skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems more than a little ironic that someone who disdains college spent so much time (7 years) in one (Stanford). Certainly as a philosophy major Thiel can look back and say that his education didn't contribute much directly to his own success, but generalizing on his very special case is dangerous. (He's a billionaire for God's sake, the odds of anyone reaching that level are infinitesimal no matter how talented, brilliant or lucky they are.) Who knows, perhaps connections he made in undergrad or in law school were critical in the path that brought him his financial success. In any event, many who go to college do so to enrich themselves in an environment populated with similarly motivated people. Philosophy majors, say. And hearing the ridiculous 'higher education is a bubble' meme from someone like Thiel with the financial experience to know better can only be taken as disingenuous.
Oh my god, Facebook will know that you asked a question on how to write Hello World in lisp!
What were you interviewing for?
no. security and government decency is telling everyone "we spend x billions here and use z and y to encrypt access to it"

what happens is "we spent x billions on toilet seats (to quote an alien movie) and password go over the air unencrypted, but we are not telling you the frequency"
You're reading it wrong. Here's an annotated version of what you replied to:

I'd say the opposite [everything is NOT a cost/benefit analysis]. [As evidence of this,] We spend vast amounts of money prolonging the life of people who we know in advance are extremely unlikely to generate quantifiable benefit. How do you suppport what you've said [that everything is a cost/benefit analysis]? [The evidence shows your position to be incorrect, therefore my position that life is more valuable than cost/benefits indicate is true.]
Can someone explain why normal everyday chapter 11 bankruptcy is not applied to banks?

Why can't they wipe out the shareholders, sell off the assets, and pay the creditors from that?
Thanks :)

It uses my own mini-framework for Google App Engine. This comment has more details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916803
The word you are fishing for is 'identity' or 'corporate identity'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_identity
How long until I can boot iOS on my HackintoshTV? (I kid... sort of.)

Seriously though, throw WiFi in there and lock the output down to 720p, and you've got a $99 AppleTV sans software.
Cyber war against Israel have taken very dangerous turn
Come back to teenagedom in 1985. You listened to the FM radio, because CD's hadn't been invented yet. You made calls on a landline, and yes, it was called "the phone". You didn't have a beeper. You didn't have "the internet" (it had been invented, but you had not heard of it yet). Instead, you had local dial up BBS's on a 1200 bps modem (if you were very lucky) or on a 300 bps modem (typical). You most likely had an Atari 2600 as your "game system" (that is, if you had a "game system" at all). And your calculator of choice was the HP-15C.

Well, maybe most didn't have a HP-15C, but that was the calculator I had. Still have it actually, and it still works as well today as it did then.
but i think the 250000 people is just the poor with a good life.... isn't that about the <1% you are taking about?
I'm sure that's where it's headed. You can already build a private IaaS cloud with VMWare's ESX product line, and since their acquisition of SpringSource, who built CloudFoundry, more and more PaaS style capabilities have been produced. I'm sure it won't be long before we see Cloud Foundry Enterprise of vFabric Platform Cloud or whatever name it will be.
> Here's what I mean by that: math deals with pure logic. All logical deductions (derivations from axioms to conclusions in formal systems) are in a sense "out there", waiting to be discovered. Certainly they have always been true, before people knew about them, and there are deductions that are true even though no one knows about them yet.

From one viewpoint, math deals with pure logic. It's something of a poor viewpoint from my perspective: Newton couldn't back up his calculus with logic, Euler and Riemann made numerous unfounded assumptions when looking at the zeta function, Heaviside built a telegraph across the Atlantic despite lacking a proper logical foundation.

My personal viewpoint is that mathematics is a series of shortcuts for understanding and manipulating a wide variety of phenomena, and mathematical research is the development of further shortcuts. Often logic comes in, but it's usually after you get the result.

Nothing wrong with logic (I sure do like computers, for example!), it's just not the panacea for anything mathematical.

> But either way, I think you are wrong that high school teachers don't think critically about why 1/x^2 = x^(-2). Some may be bad teachers, but I have known a lot of incredibly good high school math teachers, and I suspect they have thought about this. In fact, when I talk to mathematicians about high school education, they usually agree that people doing research know more parts of mathematics than high school teachers, but good high school teachers have a much deeper understanding of elementary math than people doing research, because they have had to approach it from many different angles in order to teach different students.

You're absolutely right about this, and I was specifically thinking of two very bad high school teachers when I wrote my post. The fact is that I know very few HS math teachers, and so my opinion is quite clouded by these two.
Still use my HP 48sx daily ... A bit hard to turn on, but I really can't justify buying a new to calculate css pixels ...
Why Facebook App Development is Seriously Flawed
I guarantee that if you like what Plano represents, you'll hate what Portland represents, and that the feeling is mutual. But you'd probably like Lake Oswego or Beaverton. I'm surprised you like Seattle, for that matter, unless you're actually living in the suburbs and not telling us.
Show HN: My year long project, animated and narrated children's storybooks -iPad
Why Shutting Down Cell Service Is Illegal and a Really Bad Idea
Through the magic of cross-posts, it usually is.
Facebook Targets Instagram With Photo Filters
At the same time, virtually everybody I know who has tried Places has said the exact opposite.

To be fair, I have many friends who use Foursquare for its most obvious and intended purpose, which is to arrange spontaneous meetups without having to text all their friends where they are or to find out where everybody is going. I do it myself, I just pop open 4sq on the phone and see "oh, everybody is at Foo's Bar" and then go there. Easy. Facebook Places makes that simple action incredibly difficult and slow.

Places essentially fails as well because it broadens the userbase too much. My college friends whom I no longer live near couldn't care less what bar I'm at. My local friends who I'm friends with on 4sq do care. So there's a natural separation. I'm only 4sq friends with people I'm likely to see often. I'm Facebook friends with almost everybody I've ever known.

Location as meta is a good thing for Facebook. Location as check-in doesn't fit with Facebook's friend model.
Only after seeing how many comments on the article attempted to genuinely refute the article did I get a sense of how few people grasp the foundation of mathematics (that is, the composition of arbitrary assumptions to agreeable statements).
So basically the Fb.SO sub-domain is just for showing questions tagged with 'facebook'. lame!
Can Square Enix sue GameStop for trademark infringement or something? Opening trademarked boxes and removing things that the customer is presumably paying for, without notifying the customer, sounds illegal to me. If you did the same with boxes of Legos, what would the result be?
I successfully managed to explain 3^0 to 10 year olds (as a recovering high school math teacher) as:

3^2 = 9
3^1 = 3 (divide 9 by 3)
3^0 = 1 (divide 3 by 3)
3^-1 = 1/3 (divide 1 by 3)
etc

This can logically be explained as n^0=1 for all real numbers.

Unfortunately this doesn't really handle 0^0 but fortunately 10 year olds are rarely that difficult.
Any examples of unfairly flagged-down articles?
What is "indeterminate form"? What does it mean for expression to "have a specific solution"?

You see, 0^0 = 1, and it's obvious to a mathematician. The only problem is that the function f: [0, \infty) x R -> R, f(x, y) = x^y is discontinuous in (0, 0) and that's what causes problems -- for instance, this is the source of the whole "indeterminate form" notion. If a function f is continuous in (a, b), then for every two sequences a_n, b_n, such that lim a_n = a, lim b_n = b, we have lim f(a_n, b_n) = f(a, b). That's why lim (a_n)^(b_n) = a^b if (a, b) != (0, 0), and this is "determinate form". But if (a, b) = (0, 0), then no matter how we define 0^0, it does not follow that lim (a^n)^(b^n) = a^b = 0^0, because in this case, lim (a_n)^(b_n) can be every positive value, and so mathematicians used to call it "indeterminate form" (it's not common today, though). So, since this problem is unsolvable in a consistent (continuous) way, we define 0^0 = 1, to be consistent with exponentiation rules, at least.

I've never seen a need for an "intuitive" explanation of exponentiation -- the usual definition is as intuitive as one can get. The thing is, most people do not know, _why_ expressions like pi^e are supposed to make sense -- they just take exponentiation as given. Only then they need to make up some explanation why "exponentiation rules" are like this, and what exponentiation is about. Hell, people don't even know what real numbers are! How are they supposed to make sense of exponentiation with exponent other than natural number?
ISuppli: Tablet Market Remains a “One-Horse [iPad] Race”
Have a 14 year old TI-89, that I still use to this day. It's small, simple, quick, and have all the functions and symbols I use under the custom menu. Amazing their haven't been any screen and function improvements (built in programs).
well, that's one way to build a moat.
The facile answer is that it's simple corruption. The slightly longer and more nuanced answer is that allowing such a failure to happen would cause more chaos and disruption than is politically acceptable to our elite decisionmakers.
Excellent point! Commonly told anecdote, lady sees Faraday's inventions and asks "What is it good for", he answers "What good is a newborn baby!" (I just found out that this didn't exactly happen this way, see http://www.jstor.org/pss/986790, but you get the point). Some tech advances are pushed by necessity, some just happen (or may be pushed by some other necessity) and create the question or need that they then answer.
Growing Up Google
+1. I've got a 50mhz DT telequipment d83 which is older than me and built like a battleship with no integrated circuits at all. It is bomb proof, feature packed and still as good as new!
The last one was pretty cool. Looking forward to a more comfortable venue.
Flat Stanley iPhone App: Beloved Literary Character Goes Mobile (PICTURES)
The Rise of Letting Developers Play
More and more companies are trying their own spin on Google's 20% time, mine included, are we witnessing the rise of developer play time?
There’s a Market for Internet Shopping
the lack of intuitive explanations for math is a major pet peeve of mine

I'm a very visual thinker, and that is one reason I enjoy the new Art of Problem Solving textbook Prealgebra by Richard Rusczyk, David Patrick, and Ravi Boppana--

https://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=...

it is full of interesting visual "explanations" and substitute for proofs in a book intended for a young audience.

That said, I finally realized that I was limiting my mathematical development by insisting that every mathematical idea must appeal to my visual intuition. Some mathematical ideas are proven even if they don't appeal to visual intuition. In the words attributed to John von Neumann, "in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

That point of view makes a lot of sense to many of the best mathematicians.

One more example of really interesting visual explanations of mathematical concepts is Visual Complex Analysis

http://usf.usfca.edu/vca/

by Tristan Needham. The book is delightful, and well reviewed, but it is not the sole path toward getting used to complex analysis.
WinningFT เล่นบอลออนไลน์ กับ WinningFT แทงบอลผ่านเน็ต วางบอลผ่านเว็บ
It says "Get a powerful oligopoly to essentially require your product and say goodbye to competition! Cut R&D and cruise down easy street."
Should flaggers have to give a reason (from a list) for flagging? e.g. spam / off-topic / linkbait / editorialising. Then when you see that I've flagged a link, you see why I flagged it.
The Easiest Way to Meet Your Rewards Checking Account Requirements.
Doesn't the first argument have a logic error, in that x^(1-1) = x^1x^(-1) has a caveat for x not equal to 0, so it shouldn't prove anything for x = 0. In other words, it just says x^0 = 1 for any x =/= 0.

Using Abstract Algebra, I think 0^0 = 1 is completely accurate. The power function (y^x) could be defined to be the amount you times (x times) you apply the operation between the y on the identity element. In our usual numbers that looks like y(y(y...(y1)...)). When x is negative y becomes the multiplicative inverse of y and everything else remains the same.
What Google still doesn’t get about running an online community
We're tracking Hacker News meetup style events on Lanyrd - let me know of any we're missing: http://lanyrd.com/topics/hacker-news/
Polyglot should not be confused with generalists. There are many generalist programmers who drift through their careers, never becoming an expert in a field so they're easily swapped in and out, easily outsourced, and easily forgotten. Some of the specialists out there, can make some serious salary (e.g. 200-250k/year for those that can build high speed trading platforms, or 150k+ for the architects of the biggest enterprise software).

That being said, limiting yourself to one language will be equally as hurtful, as you are wearing blinders. Even if you don't know all the languages, learning why they did things (DRY, functional programming, etc) can make you a better programmer in Java or whatever language you are in. As you supplement that, you'll find overall skill increases across the board.

My personal opinion is about 1 a year will do just fine, give you enough room to learn more than a book/sample project worth, see where the language goes in a market, and give you enough time to use it for something meaingful.
Hey guys. I wanted to share something that I have been working for a while. It is a Children's Storybook app that is available for the iPad. It contains 11 stories, 3 of them are free, and more coming. It is targeted for children between 1.5 an 4 years old. I have gotten some good feedback so far, but I'd appreciate if I get some feedback here too.

It just went out live today on the app store.

http://www.storyfun.com/

Appstore link:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id411269443

If any of you have children that age, or have close family/friends please download it (it is free) and I can give you access to all the premium stories for free shoot me an email at ardit33@gmail.com

It is a product of love inspired by my two nieces.
You're splitting hairs. That's 5 years of iPhone development. Android is super fragmented in 2.
Can someone explain how organized these meetups are? what happens in them? What should I expect?

Thanks!
Send me an email (I didn't see it in your profile), and I'll let you know when future events happen.
You add a bunch of stuff and you get a total. You add nothing and 0 is the total because it's the identity and starting point for addition. You multiply a bunch of stuff and you get a product. You multiply nothing and you get 1 because that's the identity for multiplication.

(That's the same as saying "the rules of algebra work out" but there's maybe something intuitive about multiplying nothing and getting back the thing that doesn't change the result of multiplication?)
Where does that leave the iPhone, which is basically a digital swiss army knife?
>without that protection, the pharma companies would not have invented the drugs in the first place because their ROI would be insufficient without the government-protected price premium.

interesting, sounds like the invention and innovation would stop in that particular area of our technological civilization if the protection is turned off. Are we sure that the protection really stimulate the invention? I mean, in all other areas the government protection usually inhibits innovation - for example telecom started to boom as soon as demonopolization happened.
But what's the expectation of lives lost due to late emergency crews?
First paragraph:

> The "merger" would completely destroy the value of BAC's common shares.
Google to the rescue?

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:D6mF_SI...
Even better, you can add them yourself - visit http://lanyrd.com/conferences/add/ (you'll need to sign in with Twitter - we won't tweet anything on your behalf)

(I'm simon at lanyrd.com)
That's supposed to be what the Change Log is for: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/changelog/ But yeah, they need to work on the relevancy of that content in regards to the constant changes going on.
ah, thanks - I had a feeling it was something like that! I figured a Calculus book would probably get it right :)
True, both of these. Although the recent move to 'USB' type scopes has some people wondering if maybe moving all the 'display/ux' bits to a laptop warrants the price reduction.

I was trying to explain the difference between the Tektronix probe frontend (expensive american brand) and the Rigol (cheap chinese brand) scopes to a hobbyist and they couldn't really appreciate the flat frequency response from DC to the scope's rated frequency of the Tek front end, whereas there was a little more than 1dB dropoff in the frequency response on the Rigol as it approaches its rated frequency.

(Oh and the Tek actually 'works' to nearly double its rated frequency and the Rigol certainly does not do that)

I worry though that 'good enough' will make it hard to find quality test gear going forward.
Fixed now fwiw! IE7+ supported! :D
Math is out there. I don't understand how anyone can say that the Mandelbrot set was created or is formed from arbitrary axioms. It was discovered full stop.
Is it common to just leave out diacritics when dealing
with foreign vocabulary in the English language ?

I don't know for English, but in French, we completely translate the name of some German cities :

- Freiburg im Breisgau => Fribourg-en-Brisgau

- Aachen => Aix-la-Chapelle

- München => Munich
I just posted a blog post related to this. My company has done a similar thing to NPR, we call it "build it in a day". I see it as a step towards 20% time projects being encouraged. I know one of the contractors with us at the moment has what they call "innovation friday" every 2nd friday. So be it a spin on the idea, I find it encouraging companies are realising there's better ways to motivate people and increase their productivity.
Interesting post. While I used distributed 2LC using Ehcache many moons ago, I never actually encountered this problem. I guess I was lucky.

Eventually though, I realized that using a caching mechanism tied to the ORM wasn't the best idea for me. Since then I've been using memcached more liberally, but I've also avoided classical ORMs in general...
To be honest there are tons of Steam haters (including me). Gamers love the concept of digital distribution but not the way Steam does it. Right now there is no decent competition, there are several companies but most of them are quite weak in many levels.

Possibly future is Steam alike platforms with rent ability (such as gametap / metaboli). Simply put Netflix for games is the next thing, although looks like going to take another 3-5 years to get something decent in that field.
+1 for real buttons.
If you're interested in this topic and the discussion here, do yourself a favor and pick up David Foster Wallace's "Everything and More".

I'm about 1/2 way through. It's a real gift.
Jailbreak iPhone 3G iOS 4.1 with RedSnOw
Dev Team updated the RedSn0w jailbreak.. There are various steps that one has to follow in order to successfully jailbreak iPhone 3G iOS 4.1with RedSnOw.
The discussion of Gödel's theorems is not the only thing that makes GEB an interesting read.

What's more, GEB presents Aristotelianism vs. Platonism in the context of _computation_.

_That_ is a question CS majors should at least be aware of.

The question of whether computations can _ever_ be brought to have consciousness.

Then again, given my limited knowledge, I am far from being an authority on the topic and look forward to gaining more insight by hearing other opinions.
Spend a day hacking Hadoop code with Doug Cutting
Yeah, this is Core vs Context. Outsource everything that isn't core to your business. Concentrate energy, brainpower and delivery on the core that makes up your unique value.
I have no citation, but I recall marketing studies that show that knowledge of priming has little to no effect on the subject. Which blew me away.
All this makes me think is that I never want to run a really large head-count organization. The kinds of thinking and "work" he had to do at Opsware are exhausting just to read about.
My takeaway: Executives get fired, but N*&$!s get capped & bagged.
Thanks for the pointer! I found Needham's book awesome, I've barely made a dent in it but love the visualizations.

I don't think visualization is the only intuitive method -- you can have a general "sense", not sure how to put it more specifically -- I have a "sense" about growth of e without a specific diagram.

Agreed that not every concept can be understood... yet. There's a quote I love to rail on, in reference to Euler's formula:

"It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth." (Benjamin Peirce, 19th-century Mathematician)

Really? Yes, it may be baffling at first, but we can _never_ understand it? Only if that's our attitude :).
Tablets Suck - Why You Might Want To Avoid Buying A Tablet
Oh, math only works this way in intuitive fields, like elementary calculus, elementary probability and staticstis, graph theory or Euclidean geometry. However, there are fields in math that are different -- for instance, there are topological spaces that exhibit phenomenons unseen anywhere else and that are very hard to grasp intuitively (I had very hard time trying to imagine what Cech-Stone compactification construction based on ultrafilters look like, and eventually I gave up after I understood that this space is only supposed to satisfy an universal property, and not have any intuitive shape). Deep results in algebraic methods in topology say interesting things about the models, while being completely indescribable outside of them, apart from some trivial examples (for instance, what _exactly_ are cohomology classes?).

The bottom line is, if the only things you've seen are geometry and calculus, with intuitive concepts like speed of change, area, length, then yeah, it's only making our intuitions more formal. Otherwise, it's something completely different.
Best DeviantART Groups for Typography Inspiration
DeviantART has become one of the most popular art sharing groups on the web. Their offer of watermarks and protections for artists, added to a huge membership and plenty of groups, make it a wonderful place to congregate to market yourself as an artist, get tips and or course find inspiration.