skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
E8 is an exceptional Lie group (ie a group that is also a manifold, hence in particular infinite). You seem to be mixing it up with the exceptional finite simple groups. Wikipedia explains.
If a company is trying to create long-term value it is not a high growth company, and doesn't need venture capital - It can (and should) get bank loans based on its cash flow.

The venture capitalists are basically screwed because of the disappearance of the IPO market, and the increased importance of angel funding. Fred et all are just spinning things to make it seem like there is still a reason for their existence.
It's a wide-spread myth that the weather is cold in Siberia. I do live in Tyumen (West Siberia) and it's +32C here now. So, you cannot save on aircooling.

The two more myths are, that wild bears are all leaning around over here and one can drill oil right in his backyard.

There are no problems with BW, as for the past 8 years Transtelecom and Rostelecom -- both nationwide telcos, deployed a number of transcontinental fiber cables all along the TransSib (the rail-road connecting farthest east and west points of Russia). On both ends they are peering to EU and to Japan/China/Korea.

The average ping from Tyumen to my servers co-located in Mountain View is 180-200ms and the most part of it constitutes by european backbones.
Ask YC: Does anyone know of a bank whose online account doesn't suck?
I've used multiple online accounts for managing bank accounts and credit cards. They are all so terribly confusing and unusable.

Some assign me a completely (random) numeric user id. Occasionally, the website goes through a revamp, and it seems like it always turns out worse than it was before. Some attempt to allow me to link multiple accounts (e.g. checking, savings, etc.) from the same bank into one login, but that feature never works for me.

Am I just using the wrong banks? Or are they all like that?
"Theory of Everything" is not a theory for everything, literally. It is just a catchphrase used by physicists to mean a theory that encompasses the "Standard Model" (which describes particle physics) with General Relativity and gravitation, thus describing the whole physical universe (which, in the physicists narrow mind, is everything). So Godel has nothing to do with this.
for some reason, i'm not able to load the site in firefox anymore. shortly after i posted this, it throws back "failed to connect" errors.

i tried in a CGI proxy, works fine, so i know it's not my internet connection. i cleared my cache too. i'm using latest version of ff and ie.

adding the "www" prefix doesn't help either (i know some DNS setups are picky about that)
The "idiots" crack was totally uncalled for.
Here's a phenomenon I've recently noticed: posts that put down women, or demonstrate ways in which they may be inferior to men, get to the front page. Then the armchair evolutionary biologists post comments of dubious veracity about biological sex disparity.

I submitted a link to an article about the lack of differences between genders in mathematics, and it generated no upmods or comments. I initially assumed it was bad timing, or not particularly interesting to hackers. Now this submission which is clearly not hacker news has found its way to the font page & I'm starting to wonder if my gender is simply not welcome here.
I am non bay area, its more the tone of comments. PG is trying to keep HN "different" (but not exclusive or anything).
Why does there have to be only one "right" way to do things?
First quarter growth this year was 1-1.6%, and second quarter growth is expected to be around 2-2.5% according to the FT.
I blame the media too. With the endless flow of 'XX got funded' or 'YY got bought', its hard to pay attention to the right role models for building a long-term business.
Economists Weigh Possibility of a Recession Amid Economic Growth
Is this site down for anyone else?

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mikael.jansson.be dies.
In my experience they're all pretty mediocre. Of the banks I use, Discover has the best website. Its not overly bloated, and they make it easy to file customer service requests online.

I think that Citibank has an extremely confusing site, and Capitalone is not much better.

My local bank has a halfway decent interface, but it has a very dated look and does not have very many features. Sadly, the lack of design beats out most of the other bank's over complicated designs.
The conclusion that DRM could be good is based on the assumption that a DRM'd textbook would be priced at $25 compared to $209.95. The same article that draws this conclusion says the current price for a DRM'd e-book version is $109.99. It's also worth mentioning that the title of the article is "Textbooks next to try DRM - raises prices for students by a lot!". What the heck is the author trying to say? The title and conclusion are polar opposites. Furthermore, the conclusion is based on completely made up information. This is simply ludicrous.

I suppose in some fantasy world where DRM is used to allow for per-semester rentals of textbooks at a drastically reduced price it would be a good thing, but we all need to understand this will never happen. The entire point of DRM as it's used now- and how the textbook publishers propose to use it- is to enforce old and broken business models, not to enable new ones. As markets change and as new technologies become available the value to price ratio of certain goods will fluctuate. A low value to price ratio promotes piracy. DRM is only a means to avoid adjusting to these changes.
A Public Service for the FSF
No. Even though particle physics gets all the media attention, theories like this (and string theory for that matter), are shallow in comparison to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.

It's exciting to find out what the smallest building blocks look like, but all the real structure in the universe arise from the interactions... and statistical mechanics addresses the interactions at all scales.

Modifications to our understanding of the smallest scales will trickle up to stat mech and thermo, but statistical mechanics is the true heart of physics.
Reply to Scobleizer's "Silicon Valley VC Disease"
You tell reporters stuff about yourself off the record?

Because that, not off the record generally which Dan spends a whole paragraph defending, is the relevant bit.
ING's ok, I guess online-only banks should be more on top of it. USAA also, you can even deposit checks by scanning them. (The last remnant of a system that should have died decades ago!)
I have to say that there is a huge flaw in that article and thinking.

Women in their 30s lose their looks really fast. (unless you have plastic surgery, botox, etc.), women just look better on their mid 20s.

These great "women", hold on for their perfect partner, but they don't realise that their value is diminishing in time, and in their 30s they are no near as valuable than in their 20s, hence they will Have to setle for somebody less, or stay single forever.

Sorry if the above paragraph comes out too callous, comparing women to something with an expiration like milk, but the truth is that looks matter, and that there is a real biological "expiration" date on women, if they want to be mothers. Guys just don't have this limitation.
The BEA itself said under 1% growth in the first quarter, iirc.

And The Economist (http://www.economist.com/countries/USA/profile.cfm?folder=Pr...) estimates less than 1% net growth for the year.
I voted you up because it does seem that this is a younger, testosterone-loaded crowd at times. Some of the comments -- I can't help but picture a pimple-headed nerd spouting something so silly.

As far as I know, all genders are welcome here. (They're only 2, also as far as I know, at least until the Trans-Neptunians arrive)
Exactly. Most winning companies are not out there hyping their companies. Keeping quiet discourage competitors and gives them more time to grow their profits and increase the barriers to entry.

Btw in my assessment we are in a recession.
Who Will Be Microsoft’s Next Online Chief? McAndrews? Miller? BoomTown?
I too think that there is untapped potential with cell processing - specific tasks that the cell processors are more adept at performing. There have been some interesting publications about cryptography and password cracking using PS3's cell processing technologies published in the past several months - something you do not see branching out to other such related tasks.
Someone checked in an infinite recursive loop.
Attention hackers: the idea of combining athletics and chess had Alan Turing's endorsement: he invented "run around the house chess," a speed chess game with a twist: after making your move, you dash out of the house, run completely around it, and your opponent has until you return to your seat to decide which move to make.

http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:HCBY1qLAY7kJ:www.chessc...
Wasn't there an article just last week about their continued popularity in prison?
I switched from BOA to Sovereign recently and I've been pretty happy with their online banking so far. However, I don't really use it for super intensive tasks (paying bills, etc).
Thanks, informative. Hydroelectric power sounds very clean and safe, but dam failure is catastrophic.

I'm sure you're correct on the fatalities for fossil fuel vs. nuclear, but fossil fuels are also much more widely used (I imagine by several orders of magnitude).

Making land unsafe is a less dramatic aspect of safety, but actually destroying usable land is an amazing feat of destruction. I guess if reactors were located on land that was already unusable (eg. desert, esp Antarctica) it wouldn't matter so much. But I think (present-day) electrical transmission requires them to be close to the power consumers?
I completely agree with you: it's a scam.

But we, the profs, don't have a lot of choice in the matter. Problem 1: we need to assign a text which is available to all students, and I can't guarantee availability of enough copies of the old editions.

I'd love to use this book (http://store.doverpublications.com/0486457710.html) costing $20 for calc, but that brings up problem 2: I have to use the book the department assigns. Changing this would require joining a curriculum committee, turf wars, academic politics, etc. Yuck, I'm a scientist, not a politician.

I usually work with my students to save them some money (copy problem pages, etc), and I bought old editions when I was an undergrad. But that's about the best I can do. I have given the problem some thought, and have a startup concept (with some code). If I can overcome some technical issues, I'll go live with it.
Is it just me or are the HN headlines becoming too similar to those of reddit?
I still don't understand why more data centers don't just use lake source cooling. With a relatively modest upfront investment these companies could reduce the amount of electricity they use for cooling by 90%.
> but fossil fuels are also much more widely used (I imagine by several orders of magnitude)

True. Also consider the relative efficiency of the generation methods. Supplying the world's demand for energy with nuclear power would probably require far fewer powerplants than doing so by other means.

> I guess if reactors were located on land that was already unusable (eg. desert, esp Antarctica)

Except for the melting of the Antarctic ice and all that, in case of an accident :) Most technology seems to involve a trade-off of evils.
You know, I was just guilty of doing what I always make fun of trolls for doing: commenting based on the title without reading the article first. But I've just read it and I see that I've also done the second thing I make fun of trolls for doing: attacking something other than what the author said. So I take back what I said. It's true, but beside the point.

I do still disagree with him slightly. It's not hard to imagine things one might want to tell about themselves only off the record. Especially about one's health: there are lots of medical conditions someone might be embarrassed to have other people know about.

But I was wrong to suggest that he distrusted off the record statements generally. It should have set off warning signals that I was accusing an experienced reporter of making such an elementary mistake.

One reason I didn't read the article was that it was so long. That's probably one reason people so often do this to me.
wow...that's not even wrong
Would you really drop several hundred million in investment in a country that just decided to nationalize all of its oil industry? A country with a history of nationalizing things so that the rich plutocrats keep geting richer?

Maybe Microsoft, but not me.
Blogging While Brown Keynote Wrap-up | My Philly Network
2 Ways to Take Screenshots From Your iPhone
about half of all the initial investments we've made in the past three years have been angel rounds. i see our firm as bridging the gap between angel investing and venture investing. we can invest $250k in an angel round and scale up to $10mm+ if need be.

if there's no reason for our existence, we'll close shop. but right now, we are seeing more deal flow than ever which is certainly an indication that others see a reason for our existence even though you don't
The front page is consumer facing. We have plans for another page that will show more directly the other ways to use Tipjoy.

I think reputation will be largely built by distribution, and the mascot will not significantly affect distribution. Also, the star on the turtle's back is our favicon and used in places like friendfeed.
sweet. a comment as a headline link on hacker news! this service rocks.
>just decided to nationalize all of its oil industry

that's false. do you by any chance get your news from the Anglophone media?
Tip rates are accelerating. I think showing the total amount made people want to game the system more than it impressed people with the transaction volume. People giving ridiculous amounts has decreased while transaction rates are continuing to increase.
That post was a day before our second techcrunch article announcing a large new set of features. Someone that judges a startup a failure just a few months after launch doesn't know anything about startups.
it is being treated like a post right now on hacker news. that's so great.
You appear to misunderstand the meaning of the terms "inconsistent" and "incomplete" in the context of Gödel's theorem.

"Inconsistent": There is at least one statement within the system that can be proved both true and false.

"Incomplete": There is at least one statement within the system that is true, but cannot be proved to be true within the system.

Since Gödel's theorem applies to formal systems in mathematics, it does not say anything about the possibility or impossibility of constructing a "complete" (whatever that means) mathematical description of our reality.
We are actually looking for funding, so even the incorrect interpretation is somewhat correct.
I know two other married founders sets, and they love it too.
The vast majority of corn grown in the US is for cattle feed. And if we're talking about energy efficiency, that's pretty much as bad as it can get. Not to mention that if we worry about feeding the planet, we should immediately stop growing cattle, except possibly where they can graze on land too marginal for agriculture. Growing a heavily fossil-fuel based crop like corn to feed cattle only makes sense because a) most of the costs of the fossil fuel are externalized, and b) no one actually cares about how many people we can feed, because the people that can pay want beef.
Wachovia's online account manager isn't bad. It's not flashy, but it shows transactions and can do ebillpay.
I still use them.

They are still very widely used in many non-western countries.
Also, I think a MUCH bigger problem is that we have tip in the name but want to do more than tipping.
Thank you.

If I understand your last statement correctly, you are saying that a complete but non-formal mathematical system could exist which models our reality.

I'm not sure that's where you wanted to go, but I appreciate the help and clarification.
Modeling The Real Market Value Of Social Networks
Never occured to me. Why bother?

Way back there was a second copy of delicious set up at susp.icio.us for testing, but I had to take it down as people were using it.
Returning The iPhone After Two Weeks Of Daily Use
Associated Press Invests in Mobile News Startup Verve Wireless
200ms is very slow. I wouldn't put my business on anything slower than 100ms, I manage servers at three different US data centers and ping is within 50..70ms range for all of them, including cheap slicehost.
It sounds as though they are working on it. I'd buy one.
In this case, it would be a pretty safe bet. The oil industry was owned by even more sinister plutocrats before it was "nationalized" by the current ones. The reason you're hearing so much more about this now is that the current plutocrats are more into long-term strategy and less into dumping their stolen wealth and retiring in London as soon as possible. This is bad for certain Western interests, hence the "Putin is the Devil" stories you see in every other issue of The Economist.

In fact, investing in Russia paid off well for many Western companies, and the Russian government never got in the way (beyond its natural tendency to get in the way due to widespread petty corruption).
Nuclear power is only commercially viable because of huge subsidies (up to 80% in the US) and because the state usually assumes the liability for disasters. And even then, it's the most expensive form of power in wide use. I suspect that with the same amount of subsidies, wind and solar would be very competitive.

And as far as its environmental sustainability goes, even if we ignore the fuel storage problem, look at what uranium ore mining looks like. Then imagine what it would look like if the whole world was powered by it.
If you look at apache POI, they have libraries for handling doc, ppt, xls, etc. There's also a poi-like toolkit for handling the new docx, pptx, etc file formats somewhere, but I forgot where. They're java libraries, but it's pretty easy to write some simple stand-alone conversion tools using them. If you need to convert a ton of files at a time and the JVM startup is killing you, you can try nailgun (http://www.martiansoftware.com/nailgun/).
Not to mention Arnold's hydrogen Hummer...
His nick implies, at least statistically speaking, that he lives in a informational isolation and has no access to news, unless he knows more than one language [and uses it].

For English speakers the only source of information about international affairs, IMO, is books: Internet and TV are useless. For Daniel I'd recommend "Bad Money" by Kevin Phillips.
A distinction should be made between corn ethanol (which most studies say has a net energy gain of ~20% compared to gasoline) and cellulosic ethanol, which has enormous potential. Certainly more potential than nuclear.
Are you kidding, most political policies seem to be have essentially no connection to scientific results. Be it in energy policy, climate policy, education policy, economic policy, or whatever...
This question occurs often and the short answer to finding the talent/co-founder you want is to go to the watering holes they frequent i.e. conventions, events, meetups. Network, get known, know people, find a compatible match.

Also http://www.searchyc.com can provide you with many of the answers you seek if you are willing to spend the time e.g. http://searchyc.com/comments/where+can+I+find+good+programme... and http://searchyc.com/comments/finding+a+cofounder?sort=by_poi...

Lastly, finding a co-founder is a lot like dating and creating a serious startup a lot like marriage. You will spend a lot of time with this person(s) so spend time to get to know one another and ensure the fit is right.

Perhaps work on something light/fun before going full speed into a startup.
"Also, I don't get this thing Americans seem to have for private offices."

Spolsky is a fan of the book Peopleware, which I believe advocates for private offices, even for non-Americans.
Iverson on APL
Yeah, I thought he was just going to say "put the electricity directly in the car with a battery". All these conversions just don't make sense, if you have the electric power, just run the vehicle on it directly. People complain about the range of electric cars, but if your competition is a 3000 pound hydrogen tank you can put in a lot of batteries! ;-) Plus, from a carbon perspective, purely electric vehicles have high enough efficiency that it's a net carbon reduction over gas even if you run them with coal-based electricity.
Also, I don't get this thing Americans seem to have for private offices. I guess cubicle farms are ugly, and if your co-workers are all annoying nerds being able to shut a door might be nice, but I've always preferred open, multi-desk offices where you can discuss things with the people around you.

Joel has written at length about the need for programmers to have spaces where they cannot be interrupted, and from personal experience I agree wholeheartedly.

From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html:

Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff.
There's too much money to be made for the VC community to not figure it out; either the IPO market will come back or we'll see something like an increasing number of private equity buyouts of tech firms so the VCs can close out their funds. Companies building for the long-term still often need more than just angel funding in order to have enough runway to hit sustainable revenue levels and to provide a cushion to survive the inevitable vicissitudes of the market, which means there's still going to be a need for VC funding, and companies building for the long-term will offer a rewarding enough financial outlook that the VCs will still invest and just find new ways to get their money back out.

That said, I really think the attitude in Silicon Valley is very much around creating products and then getting out rather than creating long-term profitable companies; the latter is just a different deal and involves dealing with all the unglamorous, less fun stuff like figuring out how to grow past a few dozen people, figuring out how to manage multiple products, working on the same codebase for a long period of time over many iterations of a product, figuring out how to manage the transition of people in and out of the company, adapting to changing market conditions over long periods of time, and figuring out how to actually make money sustainably.

It's not just the VC side that's been spoiled and will have to adjust; the attitude among most entrepreneurs I run into in the valley is also very much the "build one product for 5 years and exit" mentality rather than the "build a company that makes good products and that can exist for a long time." So both sides need to adjust.
so put your data centers for American use in America, and for European/Japanese use in Russia. Duh?
Is down for me.

I found this instead:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2219