skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two points

1) The article is primarily concerned with Dirac's relativistic formulation of quantum mechanics. This is why they make the claim

'Without understanding the origin of spin, and the Dirac statistics, you wouldn't have mobile phones, computers or anything else that runs on electronics.'

However, Fermi-Dirac statistics can be derived directly from the properties of fermions. True, you can derive the fact that electrons will be fermions because of their spin from the spins-statistics theorem, but you only need to know the Pauli Exclusion principle to get the F-D statistics.

2) My understanding, and speaking with engineers in the field, is that most of the applied industrial research uses empirically derived band structures (which definitely does require Rel. QM to derive from first principles) and regular QM to design devices. This is also the approach I've seen in most semiconductor simulators. However, it is entirely possible that Intel or AMD take a different approach. Not having access to the tools they use, I can't speak to their tech.

However, you seem to be a knowledgeable person, so I'd be more than happy to be informed that I'm full of shit here. :)
Miz Mooz BLOOM
@gregschlom

Great to know there's others who see things this way.

I wish there was some site that was just for people who hold this sort of view (which I've always thought is really a difficult one to find in what's written about programming in today's print and online publications). Maybe the IOCCC site will take on that role.

After always wondering about the reasons why the IOCCC was discontinued, and surmising the worst, this is like a wish come true.

Have you read Don Libes' book on the IOCCC entries?

Mr. Libes, if you're out there, we may need you to write a new chapter.
Little trivia: The BCC develops a wavelet based video codec they call "Dirac"[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(video_compression_format...
Duqu computer virus Detected by Iran civil defense organization
Having a large number of much younger cousins who are, oddly enough, from the Portland area, I think the author is painting an entire generation on the basis of a few highly visible examples.
He was also quite modest, not naming equations after himself, and used to refer to Fermi-Dirac statistics as "Fermi statistics".

Btw, how did PAM Dirac come up? Is it some celebration i am unaware of?
"We shall have to work faster."

http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda

Even if it was suicide, this too we will overcome.
> It's the only way you'll get buy in

I don't agree. What you propose would stop the growth of the industry; who in the industry would agree to this, except the very lowest bottom-of-the-barrel employees, like the night-time guards?
Sorry for being naive, but what about that photo makes it worth that much?

I've seen landscape photos that illicit an emotional response from me but I just can't see what makes this worth that much. It just looks like a drab, overcast day in any place in the world.
Direct link to the website: https://www.artoftouch.com/en-us/#/learn/about
Interesting article. However, I would have liked if the author would have gone more in-depth on what type of applications could be build on top of SMTP by giving some examples and why SMTP would be more beneficial than e.g. HTTP for those applications.
The earlier HN thread about Feynman mentions Dirac:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3230826
Your odds might not be so bad. It's a tough market for anyone working in traditional (read: overcrowded) areas [1], but there are precious few folks working in the intersections, particularly between the arts and sciences [2]. Of course, you'd have to be willing to live below the poverty line for a while!

I highly recommend working up some paper abstracts and pitching them to conferences to gauge interest. There are plenty of organizers who won't care that you aren't affiliated with a university, and that would be a great chance for you to get in a room and chat with others who share your interest.

1. http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the-Huma/448...

2. Purely anecdotal, but I've taken Ph.D. phil and lit seminars at Berkeley and UO, and never encountered another student who could even code. They must exist, but they're rare.
Tracking Offline Events with Google Analytics
Here is a nice NPR podcast about the German-French relationship and the creation of the Eurozone: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/21/141512746/france-a...

Apparently Europe created the Eurozone because they were afraid of the newly united Germany
How Biking Can Save Cities Billions of Dollars in Health Expenses
> I don't plan to start now--among other reasons I can't stand the taste

I'm not trying to pressure you into drinking, but there are a lot of different kinds of alcohol out there. I used to hate beer, but after a few months of starting off with hard ciders, I've actually found some whose taste I really like. Same with liquors - some stuff I absolutely will not touch because the taste is actively unpleasant to me, but some tastes great.

You just have to find out what you like, if you're interested.
How to Make Money and Market Your Products: A quick insight
I have four questions, I only see one at a time.

On http://routinetap.com/answers_list I expect to see all four of my questions.

I want to spend as little time on this app as possible.
Coincidences
Average Facebook User Has 130 friends
Basically this argument can be found in this nice NPR podcast: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/21/141512746/france-a...
I'm much older than the generation he's talking about, and I think you're entirely right. I shouldn't expect too much understanding of grubby commerce from a former English professor, but I think the affect of a salesman and of an entrepreneur are worlds apart.

An entrepreneur is up to a whole thing, and deals with mainly closed feedback loops. A salesman is at best a fragment of a real enterprise, but is often, as in the case of a snake-oil salesmen, backed up by little or nothing. The feedback loops for a salesman are frequently open, allowing all manner of bullshit.

Further, even if he were right about entrepreneurship being more common, it still wouldn't be the dominant experience, so using it to explain a generation's affect is suspicious.

Instead, I think it's much more reasonable to look at the rise of electronic communication (cheap phone calls, texts, email, chat, Twitter, Facebook). It means, in effect, that each of us lives in our own virtual small town. People end up being pleasant to each other because when they aren't, the consequences are more likely to be felt and harder to dodge.
Books About Warren Buffett and Stock Trading
Profanity and OS projects - should we care?
Seems like too much free time and the politically correct got its round over the ruby community for good this time. Luckily they are not reading the linux kernel.
^This^
Just because you lose, doesn't mean it's a scam.

If you're getting outbidded by people they more-than-likely figured out a way to monetize the customer on the backend a lot better than you. A lot of things on Adwords depend on breaking even on the front end and monetizing them over the long-term.

That said, the article does raise some interesting points - but it's interesting to see how those vouchers seem to have had a more of a net-negative experience for small advertisers who've been burned and turned off of AdWords. That said, I work with some pretty big companies and we see some great ROI on our work.
I didn't mean to imply that and I completely agree with you. I'm not a huge commenter myself--my general rule is only comment what is weird or un-obvious and make the code readable with good function and variable names.
Product Launch Formula 3.2
Occupy Wall Street Protests Shifting to College Campuses
Should I add "IMO"? I use both Ubuntu 10 and OSX daily, and brew packages are always more up-to-date and more reliable.
Hey, I don't mind going into some more detail here:

With attachments.me, we've been looking at using special ephemeral email addresses for categorization:

* You can post to an email address with your company name and a folder in it, and the attachment will automatically be categorized within that folder.

Here's some other ideas:

* Email an image to an email address, with dimensions in the body, the email is stored with an image resized to the given dimensions as an attachment.

* Email an to an email address and have the data show directly on your Tumblr account.

Email is a big part of a lot of people's workflow, and I love the idea of building hooks on top of it -- a good email client is pretty much a given regardless of whether someone is on their smart phone, computer, or whatever.

I still see HTTP as a big part of the equation, but with SMTP services performing more and more interesting actions behind the scenes.
What is also very different is the way WhatsApp is used, as you break up messages in multiple bits sometimes, which doesn't matter because it's free anyway
> Have you read Don Libes' book on the IOCCC entries?

I haven't, thanks for the suggestion.

Hey, let's continue this discussion over email. My address in in my profile. Shoot me an email and let's talk about obfuscated code. Do you have any plans to submit something for this year's IOCCC?
This isn't standard Google-fare.

Are you sure you weren't talking to a marketing consultant that was giving out those coupons (Google gives those out to consultants like candy to sign up new advertisers).
With essentially zero tariffs on capital flows, why is it necessary to target winners and losers with immigration policy? We saw what happened to wage rates when the richest companies in the US got access to the massive quotas of guest workers that US agriculture has: tech bubble and unemployment. Why use immigration policy as a subsidy to the venture cap industry? This makes little sense. Immigration policy can certainly be reformed but handing it over big money and big lawyers makes is foolish.
9oliYQjP did a pretty good job.
Simple fix: add more keywords. Raise your budget.
The Real Cost of Patent Trolls: $80B/year
As long as we're talking about reviving programming contests, I'd love to see a return of the underhanded c contest (http://underhanded.xcott.com/). The winners tended to do a really nice job of abusing subtle "errors" to accomplish their goal.
You can do this already. I've done it on a few client projects, mostly to make an instant API for my own JS needs on any page.

Make it so every page extension can be changed to .json, and the response is the data used to build that page.

This is exceptionally easy if you're using a templating library. Just check the extension on the current url and respond in that format (I've done the same with XML and PDF when necessary).
Saying "This experiment uses experimental features" presented as a negative is odd, that's all.
"I'm not in it to save the world, I'm in it for myself"

At least, that's self consistent and honest. Maybe not a good sales strategy though.
+1 to this distinction. For what the OP is observing in Portland (and other urban intellectual enclaves: NYC, Boston, SF, Seattle, Austin, etc) - this is a much better characterization of the emergent DIY culture.

Still, I think the article itself is pretty narrow in trying to economically label a loosely defined generation. The data just isn't there to support any large scale, nationwide increase in owned-and-operated businesses that are drawing in significant revenue.

I looked for it, not incredibly exhaustively, but long enough to wonder if it's out there. Moreover, the stagnant wage and salary figures, combined with increased student debt loads seemed to crowd out and more promising spins on the reality of what's happening with the Millennials.

I would love to find data that supports a real economic movement back to craftsmen culture though.
I recommend Graham Farmelo's 2009 biography of Dirac, The Strangest Man.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/02/paul-dirac-str...

I once started a physics degree at Bristol, where Dirac was born and raised, and the department made a big show of 'their' man. The house he grew up in is a few minutes' walk from the department, and has a blue plaque indicating its status. It was some years before I discovered that Dirac had never been in the physics department at all, but in fact studied electrical engineering, before entering Cambridge, where he flourished as a physicist.
TwitterTwitterChickenDinner.com
A Saturday night project to learn node.js. TwitterTwitterChickenDinner.com picks your Twitter contest winners randomly and most importantly with one click.

Just enter your giveway hashtag and how many winners you want randomly selected and hit spin. Your winner will then show up.

Try it out and then follow @TwtrTwtrChknDnr

Hope it comes in handy next time you are giving away something on Twitter! : )
I believe that you have just managed to generalize Poe's Law. Congratulations
"No matter what price we choose, we always make the same revenue"
A Saturday night project to learn node.js. TwitterTwitterChickenDinner.com picks your Twitter contest winners randomly and most importantly with one click.
The SMTP standard is complicated and crazy. RJBS from Pobox does a good job of scaring anyone thinking of writing an SMTP client or server: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JENdgiAPD6c
...we are the most mature and responsible generation ever

Just because the hipster ideal is more "mature and responsible" than related social movements which preceded it, does not make our generation more mature and responsible than those which preceded it.

Calling our generation "sellers" has negative connotations, as if we 're super-conformists or sth.

Are those negative connotations necessarily unwarranted? For example, is everyone starting their own business and doing their own PR really the most effective way for us to organize ourselves?

We understand that you can change society by not being confrontational

Really? I count OWS, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, etc. among the biggest contributions of our generation. Certainly these are confrontational?

We don't have a dominant mass culture, which means we are open to micro-cultures

Agreed. This is what I admire most about our generation.
It's way more complex than that. The debt includes private and public institutions, and countries from outside Europe.
They do that because you can't think of everything ahead of time, and it's the company's lawyers who write them. Better safe than sorry, as they say. The custom and implicit if not explicit promise is that you do your time, work hard, and get paid. And that trumps the letter of the agreement. Go to a typical startup and ask the people working there if they know what all the language means. In my experience it is the rare exception that someone does. Usually, they are relying on ethical behavior from the founders, and will admit as much if you ask them.

If that language were written for this purpose, you would see people being forced out of their options prior to the one year cliff routinely.

But then, if that were common (or even somewhat likely), options would have literally near-zero value. See the problem? This cannot be the default behavior and make sense as an incentive. It has to be reserved for very rare and special circumstances. And even then, I have trouble thinking up a scenario where you would want to keep the employee but reduce their equity compensation.

Yes, these are agreements between consenting adults. But a contract is only a contract if minds meet. And if one mind is thinking "if I work hard, I'll get paid whatever this stock is worth" and the other is thinking "I'll reduce this guy's payment later if I want to", then you don't really have a meeting of the minds at all, do you? It doesn't matter what the words on the paper say.
The electric Kool-Aid acid test by Tom Wolfe. In a way I feel sorry that we don't have these kind of counter-cultural, non-conformist movements anymore. A hipster just isn't the same as a hippie... Reading this book has been an experience, although I'm not sure what exactly. I guess I'm just "on the bus"!
Lets hope that this douchebag never reads the Linux Kernel source code
I think a far better action than saying "oh no, swear words" would be to ask: what code is apparently causing developers to swear and how can it be fixed?

And for what it's worth, when people are offended by mere words I counter with "I'm offended by censorship", because I am. What is it about certain commonly-censored materials that makes them so special? Why can't a person just change the channel or read something else to avoid uncomfortable material? Also, why are people so much more likely to be angry about swear words (which cause no demonstrable harm), when things that do cause harm (like wars) are more-or-less tolerated silently? Makes you wonder.
Just curious: are there any visually impaired hackers hanging out on HN? I'd be interested to hear what software setup you use.
Early Sketches For The iTunes Logo. Apple ultimately went a different direction
They said that they pay out 68% of what they collect from advertisers. Do vouchers count as money "collected from advertisers"?
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Watch out for the reseller contractually locking up territory or clients, and not selling your product. If it's not an easy sale for them, they may move on to other projects, and you'll miss out on a lot of potential business.

Also, watch out for an agreement that gives you a percentage of the sale price, without specifying a minimum that you'll get. I've seen deals where the reseller negotiated a percent-of-gross deal, and then "gave away" the product to their best customers of other products. You get virtually nothing, and the reseller gets the benefit of your product and the goodwill of their customers (and potentially more sales of another product in their arsenal).
How I triage and fix software issues
Yep, same for me. I've just setup a Linode server today in their London DC.
I think Tim O'Reilly's argument is pretty silly actually. Here's my response: http://bit.ly/v6Adhu (re-printed below).
---

I understand what Tim is saying, but I disagree that it's time to start over.

With Mac OS X, Apple definitely seems to have begun heavily focusing on feature development over refining existing UX. But the claim that successive releases of OS X become more user-hostile and encourages more lock-in is a bit of a stretch.

Apple has never developed for the power user, and they never should -- this is part of what makes their products so great; their unrelenting focus on the common case. In fact, complaining about a hidden library file for Mail.app misses this point entirely. It's actually a wonderful feature, since the common user is more likely to mess up their own mail library than to have a need to move it between disks.

+Tim O'Reilly's second point is valid, though, the UX for emptying the trash can definitely be improved. But again, is the common case deleting 400,000 files? Is the "delete whatever you can checkbox" too odd for a normal user to understand? Let's take the mom example; if your mom emptied the trash after deleting a file, would she want to know if it couldn't be emptied, or would she be OK with it being emptied without her recently deleted file actually being removed?

People can yell for a OS do-over all they want. The fact remains though: Apple focuses on UX more than any other company I know. If that UX doesn't cater to your particular needs and you'd rather have power-user flexibility and features, even if it means less polish and more annoyances when dealing with common tasks, use Linux or Windows. Or, better yet, just learn to use the Terminal and you can have the best of both worlds.
I may be wrong, but I believe Benjamin Franklin had a system similar to this. Except with "daily habits", it was "virtues".

I like the idea, and think it would be even better if you made things simpler for the user. The point of this kind of app would be to get daily input, but the user is their own worst enemy by not entering it every day. So, a nag would make it much better.

Also, your use of Twitter Bootstrap is nice, but I saw that on the Sign Up form you had the "@" prepended before e-mail. I think that is meant for when there is a form to enter a twitter handle.

See here for what I mean: http://cl.ly/2Z3Q1N112x2a3W0C0K3x
Cogratulations to the LaunchRock team. Great product - like the look, feel and ease of use. It will be interesting to see how they fare once monetization begins.
Indeed. See De Broglie's equations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_wave
The Flash Apocalypse hello Corona & HTML5
An idea, a vision, a prototype, a marketing plan, and a reality check
The idea:
Make managing Gift card balances an easy process

The vision:
Create a Mint.com type solution that would allow a single click of a "Refresh" button to update all your Gift card balances in a matter of seconds

The prototype:
http://www.giftcardmate.com - Gift Card Mate

The marketing plan:
Thanksgiving Gift card giveaway to entice people to sign-up to at least try the service (depositing the Gift card prizes to the winning contestant's Gift card mate account).

The reality check:
No matter what your idea, vision, or marketing plan, the consumer is the ultimate test of product viability.

Unfortunately the consumers have spoke since I managed to only sign-up 4 users in the past month and a half. Granted I'm not that good at marketing but I'll chalk this one up as a lesson none-the-less.

Cheers!
Have you seen http://www.plaxo.com/?
Vouchers give you a monetary balance in your account. If bidding on a display network property, they would pay the advertiser.

However, if they're bidding on the search network, Google basically pays itself.
Heh, that's almost exactly how I started: making websites using Frontpage for school. For some reason, we had a really thick Frontpage book lying around at home; I found it fascinating. My designs back in the day involved animated backgrounds, unstoppable music and weird fonts. I even hacked together my own version of @font-face where the visitor would download and install the font manually... Fun times.

It's really reassuring to hear of other people with similar experiences, especially those my age. There is nothing comparable to knowing what you want to do in life and being able to enjoy it immediately.

I really hope you continue to be successful and go on to build many cool things.
Not sure were you get any naivite from my post. It's not like Germany and France decided to create a new currency and a few bystanders hopped on board. It was a very complicated and long process, and yes, the German reunification was at the heart of it, 10 years before the Eurozone actually came into existence. Even the US and Russia played key roles in the process.

I do get where you're coming from though, since Germany and France have been the motors of the EU's economy. Fair enough.

But the original claim from the ancestor was that Germany and France created the Eurozone and others joined later. That's simply factually untrue.

Anyway...
Feynman didn´t write the book himself. It is an edited version of the taped conversations of Feynman with Ralph Leighton.
Leap Pad
Wouldn't run node on windows in production, but it makes it a heck of alot easier for dev work.
I agree with the sentiment of the article. How many of the innovative products coming out of the Valley (for example) address basic needs and problems, versus providing convenience, entertainment value, or just incremental improvements? How many don't involve websites, phones or even the internet? There are a lot of things in the world that need improvement but don't intersect with digital technologies.