skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think these concepts became clear to me when I learned about the complex plane, Euler's formula, and demodulation of an FM signal.

Particularly enlightening was the demodulation of a frequency modulated sine wave when the tuner was imperfectly matched to the carrier frequency. Looking at it on an oscilloscope was similar to watching an old TV with the Vertical Hold improperly set.

That made me start thinking in terms of a signal (sine wave) that was a cycle rather than a sinusoidal shape. Seeing that you can graph the amplitude and phase of any signal on the complex plane and that the frequency was the change in phase from one moment to the next was the aha! moment.

Then if you think about sampling and how if you sample a sinusoid exactly at its peaks how that would graph as a constant point on the complex plane, but if you sampled at any other mismatched frequently, the point would rotate and change amplitude with respect to either axis. The further away from the actual frequency you'd go the the points would look more random, and they'd average out to zero with fewer samples.

This would be a fun animation or java applet to make; I'm sure someone has done it.
If Random Megacorp X did this, I would think "Well, either they hired someone whose job it was to sell bonds and by God he is going to sell bonds whether it makes sense or not" or "Somebody's roommate/boyfriend/etc works at Citibank" or "There were a few expensive meals on a corporate account and, whammo, new bond offering."

Google is not a preciously unique snowflake. They're a big company. They're subject to all the usual pathologies of big companies.
You do realize that you started out saying Google believes in the "open" nonsense and then went on to say how it could slap Amazon's wrist and how it did a similar thing to Samsung and Motorola.
How Granada were the Apple of the 50′s by ‘Thinking Differently’
HTML 5 not solving everyone's mobile dev problems yet
Oh my bad guys I didn't realize he was just looking for a pat on the butt. In that case, yea dude startups are totally awesome !!!!!!!!!
Red Hot: The Computer Science Job Market
"It’s incredible that CSE students still in school can earn summer salaries twice as high as students from other majors can expect to earn after graduation."
> Why are you quoting invented dialogue?

Because art both affects our beliefs and provides a nice form for expressing them.

Today's trivial "Follow the money" does not appear in the book "All the President's Men" and the relevant reporters never said or wrote it. It comes from the movie, written by William Goldman. And now "every" story about investigative journalism cites it.
Linkbait title should be changed, really. There is a massive difference between taking out a loan and issuing a round of debt securities.
Like they say in "Kill the Irishman", real business-men never invest their own money :)
No. What they are doing is heavily betting that inflation will go up, or that the US currency will fall relative to other currencies. They don't need an extra $3B to buy anything. That would be like me borrowing $3k when I already have $37k to buy furniture and nick nacks. Sure a good sofa might cost $2k or so, but most of the stuff I'll be buying are way less than that and I certainly don't need the extra $3k.
Sadly my dreams were also crushed when I discovered that lynx wasn't in there.

However, wget is there, so all the building blocks are in place.
Try it again. There were some minor bugs causing the thing to asplode. Seems to be fixed with the latest pull request.

Also, you'll probably have to drop this thing on a virtual host. Local filesystem restrictions seem to break it also.
SEOmoz introduces public analytics on all posts
Yes. See http://docs.python.org/reference/simple_stmts.html#grammar-t... , and the source code is pretty well commented: http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Objects/genobject.c?...
Learn to ‘Do the Right Thing’ for Your Startup
"With corporate borrowing costs about as low as they can be it makes sense for Google to grab some cheap money, even though it has some $50bn in the bank or in short-term investments.

It also means the company can build a reputation among bond investors in order to raise more money in the future."

-- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/17/google_bond_sale/
I think it's pretty cool that they constrained the robots to using human phonemes, because the investigators can actually listen and observe while the robots are talking. It might be more scientifically rigorous to prevent that kind of informal observation when testing a hypothesis, but they might learn something this way that will generate new ideas and new hypotheses to test.
I saw that, but I don't understand how it's booted.
The International Air Guitar Insurance Company has a special offer just for you
How Not To Overload Your To-Do List
First thing I did after booting?

alias ll='ls -lh'
Yes, that would do it.
HN would appreciate if you left reddit at reddit.
Yes, I wish they'd stop calling it a "quantum computer". It's not a quantum computer. It's a thingy.

That said, I'm quite impressed that D-Wave is finally bringing out a thingy that actually does something. Reading the Scott Aaronson post elsewhere in this thread it appears that they've finally got around to demonstrating that their thingy really does do stuff that involves quantum mechanics.

They're still way behind their implausible schedule, and their thingy still can't do anything that a classical computer can't do a helluva lot faster and cheaper, but I do congratulate them on having a proper working thingy.

But they need to stop calling this thingy a quantum computer.
Run-flat Tires
It's good to know that the future Skynet will be able to talk to each other and we won't have a clue what they are on about!
What's with the constant reminder that it was "built in 8 hours"? Is that to warn me that it's really buggy or are you trying to impress me?
Presumably CDN servers whose job is just to serve up the content, not to deal with who is logged in or who has access to view which content?
I think if Amazon wants to form an assault on Google/Apple, they'll have to go it alone for the most part. Partnering with Microsoft means jumping in bed with someone who has their own competing platform. There's no way in hell that MS execs would watch as Amazon/Android platform move ahead of WP7 without doing something stupid to try and impede their growth.

I think Amazon is the kind of company who could put together a good competitor to the Google Apps product. The only area I don't see them coming out on top is search. Although, we shouldn't forget about A9. Amazon has some tremendous strategic advantages in that they own the largest online retail presence in the world. I use the hell out of their shopping and comparison apps.

Keep in mind that your Average Joe cares about a radically different set of problems than you and I. They're less concerned with "checking in" and more concerned with getting the best deal through the easiest possible method for the things they buy day-to-day. Apple understands this. That's why SJ pushed so hard for the $0.99 price point for music in the iTMS, and why Apple licensed Amazon's "1-click" patent.

For the huge number of consumers that are still using feature phones, an Amazon offer with tightly integrated retail tools is a very attractive proposition.
Learn To Choose Mobile Broadband Packages
Lessons learned from Y Combinator and Seedcamp
It would be good if the user could control the scrolling. I can't read the page because it keeps scrolling to the bottom to show me new translations.

Also copy and paste is broken.
For the record, this also happens to me.
Tl;dr: Entire article is nothing but 'relying on js is bad'.

Author discounts modernized entirely because it only works with javascript. Suggests you can replace it entirely by tagging your html tag with an ie class using conditional comments (thereby relying on browser sniffing, after arguing that browser sniffing is terrible and doomed to fail) and the cascade in stylesheets.

I'm not convinced this gives a fair shake to the difficulty of getting graceful degredation right with just the cascade, and any author that says 'x is bad' then relies on x is clearly presenting an incomplete argument.
Epic Viral Marketing Fail - rap videos + slideshow
yea on your computer ;). though screenshot(s) would be nice.
I tried it out.

Ran into some problems that hopefully you'll shake out. Surprised by the choice of web stack (.net and asp).

I didn't see an option to delete accounts, did I miss it?
WIth $37 billion in cash currently they are bleeding money with negative real interest rates. It doesn't make much sense that Google is worried about inflation here. Also, consider that Google has about $17 billion in cash overseas to avoid US taxes and may not be able to deploy the full amount of funds at home.

Google may be altering their capital structure to include more debt which will do a few things, 1) lower to firms cost of funds and allow it to better operate in a lower interest rate environment. 2) Debt offers firms a tax shield, by putting out some debt,Google can lower its effective tax rate.

With interest rates at historic lows it makes sense to borrow as much as you can. We have negative real interest rates currently. If you borrow at a big economy like Google, paying back the debt will be much easier in this environment and the lenders stand to loose on a purchasing power basis.
Popping the Android-iOS/Windows-Mac OS Bubble
I don't get how the meaning of open somehow got turned into you have to let competition run all over you. Leveraging your work may not be in the sunshine feel good happiness part of open, but it certainly isn't closed. Motorola/Samsung were able to use Skyhook if they wanted to, Google just put themselves in a position where Motorola/Samsung had to choose between who was the more important partner. I have no doubt Google can do the same with Amazon.
Do not take this article too seriously. It is not an article in the old-fashioned sense, but an experiment in post-modern essaying. The paragraphs were written by 9 separate undergraduate freshman, in separate places across the English speaking world. The students had no contact with each other before or after the essay.
Our own Fukushima?
During the April 27th tornadoes in Alabama, a tornado passed within several miles of the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant, and severed the transmissions lines to the plant.

The shutdown was not as smooth as was first reported, and the majority of the emergency evacuation sirens in the area were not operational.

The Browns Ferry is identical in design to Fukushima unit 3.

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/2011/20110428en.html#en46793

Since the shutdown, there have been further problems:

http://www.citizen-times.com/article/DN/20110516/NEWS11/110516015/TVA-reactor-loses-cooling-80-minutes-NRC-report?odyssey=nav|head
This kind of research is more exploratory engineering than it is science. As someone who does this sort of thing [1], we don't really have a hypothesis and are looking for data to support that hypothesis. We have an idea - "Hey! I think we can get this cool thing to work!" - and then we grind away at implementing it until what we have is cool enough to show off. This is fundamentally different than pure science because we're not actually testing a hypothesis or a theory. (If you're thinking "What about the hypothesis, it's possible to do X?" well, that's a pretty weak hypothesis.)

Yeah, we have experiments, but those are used to show that technique X is better than technique Y when using metric Z. We're not improving our fundamental understanding of how how the universe works, we're improving our ability to build things - either by demonstrating a new technique to achieve an old thing, or by demonstrating that an entirely new thing is possible.

[1] Not robots or machine learning, but computer science research in general. I do high performance computing and systems research.
Here's a clickable link: http://osm.mapki.com/JS-Minecraft-Map-Viewer/

... Chrome was giving me security errors when I loaded it locally.
No,I think they are exactly the same. When you get a car loan you just issued a "debt security" to whoever gave you the loan.
Profit booking
Fly Like You're Rich With Social Flights (And Private Planes)
Nvidia Unveils Affordable DX11 GeForce GTX 560
What is Syntax error
Syntax error is the error that takes place on part of the person when an information or data had been incorrectly entered within the computer and an error results as a response when the results can’t
would appreciate if you could tell me any other problems your ran into! I'm keen on any feedback. genystartup@gmail. cheers!
nope, just looking for information. "Don't do it" is information too.
How that article got by without pitching naming the feature "Worms With Friends" is a mystery of the ages.
Ugh, you're bringing up bad memories for me. I was once bit badly by the require_once/realpath() problem.

require_once("/foo/bar/baz/random/crap/foo.php");

The above requires 5 lstat(2) system calls thanks to realpath() and a typical WordPress-MU page load for us was calling lstat over 5k times. Over NFS that's 5k round trips to the server for every page load. Thankfully there is a knob you can tune in PHP 5.1.x (realpath_cache_size) that caches all those lstats, but as usual, the default is (16K) is too small to be of any use.
Their own money is free. What do they want with "nearly" free? I still don't get it.
Check out the new Mark Zuckerberg
When I see security vulnerabilities I rarely get involved because the party with the vulnerability will become suspicious of you. It's not worth the hassle.
Miss India Worldwide 2011 Wallpapers,miss india worldwide 2011 Images
A clarification: conditional comments are a feature of IE, and thus are stable and reliable, and aren't technically browser "sniffing", at least in the traditional sense.
If you can figure out how to use the Viagra compound to shine shoes, you can patent that, and the pharma patent doesn't apply.

Not if Pfizer files a lawsuit about it and you run out of money before you ever see the inside of a courtroom.
See http://mongodb-is-web-scale.com/ for a humorous angle on the speed vs. ACID compliance tradeoff.
I emailed them asking how much and when. $10million USD available now.

Ouch.
The Easy life of a Programmer
As a recruiter, I can tell you that screening a manager is difficult. Y'all are usually good talkers. Good leading indicators to me are prior success, ability to articulate complex ideas to a lay person, and brevity in communication. It is also good to stay on top of communication, be patient, and nice.
I am not a 'best engineer'. I am a semi-junior engineer who is quite likely in the 1st standard deviation of engineers. This article's company hiring practices would be very difficult for me to work with.
FCC's Ten Key Cybersecurity Tips for Businesses
Android Malware Quadrupled in Six Months
Interface's Ray Anderson knows sustainability leads to bigger profits
Hey, if you're still looking, we're doing early testing on an online portfolio service that might meet your needs. I'd be glad to send you an invite.

Email me at tim -at- bitsmachine -dot- com

http://bitsmachine.com

Example portfolio (mine): http://timbarkow.bitsm.com
Amazon EC2 Used in Sony Playstation Hack
There are other competitors as well, but that just validates that there is market interest in this field. Having no competitors is much more suspect!

I don't know that anyone on the team seriously considered a YouTube scale exit. In fact, thinking about exits this early is probably a giant red flag.
Most large companies do.
Hardly Working: Start-up Guys
They get to keep their money for a rainy day, or put more money into projects than if they just used their own. All they have to do it make more than ~ 3.7% using the money in the bond issue.
IPhone NFC Accessory launching this Weekend?
There are only a handful of browsers that doesn't support javascript today [1]. There also users consciously disabling scripting on their modern browsers but they don't add up to a significant percent of browser users [2]. The second argument that an external .js file can fail to load applies to the .css file as well.

There may be arguments against the modernizr approach, but the ones in the article are quite weak.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Java...

[2]: http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/08/eu-and-us-javascript-d...
Old, outdated. Cults are passe. Lame.
When to tell your advisor you’re going on vacation
Darpa takes aim at building iron-clad cloud services
If there was a major security hole in 2.2, I expect there'd be a patch for 2.2 that'd get pushed out as an urgent update.
That makes no sense. If in the future Google’s fate should change such that the company becomes desperate for cash, no one will care about Google’s past good credit score. Bonds are always rated on future expectations.
Ask HN: Startup Interview Tips
I have a technical interview with a really hot startup tomorrow. I usually am cool as a cucumber going into interviews, but this is my dream job, so I'm getting a bit nervous. I've already interviewed with the business development guy and now it's time to interview with an engineer.

I think this could be valuable information for a lot of people trying to get jobs at hot startups: What sort of questions should one expect and be prepared for in a technical interview? What, if/any tips would you give? What other advice would you give to someone trying to get a job at an exploding startup?
If the interest rate they pay on the borrowed money is lower than the interest rate they get from sitting on their cash, spending the cash has marginal cost equal to the difference between the rates.

It always makes sense to borrow if the return on your cash is greater than the interest on the loan.
Why do people assume that this is some kind of giant Facebook conspiracy? From the article:

"According to Grubb, security expert Christian Heinrich demonstrated in front of the delegates how he had managed to acquire privacy-protected photos of the wife of fellow conference speaker Chris Gatford, who is Director at HackLabs."

Isn't it more likely that the police are investigating charges against Heinrich in relation to the presentation?
Evernote for Honeycomb coming soon with impressive rich text editor
What does it do? It just sticks my text on a US flag. With mentions of scrolling in the comments, I am certainly missing something. Will leave open for 8 hours and see if situation improves.
A blog would be a very good idea - show what your ideas on management are. See, for example, Rands in Repose.
This model sounds like fun if it's your hobby.

In my world, however, spontaneously upgrading a library or a language runtime from one major version to the next will cause a bunch of websites to break. This is exactly what customers pay our company to avoid.

Because, in fact, the "continuous" model is a poor fit for software ecosystems unless your time scale is sufficiently long. If you don't care about downtime as measured in hours or days, go ahead and sync up every day. But if you care about downtime as measured in minutes or seconds, the continuous model isn't good enough, because at that scale software doesn't evolve continuously at all. It lurches ahead in sudden jolts, and each component lurches ahead on its own timescale, and only when you stand way back does the process look continuous.

The other problem with the "continuous" model is bugs. Software only lurches ahead on average; in practice any given patch is as likely to move you backwards as forwards. Three steps forward, two steps back. If I could be assured that every change in the Linux kernel was permanent and perfect, it might be worthwhile to run my websites off the latest kernel source HEAD, sync up every day, and fix bugs as they arrived. But in the real world, if someone commits a bug to the kernel source tree on Monday, and it breaks my site, so I work around the bug, and then someone fixes the bug in the kernel on Friday, and then I roll back my workarounds, I have just wasted hours of my life that I will never see again. I have churned my code for no net gain.

(Of course, you may ask: Why didn't I just fix the kernel bug on Monday instead of working around it in my site's code? Well, the Linux universe is too complicated for any of us to hold all of it in our heads: I can't fix kernel bugs, at least not on a timescale of days. So "this isn't the Apple II anymore; the universe is too big to patch the whole thing at once" is yet another reason why the continuous model doesn't work.)

It's just not that simple.
Kinda. There are too many legal implications to be a real hedge fund, but they do actively manage their own cash. When you have that much money you don't just plop it into a savings account.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_23/b41810335...
New solar product captures up to 95 percent of light energy
Google wants the capacity to do really big acquisitions (like Facebook big). Assuming Google did decide they wanted to buy facebook for $70B, they would need to raise some serious cash. Much of Google's cash is in overseas accounts and would incur US income taxes if repatriated.

This $3B is a practice round. The $50M or so in wasted interest expense is the cost of an option to do a huge acquisition.
Agreed. Poorly paraphrasing a line I read somewhere: "Software is like a fish: once it stops moving it dies."
well, that depends on whether you worship chomsky or wittgenstein :o) although this is more like skinner :o(

dropping the pseudo-intelectual bullshit: there's no grammar here. yes, this is like saying "hammer" while holding a hammer aloft. but it stops there. language is more than a collection of nouns; there is structure. and any structure here is not learnt.
How Fiverr helped increase my page rank in just a week
Ask HN: How much should I charge for the Power User Toolbox for Facebook?
Over the past several years, I've build a number of Facebook applications that extended and enhanced my own user experience -- such as an app that bypasses the standard 400-character status update limit and an app that sends email notifications when someone "likes" your post.

I decided to bundle them together and charge for access.

I have no idea how much to charge, though.

I've thrown together a bare-bones landing page that describes all of the apps that will be included in the toolbox:

http://facebook.pressbin.com/poweruser

Would you mind taking a look at what's being offered and giving me your two cents about whether this is worth ... two cents? two dollars? more?
Should be able to run it in PhantomJS if you need something headless. http://www.phantomjs.org/
In case you're curious, here are links to a couple of the apps that will be included in the toolbox. (Obviously, they will be refined and combined, where appropriate, once I start charging for them.)

Right now, most of them are either free or restricted to my own personal use.

http://facebook.pressbin.com/clicktrack

http://apps.facebook.com/hiddenstatusupdates

http://apps.facebook.com/schedulestatusupdate

http://apps.facebook.com/unrestrictedstatus
Landing page, hyperlinked:

http://facebook.pressbin.com/poweruser
Oracle Introduces New JSR to Evolve Java Community Process
I remember the very early days of youtube.
For the first 3 months, it was just a copycat of Flickr (concept, layout, tagclouds on the homepage etc.) with flash videos instead of photos. The initial idea was to offer a service where you could share your home videos with family and friends privately, with the possibility to make some of them public to anyone.

Youtube wasn't the only video sharing service on the net at that time, but the only one allowing copyrighted material.

So youtube quickly became an hub for tv shows and music videos and while everyone else was fighting against DMCA notices, RIAA and taking down content, no one at youtube seemed to care. That's how they've got their first 10k users.

As they've estabilished as no.1 video sharing website, Youtube started to take care of the legal implications.