skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I won't belabor the point any further than this, but the argument really is that it would provide enormous benefit. It's not just a "what would happen?", and it's not that τ "extracts" meaning from equations. It makes the intrinsic meanings of equations drastically more clear. For instance, what does sin(x) mean? What does Euler's equation mean? They're both eminently simple concepts, but they remain obscured by π.

It's exactly like refactoring code: sure, it does the same thing, but now it's more compact, more concise, more clear, more elegant; the parts of the system all fit together better, and people coming onto the project will be able to learn it faster. If you don't care about those things, then you won't refactor your code, or see the point of τ.
False dichotomy. You can't "pay $20/mo to stream as many as you want". The available selection from services like Netflix and Hulu is extremely limited.

Many in the "15-25 set" pay about $20/mo to download through an offshore VPS, private trackers and servers. This money would go to the content holders if they didn't cripple their "precious content" with bundling packages, intrusive advertisements, DRM and region restrictions.
Data journalism, data tools, and the newsroom stack
That's a good point, @HockeyPlayer and @Travis. Hrmm
I have a Google+ account but I've never used Facebook, so I can't compare. I like Google+, I can see the potential.
It's sort of like Twitter was back in the day: a good place for techies and techie friends to nerd out away from the noise.

I think it will probably take off, just based on the fact that I'm actually still using it (unlike Buzz or Wave).
Why I Am Ashamed Of My Early VC Years
Doubtful. They're probably not even going to be stored in the same datacenters.
There is a reason why I would generally assume that any developer that assumes that any serious project generally uses Spring is generally mediocre to bad. Generally.

Java may be a bit limp. But there's no reason to hit it over the head with a bent crutch as heavy as Spring. That doesn't make it better.

Generally.
Would be a bit more useful without the NSFW screenshots
Open Robotics
I would like to convince you of two things. The first is that robotics will follow computers and the Internet as the next transformative technology.1 The second is that, for the first time in recent memory, the United States runs the risk of being left behind. I explain why we lawyers are to blame, and offer a modest, non-Shakespearean solution.
Perhaps they mean it as written---no self-importance.
Call To Indie Artists: Stop Giving Away Your Music For Free
I think you read that `add' as an `and'.

It's "after using `git add', before they get committed", which is correct, the `git add' command adds a file to the index.
Mostly, my complaints about Android revolve around issues outside the devices and OS. The market is dreadful, but day-to-day life with the phone is nicer (better notifications, widgets, additional useful functionality, etc.)

iOS5 should close the gap on a lot of this, and it's certainly a more usable OS in a lot of ways. I'm probably committed at this point, but it'll be interesting to see one way or the other.
And Plato regretted the invention of writing because it atrophies our memory. Same thing, different millennium.
More Views On Youtube What You’ll Need To Learn
I ask this completely seriously. What would it take to declare the domain of the internet as its own sovereign entity? The internet to me has become greater than just a communications network. It is a place where people connect/work/play. DNS is a natural resource, and should be regulated by all that is affected by it.
Great job getting it up and running. However i have a few suggestions:

1. The color theme needs to come alive. The colors are all screaming at me.

2. Dont just say internal error. Tell us what is going on
3. notfound.htm page is missing

Again i say, great job.
Accessibility of Google+: Will Blind Users Be +1ing?
If Senators (and Representatives) should not make law, then who?

That is, of course, a rhetorical question. The fact is that I don't elect "my Senator on economic policy," and "my Senator on foreign policy," "my Senator on technology policy," etc. I elect "my Senator," period. Because the law touches on almost everything, there is no way for any given legislator to be an expert on all of the subjects involved, or even on more than a handful. That's why legislators have staff: people they trust, who are experts, who help them to reach informed decisions. Of course, some legislators do a better job of selecting and working with their staff than others, but that's what the ballot box is for.

Senators should not be picked based on their technological competence, nor their competence in any particular area of policy: they should be picked on their ability to exercise sound judgement in the best interests of their constituents.
Having your clients send an application specific MIME type can actually be better for browsers as well. All you need to do is provide a representation of your resource in HTML which browsers will request by using "text/html" in the Accept header.

I've found this a nice addition to documentation and, depending on how well the HTML representation has been done, is great for learning/exploring an API.
Mingleverse has 250,000 subscribers
The first media business that figures out how to sell to this generation will get adoption quickly.

It's too soon to tell, but the model Apple has taken with iTunes Match seems promising. Basically, instead of selling access to the media (which they already do), they're selling a cloud service that's useful even if you already have the media. And they manage to not compete with themselves because the service is free if you buy the media from them. So free that it's not even a service, it's just the way their store works now.

The usage patterns of TV and movies are different than music, but they aren't so different that something like that couldn't work.
Yes, it will still be taught using Python. Almost all of the undergraduate CS courses are moving from Scheme or Java to Python if they haven't already. (One notable exception is the excellent 6.172, about Making Things Fast(tm), which uses C and Cilk.)

The videos will be recorded this fall semester; Erik will be lecturing again, along with the equally awesome Srini Devadas. In the past, when Erik has recorded his own lectures, I recall that they were posted as soon as they were edited. Every time I've worked with OCW, though, one of their staff members comes in and collects materials at the end of the semester.

I'm not sure exactly what the material differences will be; that's the lecturers' call (way above my pay grade!). If you want more than 6.006 offers, though, check out 6.046, which is the follow-on undergraduate algorithms course.

Since we're doing as much of our planning now as possible, I'm curious: what sorts of things do you wish we'd include? Does anyone have suggestions?
25,000 EUR is a fair bit of money, especially considering the avg. YC investment is < $20k, IIRC. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like a GmbH operates almost nothing like an S-corp.
Take boombox.js across the web with Boombox for Chrome
There is nothing wrong with a little swagger, or confidence. However, adopting "no assholes" isn't quite enough: a non-asshole can still let their ego get in the way of their work and their team. For example, by refusing to admit fault.
Given that old people actually vote (after a little more research to corroborate it) I would put money down that the minimum wage will raise soon.

Or spin another way what company could you create that would have minimum wage type jobs that you would trust someone older to do, but not a teenage?

edit: spelling
The importance of programming play
sweet but surprising. This would probably never have happened if the author of Ring didn't work for Heroku.

Anyway, definitely a major milestone for the most elegant language of the last 5 years.
My frustration with files
http://duckduckgo.com/ might help. I know it utilizes the bang syntax.
or god forbid a warning
There's really no reason why browsers couldn't have an option to make tabs which aren't currently active (ie. being viewed) be treated as bookmarks, which take up virtually no memory, since all they are are a URL and a bit of metadata.

This would, of course, slow down browsing when switching from tab to tab, since the entire page would need to be reloaded. But I would gladly give up some speed for memory on my old machine with only 3.7 gigs of RAM.

Before anyone asks why don't I just use bookmarks in the first place, let me say that I prefer the organization that tabs give me for pages I am currently working on. I do move those tabs to bookmarks if I use them long enough. But in the relatively short term I prefer tabs.

Another option that would be a compromise between the solution proposed above and keeping all tabs in memory would be to keep only the N most recently accessed tabs in memory, and treat the rest as bookmarks. That would make switching between those N tabs relatively responsive, but still use a lot less memory than having every page for every tab reside in memory. Especially for people like me, who regularly have over 100 tabs open.

Of course, the value of N should be user-configurable. With a N=1, the second proposed solution would be equivalent to the first.
Dawkins says: "No, I obviously don't get it. I will gladly apologise if somebody will calmly and politely, without using the word fuck in every sentence, explain to me what it is that I am not getting."

Phil Plait, the author of this article, failed to articulate an explanatory response to Dawkins.

I don't get it either and this article isn't helping me understand why Dawkins is wrong.
"The only thing the US government has ever given up is control over the registry and DNS management. Under a MoU[1] that facility was handed over to ICANN ..."

That's just a bureaucratic illusion. As we can see from recent domain seizures, the feds can take over any of these domains, unilaterally, and without any notice or due process.
No, there is no spin needed - this ONLY applies to the financial industry. You didn't read far enough:

(d) Definition-
(1) IN GENERAL- For purposes of this section, the term ‘covered business method patent’ means a patent that claims a method or corresponding apparatus for performing data processing or other operations used in the practice, administration, or management of a financial product or service, except that the term does not include patents for technological inventions.
Sounds like a good time to start selling those .com/.net domains I've got stashed away.
I think I used this extension months ago before it got blocked. Worked pretty well, but I found that it didn't get all the information that I was hoping for. Namely the e-mail address was missing for all of my contacts. Got their bio info. and other stuff though.
Overview of the Internet Advertising Competitive Landscape
StartupBus 2012 kickoff party
http://startupbus2012kickoffparty.eventbrite.com/

Password is "busbubble"

Party is being held at StartupHouse, which was recently uncovered here http://thenextweb.com/video/2011/06/24/could-this-be-the-biggest-startup-hub-in-silicon-valley/

Free booze, free food, DJ and announcement of a nationwide hackathon challenge. 15 tickets being issued to HackerNews readers.
Ask HN: Any pointers?
I want to work on this problem http://www.kaggle.com/c/wikichallenge . I am not an expert at Data Mining and I just have theoretical knowledge so far. Any pointers on what should be my approach ? Anybody wants to join with me to form a team and solve it as a good learning exercise and may be aim for a good rank ?
The first section shows "git diff" as the command but shows output from "git status" below it with the only mention of "git status" in the entire post buried at the very bottom.
The primer says
"The git branch command lets you create a new branch of your project. It creates a new commit with a new pointer label pointing at it."
which is not correct. When a new branch is created it just creates a new pointer to the commit which one branches off from, there is no new commit made automatically.
SVK: A comic about cities, technology and surveillance using invisible ink
It's the integral of tau * r * dr from 0 to 1, which is tau/2.
You can make a million brands of beverage, but everyone will still grab a Coke or a Pepsi from the shelf.

The new gTLD program is just a money land-grab. It's been well known within the domain industry that firing up a new TLD is one of the most profitable things you can do. Between speculators and brand protection agencies you are guaranteed a minimum of 100k+ registrations. Multiply that by $20-$30 bucks a pop.
Thanks guys for your valuable feedback.

I just updated the article and demo:
-Added CSS3 animation support for Mozilla 5+
-Fixed flickering the proper CSS3 animation
-CSS3 gradients syntax updated. Now, Safari also renders background stripes.

Once again thanks for your comments!
Catalin
Cool. I've been looking for a more visual git introduction.
Is ØMQ such a big topic, that so many people would like to really (finally) know, what the theoretical foundation of it is? Tim, what did I miss?
Customize Your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch Themes Using DreamBoard App
The landing page design is really pleasing, but I'm curious -- why the nautical theme? I don't necessarily think of the ocean when I think of the word "groove". I absolutely dig the retro vibe, though. One last design thought: Your "Contact Us" and "Log In" buttons at the top-right are very low-contrast. I'm red-green colorblind, which is pretty common, and I find them hard to read (although I'm not sure that's why). If you just used a darker gray for the text, I think it would solve the problem without taking away from your calls to action.
It makes sense, but they should be careful with the blogger rebranding - it should be integrated into G+, but people need to be able to keep all their templates and customizations.

Something like replacing the blogger toolbar with a g+ toolbar and adding G+ widgets (or gadgets or whatever they call them) would work pretty well.
Is this going to help in any way to better clone facebook?
http://www.renren.com
This also means that technically there is no reason why Heroku Cedar couldn't support other JVM languages, such as Scala. It would be fun to watch Scala and Clojure fight it out on an even playing field.
Cisco's Big Bet on New Songdo: Creating Cities from Scratch
It really sucks, though. Between Calendar and Docs, there's often a conflict where it won't log me in to the second account.
Grizzly, a part of Glassfish. Officially sponsored by Sun^h^h^h^h Oracle.
Hm that's an interesting feature, thanks.
I was checking to see if my .asia domain was safe, and found out that .info, .org, and my beloved .asia tld are operated by Afilias which, according to wikipedia, "is headquartered in Dublin".

I'm prepared to believe that wikipedia is wrong, but you'll have to prove it. with references, citations, and what not :)
San Francisco, CA

Web Developer/Backend Engineer at an Early Stage Stealth Start-up

Helping people discover new experiences.

We are a stealth start-up located in San Francisco that helps people find new, unique experiences and activities in their city based on their interests and personality. Our team is focused on building great products that change the way people think about their free time.

We are an early-stage VC-funded company looking to bring on excellent talent with competitive salary and equity options. You will have a chance to work directly with the founders and be part of the core team (5-8 people).

We are looking for a backend engineer with the ability to build excellent web and/or mobile products. Real-world experience is preferred (this means you have worked on creating web products from start to finish - either in the professional setting or as side projects).

Required skills:
+ Willingness and ability to pick up new programming languages
+ Ruby on Rails
+ Javascript/JQuery
+ CSS/HTML
+ MySQL
+ Amazon Web Services
+ UNIX/Linux
+ Easy going

Bonus points:
+ Web scraping technologies
+ node.js
+ Objective C (iOS dev)
+ Experience scaling servers (caching/optimization)

You will work directly with the CTO, who handles most of the back-end programming, on a daily basis, and deploy product updates on a regular basis. Your responsibilities are primarily Rails programming, but you will be expected to work on whatever is necessary at the time.

If you fit the bill, apply with your resume and portfolio.
jobs@whitehawkventures.com
Why I joined IndexTank
Wow, am I glad I chose to read the comments on this article before opening it up. Thanks!
"How could a company be responsible for something like a computer, which is capable of doing an infinite number of things?"

There's a big difference between selling a computer, which could potentially do an infinite number of things, and a vast security system expressly designed for surveillance on the population, the suppression of dissent, and the curtailing of human rights.
Until then... :-)

My suggestions:

- Erlang: Erlang & OTP in Action
- (Common) Lisp: Practical Common Lisp
- this one can also be read online for free[1]

Disclaimer: Haven't finished either of them but they've been great so far.

[1] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
Thanks, but that's really not the same at all.

Those are just predefined custom searches, a feature built in to Opera (my browser of choice), and probably other browsers as well.

Unfortunately, custom searches are still limited to using whatever syntax the search engines they query use, so if that search engine does not support regexes, using a custom search (or "bang search") won't help.

They can still be a valuable search tool, but not what I'm looking for.
Well, PirateBay is a .org
Google+ iOS app submitted, “waiting for approval”
Very nice. I've been discussing this very thing with the HNSearch guys, trying to add it to my hobby project.

Well done!
Building a Database-Backed Clojure Web Application
I'm not sure in what way you mean "fight it out", but I'm glad that Heroku opted to start with Clojure...

As a guy trying to get on the JVM, the experience of getting up and running with Clojure has been significantly easier and less "fiddly" than trying to get a decent Scala environment set up.
Reminds me of this cartoon: http://i.imgur.com/9q7UL.gif
(To answer your question, the unit circle, with radius one, has area π.)

A quarter arc of the unit circle is π/2. A quarter arc of the circle with area 2π, though... Here, let's do it in τ for fun. :3

So, the circle with area τ has radius sqrt(2) (from A = πr^2), diameter 2sqrt(2), and circumference τsqrt(2) (from C = Dπ), thus a quarter arc of that circle is τsqrt(2)/4. That's not a pretty number at all to work with.

Maybe keeping the unit circle at its current size is a better idea.
PyPy can be faster than NumPy
Very interesting. Seems rather niche, though after the recent sale of Phenona (which I believe was on Hacker News a couple weeks ago), I can see why everybody would be rushing to become the cloud-deployment solution for any language vertical.
Why fight against this? Just remove the limiter and apply it to all patents. Especially software patents.
Ask HN: Why ain't there many rant about Apple App Store?
Why ain't there many rant about Apple App Store despite the much obvious suffering every developer had to go through atleast one way or another?
Off topic, but if you're using floating-point for pathfinding code, you're going to have different results depending on your distance from the origin.
It's probably a case of locking down future supplies, with the added advantage of getting a massive discount for paying up front. Tim Cook isn't one for waste.
I am new to programming, currently teaching myself Python.
I have "Dive into Python" and have done most of "Learn Python the Hard Way".
I feel both of these are not ideal for beginners. Maybe they would be better for programmers new to Python.

I have found "Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science" by John Zelle to be the best reference so far.
The International Society of Business Astrologers
IMO, yes. Maybe it's that I was on Chromium on GNU/Linux, and not Chrome proper, but I found the chrome dev tools to be buggy, and a little incomplete, like as-of-yet unpolished FB clone.
In addition to the observations of this article, I can say from first hand experience the Dept Homeland Security jumps on the term "hacker" when they are reviewing your visa situation upon arriving (back) into the USA from a foreign visit.

I'm described as "hacker-turned-consultant" in a lot of places (I work with big companies often, they like that), including my own blog now, and they did a quick search for me online and decided to grill me on it.

With Lulzsec, Anonymous, etc I'm even more concerned now...
Anecdotally, New York feels like a vibrant, budding startup scene. It's cool to see the data corroborate that. New York had as many job postings as Palo Alto and Mountain View combined.
Given I've not been able to invite hardly any of my friends, I haven't really gotten to make much use of it. I think, for me at least, this is a mediocre entree to the platform, since my first impression is that it has almost no utility, they really should have just opened it up to everyone so I could quickly have my FB buddies on here and be having fun and socializing.
Assets used in the commission of a crime can be seized regardless of if you are charged or even found guilty of that crime. Cars, boats, and houses are regularly seized from suspected drug dealers.

None of these people have been deprived of due process. The due process is to go to the courts to challenge it.

If you don't like either of these points, you'll need to go to the courts and have the laws changed or thrown out. Thats how America works.

EDIT: Downvotes are not how you disagree on HN. Well thought out replies are.
It's certainly interesting, but I don't think the internet could be considered its own sovereign entity. One major problem is that the "internet" is just an emergent property of lots of connected machines, and all of those machines have to physically exist somewhere within another sovereign entity.
This is better than business cards because you don't have to disclose any personal information like email, phone number and address. There's less pressure on both parties as well. I like Cheek'd, it's great for NYC.
I second this. Just loaded it at work...
A lot of xenophobia in this article. The amount of data Facebook, Google and others are collecting on us is worrying when we think of what might happen if it gets into the "wrong" hands. Right now thoughts of China buying Facebook illicit this image easily in our western minds, but we should recognize this feeling as an admission that we don't really feel safe giving so much control to these companies.

I haven't taken many active steps not to depend on them, but it's troubling whenever I think about what happens if a bad apple gets in the bunch. If I were to become a target of someone with access to Google or Facebook level data, there would be nowhere to run.

I don't foresee becoming a target in the near future, so I haven't done much to 'liberate' myself or switch to open solutions. For now the services provided give me many more benefits than worries. I just wanted to point out that this article is playing on xenophobic fears and we should be careful of doublespeak.
The book 'Crypto' by Levy is also good.
i wonder if we can get monzy and mc++ to take opposite sides....
I think this is a terrific idea. I think this is about the concept- not the fact that you already have a business card. The mystery and humor are a part of this company, plus- it's memorable!
Electric Aeroplane’s Pilot Beats Own Flight Speed Record
That explains why they have JVM support but have neglected to do Scala or other JVM languages yet.