skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh come on. You appealed to elegance and failed to show any. I could just as easily define a circle as the shape which encloses the most area for a given perimeter. If you think this is confusing, consider that it is the same as defining it as the shape which a small water droplet forms on a piece of glass.

The thing is that most of us knew what a circle was before we knew what a radius was. You've probably been encountering circles since before you could speak, and the term was certainly in your vocabulary long before you ever took a course in geometry. Appealing to the definition of a circle as elegant is weird when you consider the intrinsic inelegance of trying to formally define an intuitive concept. It makes more sense to measure it, which could be why Archimedes, Liu Hui, and Brahmagupta all ended up studying the same number.

Euclid's formalization of geometry was a landmark achievement in mathematics and possibly the most important single technique of antiquity. However, it was superseded multiple times before set theory became the foundation of essentially all of modern mathematics. Today, a circle is not an axiom but a construct itself derived from the distance formula and the definition of R^2 (a collection of points all the same distance...).

What got me involved in this argument is the assertion that it would make life easier for students learning mathematics. I, like most HN'ers, regard with serious concern the deterioration of mathematics education in the United States, but, also like most HN'ers, am not apt to solve my problems with snake oil. As a student myself, I regularly got pi/3 confused with pi/6, as the latter was a third of a right angle. Since angles and their respective sines and cosines were always diagrammed in class as portions of a right angle, I slipped up a few times between pi and pi/2.

This doesn't mean anything, though, other than a vagary of the way I used to think at the ripe old age of ten. Students of mathematics quite often have their own individual approaches and understandings of the concepts as presented, and this switch of constants is not really likely to make things any easier. This is why I kept pressuring you (unreasonably I do admit) to demonstrate that some essential proof or argument is simplified by using tau.

It is more annoying, though, when good, practical, tested, and effective solutions to educational problems go ignored in favor of something that geeks find interesting.

http://jumpmath.org/

This is an example of a far more effective use of our collective time than the definition of any fundamental constant, be it pi (perhaps tau/2), e (perhaps 1/d, where d is the decay constant), i (perhaps -i), gamma (perhaps log(gamma-prime), since e^gamma appears as often as gamma), etc...
Group texting is a Telco game
This is one of the more useful things I've ever seen on HN.
TD Bank. Hands down the best bank.

I set up my business account on a Sunday!
Check out video monkey to get it into a MP4 container. Then QuickTime/iMovie will work with it.

You'll loose some quality though from the encode to MP4.

Your best bet is to search for something that will get that MKV file into apple intermediate codec, or ProRes.

Check the Mac App Store for apps that will convert MKVs without transcoding them.
Signing an Adobe AIR application with a startssl.com certificate
Someone needs to set up a site that tracks all these breakthroughs to see what comes of them. Seem to read one a week for everything from voltaic panels to IC engines but they never seem to convert...
So does the book "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" ( http://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-Violate/dp... ).

It essentially claims that a brand should not try to be all things to all people. Different brands, however, can. For a good discussion, see: http://www.codemyownroad.com/circumventing-the-law-of-line-e...

Edit: I see the book is written by the same author. Probably no coincidence.
Not surprising. Mark is interesting, and he's in the spotlight. Eric is boring, not that he isn't a great CEO, but the fact that Mark is on Google+ is far more interesting than anything else, and people want to see what he is doing on his profile.
> But where some say "they're identical to Google,"
> I personally see a very large, obvious distinction.

If Google's 'Product Search' links you to a website where you identity is stolen, is Google liable? Should the government 'crack down' on Google?
The Monad Reader - Issue 18
Anxiety can ruin your creativity (Creativity for the Cautious)
I'm not sure about his prediction, but intellectual property does highlight more than most other issues the split between the individual-rights/libertarian version of capitalism, and corporate/pro-business version of capitalism. Intellectual property requires a particularly high level of intrusive government policing; for example, it can be illegal to copy a book by typing it on a typewriter in your own house, where you own the land, house, typewriter, and paper. It's definitely illegal to screen someone else's film for payment, even if the entire transaction happens in your living room (you project the film, in your house, using your own projector, to people who pay you in cash inside your house).

This sits very poorly with the government-out-of-my-house-and-off-my-land version of libertarianism, since it inherently requires agreeing that it's the rightful role of government to police what you do in your own living room. It feels more like social engineering than anything libertarian: the government has decided that, in order to promote the good of society (encourage artistic production, technical innovation, etc.), it must police what you do on your land.
Brightcove joins move to Boston waterfront
I'm pretty sure that for the single-word case you describe you can get around that by using plus, e.g.

+groupon +chicago

Unfortunately my example with special characters doesn't seem to work with that trick.
Triagulation in Javascript
Storm will be rewritten in scala
Sharing items without losing ownership
I fully acknowledge that there are domains where C is the best/only tool for the job. I was specifically taking issue with the claim that C is lucid, and neither scary nor evil.
And you took time to write that in the hopes of educating me about your attitude. Thanks. I appreciate that.

And in case you're unsure, that is not sarcasm. I genuinely do appreciate the time you spent ensuring that I understood your opinion. I think you're wrong, and I think you've misunderstood my points and my purpose. It is of value to me to see how you've misunderstood.

But I have better things to do than try to fix that misunderstanding.
Much like "perfect objectivity", "no ego" is an impossible goal unless your company has no humans working for it. It's really bad to set impossible goals (or to phrase them in such a way) because you'll immediately start going back on your word, making compromises, and inventing justifications. And then that becomes your company culture.
In my opinion, the entry-level pricing plan is too expensive. $10 for just one site? I guess it depends on how much functionality you provide. Also, once someone has a potential customer list, will you make it easy to integrate with services like Mailchimp?

But on a higher level, has anyone shown that lean-startup launch pages like this and Launchrock actually work? To me, the whole practice seems a little anti-consumer - saying you're going to launch something before actually putting any real effort into launching it. If one person does it, yeah it's clever, but if everyone does it, we're going to have this environment where people won't know if they can trust sign-up pages because half of the time they'll be for non-existent products.

And can putting up a launch page without a product to back it up really produce a significant volume of data? Getting people interested enough to sign up with a product seems like a difficult enough task.

To me, if you have an idea, you should have more conviction to put at least some effort into it. If you're just indifferent and throwing ideas out there to see what sticks, are you really going to be passionate about the idea that gets interest?
Wrong on both (but not far off) :P a) It's a "restricted subset of PHP" it doesn't compile the entire language, b) it compiles to C++.
Letters of Note: PERSIST
Google will no longer allow private Google profiles after July 31st
I know absolutely nothing about marketing so I may be wrong, but the problem I immediately see with this is that one can only make so much money selling aspirin or soap. I assume that at a certain point these brands realized that the brand name was more valuable in terms of the credibility and instant recognizability it could lend a larger array of products than its value attached to a single one, even if the name is affected negatively in the context of that single product.
Every bad VC behavior I've seen to date has been from third or lower tier VCs (either horrible zombie funds, or funds which are only coinvestors on deals). (Luckily, I only took those meetings out of social obligation, not because I was raising money at the time)

Top tier VCs and angels, at least from my experience so far, have been incredibly professional and valuable.

If you don't have access to inside information on the VCs, I'd suggest trying thefunded.com. One of the advantages of bringing in a top-tier angel (SV Angel, a domain expert in your field, YC, etc.) is that they will help you identify good investors for later rounds.
Remarkable. Congratulations, clojure folk, for a fairly mainstream Lisp coup.

[Edit: Also, props to the Heroku folk for doing something a bit off the beaten path. I'm sure clojure is lovely, but it wasn't the "obvious" next thing to work on.]
>Technological competence is a prerequisite for exercising sound judgment in the best interests of this particular constituent.

Then vote accordingly. Other people have different priorities. More importantly, this misses my point about legislators relying on expert staffers to inform their decisions. The staffers bring the subject knowledge, the legislators bring judgement and knowledge of their constituencies.

>why can't we elect separate representatives for separate tasks?

Where do you draw the lines? One man's technology issue is another man's economic issue, is another man's foreign policy issue.

>Technology policy seems to take a back seat to big copyright since the vast majority of people don't realize how widespread the effects of bad tech policy can be.

I could easily replace "technology" and "copyright" with several other pairs of nouns and the sentence would remain just as true. In many cases, you and I would be among the ignorant majority. Having dedicated-subject legislators would not make things any better because those dedicated-subject legislators would still be elected by that same "vast majority of people [who] don't realize how widespread the effects of bad...policy can be." There is no guarantee that subject-specific legislators would be the true experts in their fields, or even that they would be loyal to the best interests of the public. Powerful special interests will still spend wheelbarrows full of money to convince otherwise ignorant people to vote in a certain way, and breaking up legislative responsibilities by subject won't change that.

Probably the best way to get better tech policy is to support public-awareness efforts in regards to important technology issues. If you can get enough people to see things your way, legislators will start to be affected.
I don't think so, in my experience working on dynamic languages there's no need to kill bytecode, it's a useful intermediary form, as you still need either a stage-one compiler or an interpreter anyway, and interpreters are (to a first approximation) easier to write.
SONY ERICSSON YENDO LATEST TOUCHSCREEN PHONE FEATURES AND PRICE
First the Russians buy into Facebook and now the Chinese too? All kidding aside, why would Facebook even want this to happen. It's not like they don't have enough investors out there waiting to throw money at them, who won't have potential conflicts of interest (censorship, surveillance) don't the road.

And did the author actually mention MySpace as a potential destination for defecting FB users, without mentioning Google Plus?
It’s shocking that this document refers to "classes". JavaScript doesn’t even have classes.
Transfer from Wordpress to Posterous whilst retaining your links
BlackKatSec Hackers Claim Al-Qaeda Network Attack
Oh? I kind of see it as the US gov have already been throwing their weight around, and the spare tire is hitting us all. Didn't Darpa recently not want to completely give up power over the internet, allowing something like this to happen?
YouTube certainly has a stronger brand but when blogger is referenced I only see it either referring to a person who blogs or Blogger and the two are pretty easy to differentiate. E.g. "a blogger", "the blogger" refer to a person blogging vs "on blogger", "with blogger" that refer to blogger.com.
I appreciate your candid response.

I'm interested in the logic applied by VCs - "employees == sustainable business, contractors == not a 'real' team".

I don't get that - an employee is just as free to leave and do something else as a contractor is? In some cases, it might even be easier for an employee (contract terms and whatnot). What exactly is the benefit?

Anecdotes != Data, but some of the best start up employees I know started off as contractors initially.
That was a great paper BTW.
They had one of these parked at the Google I/O after-party this year.

From looking at it -- specifically, that big wing where you'd normally expect a bumper on a car -- it made me wonder what would happen to the aerodynamic profile of the car if it got the sort of usual dents and dings a car gets.

I know my car accumulated a few of them before I even made the first payment. Would something like that have the potential of rendering it unairworthy?
NTPd does. However, in order the eliminate it, it assumes the RTT is symmetric, that is half is on the journey to the remote, half on the journey back. Asymmetric links do lead to systemic error in NTP.

(It assumes symmetry because there isn't any way to measure the asymmetry without first having time sync, and obvious catch-22. If you need better than 10ms accuracy, you'll need a GPS, etc.)
Ok, I'll bite. The cards I received were not particularly high quality (comparable to an inkjet-printed card), and I was enrolled in a recurring monthly membership program without my consent. I also spent months trying to get removed from their email list. This was probably 6 or 7 years ago, so it's possible they've cleaned up their act. Still, I'd never recommend them to anyone.
Colorforth is a Forth written by Chuck Moore, the guy who created Forth in the 70s. In this quote from Colorforth site (http://colorforth.com/cf.htm) , read word as function.

>In Forth, a new word is defined by a preceeding colon, words inside a definition are compiled, outside are executed. In colorForth a new word is red, green words are compiled, yellow executed. This use of color further reduces the syntax, or punctuation, needed. It also makes explicit how the computer will interpret each word.
Yeah, I think I've read about a dozen of his books. But there's also such thing as "halo effect" (I think there's a book on this, too). Take the "i" letter for all Apple products now. It works the same way.

The halo effect makes it so all the children products benefit from the main product's influence, but it can also work the other way around, so they have to be very careful not to brand a crappy product like that, because then it will end up affecting all the others in a negative way.

It's also very important that they keep re-inventing themselves at least every 10 years (like Google is doing now). Because otherwise they risk becoming "the product my dad used", or uncool like that. Who thinks Yahoo is still cool now? 13-14 years ago they were "the Internet".
I think this is a problem that exists across any VM that implements a GC, not just Ruby.

.NET CLR has the exact same problem (perhaps a harder one, since CLR has a moving GC), so anytime they touch GC references (pointers to objects that are collectible) it's always wrapped in an explicit GC stack frame (think GC struct that lives on the stack). Furthermore, all reads/writes are carefully done with macros (which of course expands to volatile + some other stuff) to make sure the compiler doesn't optimize it away.

On the one hand, this is nice because they don't need to scan the C-stack (it scans the VM stack and the fake GC frame stacks -- well it's one stack but you skip the native C frames), on the other hand this means that any time a GC object is used in C code (ok, actually it's C++) they have to be real careful to guard it.

Of course bugs crop up all the time where an object gets collected where it shouldn't have, it happens so often that there is a name for it -- "GC Hole".

Astute readers and users of p/invoke may remark that they don't have to set up any "GC frames" -- that is because this complicated scheme is not exposed outside of the CLR source. Regular users of .NET who want to marshal pointers between native/managed can simply request that a GC reference gets pinned, at which point I'm mostly sure it won't get collected until it's unpinned.

The bad news is I'm almost positive there is nothing you can do with just C here to make this problem go away. You'd want stuff to magically just happen under the hood, and C++ is the right way to go for that.

It's probably possible to create an RAII style C++ GC smart pointer that would be 99% foolproof at the expense of some performance. It gets a little bit trickier if we are doing a moving collector. I am thinking it could ref/unref at creation/destruction, and disallow any direct raw pointer usage not to shoot yourself in the foot.

Of course the people writing the GC still need to worry about this..
>And it's super awesome with tau: one tau is full circle, and one period.

Well, if you've already made the jump to understanding negative heights as going below the real line. This is a topic for an introductory course in geometry? When I learned about sine and cosine, it was first defined in terms of SOHCAHTOA!
But that is by definition a tractable problem because the source will show that the root set isn't being used properly. (additionally, in practice this proves to be a rare and easy to fix bug)
Where is the comparison to the employment ratio of the entire workforce? Without this it is difficult to look at subsets (like 16-19 yrs old, 55+) and draw much of a conclusion. I would guess that population/macro effects probably tell a lot of the story.
In the wrong hands one company controlling too much can certainly cause problems with a lack of innovation. Given all of the things Google has been involved with I don't see that happening any time soon though. That is one other reason I like and trust Google most of all the big companies that show up here; they keep pushing the envelope. Only time will tell the impact that might have on smaller companies

I definitely see Google as a business and know that circumstances can change with a change in management or operating environment; there is no way around that though. In my opinion we can either fight big companies and hope to have the government or other large companies keep them in check or we can try to help shape the environment and support companies that further our best interests.
Pretty much every? No http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_with_nuclear_weapons

Nuclear radiation is very different to weapons, your local major hospital has a dozen different uses for radiation (more powerful than cleaning water).
> That doesn't help: the objects in the DOM are already allocated on the heap. You just want to hold on to them and then drop those references at some point.

The idea is to have more than one heap, with different behaviour. Objects in one heap have a "can disappear at any time, but we can detect that" behaviour.

An 'object deep copy' is all it takes to move an object from one heap to another. Or if you prefer, you can allocate all such objects in the discardable heap but temporarily 'pin' an object by changing the madvise on it's pages (this involves more page-level complexity of how stuff is laid out and how pages are shared between objects).

I'm not saying this is a 2 hour project, but it's the sort of thing which could be captured in a library without too much complexity.

> Writing a pointer to a heap object to disk, even via mmaped memory areas, isn't going to really work well.

You'd be surprised. I've done exactly this [1]. As long as your mmap'd addresses are stable, it's fine. Also note that in the case we're talking about,the pages never go to disk. They're in anonymous-backed mmap'd memory, which the kernel has been told to throw away instead of writing to disk (swap in this case, since this is an anon map).

[1] well, pretty close. I made a single-proc app multi-proc by making it's key data structures allocate out of a pool controlled by a custom malloc, backed by a mmap()'d disk file. Other processes then attached to that file via mmap() at the same address and lo and behold, all the pointers to the nested data structures were good. (One proc had read/write access to this pool, the others were all readonly. Some additional locking was required. Your mileage may vary.)

You're right in that things won't work if something else has a ptr to these pages. But as long as all references to such pages go via a single "get_page_from_cache()" it's fine.
Considering that your comment lacks comprehension, I think my point towards 'Blogger' being too generic a term is even more valid.

"Bob is a blogger on 'blogger' who blogs about blogging."

"Bob is a blogger on 'Google Blogs' who blogs about blogging."
RunLoop and SproutCore
The authors recognize that. The problem is that line extended products don't connect to the things you have associated yourself with in the customer's mind. If Dial makes body wash...line extension is probably acceptable. If Dial makes toothpaste, deodorant, or snack food the connection of Dial <=> soap isn't there as strongly.

They make the point that in long run you're diluting your brand. You can only occupy one particular place in someone's mind with a single brand. Owning that position is valuable. Owning 'they do everything' is not really a winner. That feels like 'they do nothing well.'
It may be one of those plastics that grow opaque as they age. It may not be strong enough. It may have worse glare problems. It may not resist chips and scratches as well.

Or it may simply not have been fully tested for the job.
does this mean that you would not be able to make gmail accounts without them being linked to your identity?

How far does this go, and what would be the visible effect on account management with google products?
I wasn't exactly sure if to answer [GNU/]Linux Laptop or Desktop. I spend most the most physical time on the laptop, but more CPU time is spent on a desktop/server via ssh. (I voted laptop)

FWIW, the laptop is running Parabola (a derivative of Arch), and the desktop is running a modified Ubuntu (It was once Ubuntu 9.04, but I've kept it up to date via source, since 9.04 stopped receiving updates).
Do profiles get made automatically when you use <anything> or is this something manual you have to do?
There's a bunch of lessons inherent in min-wage jobs, "You get stuff done by doing it", "Not showing up to work means you're fired", etc, that apply to all jobs.
Well, consider how the idiom works. It is asking us to consider a representative sample of four teens, and makes a statement about one of them. That's different than if you said "only 25% of teens are employed".
It looks like (for now at least) Google Apps users are exempt, I get the "This service is not available" message.