skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The two-slit experiment.

1. Single photon still produces interference pattern!

2. Ask which slit photon passes - pattern disappears

This kind of explanation is common, and it has always bothered me, because it's the wrong sort of mental model.

The interference pattern doesn't disappear "because we're looking", or "because we're asking", or "because we thought about finding the answer".

It disappears because in order to check which slit a photon passed through, we need some way of measuring that. To do so, we need some way to "see" the photon; to do that, we need to shine photons on it; and it is that which destroys the interference pattern.

The reason quantum mechanics is "weird" is because it (currently) is fundamentally impossible to invent a device to answer the question "which slit did the photon pass through?" without destroying the interference pattern.

However, that doesn't mean it disappears "because we're asking". The interference pattern is destroyed because our device, no matter what it is, will always interfere with the experiment (shining photon A at a photon B == "well obviously that would change the behavior of photon B"). Nothing more, nothing less.
Reed is a bad ass
Yes, I think you're right. Google just needs to integrate it better with gmail, possibly add a mail icon on the users' page and when clicked the user can be taken into the gmail interface.
Advice on smartphone data caps: Trust but verify
Congrats to Punchd, have met the team and they are all incredibly talented. It will be exciting to see their product realized via Google.
Ken Thompson's alligator roamed Bell Labs
>So why then does the author then complain that Google is too big?

Because gray areas and mixed bags can exist. g+ doesn't have to be perfect to do things right, and doing some things right doesn't fix other problem areas. There can simultaneously be upsides and downsides of the same thing.
Hotéis Fortaleza
St. Basil’s Cathedral
St. Basil’s Cathedral
The Cathedral of the Protection of Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat (Russian: Собор Покрова пресвятой Богородицы, что на Рву), popularly known as Saint Basil’s Cathedral (Russian: Собор Василия Блаженного), is a Russian Orthodox church erected on the
Natalie Irish - Paints with her Lips [video]
Console.fm taps SoundCloud to become the next Turntable.fm
The transition is made in the first sentence of the third paragraph: "The problem with this rationale, however rosy it may seem, is that you’re simply moving from one internet juggernaut to another." He first explained the pros of Google+ and then moved onto the cons.
Clojure is new. Hickey's status as the designer of a major and taken-seriously programming language is new. My knowledge of Rich Hickey is itself new -- I started seeing articles about the guy about a year ago. New means that most of the things that will eventually be written about Hickey and Clojure have not yet been written. Clojure has a future, but Wikipedia is about the present.

The current Wikipedia article on Rich Hickey doesn't actually tell me a whole lot about him. He invented Clojure, he's a software developer (logical consequence of the preceding), he "has worked on scheduling systems, broadcast automation, audio analysis and fingerprinting, database design, yield management, exit poll systems, and machine listening." -- where? how? with whom? All of these are potentially notable, but none are when they're shotgunned at the reader.

Of the sources there, Code Quarterly might qualify as a respectable publication, if it takes off -- it too is new.

Keep in mind that, say, moot, inventor of 4chan (more famous than Clojure) didn't have his own Wikipedia article until he started Canvas. Until as recently as June 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Poole redirected to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan and it was only moot's ascendance as an entrepreneur which changed that. Wikipedia notability relies on secondary source coverage, and secondary source coverage requires time to occur.
> That concern is exactly why the U.S. Small Business Administration exists.

Good point, it exists and it is a good thing. I see a lot of bids from companies specifically tagged as being those entities. Sometimes they get the contract sometimes they don't.

> winning contractor is required to provide the agency contracting officer with a written plan that establishes a small business subcontracting goal.

So they have to find a way to recruit all their college buddies, cousins and friends. Yes on paper it all looks legit, no doubt, it is the loopholes and what goes around the paper trail that makes the difference.

For example for contract jobs there are written requirements, then there are the real requirements. If you don't know the real requirements (which you find out by knowing so-and-so from back-in-the-day ...) you won't get the contract. When it comes to pick the bid surprise! they made a "best effort" but alas, this other bidder "just happened to guess exactly what we need". Well that other bidder might turn out to be a neighbor who needed a favor returned and so on.
Ask HN: What's an easy-to-set-up CRUD front-end for PHP/MySQL?
It's for some sports editors to manage team records across multiple sports/leagues/divisions. phpMyAdmin is a little too techie for their needs.
Agreed. Given it's a nascent product with few users/retailers and low barrier to entry (there are at least a dozen similar scan-code-for-punch-card apps), it sounds like a pure talent buy. And $10MM sounds high if that is truly the case.
Screentoo Application Framework for Broadcasters Launched
http://boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2007/11/25/the_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Union
</sarcasm>
I did something similar, though instead of cinder blocks, I made the frame out of PVC pipe glued together. It was sturdy as hell but also really light and easy to move with the top taken off.
The system is flawed.

However, the system also does some very good work by forcing more work into smaller companies. I have had the pleasure of working for two companies doing business with the government. One doing research through the SBIR program, and another just winning contracts as a small business.

On the good side, both of these companies did very good work and didn't do the "IP shuffle" as you described above. In fact, I'd say the biggest impediment to us getting stuff done was either the government moving slow, or some other company we were forced to work with slowing us down. In fact, the kiss of productivity death for any project was getting involved in a project with one of the bigger consulting companies (BAH, Accenture, etc).

On the other side, the title of "woman owned" and "minority owned" are completely taken advantage of at all times. Both companies I worked for were "woman owned", which in practice meant that the wives of the bosses owned the company (or at least some of it), but really didn't take part in anything other than showing up for Christmas parties. I am not aware, however, of any real advantage the "woman owned" and "minority owned" titles got us, though.
Make WordPress Lightning Quick with a Free CDN From Amazon
In this scenario, anyone who'd just lost their job would have a lump sum of 40% of their previous salary, plus whatever entitlements they had for unemployment. Anyone still in a job would have that cash to either pay down their debts or to spend on goods and services that would sustain/create more jobs. It's a win/win scenario.
>If we accept that this encrypted space is protected by the fifth amendment,

the encrypted space isn't protected by the 5th Amendment. The content of your brain is. If the police finds the password written on post-it under the keyboard, they would have all the rights to use it.

>then why won't we just regulate that encryption needs a "law enforcement access key" or make such encryption just illegal?

1st Amendment. A right to produce all kind of communication garbage, incl. XOR-ed image of your brain with Antarctica map or quasi-scientific reasons against tax increases or this my post.
Let's say you go with js for the user specific parts of some page. What's the best pratice to deal with those with js disabled?
You're comparing becoming a citizen in a foreign country to signing up with a social network? There are a hell of a lot more barriers to becoming a foreign citizen, such as physical location, than signing up for a social network and giving it all your personal data.

Google is a much bigger data-collecting, privacy-breaching behemoth than Facebook, so signing up with them should be an action that warrants thought.
It would be nice if you could add a blocklist for a given post (so you don't have to remove people from circles or create temp-circles).

e.g: You and your friends are throwing a surprise party for one circle-member's birthday.
Venture capital, angel investors and Private Equity
I used LibreOffice Impress over Ubuntu for that presentation.

I try to use the best tool for the job though.

Two weeks ago I had to make a code-based introductory presentation and I used showoff instead ( https://github.com/schacon/showoff ) since it comes with syntax highlighting and the slides are just a text file. It took me maybe a couple hours to learn the ins and outs, but then it was easy.

I've heard that the Mac app is good, too, but I haven't used it yet.
Band plays 28 gigs in 28 days
How to hire a Technical Cofounder - StartupNorth.ca
> I want to be able to play 2 audio clips at once. I want to be able to auto-load audio clips on page load. I want to be able to play them without forcing the user to touch the screen

I'm glad Apple doesn't allow these then :). I'm glad they have those restrictions in place, keeps me from awkward sound-producing moments and spares my bandwidth if I'm on 3G.
Geo-Dating: OKCupid Adds Location to Mobile App
For a different point of view, check out:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090619214443/http://www.o3magaz...

The author benchmarks nginx at 26,590 TPS on a quad-core 2.5 ghz amd system.
So, cut taxes while increasing benefits?

You should run for Congress :)
I sent my wife a G+ invite, but things fell apart when her Google account with Gmail address and Google account with Yahoo! address turned out to be not the same, and she will not be bothered to figure out how to delete one and add the email to the other. Too many hoops to jump through.

I started to explain it to her, but then I became embarrassed at my subtle knowledge of the history of Google account identification and conflicts* and realized that the look on her face was right: no one should have to care about that shit.

* eg. Google Apps account and Gmail account with Google Apps email being different and having no knowledge of each other.
I've worked as a developer through oDesk and I also hired developer to do a little bit of work for me through oDesk. When working as a developer on oDesk there was more than one occasion where I was hired to either finish something that another oDesk contractor didn't finish, or fix something that wasn't written quite right. The code that I had to work with from the previous developers was always pretty sloppy and never commented and it looked thrown together.

When I hired a developer I got good results. The developer came in way under the amount of time that he quoted, and the code was very clean & commented.

I believe that the difference was that I hired someone based on their skills and the interview where the people who I did work for had initially hired based on lowest price and they got what they paid for. You'll find that the lower priced devs are usually a group of people or a company who is pumping out code as quickly and are more worried about quantity than quality.
Hi pygy! :D I plan to do other awesome stuff
No need to say sorry :D
Just out of curiosity, do VC's call you to ask your opinion on things like this?
A Begging Robot Draws Attention to Poor in Wealthy Luxembourg
Examining Load Average
Yes, this is something I should have written explicitly. Your advice is spot on, I should have included a "conclusion" in the colors section saying just that.
Super Secure
Patent-pending technology guarantees the integrity
of your loyalty program. GPS triangulation, velocity
analysis, and statistical variation keep things secure.

Each venue gets one static QR code. A bit of fraud prevention based on location and statistical analysis does not seem "super secure" to me but perhaps i am missing something.
This is awesome, I would pay for this as a service.
A Brief History of 'Civilization' (the Game)
I wonder if it would be possible to claim that patents used in this way actually violate antitrust laws.
Computer disks and USB sticks were dropped in parking lots of government buildings and private contractors, and 60% of the people who picked them up plugged the devices into office computers. And if the drive or CD had an official logo on it, 90% were installed: http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/06/28/us-govt-plant-usb-...
Excited that this has finally moved to Facebook. Next: Sims.
When do we get out Congress of Vienna and World Wars on brands/IP then?
Yet Another "People Plug in Strange USB Sticks" Story
Sounds like a fine idea to me, but not very stimulative. More money would be returned to high income individuals who are more likely to hold onto the extra cash.

I'd personally rather it go to infrastructure projects -- faster cheaper internet access, high speed rail, space elevators ;) -- and basic research.
Any advice on how to word it? I've tried the "seeking technical cofounder" thing which didn't go anywhere but I have cash and am looking to build out a core feature set. Some of the work is already done so they would be taking the reigns with the code.
That was my subconscious. 4 is the maximum, but I'd actually steer more towards 1 or 2 types when possible. If the diagram is very complex and needs more types, I'd try to split it into several slides.

I saw the slide and the "visual complexity elimination subroutine" kicked in. I'll try to fix that in a future version.
It would help if they characterized 'patent trolls' accurately. Their alleged behavior is after all the subject of the piece.
I'm quite amused by the deck's opening story about the horrors of 10-year-old kids on Facebook seeing gay men dancing with towels wrapped around them in a bar.

The problem of needing to partition one's social groups is very real, but the moralization in the deck rubbed me the wrong way.

Then again, San Francisco is a city where people bring their children to the gay pride parade, so maybe I'm just a wacko liberal with an incredibly biased perspective. :)
Its simple really: wikipedia shouldn't be the dumping ground for any and all information--that's what the internet is for.

In this specific case, the only notable thing about this guy is that he invented clojure. Thus he should have a mention or a footnote on the wikipedia page for clojure. He hasn't done enough to himself be notable.
What is Usability? An interesting look.
However, in the case of a safe there exist other reasonable methods to access its content such as a safe cracker or breaking open the door.

As I stated in my comment above, in the case of properly encrypted data where exactly one person possesses the key this is not the same.
I know people who work for GoDaddy and the confusing website is part of the upsell. That GoDaddy would screw people with SSL certificates is no surprise.

My requirements for hosting are always 'Anyone but godaddy."
Improving page rendering speed can also benefit server a lot.
If done properly server would have to answer one request for Javascript file, and none on repeated requests. Now it has to answer 13 requests no matter what (3 scripts are loaded from third party servers).

Similarly after optimizing CSS images server would have to server much less traffic (and maybe fewer requests). Footer.gif and subnav.gif together take about 200KB now, but the size can be cut in half just by switching to PNG. Remaking the background with repeated images and some cicada pattern for noise should let to cut the size tenfold.
Tweetie.png can be less than 2KB without losing quality — that's 15x less.

Photos are served from different domain (good), bet those small jpegs are still way too big file-size wise. I guess they are produced automatically, but it would be worth to have some additional optimization for them — that alone would allow to cut the size of each about tenfold too.
You are welcome, I'm glad you liked it.

Here's a dropbox link. It should be there 2-3 weeks.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18558160/How-to-make-awesome-diagram...
ToApp - redirect mobile visitors to your mobile app
RTFA: "Azure removes the Direct2D and Quartz (OS X) go-between and allows Firefox to write directly to the underlying 3D subsystems (Direct3D and OpenGL)."
Ocaml was the first functional language I ever used. I always heard it was fast. I didn't realize it was that fast. That I think is the most interesting thing about this post. I know he says C++ is significantly faster than the other languages. But, I think most people would agree its much easier to solve harder problems quicker in Ocaml thank C++.
Monads in C++
What the hell is Google+ For?
"After 30 years you will get the hang of this and be a good programmer."

I wonder if a genuine beginner reading that line would be put off instantly or encouraged to find out if it really would take that long?
os-x lion: this is why i hatelike it.
i installed the developer preview of os-x lion some days ago. following are my first impressions. let me know how you think about apple's newest os.

performance

at first i thought lions performance sucks, but mdworker and kextcache processes are re-initializing spotlight right after installation which slows down the system and heats up the cpu. after two hours of fan-noise and heat the system seems to be fine and is running smoothly now.

mail

the new mail is great. finally email conversations are grouped. it features a new 3-column view, which imho is sub-optimal when working with loads of emails. fortunately the classic view also supports grouped conversations. i like

launchpad

well guys. this is a super use-less feature, as i setup my application folder as a dock-folder anyhow. for me at least there's no need to have an ios view of apps on a desktop computer or notebook.

mission control

this actually combines spaces and expose. unfortunately it adds nothing to my personal workflow as i rarely use those features.

calendar

the new calendar is actually a huge disappointment as i'm working with mutliple calendars of different people (synched via google calendar). it's not possible anymore to permanently display the list of calendars in a sidebar. this suxx big time. besides that the switching of calendars with the new dropdown kind of list is totally unreliable and the calendars don't seem to update properly when working with multiple windows :( i'll probably have to switch to google calendar or something else. any recommendations for a good calendar desktop app for os-x which can handle multiple gcal accounts?

trim support for ssd

finally there's trim support for ssd drives. this is totally overdue since windows and linux support this since quite a long time. i know that this is more a long term performance feature, but actually hoped that this would increase my ssd performance. unfortunately the xbench results did not get any better. sidenode: i'm not really convinced from the ssd performance under os-x (maybe it's the apple ssds which aren't that good, but colleagues have much much better results with linux).

versions

the integrated document versioning is quite cool and i'm sure this will save my * at some point in the future :)

conclusion

well as stated above there are some good things about lion like mail, versions and trim support, but also several downsides. i actually expected more and am a bit disappointed. there are also some other features, like fullscreen support for apps and airdrop which i didnt really test yet...

what do you guys think about lion?

cheers, karlton
The TSA fails again – a stun gun found on board?
Most of the time is spent rendering the page.

Maybe, but it's the client spending that time, not the server. It's largely a separate issue from what it is being discussed here.

Save the most user-time per engineering hour you can.

If your server can handle 100 requests a second and you know you're soon going to be receiving 1000 requests per second, it makes more sense to address that with HTTP caching than twiddle with your javascript includes. A browser can't render a page that the server is too overloaded to send.
"Notability is not inherited" makes perfect sense. Doing something notable doesn't make you notable. Doing many notable things might make you notable. Doing something that is supremely notable might make you notable. Clojure clearly doesn't qualify.
I'm not about hiring at the lowest hourly rate; I'd rather pay more for quality, usable code that can be iterated on than pay less for garbage.

Do you have anybody you'd feel comfortable recommending? I'm looking for proficiency in Rails, Javascript, jQuery, AJAX, and at least the basics of HTML/CSS. I'm not completely clueless about the development process either as I've been working alongside my current freelance dev to write the front-end as he codes the backend (we use git for VCS). I can speak the language (at least at a basic level) and can provide a full spec and HTML mocks if needed.

If you have anybody in mind, feel free to email me at claydani [at] gmail [dot] com
Would it have been so hard to just put text labels on the buttons and release a new version of the mobile app?
From the article:

> Quit blaming the victim.

Where do we draw the line between blaming the victim and chiding people for doing stupid things?

For example, a drunk driver is not a 'victim' in any sense, even if the only one injured in the wreck is the driver.

OTOH, we have all those little topics that make people go insane.

Can we even debate this concept without turning this into a flamewar?
Download iPhone Firmware iOS 5 Beta 3 IPSW [Direct Links]
Erlando: syntax extensions for Erlang
> You take a $1M investment, create a product and are aquired for $50M that is a huge "win",

if we consider that "take $41M in investment" as a win, it may explain the high-level departures (depends on the treatment their stock/options get on departure)
Minutes ago Apple has released a iCloud Beta 4 for Developers
Given that this sentence occurs immediately after a five-line example of a working program, the beginner would probably say "but, you just got something working in five lines! what are you talking about?"

It takes time to learn the truth. I remember when I first read the results of the various productivity studies cited in McConnell's Code Complete, the ones which estimate that the typical programmer creates a handful of lines of bug-free code per day, on average. It seemed like such a stupidly small number, then. Not so unbelievable now. The bug-free part is harder than it looks.
> If we're going to jump out there with wild speculations do we also have to pick the most cynical ones [1]?

Of course we have to. Cynical sarcasm is way funnier than, say, throwing around hot sauce.