skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Pascal's Wager isn't comparable here for a number of reasons. You're probably thinking of the reasoning some people give that a finite but humongous expected payoff justifies a finite but minuscule probability. I would agree that's a pretty stupid reason to do things; if it's worth doing there are probably better reasons.

2. It's not a guarantee, has anyone ever said it is? Hence my own estimate of at least 5%. (I believe I originally got that figure in my head back from http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/break-cryonics-down.ht... -- I don't think it's an unreasonable one.) It's still a better shot than being buried or cremated and worth it given the low prices available today.

3. I look forward to being shocked. I'm not going to touch your horrid comment that death is somehow necessary for progress.

4. Cryonics is a pretty poor business to be in if you're a charlatan. Where are you getting that vibe from?

While remembering that old post I linked I also found this comment I thought I'd share from a "Luke" ( http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/cryonics-as-charity.ht... ):

Cryophobia is pure evil. It makes people choose death instead of cryonics. It makes cryonics more of a struggle for those who are not wealthy; it deprives the poor of the scaling effects that would make it affordable. It deprives those who are courageous enough to try it of their dignity and attacks their character unjustly and without evidence. It splits up families. It diminishes the chance of the technology working to 5% of its potential. It is unfair to AIDS and cancer victims who must die an early death permanently because of this. It misrepresents facts, repeatedly, while masquarading as skepticism. It has no shame, no decency, and no honor.
Don't; put it to work for you by investing it instead. At current interest rates you could double your money within mere decades.
A new purchasing pattern
Look what showed up in my Cellbrite today (Verizon indirect agent here)
are you trying to do a clinton by using "am"? can you unequivocally say "i was not a zendesk paid blogger"?
As for the gender stuff: I think it's actually fairly common for men to react negatively to me in part simply because I am female. Here and now is probably not the time to start publicly navel gazing in that regard. I'm short of sleep. I need to be in to work early. Blah blah blah.

As for my personal troubles, I just need about $75,000 to clean up my financial mess and start my life over elsewhere. Thinking of taking up a collection. Donations or assistance spreading the word or what not are very welcome. It's really a drop in the bucket compared to what my medical condition is supposed to cost to treat. And it feels very unfair that the unconventional approach I took, which was both so much more effective and so much cheaper than conventional treatments, is simply not covered by the state aid, federal aid, charities, and insurance that would help cover conventional treatments. It bites.

Take care.
Euro Remains in Limbo.
Although Siri is what it is, (i.e. seemingly great for some and disappointing for others)
Apple don't really have a history of selling perfected technology out of the gate.(At all honestly)
They do however have an excellent record of delivering software changes that enhance and add value to already purchased hardware. It's why it's a no brainer to buy an apple product, with very few exceptions: you are safe knowing that Apple have a plan and a pathway for the device you've already purchased, it will get better, more featured and ultimately rebirth the product again and again.

So with this ideology I bought a mac, and each OS X update brings something interesting and new to my computer, so I bought an iPhone and each update brings a larger set of features and refinements that I enjoy.

This is why I stopped buying nokia phones and dell computers. With those devices I always knew that the best day of each of those products was the day I opened them, after that it was a downhill slide to the garbage bin.

So, yes I use Siri, and being based in Australia I haven't been able to do business searches, but I've found so many opportunities where it's been a saving grace. I don't need to be annoyed by siri, because I know more capabilities are coming in 2012 and with it being an apple product, there are likely to be further developments past the beta tag.
I was just thinking about this. In a nutshell, I was a pretty smart kid, when I first started being taught math nobody believed I didn't "just know" things like multiplication tables. When I got things wrong, they thought I was acting out because I was "bored", and I was constantly punished.
Atomic Units for a Company
What I learnt at University
Gowalla is Going to Facebook [attn: Foursquare]
Your App doesn't need to suffer SSL's problems
They weren't licensing anything. They were relying on DMCA safe harbor provisions to protect them from infringement suits. The problem is that the executive e-mail indicates plain as day that they were ineligible for that safe harbor in at least two ways: they knew of and were profiting from infringement.

Who could have guessed that basing a business on copyright infringement might get you sued for copyright infringement?
20 Best Startups of 2011
Goodbye Gowalla
Google can be used as a graphic calculator
Whether or not you trust the person is irrelevant, if it's not privileged information (i.e. to your lawyer + some other definitions) it could always be found later on during discovery.
How did Universal get GrooveShark's internal emails?
No, it's for real. I'm European, and this is a big reason why I prefer living in the US, people are more positive here. Of course, there are negatives to that, from hypocrisy to overconfidence to simple avoidance of unpleasant realities, but there are trade-offs wherever you go. I personally prefer the US approach, but likewise there must be many American people that would find Europe offers a better match for their work style.

tl;dr the differences are real, but the significance of these is subjective.
Part of the reason a lot of users are running the latest OS is that Apple sells twice as many devices each successive generation and the last three generations (including the current) run the latest OS.

Getting the last few percent of users to upgrade (assuming their devices support it) will be even easier now that iOS has PC-free software updates.
Of course, this was exactly my point -- grandfather implied that math is universally dull and boring, which I don't agree with.
Hyperdimensional Gateways
Go find alternative distribution channels.

Have you tried walking into local head shops and asking them if they'd stock it? If so, find out who their main distributors are, and go talk to them.

How about running banner ads on 4chan (http://www.4chan.org/advertise)? Are there other websites with similar audiences and lack of censorship?
HN Poll: Demographics, Are you a Dev, Hustler, Biz Dev, Casual Reader, Etc?
I'm really curious to see what the demographics of the Hacker News community is and I figured a lot of us are also curious to see how the community is broken out. Obviously, this isn't a perfect poll but it gives us an idea of what we are as a group. So the following are the rules:

There are two polls:

1. Are you employed by someone?

2. Are you self-employed? (Working solely on your own startup, an independent contractor, you have your own company?)

Rules:
1. Please only select one category below even though you're amazing and can do everything! (Developer, hustler, business development, marketing, lawyer, accountant, design or casual reader.)

2. Pick the SINGLE or ONE OPTION that is your greatest strength objectively.

3. Select whether you are self-employed or employed.<p>Thanks and please upvote!!
Developer (Front, Back, Sys Admin, etc - Anything Technology)
Hustler (A person who doesn't have a skill that is easily categorized but is tenacious)
Business Development (Generates sales or deals, brings in business, rainmakers)
Marketing (Advertising, adwords, facebook ads, campaigns, youtube and etc.)
Lawyer (Legal... self explanatory)
Accountant (Accounting and Tax)
Design (Graphic artists, UX/UI and etc)
Casual Reader (You're just here to read about stuff casually and nothing above fits)
Self-Employed (Working on your own startup, independent contractor, or own your own business)
Employed (You receive wages from an employer)
This seems similar to the VP-Tree, which there was a post about a few days ago, except that VP-Trees use binary partitioning because they're measuring similarity in a continuous space, while these ones use discrete buckets because similarity is measured discretely.
Web Development Problems
Yeah was thinking of going t-bills. Either that, or ETF.
Ah, very interesting, thanks for replying!

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "permanent write-protection"? Is that to prevent code being overwritten? If so, that is just one possible attack.

Does LuaJIT implement techniques to mitigate heap spray attacks and heap inspection problems? JS engines work against that by initializing things like typed arrays to 0, and by overwriting objects when they are free'd. These have a runtime cost though, I'm curious if LuaJIT incurs it as well.

Regarding maintainability, your handwritten interpreter in assembly is not something I would expect other people to easily get up to speed on. The JS engine codebases are more approachable IMHO.
Fair enough.

I do plan on adding additional data sources, but the data that this source provides is pretty unique.

Not so much filling holes in someone else's product, but rather using the same data to build a competing product.

Fun times ahead!
Advanced Web Core
I have iOS 4.3.x on my iPhone 3G and it stutters compared to iOS 3 at the same time. So much so that when I got my iPhone 4S I noticed how much the iPhone 3G lagged and stuttered that I no longer use it, even as a simple iPod.
These questions are so easy. Half of them are so basic that you do not even need to think before you do some kind of multiplication or addition. An adult cannot do ANY of these??? I call bullshit on at least part of the article.
Quick And Easy Tips For Better Internet Network Marketing
I actually really like the style of the writing and think this would make a good introduction for beginners, but I'd request the profanity and adult stuff be removed or toned down - so that it doesn't turn off others
I thought the content of you comment was interesting (and sounds like interviewing with you might be pretty cool), but the tone was really harsh and unlikely to spark any interesting conversation. Something like this might have worked a bit better:

"It's not the language that matters when looking for a job, it's important that you convince me you know what you're talking about. Show me something I didn't know, then convince me it's worth knowing. Demonstrate you know big 'O' notation (and maybe even tell me how little 'o' and \omega are different). Draw me a binary search tree. Show me how a skip list works. Fill in a multithreaded producer / consumer skeleton and get it correct, then make it fast. Explain how UTF-8 works from first principles (i.e. what's wrong with ASCII? How would you fix it? Now how do you optimise the answer?)

Python and Ruby are both trendy right now, and interesting in their own right, but we don't write anything in either language and likely never will. The underlying technical/CS understanding is not only more important, but common to almost all problems."
>The reality is that in the US death and dying are still anathema.

And thus with the help of the law people are made to live as long as it is possible even when they don't want to. I'm afraid that when the policy is reversed, people would be "encouraged" to quit as soon as possible (and being afraid of such reversal the society clings to the current policy).

Somehow the society just can't understand the simple thing that the decision to quit or stay is personal and not for the society to make/enforce either way.
Apple hasn't left a device behind since the iPhone 3G, and those devices are a minuscule proportion of the userbase.

No doubt they'll start doing this to the 3GS et al at some point, but Apple still sells the 3GS right now so it will probably be quite some time before it stops getting OS updates. I think that is the case of devices that don't support the latest OSes, they can be ignored, and newer devices losing out on hypothetical future OSes is a bridge which can be crossed when it happens.
I'm currently in this position, but it's more due to an industry (TV) than anything else.

If anyone knows how to do a kiosk mode across two monitors so one webpage can control two monitors, I'd love for you to get in touch. :)
The email says "we use the label’s songs", "the data we got from them", "we pay them".

This suggests they were getting the label's data from the label and paying the label.

That seems like a license to me.
I would expect the highly driven, world-class talent to have moved on swiftly after completing their grad program, if RIM's failures go all the way up.

You can be a technically brilliant engineer, but if you have a horrible sense of business/intuition, it's still possible to 'maroon' yourself at a stagnating company. There's a lot to be said for the "safe" option.
Probably not much. Unless you have a provider which loves bruteforce approach of nat handling (callcentric forces a refresh every 70 seconds or so, resizes the window based on some behaviours), then you can be ok with around 2 packets every 10 minutes. If your connection is already live (email check takes much more traffic), then you shouldn't see much difference in usage.
[Developers] Tool - Validate iTunes In App Purchase Receipt Code
That's the problem. When these statements come up in court documents, they are never put in context. You're just left up on the stand mumbling about how everyone else is misinterpreting your words.
The Future of Technology Isn’t Free
My beef with things like this is not with the concept, but the way it is used. 'Does our call center add value to our product?' is an entirely reasonable question. 'Value-add' as a noun is a big red flag for me, suggesting the speaker has a poor grasp of the underlying concept and/or is trying to overstate the significance of the issue to seem more important. I feel the same when someone uses 'dialog' as a verb.
Presumably they were given access to them during discovery for the lawsuit, per standard practice.
Echo on voip connections is very often the issue of service provider. If you get echo on some destinations more than others, try reporting it (to google in this case) - maybe they can tweak the handling of some interconnects.
AU+UK Universities Relaxing IP Rules to Encourage Commercialsiation
Make sure you teach the "tricks". Those are amusing. I'm sure you can find a bunch online.

For example, a trick to multiplying by 9: hold up all 10 fingers, and then put down the one that matches what you are multiplying. The answer is the number of fingers still up (appending the count of those to the left of the down finger to the count of those to the right).

Example in ASCII Art: 9 x 4:

! ! ! . ! ! ! ! ! !
left hand right hand

4th finger is down. 3 up on the left side, 6 up on the right. 9 x 4 = 36.

Edit: Here's a link: http://listverse.com/2007/09/17/10-easy-arithmetic-tricks/
Think of the internet like the roads here in the US. Once you connect up "your" road to any of the other roads that are connected together, you can drive pretty much anywhere that also has a road.

At its core, "The Internet" is equal parts CenturyLink, Telecom Italia, Verizon, Sprint, TeliaSonera, NTT, Deutsche Telekom, Level 3, Tata, and AT&T. Following my above example, all of these companies have really big freeways that are all interconnected. If your road, or the bigger road you connected to, connects to one of these major freeways, you can be confident that you can reach any destination that also has a road. If Verizon were to disconnect its freeways from Sprint, the Internet would be "broken."
The 4th “R” to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Repurpose your old Electronics
Chants of 'Putin's a Thief' Ring Out in Moscow
Taste of home soup video
CSS is almost too flexible to be able to stick to some sort of convention. I find myself trying to code in one style, and then doing it differently or disliking it on a different project.

I try to make some of it self-documenting, so will only class out a particular element then, through CSS, enforce a strict order of child elements by using the direct descendant/sibling selectors, etc. I'll usually include the element hierarchy in the definition where necessary. But then I don't like it because there's so much repetition.

body > header { ... }
body > header > h1 { ... }
body > header > h1 + small { ... }

Or

div#sidebar > form#login-form input,
div#sidebar > form#login-form select
{ ... }

Why is there nothing (without Less/Sass/some other package) like

div#sidebar > form#login-form (
input, select { ... }
label { ... }
)

That KSS attempts to better document CSS is great, and I'll certainly look into that more. But in some ways I think the difficulty comes from CSS itself being pretty flat when a DOM tree is anything but. And for the sake of easy re-use and documentation, sometimes you'd rather not just have a huge list of styled classes and IDs to wade through when you really don't need that many.
As I said in the other thread, there are two patterns, one is a Delegate pattern (IOS) where draw method lookup per pixel coordinate is trivial, and the other is a listener pattern, where view layout, composition and superposition is trivial. One is easy 98% of the time and super hard 2% of the time (iOS) and the other is relatively slow all the time but with much more potential for cross-process interactions.

In Android, you can have a translucent popups from App#1 appear on top of any sort of screen of App#2. You can't have this on iOS. At all.

On the other hand, animations and scrolling are blazing fast on iOS without any need for superior hardware.

I honestly believe that this alone explains the "lacking" in performance that Android suffers from: it targets super high-end multi-core devices, with JIT compilers and optimizers that don't exist yet, in order to allow functionalities that are unclear to everyone of us.

Shameless plug: I made an app (1) that illustrates what iOS will never be able to do. The question is, will anyone ever need that sort of app on their phone?

(1) https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fairyteller.linkpr...
The e-mail implies that their plan was to knowingly infringe for months/years before negotiating a license.

They could then use the data gained from (infringing) streaming/uploads as a bargaining chip while negotiating the license.
This is a neat feature. A good alternative is to use Wolfram Alpha [0]

[0]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/
I think the better question is, why specify fonts at all?

I set fonts in my browser. When browsing any site that simply leaves fonts alone, everything looks the way I want it to! When sites tinker with the font used by most text, it is unnecessarily hard to fix (e.g. my style sheet has to list all kinds of HTML tags where text may appear and include lots of "!important" flags).

I can understand setting a fancy font for the odd title or something, but all the text on the page? Why?

For what it's worth, this is my entire override stylesheet for HN, including some tweaks to the home page that I think make it substantially more readable. I recommend trying it. :)

html {
overflow-y: scroll;
}

body, p, table, th, td, a, .comment {
font-family: "Helvetica Neue" !important;
font-size: normal;
padding: 0.2em;
}

.subtext {
width: 100%;

padding-left: 40%;

padding-bottom: 0.6em;
border-bottom: solid #ccc 0.1em !important;
}
MLM Sponsoring Through Good Communication Part I
You can also get a plain old bring-your-own-phone pay by the month plan from T-Mobile for $30/month that gives you 100 minutes of voice, unlimited texts, and sorta-unlimited data (1st 5GB at 4G and then it degrades)
I think for programmers a keyboard which projects a screen should be a better idea than a screen which projects a keyboard.
Do Not Give to The Salvation Army | Never Thought To Question Why
I voted it down because it's an "argument from authority" and I found it slightly pretentious. It was also ironic, considering your other comment today defining "argumentum ad verecundiam". I didn't really like Kalid's statement either, but left it alone.

As you say, you are echoing a principle (which verges on a platitude), but not adding a lot to the discussion unless we are willing to trust your expertise without examples. Had you combined it with your more detailed followup, I wouldn't have felt this way.

I'm not really defending my vote, just explaining my thought process since you were asking. If it helps, I've evened out my actions up by upvoting this question.
Just curious: What functional languages would you find more difficult to learn than Haskell?
Oops, meant to reply to Cushman, who has no contact info in his profile.
OK danssig, -- to sum up this garbage:

I took one of your lies and insults (that you had made any "points" I couldn't answer) and you only had more insults and lies.

Enough.

Seriously, some advice -- it is common for some to let out steam by being an asshole to people on the Internet, but your lies and insults doesn't seem like healthy behavior. You should check if you need professional help with whatever ails you.
tl;dr

Successful man fails 10th grade standardized test, concludes that success is not correlated with being able to do math.

Aside from the obvious logical/statistical falacy of making an overreaching conclusion from a sample size of one, and various other illogical claims("if this guy doesn't need math, why does anyone??") this article assumes that the purpose of education is developing vocational skills.

Why should that be? Kids should learn to appreciate the world, get exposure to different things. There's no reason to make them hunker down at age 5 and start preparing for their future careers. If they don't like math, that's fine. Likewise for history, science, whatever. But it's a shame for anyone to miss out on the beauty inherent in all of these subjects.
WolframAlpha has slightly more sophisticated graphing calculator functionality: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sin%28x%29%2B1%2F2+sin%...
My clock radio has an internal battery that lets the clock and alarm operate even when unplugged. Presumably it recharges. How are consumers going to even realize that such a battery exists, when throwing the device in the trash? Are they to be expected to disassemble the device and remove the battery?
I don't really know whether to lend any credence to these kinds of rumours that tend to crop up, but it's a bit of a punch to the gut, if the iPad really is slated for a mid-year release instead of March, as I was hoping and expecting.

At the very least, the article opened my eyes to the possibility that we might not get an iPad in late Q1 to early Q2.
I work on apps every day and I always recommend supporting 3.2 and higher. There are relatively few "necessity" api's in anything above that and there is another much simpler way of blocking out the older devices if you need to. Set the opengles flag to 2.0 and higher, this will automatically cut out all of the older devices while not punishing people who just don't upgrade.

Don't kid yourself that instapapers numbers are fully correct as Josh mentions as they are Sku'd because his app is built to work best with iPad and therefore all OS's will be higher. iPad is also owned by more tech savvy people and thus they are more likely to upgrade.

If you are making a simple app which has a nice interface always aim for lowest common denominator. If you are making a 3D game cut your losses and use the tech of opengles 2.0, if you are somewhere in between, always aim for LCD and you can always put your OS up if need be.