skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks PG: This site is remarkably usable given its load.
I've recently submitted this link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2922336

Almost immediately the site has gone down, almost certainly under the load. It's a fair assumption that the people going there is a small proportion of the people reading HN, so the conclusion is that HN is under a greater load that that destination site.

And yet HN stays up, and remains remarkably usable under such loads.

OK, so HN is minimalist, clean and spare, but even so, I'd just like to say:

Thanks Paul.
A paper that would be on my personal list is "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic" (Goldberg): http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_go...
How does this work with people who are blind? Will they be able to notice the highlighted words, or will they be denied access?
Show HN: DailyScreenshot - track the visual evolution of any website
I was already doing this semi-manually for a handful a websites of my own and then I thought "Hey, other people might want to do this too". Tracking the Google homepage and BBC News can be pretty fun too.

Got my first paid customer on the weekend, which felt good. :)

Anyway, here's the site: http://dailyscreenshot.com/ Thoughts, comments, feedback?
Clickable: http://dailyscreenshot.com/
Doesn't a simple application of l'hospital solve this?
توبيكات 2012
Wall's screenshot suggests that for every dollar ad networks earn on pharmaceutical ads, they earn many more dollars on predatory "get rich quick" ads.
I have an iPhone mounted on my bike's handlebars. What should I use it for?
Ethical Issues In Fashion
Robert Kowalski (1979). "Algorithm = Logic + Control". Communications of the ACM 22(7): 424-436. http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/algorithm%20=%20logic%20...

(It's the paper that originated Prolog, but is also more broadly interesting for its analysis of, well, algorithms as logic plus control.)
It seems the site is down :(

Any mirror link?
Time for my handy "Open this page in Google cache" bookmarklet:

javascript:window.open("http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:"+encodeURIComponent(location.href))
skip the slideshow, readable link:

http://www.readability.com/articles/ldiywdsz
Emergency Adhoc Network
If our own governments are seeking for the power to shut down centralized networks during times of protest (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/24/uk-riots-facebook-twitter-blackberry plus, dont forget what the BART did in SF)... I am most certain they will be able to debilitate by any means necessary in the future.

Has anyone given thought to or simply interested in creating a platform for a decentralized adhoc network for emergencies? ie FreedomNet. It could be a very necessary platform for the future.
The best match among existing categories, IMHO is ``Theory,'' which I assume refers to "Theory of Computation."

It is there that formal systems are brought up and CS majors should be aware of the hierarchy and limitations of formal systems, which are discussed in GEB.

If I were to place GEB under an arbitrary category, I would probably suggest ``Philosophy of Computation.''
This feels to me like Facebook is kicking out the developers out of their house. Makes sense I guess.
I'm starting to split hairs here, but I'd say the skill lies mostly in the action of programming, and not in the methodological use of object-orientation. That is, you are a skilled programmer within that paradigm.
Warren Buffet's Tax Hypocrisy
Well, first off Facebook API questions are still on-topic on SO, so they will have more eyeballs and therefore a greater probability of being answered.

Second, programmers can keep their existing reputation, while a new SE site would put everyone back to 100. Since the topic is a subset, keeping it makes sense.

I don't really see what problems this solution brings that can't be solved with a custom logo.
The Methodological Confusion of Twin Studies
I saw two comments when I clicked the comment link:

TWAndrews: I think most people would be more enraged by "we're going to delay your flight because it's less profitable for us" than "Oops, wow, we screwed up."

Symmetry: I wonder if they had to tell a lie because switching which passengers had to wait would have violated some FAA regulation?

My dad was a pilot (between "Commercial" and "General Aviation"). The first comment, I thought: "Well, that's why the airlines lie about this sort of thing". The second: "If there isn't a regulation in place, and companies were more transparent about this sort of thing, there'd be enough anger to result in a regulation".

I recall a huge uproar a while back because of an airline having an unusual number of weather delays, which (at the time, not sure if this is still true) meant that they had no responsibility to pay for passengers lodging.

Here's the thing: The few customers who are very regular travelers manage to squeak out a voucher (they either know how to hack the system or can rely on their platinum status) and the infrequent remaining, especially leisure, travelers are angry and vow never to fly with that airline again. The problem is, if you work for a reasonably large company that has a Corporate Bookings/Travel department, you are not the airline's customer. At my company, if I travel, I am required to take the least expensive flight as determined by our booking system or travel agency service with very little wiggle room. If I want a direct flight (and I always do), where I live, it's guaranteed to be the same airline 90% of the time. I'm glad for this, I don't mind that one airline, but the other 10% of the time it's an airline I positively hate. In addition, the booking systems prices are almost always more what I can find doing a simple search on my own (I had a flight that would have cost $400 via Expedia but the least I could find on our booking service was $1400).

On top of all of that, one of the prime reasons we use a custom booking service is because they include a custom company hotline for sorting out these exact problems. I'm not going to say "conflict of interest", because their customer service division worked out a huge mess at 1:00 AM involving a missed flight and later missing luggage that saved me having to stay an additional several days a small town in Montana, but all of this ends up making the person the airline answers to either the booking service or the applicable federal regulation. Neither are my top choice.
Posted recently:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2903681
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0^0

Neat.
You couldn't use TI-92 on APs or other exams though :/ TI-89 for me :)
I think you're missing a quote after cache: in there.

Otherwise, very handy, thanks.
On the topic of company size and affordability, have you ever heard of any smaller companies (read: startups) that have 20% time?
Weird. It got stripped out somehow. Thanks for pointing it out; fixed.
Technical debt is the latent cost of fixing quality problems you incur because you cut corners. Instead of the "cost" of the debt staying the same, it actually grows over time. The longer you leave your technical debt, the bigger pain it will be to fix.

But there's an underlying assumption: technical debt cannot have any value at all unless the code itself has value. In a business setting, you code something, the Product Owner approves it, it starts making money for the business. It has value.

In a startup scenario, the code you write only has about a 5% chance of ever being worth anything at all.

Whether or not you want to be a craftsman or a businessman is left as an exercise to the reader. But my advice is always do the math. There's a lot of solid code out there that isn't worth jack shit -- and a lot of proud programmers who will tell you how awesome their code is.

100% of 0 is still 0.

As a side note, I'm always amazed at the stories of technical debt where a team hacks something butt-ugly, then gets a million users, then the whole thing is a piece of shit. When practitioners talk about this, it's almost like the moral is how bad hacking and bad coding is. They completely miss the point that getting the million users here is the significant event, not the coding style. You get a million users, you can complain about all kinds of things. Trust me. You'll work it out. Let some other guy write the book about what fools you were. You have the million customers. He doesn't.

Note that I'm not saying to code like crap. I'm just saying that everything you do in a startup -- programming, marketing, sales, accounting, etc -- has to be measured in terms of gaining and keeping customers. You have to do the math for your particular situation and figure out where the trade-off is (insert long discussion about how important MVP is here) Pragmatism always. Thinking in absolutes will kill you every time.
Almost 10% of employers may end health insurance
Apple's software quality has been markedly going down

People have said the same thing about nearly every OS X release (with the possible exception of 10.1). At least Lion doesn't erase your firewire hard drives [1], or delete your entire home folder [2] etc etc. The comparative severity of these really bad bugs can be debated, but I think in terms of general quality OS X 10.0 − 10.2 really were quite a lot worse than the more recent releases.

I don't disagree with your general point though, the Mac is obviously not their priority anymore, and hasn't been for a while.

[1] http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2003/10/61031

[2] http://macs.about.com/b/2009/10/13/snow-leopard-may-delete-u...
Great idea. I hope you are comparing the images to see if it has changed, and only save each changed site once. Besides reducing the amount of data to store it will also be more usable for the users.
Online gambling site using bitcoin as currency
JP Morgan May Take Over Bank Of America
Will Google+ save +1?
Technically, 0^0 is an indeterminate form and has no specific solution. Accurate but unhelpful.

Practically, 0^0 highlights the issue that most of us don't have a good conceptual model for what exponents really do. How would you explain to a 10-year old why 3^0 = 1 beyond "it's necessary to make the algebra of powers work out".

I use an "expand-o-tron" analogy

http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-exponents-...

to wrap my head around what exponents are really doing: some amount of growth (base) for some amount of time (power). This gives you a "multiplier effect". So, 3^0 means "3x growth for 0 seconds" which, being 0 seconds, changes nothing -- the multiplier is 1. "0x growth for 0 seconds" is also 1, since it was never applied. "0x growth for .00001 seconds" is 0, since a miniscule amount of obliteration still obliterates you.

This can even be extended to understand, intuitively, why i^i is a real number (http://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-understanding-...).
It'd be very helpful to see these principles in application. An example of a sales cycle with 5-point breakdown would go a really long way. To be able to see all the nitty-gritty details, exact wording, timing and what not. Not to repeat it blindly later, but to get a practical feel for these hints.
Tech giants’ weakness weighing on food chain
Poll: Should flags be public?
Using flagging to down-vote an article has become much more common in the last year and has resulted in a lot of contentious debate about the scoring mechanism.

Articles end up being significantly pushed down (flags have a disproportionate negative impact compared to up-votes) and the community has no visibility as to the reason often leading to conspiracy theories, etc. especially when the articles being flagged relate to YC companies or their competitors.

If flag counts were visible (even if they were on their own page and you had to check specifically to see them) it would help tackle this issues.

If the identities of the flaggers was also public it would allow the HN community to identify where users are flagging down articles for their personal benefit (i.e. removing negative articles about their companies).

What does the HN community think ?
Article flagging should be completely secret and anonymous
Article flag count should be public
Article flagger's identity should be public
Congrats on your launch!

First things first: I'd like to see some examples of tracked sites: The BBC News one would be a good example.

A thought: The aliasing on the free plan is annoying. PNG has multiple quality levels. Defaulting to JPEG for the free plan hurts both you (in terms of storage size) and your users, probably more than necessary. Use high compression on the free plan, and minimal compression on the paid ones.

Feedback: I'm not sure whether I can or can not share the URLs of my channels without compromising my account. A "Publish" mechanism to generate a public URL for a date range would be great. Also, the calendar interface is unexpected, I think I'd rather have a slideshow.
France cuts growth targets, unveils austerity plan
When In Doubt, Say You Don't Know
with that url? are you kidding?
Raises aren’t keeping up with inflation
The Pearl District in Portland is nice and all but I'll never understand why you would want an office there, especially if you aren't a business that requires a trendy, hip image. A web-based business with no front door is going to pay a TON per square foot just to be downtown.

Is it the address they are after? The need to impress investors? It's already expensive enough to run a business, why burden yourself and your employees with a completely irrelevant location?

I do live and work here and love the city, I just don't get the appeal of working downtown. The company I currently work for left downtown before I joined and I'm glad they did. Not many people live downtown and getting to and from work every day would take longer for me (and many others) than it does now. Not to mention an added cost of parking or taking mass transit.
The Cure for ActiveRecord Instantiation Anxiety: Valium
Or, if you're using Firefox, use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-mirror-vi...
No, Facebook is replacing their forums with Stack Overflow.

See their blog post:
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/545/

Their documentation remains independent, the alternative is insane.

(disclaimed: SE Inc. employee)
That's addressed in the article under "cleverest student."
> Defaulting to JPEG for the free plan hurts both you (in terms of storage size) and your users

Just to clarify - the JPEG filesizes are much smaller than the PNG versions, how is that hurting me with storage?

Thank you for your feedback :)
Get http response codes for a list of URLs
Looking forward to this. :)
This post seems to contradict what you said above:

> It seems like more and more, math classes are teaching students how to use a graphing calculator to avoid solving problems.

This is, simply, wrong: Calculators are banned for as long as students are learning to calculate. Once they are actually solving problems, as opposed to grinding through numbers (which isn't something they need to be doing anyway), they're thinking in ways calculators cannot match. A calculator can only do the most mechanical, least problem-solving-like parts of solving a problem.
I don't agree with the article at all.
The author advocates that you should change the environment around you so less discipline is needed to stay focused.

I think this is counter productive.
If this were a fundamental principle than our problems concerning procrastination would be solved for good. You browse unimportant websites and thus waste time? Just install Leechblock and the thereby created environment will require just as much "discipline" as you've got. Yeah, right ...

It's also nagging me how he tosses around with words like "discipline" & "willpower" as if they were just as defined as colors like red and green.
Well what they did probably got the most people home that night even if it was inconvenient for a large group and delayed a few people, but trying to cover it by saying that they don't know what planes they are putting passengers on just doesn't make sense.
This may not be true for every consumer, but for me, the salesperson who is most effective is the one who is willing to educate me about what I'm buying. I'm almost always willing to shell out a few extra bucks to buy from someone who has a teaching spirit.

For that reason, I'm not naturally as cynical of salespeople's writing. It's usually pretty easy to tell if what they've written is at least attempting to educate.
Fun digression late on a Wednesday :)

The indeterminate form seems the most correct based on the analysis of the limit of f(x,y) = x^y as x approached zero from different paths.

I had always thought of it more of an algebraic identity thing; x^n * x^m = x^(n+m). Obviously x^(n) = x^(n+0) = x^n * x^0 which can only be satisfied if x^0 = 1. But this article (and really, the wikipedia treatment that beej71 linked to) made me think more about it.
dc is the standard RPN console app that's been around forever (according to Wikipedia it predates the C language). It loads instantly but I always have a terminal window running it somewhere.
.. and seems completely unnecessary. In some ways Impulse is better than Steam, and I really hope they try to continue to improve the service.
I agree with what you're saying. I was just trying to point out that strict education requirements (e.g. state regulation of the profession) do influence wages within the profession. Parent made a point about PhD waiters being paid the same as non-PhD waiters. But that is only true because restaurants have no requirement to employ advanced degree holders. By contrast, in Law and Medicine, you are legally required to have that education. The pay difference there is huge: a lawyer with a JD makes much more than lawyer without a JD. Because you can't even be a lawyer without a JD (under most state law).

My point is about the relative pay within a profession, rather than a profession relative to other professions.
With average traffic/distance and ~25mpg, it takes about $6 for a round trip from Vancouver, WA to Portland, OR. Which would save you ~$4 on a $100 item.

However, for some reason, lots of people in general were fleeing CA at the peak of housing bubble.
Yeah, right. But still, better to have help from ourselves than no help at all.
> Facebook apparently doesn't understand how to do this, or simply doesn't care.

They didn't care. They didn't have to. Now they do, because they have to. (Hello, Google+)
Yeah, this is true. Those ones were pretty bad.
We (Puppet Labs) take interns from PSU and have hired pro services engineers from there.
This is what I think reddit should do. There are endless arguments there over whether something belongs in /r/pics, /r/funny, /r/LI5 or /r/askscience, etc.

I always thought that a lot of what we call "subreddits" are actually orthogonal tags that apply to posts. Think about it, if there's a funny picture of a naked girl, why isn't that simultaneously in /r/pics, /r/funny, and /r/nsfw?
The site isn't loading, but I find discussions about mathematical curiosities (though they're not that curious) come about because people are looking for a deeper meaning in mathematics. Math is playing with ontological objects in a system of definitions. There doesn't need to be an answer that "makes sense" for 0^0.

Depending on the context (are you working in set theory? are you making a new definitions for exponentiation?) you might have a different definition. But such operations are often defined recursively (e.g. in set theory, roughly, where S(x) = x+1 (or successor of x) Exp(x, 0) = 1, and Exp(x, S(y)) = x * Exp(x, y). Here you'll have 0^0 = 1, clearly.

For high school, 0^0 should be 1. It's necessary for problems high school students might encounter in calculous, and is the way it is defined in almost any field you'd be working in before graduate school.

High school teachers who insist that 0^0 != 1 likely don't understanding that it's a definition.
Cagey-forceshoe-measures-every-propose
http://share2aware.blogspot.com/2011/08/cagey-forceshoe-measures-every-propose.html
They have been for quite some time now.
The high school teacher in the link is a B.S. in math education. They're usually reflexive Platonists, believing that math is out there, and we merely discover it. This is a result of the teaching of undergrad math as essentially a series of completed works, with little history attached to it. This teacher probably hasn't thought critically about why, say, 1/x^2 = x^(-2).

By contrast, a mathematician has a Ph.D. in math, and has had to do original research and look at some history of topics. Thus, the mathematician knows that math is not a finished product, but is under constant refinement.

Now, let's talk about negative exponents. Students are taught that 1/x^2 = x^(-2). High school teachers often don't understand why. It is so ingrained that even asking "Why?" seems almost grammatically incorrect.

The reason why is that we know the following things about exponents:
1) x^n = x* x* ...* x for n a positive integer
2) As a consequence of 1, x^m* x^n = x^(m+n) for m,n positive integers

Now, the question is not "what is x^n if n is negative?" (which is what a high school teacher might ask). Rather, the question is "Can we define (!) x^n for negative n in a way consistent with the item two above?" (mathematician's framing). And, of course, we can. If x^n = 1/x^(-n) for n negative, then item two works.

So, a high school teacher most likely thinks that the negative exponent rule is simply a rule, handed down from the Gods of math. A mathematician recognizes that it is a convention, and such a smooth convention that there is simply no better choice.

Now, about 0^0: The HS teacher asks "What is 0^0?" and is therefore under the impression that 0^0 is undefined because according to certain reasonings it could be 0 or it could be 1. Textbooks (not written by mathematicians) wouldn't correct this. The TI-86 gives a domain error when 0^0 is input. The mathematician asks "What value of 0^0 makes my preferred formulae continue working?" and thereby defines 0^0=1.
The deal must be off; BAC is up 11% today.
Most people would rather ask and answer questions than maintain or update a wiki. That's what they have been doing, over at stackoverflow.

Since people are already discussing Facebook API over at Stackoverflow, they might as well make it official.
I know what it implements, but it could be much more. :P There were few different implementations of talk which had mentioned improvements (not all of them in the same time though).
I've always found rpg's Patterns of Software to have some deep insights into the nature of software systems. Particularly the ruminations on habitability.
We're a small company of 40. If someone wants to take time out to learn something or try an idea or work on a project of their own then they should do that. We don't allocate a specific portion of time to do that but we don't measure hours worked anyway. We only measure what people achieve. If they do meet company objectives by only spending half a day a week hacking on "directed" work then that's great. More time for them to invent something really cool. It helps that everyone in the company has equity and feels like a real owner which means timewasting and abuse is quickly pointed out and stopped.

I'm the CTO. Feel free to ask me anything about the culture we have.
Most of the suits against Apple are defensive. Apple was definitely the aggressor in this battle.
2001 Space Odyssey Has No Tablet, Didn't Invent iPad
Hurricane visualisation on weather.com
Talk to a lawyer!
Many people live in Goose Hollow (87% of them are renters) and the Fareless zone covers most of the transit distance.

I find that many people who live in downtown simply do not own a car, which seems almost impossible to function in this day and age.
10 tips for avoiding IT burnout
Mitchell's ML book is showing its age a bit now. You may want to consider adding Bishop's _Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning_: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cmbishop/prml/