skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article by William P. Thurston (a Fields medalist) called "On Progress and Proof in Mathematics

http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1994-30-02/S0273-0979-1994-...

(which I learned about from a comment here on HN, thanks) does a good job of demonstrating how a mathematician who makes new discoveries has to invent a new language for describing those discoveries. Then the mathematician has to relentlessly practice communicating those results first to other professional mathematicians, helping them to see the connections between their research and the new research results. Mathematicians who work hard at communicating with other mathematicians, Thurston says, can help greatly with the progress of mathematical research.

After edit: Paul Halmos, quite a well regarded mathematician who by his own self-evaluation was not in the same league as Fields medalists, wrote in his "automathography"

http://www.amazon.com/I-Want-Be-Mathematician-Automathograph...

that he learned a lot of mathematics as he continued his career after his Ph.D. degree by "reading the first ten pages of a lot of mathematics books." Sometimes he could only get ten pages into a book by another mathematician before he was lost, but by reading dozens and dozens of books, ten pages each, he gained more conceptual foundations in more areas of mathematical research and could gradually apply what he self-learned to advance his own research. I strongly encourage students I know to follow that same strategy of reading at least the introductory portion of many books on subjects they desire to know. Don't just read what your professor assigns you to read. Go to the library and read widely. Read as far as you can before you get stuck, and then find another book and start reading it from the beginning until you get stuck again. Eventually, you will find that you can read harder books, and go farther before getting stuck.
Here is a great way to create brand value in the digital world, that generates both financial and non-financial value: give away your mass-produced stuff as free and/or open source and/or libre, and charge for custom work or advanced support or vanity branding.

This model tends not to work for entertainment products that people, in their heart of hearts, realize they do not really need in their lives. Hmm.

Good for you, and good for the world. Do well by doing good.
Which has fuck all to do with the subject at hand, which was the relationship between abortion and crime.
You realize this press release is for WWDC 2010 and not 2011, right?
Duke Nukem Forever vs GNU/Hurd: DNF went Gold, is GNU/H next?
haha thanks for your help

contact dmlevi[AT]GMAIL
And I just ran out of gum :(
A lot of scummy sites use static "secure site" logos which have no backing in order to deceive the user into believing the site has some sort of security in place. These mimic the geotrust and hacker safe logos typically but I've seen all kinds. Bad actors have no problem misleading consumers by duplicating common "indicators" of positive reputation and are already actively doing so. A new set of privacy icons would just as easily and quickly be deployed to deceive consumers further.
Anonymous Launches DDoS Attack on USChamber.com
I don't think it's the UX that does that. I think it's the attitudes of the developers.

Some communities are filled with people who are looking to innovate and take every opportunity to do so. Others are filled with people who want to make a buck and are acutely aware of what their time is worth. C# has always felt like the latter to me.

There's nothing wrong with it, it's just the way it is.

Ruby has a massive community filled with people who are constantly innovating. It certainly doesn't get in your way more than C# does, so that's not the difference between them. Rails even has 'convention over configuration', so the fact that someone else will probably re-do your work better later is also not the issue.
I considered myself an idea guy...but I spent the last 11 months trying to learn php, html and css and I finally just launched a company. I probably could have done it in one third of the time with a developer on board, but it's been rewarding to do it on my own and learn so much. Now I need a marketing and seo guy...but I'm going to try to figure that out too :)
It's possible to play FPSes with touchpads, though probably not good for your hands and definitely not as easy as using a mouse. Using Caps Lock to shoot instead of right-click helps.
Not entirely so. I keep latency monitors running on Amazon.com and all of the sites I have hosted on EC2, and noticed a distinct spike in latency across the board corresponding with yesterday's offer.
Well, you could say it's statistics.

I dunno, I started a thread asking about what happened to the no-politics rule yesterday, but it got [dead]-ed after collecting a few dozen comments. (In fairness, by phrasing my complaint as an "Ask HN" I might have been abusing the Ask HN system.)

The other trouble with politics threads, though, is that the barriers to entry are so low. If the subject is thermodynamics or erlang then there's a certain amount of knowledge required to take part in the discussion, or even to find it interesting. But if the subject is "why is crime down" or "hey, what's up with people in the US not getting enough holidays" then anyone can chime in with their own opinion on the matter... or at least to throw their favourite political hobby horse into the mix (It's all about race! No wait, it's all about police corruption! No wait, it's all about white collar crimes going unprosecuted!)

A major point of the no-politics rule was to keep the site looking as boring as possible to anyone not really interested in discussing the sort of stuff that the site is really supposed to be about.
Let's try to keep this civil.
Main issue against this: Wikipedia is not in danger of any kind.

Although "need for protection" is not listed in the criteria for selection according to UNESCO's website (http://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria), the "Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage" which established the concept of World Heritage Sites specifically states that World Heritage Sites are to be used for protection of threatened sites. Page 1 of http://whc.unesco.org/archive/convention-en.pdf states it all quite clearly.
How does it handle large (+50,000 files) collections?

Also: Oh no, it does that homepage spammy feeling option in the installer thing. This instantly makes me not want to donate, tbh, as it just feels scummy.
Shopping locally is the most subversive act you'll do all week
College is an opportunity to push yourself to do more work and study more unusual thoughts than you would otherwise ever do. If you take advantage of that opportunity, it is equivalent to four years of work experience. If you don't, it's a waste.

So it isn't the major, it's the difficulty. Study English at a state school, and you could graduate after four years of writing mediocre analysis, never having learned to push yourself and or entertain new ideas. But go to St. John's or Oxford and rigorously study the great books of literature, and you will push yourself and leave with a valuable degree of self-mastery.
Reading between the lines, I'm guessing you're about 18-20 years old and you've never had a job outside of your freelancing activities. If this is the case, getting some agency experience could be useful to you, both in terms of your CV and in terms of skill acquisition, particularly workplace social skills.

That said, this really looks like a question that only you can answer.
If you are caching youtube videos, which looks like something http://www.filsh.net/ does be prepared to be pulled from the app store. Apps have tried and have been pulled before.
So why is this common sense knowledge constantly peddled around as something "new" in newspapers?

It's just the newspaper version of a repost.
How I Outsourced Product Development to Customers
The text actually says "Ben's Phone". I suspect it's an Android device, with which syncing is supported.
Make your product better in two ways everyday
Got the same answer with a slightly improved brute force search, in about 3 minutes. I spent more time than that trying to find a "clever" way to do it, lol.
As long as mathematicians are dependent upon finding a small clique to work with, there are no pressures to make themselves understood by more than a small number of people who have a lot of common knowledge. Thus jargon will proliferate.

See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-left-math.html for more.
Interesting idea, but some studies have shown that social media can lead to depression as well: http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/311899/can-too-much-social-net...

Basically people present and exaggerate the best of themselves online (highlight their achievements, show how much fun they're having with life). People compare themselves to what their friends seem like online, and get depressed because they're friends seem to be doing so much better than they are.
I think a savvy developer would still want hard cash or something tangible other than just equity which is very volatile, although equity is an awesome bonus (if you get us an MVP /when we launch we will give you X%)

NDAs I think aren't so great either, even if a developer passes up, it makes it hard for them to recommend a someone else

If they don't pass it up, it makes it just that bit more stressful having to work very hard for an uncertain reward

Limited equity
Some cash, even if it's just a token gesture (get what you pay for)
A lot of gratitude
Be more open, if developers can talk about your idea you might get people asking to work with or for you

Unless you've got the financial clout to go after anyone who breaches your NDA I'd guess you could hire a whole team of developers full-time. If not, well someone like Apple or Google will drown you in court if your idea really is that ground breaking. :( sad way
Isn't that how Miro started life? As a video player that used torrents for distribution, and RSS feeds for discovery?

In that light, the inclusion of a BitTorrent client is less surprising.
Get used to developers not wanting to sign NDAs. We've had it banged into our heads again and again that we shouldn't be signing NDAs, particularly when just starting to talk with someone about their project. Besides, it'll be good practice when you pitch to VCs - they don't sign NDAs either:)
People always assume this and I can't help but wonder why? Just because the price is higher doesn't really say anything about the value of the spread between cost and price
Your comment made me look at YC as an extended extremely thorough onsite interview, and it really clicked. But then I remembered that YC companies pitch demo day to a bunch of relative strangers-to-the-teams, not the YC investors themselves. Or do Demo Day investors get quality time with the teams during the season?

Of course YC is overall a mix of interview and internship and summer camp and summer classes and more. The above is an attempt to think through one of the threads.
Or Datacenter-Heated Sea, depending on your perspective.
This is my favorite from the list of things that happened since DNF was announced:

The two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity were proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched and successfully landed upon Mars where they have been exploring the surface for over 2.5 years.
Bill Gates was a "Strong Proponent" Of Skype deal
If you don't factor in risk that number looks impressive. This is how the financial crisis started.
I wonder if anyone attributes this to the continued domestication of the human race. Maybe it's just natural for humans living in modern society to become less violent.
That's great and all, however can't you concentrate on giving me a decent performance analyser built into _all_ version of Visual Studio?
If you have some skills yourself, you could hack on Reddit's code (it's all open source), which is similar in a lot of ways.

https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki
I don't see how this is any more political than all of the articles about how the newest anti-piracy bill is the worst thing ever or how patent trolling is horrible. I don't disagree with either class of posts, but they are, strictly speaking, quite political.

I think making "no politics ever" a rule can hamper discussions quite a lot. I can understand why it's not productive to talk about, say, the merits of Obama's health care bill, which evokes really partisan gut reactions and makes people more likely to start posting pithy political slogans that sound good and make for horrible discussion. But talking about a reduced crime rate without crediting/blaming any particular politician or party can be pretty interesting to talk about.

On the other hand, I don't think any of the anti-DRM or anti-anti-piracy posts are very productive. But everyone here seems to agree on them, so even though the discussions are often quite vapid, they tend to be less nasty than, say, discussions about the merits of single-payer healthcare.
appreciate the feedback. you've made a few key points that i overlooked - thanks. as for being desirable, i'm trying to get away from that employer because though i work 50-60 hour work weeks, i have little to no growth because the job entails a number of tasks that insult my intelligence. (mind you I've been working for this employer since inception, 3 years ago)
Clever idea. How much are you making from it?
> If I can get millions of people to pay $5.99 for Kellogg's Corn Flakes versus $2.99 for generic corn flakes, that's a strong brand.

Is the product actually better? If not, that sounds like a dysfunctional market. Brand seems adjacent to deception. Is that what we want more of?
Node.js as backend for Mirage Cloud OS?
For me, at least, once I understand it, the notation makes perfect sense and I find it far more expeditious and precise to express my idea in the domain language of the field. The problem is that getting to the point of becoming proficient in the formalism of a field can take an extremely long time (for me), and has the unfortunate side effect of making me feel like a total idiot for not understanding it sooner, once I understand it.

The fact is, mathematics deals with constructs with extremely specific properties. These properties can be completely and soundly stated without ambiguity quite succinctly in the formalism of the field. Once I'm comfortable with the formalism, trying to express it in English is awkward, imprecise, and generally just extremely verbose. It can then be a frustrating experience going back and convey the idea to colleagues or others in prose.

When I come across some academic mathematics paper, even if I'm somewhat familiar with the field, I generally find other things far more interesting, like the coffee stain on the floor. Effectively reading a mathematics paper requires a print out and a pencil to work through some of the definitions and take notes for yourself, and maintaining laser-like focus for a sustained period of time (more intense than programming a rather difficult problem, imo).
Yes but even if we assume a figure of 30000 men and a 10 year timeline, that amounts to half a billion man hours. To reach that level Wikipedia should have a total spend of 27 manhours per article which seems improbable. Let alone other projects.
Really inspiring post. Motivation persistence seems really important in the long run. You sometime will loose your motivation, but as long as you keep doing it, your chances to succeed increases.
InVision App launched, design high-fidelity functional prototypes
Aren't we imprisoning more people than ever before? I know here in California, the three strikes law put many violent criminals off the streets and into prison for lengthy prison terms. Now that the Supreme court has ruled against the state in a prison lawsuit, California has to release 30k prisoners. Let's see what happens to the violent crime rate here in a few years.
Server Density scores Angel funding and rolls out ‘app store for sysadmins’
Even so, YC only broke even with the flip of Heroku.

It's not all the fun and Benjamins some people crack it up to be.
I was at a CIO conference a few weeks ago (just after PSN went down) and the Sony reps there stated that Sony was undertaking a massive effort to centralize all their servers across divisions into one group in a cost saving measure. Not sure how accurate that info is but it may be a contributing factor to these problems.
It's overloaded, try another mirror. Megaupload, mediafire, etc that is designed to share docs
HN is also open source:

https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/4dc1161dc49cee286f957496bf0...
I think the media didn't understand this based on that article. See: http://girtby.net/archives/2005/08/17/microsoft-patents-ipod...

Apple couldn't file for a patent after it released the iPod. You have to do it before public disclosure. And of course MS couldn't have gotten the patent if Apple had released the iPod.

To bring in the Groklaw quote mentioned:

"The rejected Apple application is not exactly a critical one. It also doesn't appear that the Microsoft patent covers the subject matter of the Apple application, rather it was used as an example to deny the Apple application because it isn't an original idea.

Platt's application covers a way to automatically generate playlists from songs similar to one or more song manually chosen by the user. As an example of usage, Platt described a portable music player that uses a menu hierarchy for navigation. The menus aren't really the invention though.

The Apple application, on the other hand, is all about hierarchical menus. Yes, seriously, that's what they were trying to patent, the idea of using a tree of menus to operate a portable music player. Can you believe it? (I knew you could.) I'd chalk this rejection up to an example of the USPTO doing some good.

The rejected Apple application is 10/282,861 - Graphical user interface and methods of use thereof in a multimedia player

The Platt application is 10/158,674 - Auto playlist generation with multiple seed songs"

This makes a LOT more sense. The Apple patent was rejected because it wasn't an invention. And the MS patent went through because it was actually patenting something that wasn't in the iPod.
4 Terribly Easy Steps To Move Away From Unity In Ubuntu 11.04
With a killer offer for early adopters via BetaCandy
Ask HN: Good Tutorials on Website Analytics tracking?
It seems to me a fairly obscure topic that very few programmers know about.

i.e. how do sites like clicky and/or ad retargeters track their data?
Maybe they've figured out that there are plenty of smart people, but not as many truly determined people. Determination then becomes the limiting factor once smartness has been established.
The angels get one extraordinarily significant bit about all presenters prior to the Demo Day presentation: they were in YC. That is a very significant bit relative to another similarly situated twenty-something which a gleam in their eye and prototype on their MacBook.

It used to be implicit that some angels were saying "If you're good enough to be in YC, you're good enough to get investment from me." That is now 100% explicit for at least one deal. The vetting is getting outsourced, streamlined, and productized.
I don't get why anyone would want to get good at what he doesn't like...
According to the interview, pseudo-determination happens often within a ten minute interview. Yes, they're looking for people with that quality but I don't think that's their goal.

They simply don't have enough data yet for an accurate model of recruiting.
Yes, exactly. And it actually works and is used.
I have about zero skills. I am now considering taking a "webmaster course" where id learn php, javascript, css, etc...

In the meantime i'm in the military and dont have much spare time.
Interested parties please shoot me an email benbakhshi at gmail
quoth: EMI sees no irony, let alone bullying. In an e-mail, the company's lead attorney at Latham, Perry J. Viscounty...

lol Perry J. Viscounty
4 disappointments from OpenSuSE 11.4
Microsoft does a good job of making an easy to manage server/desktop ecosystem for any sized business (assuming they have at least some IT.) They do it better than anyone. Trying to break into other markets is if anything a mark that the management doesn't recognize their core competencies and is trying to overreach. What they should be working on is next generation CRM tools, directly competing with Oracle, IBM, and the businesses that rely on their overpriced stacks.
Randomly screaming "racist" is the height of incivility.
From my experience with borderlands (another gearbox game featuring save file corruption, missing items, and general mission brokenness), I'd guess that "aiming for perfect" isn't their thing. Perhaps they were the perfect company to finally ship DNF.
I mean DBA, "Database Administrator". I think you mean something different, like a schema, which might be more interesting
This is probably the single most discouraging thing I've ever read about startups, but at least it's honest. Entitlement? "Naughtiness"? I think after Google, the idea got out there that it's possible to succeed by just being good. Technically and morally. This sounds like a return to status quo. Not saying he's wrong. He's almost certainly right, it's just depressing.
Just had to give it some time. It is up there now.

But I know what you mean... the MyNook.com still isn't live. Really puts a damper on the excitement.
I am. Vaguely threatening to label another commenter a racist for citing an argument by Steve Sailer that had nothing to do with race was far less civil than anything I said.
> Main issue against this: Wikipedia is not in danger of any kind.

Many of the places on the list - Notre Dame, for example - are in no such danger, either.
you're right about the debt. that's definitely a big factor which is why I've been contemplating on whether or not to take this route and why I asked about it here.. I will, thanks.
That's the current hackernews in code? Big ups!
I didnt think there were any because i hadnt seen any copy-cat sites around.
5ish years for 5ish people, some of whom could draw quite a fine salary in the M&A division of a big company or hedge fund or VC firm, and $5M doesn't seem too very generous an estimate. It is close to dead-on.
Great advice. This has been a learning experience for us. Although this is my idea, I am creating a team. Im letting people in on this. There is no way I can do this myself so we are truly looking for a partner. We are in Chicago with connections to lightbank, and all sorts of great stuff. My busines partner goes to U of Chicago Booth and his network is impressive.

As for NDA's we agree. We know its a sensitive subject but NDA's can be terminated once trust is built ;) In the beginning and over the internet (although HN is supposed to be a safe environment) we have made the decision to have NDA's pre beta release. Its really just precautionary measures...kinda like a prenup! We don't suspect anything bad will happen but its there just incase.
Agreed that the ad hominem implication to the commenter was unnecessary.
Well PG is not really an important figure or even a public figure outside of the 'tech startup' scene. To argue that something isn't world heritage material simply based on the fact that he could 'get away' with criticizing it would be wrong.