skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pi is not globally reserved. It is commonly used in, for example, statistics to refer to multinomial probabilities, and wikipedia tells me it's also the name of the prime-counting function and parallax.

I should note that this was annoying to me when dealing with IRT, in which some models have 2pi in the normalizing constants. Not to say tau isn't used in statistics already as well.

There just aren't enough greek letters. I have wondered about what the symbol for tau should be, and I keep thinking of a circle including a radius line that extends slightly outside the circle, but tau is much easier to write, especially when using ascii.
HTML5Pattern - regularly used Inputs-Patterns regex
Data Portability Wars : Google and Facebook vs. YOU
Haha, as much as it should, this is not going to happen. The USA does what it wants and everyone else acquiesces or faces repercussions. ICANN may be "international", but remember where it's based.
It ~is~ an ExecutorService, but it's funky because the Thread(s) that this system needs are special subclasses of Thread... Which in turn means you need a special ThreadFactory and such.

Which of course points out more ugliness in Java; if there was a better generics implementation we could have the type system enforcing the correct choice of a ThreadFactory.
Yeah that's the issue in Canada which has Netflix but the selection is so attrocious it's not even funny. All this because for Netflix it's a pain in the ass to have to negotiate for the same content in all the jurisdictions and that media conglomerates don't trust canadians due to our perceived soft copyright laws. Give me a brake.

I saw a report the other day on lower CD sales for local Quebec music. The whole time they were calling for the end of the world, then at the end of the show they mention that online sales are up. Nothing explaining why CDs are better for artist than online sales through iTunes and others. Nothing that says if the majority of loss sales are now digital purchases or if the total amount of buying is down. Instead it's the same bullshit stuff. CDs are down and we are making less money from CD sales. We need taxes on MP3 players that go (I don't get how exactly) to the artists etc...

Sorry that was unrelated as a rant but this is just how annoyed I am with the situation.
Why did Facebook import e-mails over years and still hold them in their databases? There is no way to remove them and when someone with this address enters Facebook he gets recommendations for Friends.

Do they own this data?

Think about this before you blame people who just try to find a way to reconnect with their friends (who are ok with being your friend on FB) on another Platform.
> Second, usability isn't a science.

You seem to be using a different definition of "usability" to most of us throughout this discussion. To people like Nielsen (who certainly popularised and arguably originated the term) usability is like a science: it is about measuring how people behave in practice and improving your product in light of that hard data. Once may draw inferences from that data, if patterns start to emerge where some practices are on balance superior to others, but just as in science, such inferences are falsifiable and only as good as the latest data set.

It is more than a little ironic that useit.com itself has become less usable over time, according to many of the very factors that Nielsen himself has commented on in the past...
نتائج الثانوية العامة 2011
Clairvoyant science and the Deep Blue God
During the closing ceremony, Dr. Jaime Taylor, dean of the College of Science and Mathematics and professor of physics, explained briefly that a growing field in computational science is what he called "clairvoyant science."
betterplace.org is looking for freelance (and full-time) Ruby an PHP hackers. Please check: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730631
Kelahiran Kimia Fisik
Toyota Joins Linux Foundation | The Linux Foundation
Not to mention for example "boston ma" vs. "boston ma." or "new york new york" vs. "new york ny".

On the other hand, the size of area to aggregate probably depends on how close you live to that area.
Richard Dawkins and male privilege
To be fair, what you're highlighting is that useit.com caters better for regular visitors than for newcomers who aren't familiar with its terminology, which is a genuine usability problem. Your visitors spend most of their time on other people's sites, remember? :-)
.com is not a broken system, and .co.us is not as easy to type. Other than to strictly conform, I don't see any point in it.
one minor comment is that you dont allow tabbing without actually putting a space after the command. In a terminal if I type "bin" and the hit tab it adds the space automatically so I end up with "bin " and I can partial type or tab again etc.....
Kate Moss Hot & Sexy Wallpapers, Hot Kate Moss Pictures & Photos Gallery
I think you meant effect.
Regarding Motorcycle Shipping
Motorcycle shipping is in contrast different from shipping of automobiles. Some auto transport or freight companies require different crates to be made to transport motorcycles and require the fuel tank of the motorcycle to be removed and the batteries to be taken out prior to shipment.
7 billion people having an unlimited number of offspring might put a bit of a strain on our natural resources. Or if you're going to halt all reproduction then you've just ended human evolution.

Those seem like good starting points for a discussion on the ramifications of immortality.

That said, I'm more of a shoot first, aim later kind of guy so I say go for it...
Don't be fooled by the current hate towards wall street (not that they don't deserve it). As far as I can tell this legislation would actually be a good thing.

Just read the part of the bill in question at http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h1249/show. I didn't see anything specific to the financial industry in there. Even assuming some nefarious special interest bankrolled the provision (section 18), it still sounds sensible to me. I think it just makes it easier to challenge "business method" patents. As far as I'm concerned the whole notion of a business method patent is utterly idiotic and counterproductive, economically speaking. So making it easier to challenge business method patents sounds sensible to me.

Seems that this news is being spun against wall street by a concerted lobbying effort: "Not surprisingly, the ever-aggressive plaintiff's bar is bankrolling a major lobbying effort to strip Section 18 from the Senate-passed reform bill when it comes up for a vote on the House floor."
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/judicial/168087-stopp...

Reuters has a shorter piece in favor of the provision. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/07/05/bringing-se...
Flightcaster is even earlier. FC might have been the first.
Oh you're right - I totally forgot about Flightcaster's acquisition!
The best intro book to C++ is K&R, eh? =)
>Yeah that's the issue in Canada which has Netflix but the selection is so attrocious it's not even funny. All this because for Netflix it's a pain in the ass to have to negotiate for the same content in all the jurisdictions and that media conglomerates don't trust canadians due to our perceived soft copyright laws.

Consider that Rogers and Bell don't want to make it easy for anyone to steal their market share. I don't have cable, but I'd pay for Hulu, if it were available here. Look at the recent Internet Metering attempt by Rogers and Bell to stifle innovation in the way Canadians get TV and Movies.
See this is why I don't agree with the arguments as used. They're the arguments of a firebrand or a demagogue---not a logician.

I find that statement ironic, given the fact that your own argument has a glaring logical fallacy in it:

1. The situation is called misogynist---aka evil.

2. The situation is called childish.

So misogynistic is childish now? Or is it the reverse: are children misogynistic then grow out of it?

1. My computer is a laptop.

2. My computer has 4 USB ports.

So all laptops have 4 USB ports? Or is it the reverse: are all computers with 4 USB ports called laptops?

I hope this serves to illustrate the point that "P and Q" is not the same as "P implies Q" nor "Q implies P".
I like it a lot. Sometimes hackers get a bad rep for their obnoxious egos. I will say though, a lot of my inspiration to improve my programming and to get better with emacs comes from programmers with huge egos.
Yes, but that (specific) example is a great example of a waste of space in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases.
Let me show you examples of code that hides that whole iterator groadyness:

Python

for foo in Foos:
baz(foo)

Common Lisp:

(loop for foo in Foos
do
(baz foo))

Perl:

foreach my $foo (@Foos)
{
baz(foo);
}

C++ has a foreach construct as well, but it's a bit shoehorned. I'm relatively certain C# has some shorthand here for the same thing, and IIRC, it flows nicely.

There is no "Most likely", no "exception", it's very straightforward.

Rarely - very rarely - I care about the mechanisms of initialization, nexting, and termination. The rest of the time, (loop for var in list do) gets me by just fine.

* Macros change your program logically (as in not just perf improvements) prior to compilation. Not-macros do not. That's a big difference.*

It's no different than hunting through framework documentation.
If you had experience in a functional programming language, you'd have recognized this as a fold and written the foldMyStructure function. If your Visitor pattern solution is similar to the example code in https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Visitor_patte... then it is certainly longer than the natural solution in functional programming.
I had a flatmate once who used dodgy online streaming websites. They were riddled with pop ups and advertising but no ads in the actual video. The quality of the movie also varied in source from "Cams" to "dvdrips".
Google+ for Google Apps domains is in the works
man i would love one, address in about.
These appear to be dead-tree books.
It would be nice to have such a list with freely downloadable books. Any pointers?
The secret art of the tutorial
What authority is determining the "best" book for a topic?

What's your plan for adding entries for topics? I was expecting a "suggest a book" link, but that sort of assumes that "best" = "most popular" which may not be your criteria.
How were the candidates determined? I can imagine topics like Rails and Python being fairly contentious.

It also needs a Django recommendation. Do you receive a notice, when the queries return no results?
How to Create Team Cohesion
You really think it's a good idea for him to do a 99designs-style Rails prototyping service? "Working version of screenshot for under $3000"?
Looks great, but you might want to implement literal search strings. A search for C# or C++ both return K&R
I just downloaded it, because I didn't know the answer. It's better than that, actually -- you get full vCard collections of all your contact groups, with a fully populated vCard for each contact.
Apple is killing the WWW?  Hahahaha
A working Rails version of a screenshot is maybe worth more than $1000?
Xbox Live Indie Games: no way to make a living
When you're doing a startup, chances are that a huge part of your team will be 20-somethings who love the Berlin dirt and parties.
The area of the traditional unit circle is π, which has strong ties to the definition of every trigonometric function, and the reason that radians of common fractions of the unit circle are expressed in terms of π is related to the integrals used to derive arc length.

Just as an exercise, try setting the area of the unit circle to 2π, and then see how meaningful your radian measurements are. How many radians are in a quarter arc of the circle with area 2π? :3
I'll soon be in the market for similar services (i.e. a consultant to build a web app I've mocked up), but having been on the other side of the fence, all I can say is woe to you if you ignore what Patrick/patio11 says :)

However, what I think there is a bit of a market for is web-app-as-a-commodity -- well, not actually the web app itself, but the billing, membership, marketing site integration stuff that's all _generally_ (and I stress _generally_) pretty common. Or, at least, developers who market themselves that way -- "I'll take care of all the x, y and z, and focus on making your app idea as good as it can be (and here's how many times I've done it before)". Boom, great, take my money, get it done.

The actual web app part though is an absolute wild card, and that's where you should be aiming to make the $$$ -- provide everything around it as a done deal, and focus on getting the MVP/app idea right (which is 90% communication & email with the client, and 10% actual coding).

Remember, people want their hand held. There's a million different things to worry about. Thinking is hard. It's time consuming. Make it as easy as possible, hold their hand, allocate way more time than you think is reasonable (and you'll still get burned), and charge a fair rate for it. After all, that's what you're doing - it's still time-for-cash, it's just a question of how you market those services.

Finally, don't forget:

> The napkin crowd believe they have specs. They do not have specs; they have napkins.

Good luck! ;)
I think this would be very useful to people who are new to a particular subject and do not have other means of guidance.
One way of building the database would be to request users for inputs if there is no data for the topic user is searching for.
I think tomelders is talking about the legality of the plug-in, which collects personal data and provides it to another party. (Edit: Actually, on rereading, maybe he really was talking about a right of access to the Facebook data. The following stands either way.)

I'm not a lawyer, but I do spend a significant amount of time working with data protection and privacy issues in the UK. With my current understanding, I don't see how that could even possibly be permitted under the data protection and privacy laws here without the consent of those whose data you're transferring to Google+.

I suspect Google could get into trouble with the ICO (what, again?) if they are behind the plug-in, but if I were them, I'd be more worried about the European level privacy hawks. Here in the UK we're relatively forgiving, but Europe can and does slap down megacorps with significant penalties from time to time.
You're more likely to survive a plane crash than click a banner ad
I've heard $1-3M per engineer is common math at BigCo (from the horse's mouth).

In this case, the BackType engineers are pretty damn epic, so I'd wager it's towards middle/high side of the range.
Yes. I'm logging the searches and will add books for the missed topics. It started off with 250 or so, which was a fair amount to hunt down, but it looks like I have even more work to do.
sorry revorad. you can just send it to my username @gmail.com

thanks!
Hey, look at this asshole, what a jerk
LulzSec Gets Unmasked by the A-Team and Web Ninjas?
Part of the problem is that the fundamental idea behind REST has more depth to it than most developers care to understand, so the parts that most designers, developers and consumers of "REST" APIs think they are in love with is a rather superficial part of it.

This makes things really confusing when people talk about REST because you can't really know what they mean by it.
This does expose the bigotry of Facebook so much.

On the other hand the valuation is merely based on the fact that they are the "one and only social network". They are dependent on this monopolistic behavior or they are screwed and can forget an IPO.

Zuckerberg himself with this "i just try to connect people for the rest of my life" seems to be under this bias. He is no Steve Jobs who was able under almost any condition to create value.

This social network stuff has the biggest lock-in of all internet services, but he can't prevent people from moving by force.
Unfortunately, I'm at the whim of the hosted search solution I'm using (IndexTank).
It isn't just the domain names system, the whole way IP addresses are handled isn't much better.
Show HN: Look at this thing I built
Samsung Consolidates Lawsuits in Apple Patent Battle
I'm concerned that he would rather have small amounts of cash than a small equity stake in the company.
Perhaps they could get access to information about people outside of China.
San Francisco, CA
www.focus.com is hiring another senior Django developer. What you should be: smart, use Python, Javascript (jQuery) and CSS (Blueprint/sass) or some combination of these things. Must be willing to work on-site in San Francisco. Our offices are about a block from BART's Embarcadero stop.
Contact info is in my profile.
I would also suggest that a set time frame of 3 days will not fit every project and could be a cause for pain when you can not deliver said project on time. You might want to have some sort of range of times/prices depending on how hard/big the scope of the project will be.
Troll much? Knowledge, not age, is relevant. A 30-year-old senator who knows little or nothing about the internet (yes, it is possible for one to use email and other basic services without concerning himself/herself with political, legal, and technological issues regarding the internet), is arguably more of a threat than a 70-year-old uninformed senator because he or she appears to be more tech-savvy by youth alone.
How Apple became a monopsonist
I said "I like it but don't prefer it to Facebook", but that needs some explanation.

At the moment, Facebook still has the edge because it has all my friends on it. I also am less than 24 hours with +, so I haven't gotten to fully explore. But when more people join and I figure out all its quirks, I believe I will prefer it to Facebook (as I haven't particularly liked Facebook for quite some time now).
They are trying every vector of influence. Maybe they're trying to work up to a board seat. That would give them strategic and operational insights that would help them monitor and censor. And, position them to co-opt any China entry under a "partnership".

Also: Many Chinese are accustomed to considerable collusion and shady dealings among partners. Simply publicizing a stake could make many Chinese leery of FB, and less likely to use it politically.
Is Alertbox really such a cryptic term? I doubt that very much.
Some of those topics are definitely in the site, but the search is only doing exact match right now. I'm in the process of getting stemming and some fuzzy matching turned on, so hopefully bikes will give you hits for bicycle in the near future.
The proof of the pudding will be when the real world arrives on G+. At the moment I'm interacting with my usual gang of geeks, and political and media moguls that I mainly interact with on twitter. When, perhaps if, the facebook crowd arrive, then things will get interesting.

I'm really looking forward to when this happens.
"The No Asshole Rule" is a pretty good book on this subject and philosophy.
It's a dual-class stock structure, "an influential stake" is purely theoretical.
I have had that thought, but find it incredibly hard to entertain. Do you genuinely believe it, or is it just something that explains why others' opinions might differ?
I care more about 'web professionals' than 'real people' switching. This article made it likely I'll switch to the now-available early Firefox 6 versions, just to do the manual about:memory 'minimize memory usage' trick, even before Firefox 7 arrives in any form. Giant footprint and mysterious GC pauses in Firefox have been driving me to use Chrome more and more; this might reverse that trend.

Personally, this is big enough news I'm happy to see it (even in a couple different forms) on HN.
Five 'Thinking Traps' Entrepreneurs Should Avoid
if they even remotely try it, I bet each country will have their own dns server and broken internet. this clearly show that How gradually, USOFA do not have any intention to keep internet open. so it would be wise to move away from them while we can. ( only sometimes, once in a while, why it seems that china is better ? )
inline-block doesn't work too well on <= ie7, <= ff2, which is really annoying because it's the best way to do that layout.
And just 34 days ago AdGrok was joining the flock: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2603541

Guess YC/Twitter relationship was only at the very beginning when Avi Bryant helped pg adopt @paulg: http://twitter.com/#!/avibryant/status/22303889283
Eh, it's an ugliness in this particular program IMO. You should not be subclassing Thread, pretty much ever, and every competent Java programmer will tell you so.

That's like me writing Perl or Python code that uses globals for everything and then complaining that they're unmaintainable languages.

Out of curiosity, which system are we talking about here? Jboss or something? Java protip, avoid any library involving the letters "EE".
I don't sorry. I just know our mail gets inboxed and we use sendgrid.
Hackers Select a New Target: Other Hackers
Stanford athletes sleep for better performance
When I think of macros, I'm generally thinking about getting a syntax tree at runtime and doing transformations on it.

The closest thing related to this in a mainstream language is LINQ in .NET. When passing a lambda expression, you can either get a method reference that you can execute, or you can get a syntax tree of that expression.

It is effectively used in Linq to Sql to query databases using the same syntax you would use for querying in-memory collections of objects. You can also teach it to do pretty sweat things, like doing data transformations using the GPU. Check out this project for instance: http://brahma.ananthonline.net/

Also, macros are not necessarily executed at compile-time as in C/C++ - in Lisp a macro has no boundaries to when or how it gets executed. A macro is just a piece of code that can call normal functions and that returns a piece of code that will then get executed.

One common use-case is for achieving lazy evaluation in a language that isn't lazy and so most macros are trivial to understand. But you can have other use-cases, like in the above example with Linq, where the piece of code getting generated depends on runtime conditions.

I do agree that macros can make code harder to understand, but then again, I've seen horribly over-engineered, poorly implemented and unreadable pieces of Java code and so I think it all comes down to having a culture for code readability than about having a language that forces you to do things in a certain way.
Though most entrepreneurs would have trouble faulting Phin's (I think that is the authors name) feelings, I think it is up to the presenter to get the listener (investor) interested.

Though we are looking for partners, we are selling our product. We are selling ourselves. They are paying for a slice of the returns of what we are creating and to be involved in an amazing business.

Should a VC be on time? Of course, everybody should, but that isn't reality. Should they give you 100% of their attention, sure, but the onus is on us to give them a show and sell the idea.

I've had 3 investor meetings regarding two different businesses, and have never had the issue of the (2 VCs one angel) being distracted or feigning interest. I didn't raise funds either, so it wasn't that the businesses were completely infallible, but I suspect it was presented in a way that I suspect was intriguing enough that I had their full attention.
Stimulant use in start-ups
Just wondering, any startups here that actively use substances other than caffeine to boost productivity?

From time to time the ritalin/adderall threads appear here on HN, but afaik not a single one has talked about using these substances in a team.

Highly motivated people cramped together on small room can already be killer-productive; highly motivated people on speed must be kind of scary.

Throwaway accounts highly encouraged in case of illegal substance (ab-)use ;-)

Disclaimer: Stimulant abuse is bad. Don't do it.