skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Considering that these look very like the design of www.wdyl.com AND we're only seeing this after wdyl.com is unveiled I'm led to believe that this is the product of someone who has too much time on their hands.

The design is also very not-google-style, look at the buttons. There's a blue one for the image search and then some crap looking grey ones for text search.
Explanation:
This morning, Google suddenly looked different on my laptop. I believe that I was lucky enough to see the new UI as it was being A/B-tested.
Flask 0.7 Released (Python Web Framework)
The Greek letter tau is already used to refer to the period of an oscillation, the time constant of a decay interval (these are intimately related), plus plenty of other stuff. There really aren't any Greek letters left that aren't used for a million things already. tau-as-time-constant is the standard use for the thing, and the confusion with torque and natural temperature is bad enough as it is.

Yes, pi shows up as the prime counting function, but there it's a function, which clears up the otherwise ambiguous notation. Furthermore these abuses of notation are generally considered a bad thing, something we try to avoid.

As for the intuitiveness of such deep results as Stirling's formula and the even values of the Riemann zeta: this is to concern oneself with the upholstery on the Space Shuttle.

If you want a new pi symbol, might I suggest the variant pi described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_%28letter%29 -- though I'm afraid this is all a waste of time and energy.
Harvard-Smithsonian Confirms Black Hole Existence after 40 Years
donated. easy choice. I uses quirksmode often.
Today is Tau Day
Yeah, let's make being stupid cool!
oh ok, maybe it is real then! That would be awesome. Looks far nicer than the current design (if you could call it design)
Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games
A photo is much more than the subject getting photographed. It's also about the creative exposure used (lights, shadows, colors, implying or stopping motion) and about the composition done (the angle, the distance). These elements are used to express or induce a feeling or send a message or make the subject memorable (even though it's quite a boring subject).

photographers who take photos of building are stealing
the architects designs?

Copyright is about protecting the expression of a concept/idea.

Protecting buildings from photographers with copyright is stretching it, but it depends on the context. Also depending on the context, it is also an issue of free speech.
It's because we [developers] are highly opinionated people and [most of us] love to be "right". Some people have a hard time understanding other people might not think the same - and in cases when they don't know how to express their feelings - you get name calling.
Why we (Atlantic Canada) suck at starting startups
A typical rule of thumb while consulting is to charge double what you do if you were employed.

When consulting you need to build up money to pay yourself for time when you're not working, but as a paid employee you'd get 'built in'. e.g. (a) 4 weeks holidays per year, (b) about 1 week illness, (c) 2 weeks(ish) publis holidays per year (d) 1 week (more?) of administration/taxes/form filling. Before you know it you can't work all 52 weeks in the year! And that implies you're working full time. Contractors often have lulls when they have no work. No work, no pay!
> This is what you get when you act ignorant or plain lazy.

Or, in general case[1], when 'industry standard' tools are PITA to use. Simpler solutions are always preferred, for better or worse.

[1] I'm not defending here the person that caused the SoSasta breach.

EDIT: Formatting.
Pancreatic Cancer Diagnosis - Facts You Should Know | Pancreatic Cancer Symptoms
This is a great idea. Unfortunately pastebin and sites like it are generally not indexed by google.
People expect others not to jerk them around. They will bitch about how they've been jerked around long before they'll cut the jerk from their life. Hopefully, because said jerk will change their behaviour, in a perfect world.

There is also a lot of inertia created from using Facebook for a little while. You can't just pretend that inertia doesn't exist.
Did you already close the startup? What does/did your startup do?
Hm interesting thought. Any good tutorials/sites I can use to get going on this? Or is it so simple I won't even need that. I find myself scraping a lot, so finding the best lib for that is a priority.
> Not all fans of maths agree, however, and pi's rich history means it will be a difficult number to unseat.

This statement is never supported (the fan part). Bad BBC, bad!
Somehow this thread of mine got larger than I imagined.

I don't think I've lost my touch on reality. Details? Maybe. I'm also not proposing that Dropbox didn't do something stupid.

But why would you sue? Because someone told you that your data ~could've~ been potentially accessed? I'm not against calling a lawyer in general. But these kinds of (class action) cases regularly look like [Note: Still firmly anchored in reality here. Maybe just in a different culture..] witch hunts to me personally. Like angry/annoyed mobs.

Again: Note that I don't say "these people have no right to sue" nor "the people in this particular case are equivalent to a medieval party of farmers with torches and improvised weapons". This whole thread is mostly "Why oh why?" and less "You're doing it wrong".

In the end I really like edw's comment further down in this thread:

"I think there's no question that Dropbox seriously dropped the ball, but as programmers we should be extremely concerned about the prospect of companies being held liable not just for actual damages but theoretically possible and potentially non-economic yet non-existent damages."
I never got this. Why do I need a meta-Twitter application to centrally display #hashtagged tweets?
Does that work? If I remember correctly I may have tried that and it was one of the things that failed. Something would not compile I believe. I am still a noob so if that works and I just messed it up I wouldn't be surprised. Do you know by experience that is all you need?
I definitely keep going back to my MVP plan to cut down the scope-creepiness so-to-speak part of my work. It's getting better.

Are you breaking up with your girlfriend to do startup? That's a bit of an extreme case isn't it? I could understand if there is implication of bigger issues--but the world is quite a lonely place without people, my friend.

I wanted to commit to startup/entrepreneur life for 2 reasons: I can't live without it and I want to take care of my family with the rewards :) You can't possibly conquer the world without love ones' support. It is such a lonely path, being entrepreneur, already. Any love a long the way would only enhance it.

By the way, some might trade everything for a snuggly full night of rest.

Stay enthusiastic, my friend and good luck.
Of course he's going to say there's no price he'd have licensed the image at - he was trying to get damages out of Baio, so why put a limit on how much his damages were?
Don’t Be a Social Media Copycat
3 Ways to Build Your Brand Equity
Auto Transportation
There are a several auto transport companies today and each of them offer different methods of vehicle transport.

When you get an ideal auto transport company, the only aspect to keep in mind is to be sensible in indulging with cost effective auto transport companies.

Before indulging in carrying out the business with them one has to do an analysis and also verify about the auto transporters. After that a list of all the essential aspects has to be prepared.
The earliest example I've seen of 2π is in a 1763 letter from Thomas Bayes (the paper that appeared in the Royal Society proceedings directly after the one that's famous). He used c for the circumference of a circle whose radius is unity.

If you've ever used Stirling's approximation, this is the paper that first points out that it's a divergent series.

Scan of original (it's also on JSTOR):
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/letter.pdf

With modern typesetting and an explanation:
http://www.stat.ucla.edu/history/letter.pdf

(I don't seriously think we should change from pi to tau.)
Ask HN: HN Parents - Rate my content marketing / customer development
I've posted before about an app we're working on--basically a personalized risk management and preparation app. We've decided our best customer segment for early adopters would be tech-savvy parents.

I thought it'd be neat to challenge HN to 1) see if our app is findable and 2) see if our unique value proposition is clear and understandable to our target segment.

So, with that, the app is called RiskRef. Have we done a good enough job promoting it thus far (i.e., Can you find it without me pointing you to it)?

And, once found, do you understand what problems its solving and how it's unique (i.e., the unique value proposition)?

Thanks for participating in this little game! I'm sure we'll learn a lot if you can find and understand the app. Also, if you're interested in doing some problem / solution interviews as a tech-savvy parent, please message me your email and we'll follow up!

This community is awesome, I've learned so much lurking here. Happy to finally post something.
Weather info via Twitter
I'm not a big fan of introducing a new constant (though I believe \pi should have been 2\pi), but I love thinking of the integral you wrote down as \sqrt{\tau / 2} because then the answer practically tells you how to derive it!

How to derive the value of the integral: Square the integral to make it an integral in two variables, introduce polar coordinates, then change variables.
Finesign
Ah right - we weren't aware of the ranking penalty. Previous "rate my startup" submissions were pretty universally non-linked ones, so we went with that, assuming direct links were specifically frowned upon for these posts for some reason. Live and learn...
Thank you so much for doing this. I've been hoping someone would write a decent online REPL for a long time; hooking it into Google Docs sweetens the deal.
I much prefer Scrapy (http://scrapy.org/). BeautifulSoup is pretty outdated.
Opera 11.50 released: Presto speed-ups, password sync, tweaked Speed Dial
"find my wife nearby"
"explore my wife in 3d"
Offtopic: Inputting text with Swype on Android is a breeze once you get used to it.
Line by line carefully. Never skip anything in hopes it will clear up later.

You may allow to yourself not to know with what intention author wrote the line but you should never allow yourself not to know why the author could write this line.
The conversion rate on advertising is incredibly low: often less than 1%. The remaining 99% see the ads and either ignore them (best case) or get annoyed by them (worst case). Either way, it's content on the page that those 99% don't want to see, and it dilutes the value of the page as a whole.
I'm no lawyer, but wouldn't Ms. Wong have to prove actual damages occurred as a result?
Of course, if there's proof that the changes from Pi to Tau will accelerate technological advancement even by 0.01%, I'll totally support it.

The fact is that making things easier doesn't necessarily mean improvement.
Argentina 11/12 new style away soccer jersey
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Original article from PhysicsWorld: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/46362
Interesting - will have to play with it when I wake up. Any reason in particular you think it is better than lxml? Beautiful Soup is only used with lxml to parse broken HTML into a DOM. Lxml does most of the heavy lfiting
I've tried it out in a VM for a bit, and I must say I'm impressed, but I wonder; is there any reason to use haiku (yet?) over any linux distro for any real-world work? Does it work better on shitty hardware?
i love cats, and it didn't find anything in product search!

"Buy all kinds of cats stuff
with Product Search
No results were found.

Polite cough Couldn't find anything. Sorry. Try something simpler?"
You can balance ssl traffic at a TCP level using the client's IP to set affinity. The only real catch is if you have a large base of clients behind a single NAT, but in most cases traffic will balance out pretty well.

Sometimes though, you don't want affinity at all. If you don't care what backend server takes the request, you can balance the load more efficiently, and more easily rotate servers in and out of service.
Yes, it's one of my favorite proofs. (I think I like it more than Euler's formula, especially since many calc teachers will look at e^{-x^2} and say it's un-indefinite-integrable without a second thought at what else it can do.)

But I'm not quite sure how you seeing it as \sqrt{\tau/2} helps you see the proof more easily. Because if you see \tau (ignoring the 1/2) you think "It has to do with circles or polar form." as per my rule of thumb?
The commercials aren't there because people worship lawyers! I think most Americans aren't actually all that fond of lawyers. They're there because there is a lot of money at stake. When each new client can bring you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can afford to take out TV ads.

It's the same reason "mesothelioma" was the most expensive keyword on Google.
IMO the appharbor add-ons page is a poor replication of the already poor UX of the heroku add-ons page.

I get that your a heroku clone but it probably wouldn't hurt to show a little innovation.
Apple warned of phishing attack threat to iPhone, iPad and Mac OS developers
Worked for me when I did it on Debain Squeeze. I later ended up uninstalling the apt-get version and install the newer version from pipy via pip.
I thought for sure this was going to be a Siracusan epic article. Instead it's a measly 3 pages from last year.

:-) great article though about an OS I missed the boat on.
I've looked through a few and by the life of me I can't find one that is doing something only available with 3.0. Google changed a lot of stuff with the UI, yet non of the apps seem to utilize windowing or other new stuff.

This is really kind of annoying, since I'm trying to understand how all the new UI paradigms will work, and no example is to be found (at least not on my Xoom).
I think there are several reasons. First home use, Linux has a (comparatively) good desktop experience. PCBSD is relatively new, rough around the edges, and is perhaps the most important thing for the healthy future of FreeBSD. It gets people exposed to the OS. If I have used Linux before and I am going to set up a server I am much more likely to pick Linux for that server than I am FreeBSD.

Second strong corporate support, IBM and several other big corporations are behind Linux development and help get it in to the field. FreeBSD doesn't have a large IT services company installing Linux on servers as a part of their consulting business.
Sometimes they are witch hunts (or maybe "money grabs" is a better term). But there are also many instances where they have effected real change for the better.

A potential settlement in this Dropbox case could be: Dropbox pays off the lawyers (of course) but also agrees to hire a Chief Security Officer and submit to quarterly security audits by an outside company for the next year.

In the absence of a strong government consumer protection bureau, the class action lawsuit is one of the primary ways Americans force corporations to take responsibility for their actions.
So why does Adblock exist?
Certainly, this was the CTO himself who quickly thought of a hack to reduce login times by a factor of 10, e.g. by logging in all users ;)
Zork really isn't the best example, just the first (and even then it was just an adaptation of Adventure). The Infocom adventures got far more sophisticated in every way over the following few years, in terms of prose, setting, gameplay and atmosphere.

I credit adventure games with teaching me to touch type. To this day I can still type "inventory" far faster than any other nine-letter word.
This is exactly why I tend to prefer books to theatre, and theatre to film. Filling in the details engages my imagination in a way that the polished, finished surfaces of contemporary games and films do not.
Is this going to get posted every year?
"Donation drive succeeded. After 4.5 hours. Wow... am not sure what to say next."
https://twitter.com/#!/ppk/status/85703744460824576

Great job, Internet!
General truth right there sir.

Maybe there is a correlation between developers and math? Since I'm guessing many developers might have a CS background that involves a lot of Math, Statistics, Physics, and of course Programming. These subjects require people to answer things correctly hence subconsciously create a habit of being "right".
I've had that interface for a while now (probably regional split testing).
So will this work from mobile browsers?
>But, they're still a startup

So what?

Aww... the cute widdle startup gets the bar lowered for them because we love startups here on HN?
Go to just about any programming language tutorial site, you will most likely see bad code.
The same reason people don't enjoy using Solaris?

For me, the _default_ command-line tools are not a joy to use.
Um... no. Read my comment.
I really enjoy Flask's simplicity (relative to Django) and light-weightness. It was the first web framework I used, actually. Armin Ronacher & team make quality products.
How is BeautifulSoup "outdated"? It's meant for making it easy to scrape non-properly-formatted sites, and works very well at that, as I've found out in practice.

What's the advantage of Scrapy?
Most people can tune out adverts they're not interested in extremely well.

When you buy a photography magazine, it might have 20% of the pages covered by advertising. I'd say most people buying the magazine find them useful. Maybe only 1% convert to a sale, but I'd say the majority of people find the adverts useful.

Also, it's not a black and white thing between "content" and "advertising". For example, quite often adverts in digital camera magazines are handy for me because they show me new products or lenses I didn't know about - Those adverts are 'content'.

I'm not going to convince anyone who hates advertising to open their mind a little though, so I'll retire happily to my ad-supported magazines, and ad-supported websites.
How Android app TuneMe is generating $100 per day in advertising revenue
pretty good way to show off google's array of products. But also makes me wonder about the 'too many things going on at google' thing
I think that the old MUDs have great potential as a teaching tool. It might be harder in this modern age of fantastic graphics, but if you get someone hooked on a MUD, they usually get a typing speed of 200wpm or so. Further, the persistent nature of the world lends itself to programming.

I've been meaning to write a small mudlib and course around MudCore, a server I finished recently. It's at https://github.com/endgame/MudCore , if anyone is interested.
Marketers: Don’t Subscribe Me to Your Crap and Call it a Service
The part about extended attributes reminded me of my time as an OS/2 programmer, it had EAs as well but they were awkward to use, sounds like BeOS made much better use of them.
US Congress To Use Skype For Video Teleconferencing
Applicative Programming with Effects
I think that was a bit hyperbolic, but affinity does have drawbacks. Balancing the requests is much easier without affinity, and you don't run the risk of the load ever getting severely skewed. Maintenance is also easier, because you don't have to "drain" the load from a server, you just drop it out of service, and the requests can go on to something else.

The latter point isn't that big a deal if the only reason for affinity is SSL session caching, because you could yank the server even if it has active sessions, and the clients would simply re-establish with the next backend.

I often load-balance ssl using session affinity, and would also like to know if this author has encountered other issues, or just hasn't looked at the capabilities of haproxy in a while.
I just had a reviewer criticize a report I wrote for containing "sentence fragments". The paper says things like, "Then x = y/2", which my reviewer interpreted as a one-word sentence ("Then"), followed by an equation. It made me realize how unnatural it is for some people to actively read mathematics-- for example, turning "=" into the verb "equals".
What's going on in Spain?
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New Math Constant on the Block Gets Kick-Ass Theme Song
Release Announcement: http://flask.pocoo.org/mailinglist/archive/2011/6/28/ann-fla...
I've been looking at light-weight scripting-language frameworks, any experience with Catalyst? I'm a fan of Perl.
Not true, IE6 was very well received when it launched, it was a capable browser. The problem is that was 10 years ago and it never went away
Scrapy is a django-like framework. It has more structure and a lot of built-in features compared to using a library like lxml.

lxml and Scrapy use the same library on the backend, libxml2.

http://doc.scrapy.org/faq.html#how-does-scrapy-compare-to-be...
http://doc.scrapy.org/topics/selectors.html
I actually started diving into Python a few months ago, and after a day or two into it I had already ported a feed aggregator from PHP to Python thanks to Flask: https://github.com/giu/hsr-twitterverse. I've also written a simple paste site using Flask without any headaches.

Its simplicity is just amazing, and it's really fun to work with.
The Universal Science Of Being Beautiful
For now I'm just kicking her out to avoid distraction, we'll see about full-on "breaking up" later. I have plenty of people in my life, but I need them to stay inside their time-boxes if I'm to get anything real accomplished in this short life I have.

It's no so much "to do a startup" - I think the "go to work"/"do a startup" dichotomy espoused by so many on HN is a bit of a meaningless construct. I already have a fairly successful business that I started, but I'm always working on several other projects (some revenue, some not) at any given time.

Most of my ideas are the kinds of things that are somewhat market-timing-critical, so there will be quarters in which I am "only" working 50 hours a week, but sometimes during a rush to get a product out, I will double that. I don't really count hours - it's one of those things where you're either sleeping, eating, or moving toward a goal. It seems perfectly natural to me, and it certainly doesn't feel like work.
Why does Opera exist? :/
How does Flask compare to Bottle (http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/index.html)? Any advantages/disadvantages?
Thunderbolt Cable, RAID Available through Apple Store |  The Mac Observer
Practical File System Design: with the BeOS File System (by Dominic Giampaolo)
http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/3.1-problems.ht...

I guess it looks like BeautifulSoup finally got a 4.0 alpha release out which supposedly works, but that took several years. The codebase is aged and releases are incredibly slow.

"I no longer enjoy working on Beautiful Soup..."

"Parsing is longer a competitive advantage for Beautiful Soup, and I'd be happier if I could get out of the parser business altogether."
http://www.wdyl.com/#lolcats reveals that there is a patent with the word lolcats in it (http://www.google.com/patents?q=lolcats)

But besides that and "Scour the earth for lolcats", this isn't really doing much for me. Nice try google interns.
A webless social network
Of particular interest are the generic or 'pluggable' class-based views. They work in a very similar manner to the ones that came with Django 1.3.

http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/views/

It's good timing; I was just getting to the stage in my app where I was noticing the need for some view refactoring.