplifying things for the beginner, and being totally correct. (Kind of like how in physics, you learn mechanics, and then find out it's not totally correct.)

It's true that the tutorial uses commands (like "print") that aren't built into JavaScript. It helps to recognize that we're trying to teach programming in general, not JavaScript specifically (as the headline might imply), and with an audience of total beginners. We feel that the JavaScript language, together with the AppJet framework and website, provide a great environment for beginners to start writing programs.
Well, we're profitable, time to scale...
Context: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232958 | http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=241296

Thanks, Hacker News! You were extremely helpful in our beta.
I agree there is nothing new here except the length.

The many worlds explanation does not help for this. That explanation is only useful for dealing with quantum interference. Many worlds does not explain why the two photons give related results.

A theory that can explain it is the hidden variables theory (which makes a lot of sense to me, because I can't understand the bell inequality). It has still not been ruled out, although the gut feeling is that it's not happening.

I have another option: the two photons are hard linked in the matrix simulator of the universe. That would explain it pretty nicely no?

The planck length is the size of each cell in the simulation. All the various quanta (and there are some really weird ones, like direction) are because that's the smallest increment in the variables that keep track of each cell.

Anyone know a good hacker? I want root access :)
No you can't tell if it's been measured. Assume you are measuring angle on the photons: the angle of both sets always adds up to 0. So if you measure 10, he'll measure -10.

So by measuring yours you know what he got, but that's it. You can't unmeasure it, and you can't tell what he did.