skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> His "point" was not clear:

To you perhaps. But others did not seem to have a problem with it. [1]

> PG won't respond to deny this.

I would hazard a guess that pg has better and more fulfilling things to do.

> That was a good and helpful suggestion

> I wrote a good post. The CS community lost out.

> my outline said to 'mathematize' CS. That suggestion is potentially earth shaking

The question is, is there anybody else who thinks so. The only praises, "earth shaking" or otherwise, that your comment got seems to be from you.

> CS profs can struggle on their own to get published without my help.

A delusion of grandeur couldn't be more apparent.

It is bit if of a bummer if in a discussion about CS theory you are not willing to address computability. Yes there are axiomatic basis to probability theory, but the question is: are those axioms sound, if so, then prove it. It will be a huge contribution and will have no trouble getting accepted if its correct.

No first order logic or equivalent and (axiomatic set theory is one) has the power to capture the whole real line. Non-standard analysis is the only one that tries to approach analysis with computable numbers.

Trust me, there is more to CS than real analysis and measure theory. I am sure you have heard of this aphorism about having one hammer and seeing only nails. Gratuitous unsolicited and smug advice that is not germane to the post, that too offered without understanding the field does no one any favors. If you delve into formal methods in CS you will actually encounter a lot of these methods that you are pointing to. Ask any CS theorist and they probably own the two volumes of Feller and will wax eloquently about them.

You are, yet, again extrapolating (to conferences) from your experiences with some journal. You are also contradicting yourself. If I understood you correctly, your main claim was that, what's stopping people from getting published is insufficient grounding in math. Then you give an example of your own submission that was mathematical but met resistance when you tried to publish it in a journal. Do remember journals have lower thresholds and higher acceptance rates than conferences.

1: Often the desire to push yourself on others can get in the way of comprehension.
Getting started with Backbone
I think a good point is to avoid jokes, especially weak ones. They're easy and distract from the original topic(s).
> I sold an old French violin to a buyer in Canada, and the buyer disputed the label.

Any more info about the "disputed" label?
I urge people to think twice before publicizing their UDIDs. Many apps have very serious shortcomings in the way they deal with UDIDs, which means that an attacker armed with your UDID could potentially access accounts and personal information.

See here for some recent examples, looking just at a single industry (social gaming networks):

http://corte.si/posts/security/udid-must-die/index.html

I can tell you with absolute confidence that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Modern Warfare 3 ads don't sanitize war, they reveal game's truth
Before reading this post, a new user should ask him/herself a question: Do I feel a need for validation?

If the answer is yes, go ahead and read the suggestion along with the guidelines of how to act.

If the answer is no, stop reading the suggestion after the first point: "Be yourself."
Given how well integrated Windows Phone and Xbox Live are already, I've got plenty of faith in good integration going forward.
Pitney Bowes trying to compete with ConstantContact
Similar features and prices. Pitney Bowes is a large company with existing relationships that could make a dent.
As a musician, there's something genuinely horrific about the destruction of a musical instrument.

Whether it's the fault of PayPal or not, I really hope whoever has done this gets what they deserve.
I'm actually surprised that the median founder of a venture funded firm only owns ~5% of the company.

Do others' experience confirm this?
"I see no need for "personas""
If you work for a company X and you are posting with your real name, you will somehow represent the company X. Whatever you say on YC is public. Be careful to not damage your company image.
The PD in question also bars people who fall below a given test result threshold.

They seem to seek a "sweetspot" where they're smart enough to be valuable additions to the force and not be easily outsmarted by a average people but not so smart they grow bored and quit thus costing the dept time and money.
The lateness is not that important since phone contracts are up in about 2 years and at the time, people shop for new phones and usually aim for the coolest one as their new phone. Phone markets renew every couple of years but clearly the iphone keeps beating the value(how many iphone's generation 1 do you see on the street?). The iphone was even late to the game but that didn't stop it from taking away the coolness and market of the motorola Razr which everybody wanted and had back then.

Another factor is the Windows phone, Android and iPhone have about the same initial and per month cost. Roughly the same price but All 3 give very different values back in terms of apps,feature,ease of use. Coping with the downsides or nuances is also a 2 year commitment so unless an option is clearly way ,way better, people will stick with an iPhone or go back.

With pcs it's a different ballpark. A macbook feels nicer than a generic Acer notebook, but one costs $1,500 and the other $499. The phones are all around $199 and plans are about 70 bucks a month. Even if the phone is "free" the per month payment is the same.

Also the iPhone sets a standard of experience which still is unmatched. If I drove a mercedez, then switched to an Acura and didn't like it as much, it doesn't mean either is bad. Acura is awesome, but I might miss the feeling,driving, status,smell, etc and hold the Acura up the Mercedez standards. Windows phone is stuck in an unconfortable situation where it doesn't give way greater value to an iphone user but doesn't cost way less either to make it into other emerging markets and grab marketshare from somewhere else.
You might just be ambidextrous with a strong right hand. My strong hand is the left, but besides more complex things like writing I can also do pretty much everything with my right hand without having to train.
Yes, when JC Penney was discovered to have purchased links through the actions of a third-party, and said hey, it was the contractors fault, Google immediately say "Oh, that's OK, no reason to penalize you."

Oh, wait. They didn't. They slapped a ranking penalty on the company, because ultimately it was JC Penney's responsibility.

Google did participate in a blog for payola situation. The fact that it employed third parties that got it involved in that doesn't magically excuse it from potential penalties.

This wasn't some "rogue" contractor that just did whatever it wanted. This was an agency Google hired, which in turn worked with another agency, that ran this campaign. These companies were engaged by Google.

Did Google expect this type of mess? No. Should Google have been watching for it? Absolutely. Either no one at Google bothered to fully examine the final and promised work product or they did and were dumb enough to let this go forward. Neither speaks well about this case.

And to date, I still haven't gotten Google or the agency to provide more specifics about what was expected or promised. That generally isn't a positive sign.

I think someone at Google got a pitch about doing some viral blogging thing to promote Chrome. They probably decided cool, go for it. They probably didn't examine exactly what was going to happen. They almost certainly didn't plan to buy links or have garbage content be produced. There almost certainly wasn't some evil plot to do all this.

But that's not the point. The point is that this did happen, by a company that when others do this, passes out penalties against them, regardless of the excuses. That's why it's an important story, and I'm sorry that's lost on you. It's not lost on many other people.

Including Google, by the way. That's why Google's own spam team has penalized Google Chrome's page.
New Zealand's no #swpatents stance is attracting companies looking to relocate
Or you could write the applications for the systems they will run on. Why develop in the latest Ubuntu with Python 2.7 when you know your company runs RHEL 5 or SUSE with Python 2.4?

I know it was annoying how long RHEL lasted with Python 2.4, but now the latest RHEL, Debian-stable, and Ubuntu LTS all have Python 2.6, so write to Python 2.6 if your company uses those OSs, there's not excuse to write incompatible code targeted at Python 2.7.

In many Linux distributions it is impossible to replace the Python version, core parts of the OS like package management will break. It is possible to install another version in parallel and use "virtualenv --python=" to use it for an application. If you are using RHEL/CentOS 5 you can install the python26 package from the EPEL repository.
you can live a reasonably cheap life in new york--live in brooklyn/queens/nj, make food at home or eat in one of the three chinatowns, etc.

the expenses add up when you live in manhattan (probably $1k/month minimum depending on neighborhood), go out to eat and drink, and, essentially, exist. every time you walk outside you can deduct like $20 from your bank account.
Sarno's book is a… difficult read for a person inclined to think rationally.

I recommend reading the entire contents of conquerrsi.com (gone, but still accessible on archive.org), thinking about that while your read sarno.
If you could imagine designing Postgres to be more enjoyable and productive to use in the earlier stages, what would you want?
ok i see. Well if the idea is play with others then creating a lobby with usernames/chat idea should be considered and a "play now" button leading the user to another screen showing hosted games (with host names).
A point system should also be considered like win: +5 points loose/forfeit: -3 points
Not even in a small claims court?
You sound angry now. Imagine how angry you'll be when you lose your internet tough-guy lawsuit.

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-c...

10.1 b Further, if you lose a SNAD Claim because we, in our sole discretion, reasonably believe the item you sold is counterfeit, you will be required to provide a full refund to the buyer and you will not receive the item back (it will be destroyed). PayPal Seller protection will not cover your liability.
For what it's worth, the AFLCIO doesn't list themselves in their list. Their CEO, Richard Trumka, makes over $300K/year... More than 5x the average worker, and he got a $50K raise in the past 3 years while his memberships incomes lagged.

How much does the Economic Policy Institute pay him to be on the board of directors?

How much is his net worth?

How is it possible that the AFL/CIO represents their membership, when 100% of 2010 political contributions went to Democrats, and none to Republicans? It's not even statistically possible that it MIGHT be representative.
(source : http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgot.php?cmte=C00003806... )
Yeah. I'm selling some old stuff on eBay, using money to buy newer stuff, drawing the difference from the bank when the PayPal balance is not enough. Repeat.

After not even two cycles of this, I get an email from PP saying:

> Starting MM/DD/YYYY, money from payments you receive will be placed in a pending balance for up to 21 days. By doing this, we're making sure that there's enough money in your account to cover potential refunds or claims. [...] We reviewed your account and determined that there's a relatively higher than average risk of future transaction issues (such as claims, or chargebacks, or payment reversals). We understand that it may be inconvenient to have your payments temporarily held but please know that we didn't make this decision lightly.

That's right. You didn't make this decision lightly. You made it out of greed. You're simply looking for ways to keep my money longer than necessary in order to accrue interest, or whatever. How is this legal? It's my money.

Fortunately, I noticed that selling stuff on Amazon is not too different from eBay. So I'm thinking to move my transactions to Amazon and stop using PayPal altogether.
This actually happens frequently here in Vienna.

There are quite a large number of Slovak students and assistants at my university.

It is also common for Viennese to use the Bratislava airport instead of Wien Schwechat because of the lower airport charge.

Those two cities are only a half an hour drive apart from each other. We now even use the same currency.
Plausible, but would Google accept the same excuse from another company facing enforcement action for buying outlinks?
some of the best elements of RoR (gems/bundles)

I program in Ruby a lot, have done for a long time, and love it, but I've also lost weeks (months?) of my life to fighting gem interdependency problems and watching 'bundle install'. It's almost certainly my least favourite part of the job.

That's not to denigrate the efforts that go into RubyGems, Bundler, etc. - they're doing a good job, and they make life much easier than it would be without them, but in some ways they're playing with a lousy hand for historical reasons that are too late to change now.

I'm largely ignorant of Symfony2, but I hope it's learning from the flaws of the RubyGems ecosystem as well as its strengths.
it's legal because PayPal is technically not a bank.
It's called small claims court. Just take Pay Pal there, and win the $2500 plus costs.
I have an experience with one of those "Bad Incubators" the analysis is spot on.

- We all met weekly for presentations, half the advisors knew what was going on the other half did not. Right before demo day the other half of the advisors were shocked that we had pivoted and planned on selling our OLD idea. Those same people then pitched our OLD idea to the few investors as a possible pivot, which was a huge WTF.

- They brought more politicians then investors to the demo day presentation.

- The investors they did bring focused on healthcare companies and companies further along(profitable, paying customers, large user bases etc)

- The entire operation was paid for by a single guy, who subsequently was the only investor in most of the companies in their "Accelerator" round.

- Most of the companies accepted had non-technical founders/co-founders. Most of the companies could not even launch a product, yet alone MPV, in 3 months because of this, and some had trouble launching a product after 1 year.

Overall we turned down money from their "Accelerator" which ended up being a great decision. If you are going to use an incubator make sure to heed the advice this article gives.
If I'm using Django, I really like django-compressor[1].

If I'm using Flask, I really like Flask Assets[2].

[1] - http://django_compressor.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.htm...

[2] - http://flask-assets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html
I would sue PayPal in small claims court.
That's pretty dumb. Your account could be compromised for spam purposes, or someone could easily start posting things as you.

Because your full name, personal domain (which includes your last name), college, and interests are all part of your profile, it would be fairly trivial to post some pretty embarrassing comments or links as you. Then if someone (potential employer/girlfriend/family member/etc) does a google search for Zachary Maril, and a bunch of links to racist or pornographic sites come up... "my password is public" is a pretty lousy excuse.
tl;dr

At this stage, our business is preparing to move to New Zealand once it is clear that software patents are invalid there.
We are a company of six highly talented people, including mining engineers, a mathematical physicist, and myself (computer scientist).
Our company is growing, and we are going to have to hire more people this year.
I guess there's going to be a lot of counterfeit Roman-era coins that will have to be melted down for scrap!
Next week: counterfeit kitten claims lead to international PR disaster for Paypal.
To answer a couple of questions:

1. $2500 is a mid grade violin. I have a 100yo Czech violin that is worth $250. Sears specials for Jr. High students can cost $100.

2. The seller is right that the Label doesn't qualify as intentional counterfeiting. My Czech violins says its a Strad. This is extremely common, and should be taken more like a 'inspired by' tag--unless of course the maker is reputable enough to place their own tags.

It seems to me that the problem is paypal's definition of counterfeit shouldn't be expanded to cover objects where you truly need an expert to determine the counterfeit status. Knockoff rolexes are on thing, but at least from the post, it seems they are taking the buyers word, and don't understand the nature of violin labels.

Also, isn't PayPal owned by eBay? Aren't there thousands or even tens of thousands of counterfeit items littered across eBay?
I don't think he's contemplating suing Paypal, but rather the fellow who destroyed the violin.

I don't know if such an act would be legally viable, but it certainly seems morally reasonable to me.
Then the law is wrong.

I mean, let's drop the literal-mindedness for a second. It's my money. They are holding it hostage. I want it back. They should not be allowed to do this.

Still nothing wrong with the situation, in your opinion?
Sullivan keeps saying some form of this:

There’s no reason to talk about payment based on Google PageRank unless you expressly care about link juice. It is Google’s own measure of the ability for a page to pass along link juice.

That's not strictly true. PageRank is equally an indication of net inlink significance. Also, both in its original incarnation and via all the black-box tweaks since (like weighting by actual clickstream data), it is highly correlated with overall visits/'eyeballs'.

So you could rationally be interested in a site's PageRank even if you were just doing a branding/reach-the-most-readers campaign, and truly were ambivalent about outlinks/link-juice. It's a strong proxy for total viewership.
An example of an untenable choice is say skipping a meal a week so your kid gets to see the doctor.

Losing your cable TV is not one, especially in this day and age of Netflix and AppleTV/Roku direct sports channels.
- Don't be discouraged at first to post if you don't think you're "following the guidelines". We all get downvoted from time to time. Especially when people first get active.

- Discussions are almost always value add. Even if you adamantly oppose someone else's position. Gaining perspective is a huge value add for me personally.
I'm sooo sick of this constant windows phone analysis that doesn't address the two most important points:

1 - They were stupidly late to market

2 - Both the Windows brand and Microsoft's imagine are at best mehh..at worse very uncool and bad.

#1 is important because Microsoft simply doesn't set the [consumer] agenda any more. I don't think they've realized this. And until they do, they are just gonna keep being behind ([good] tablets).

#2 is important because if you don't realize how tarnished your brand is, you're royally screwed.

It doesn't matter how great your product is if it comes years too late. And it doesn't matter how great your product is if people have written you off already. Combine the two...come on, the thing has no chance.
When your money is in PayPal's hands, it's technically theirs because they are not a financial institution. Your money is not insured or protected in any way other than how PayPal deems appropriate. They are not liable for anything, unlike a bank. So it's not only illegal at all (perhaps immoral but hey), it's also perfectly OK because _you_ agreed to their terms of use when you opened an account with them.
FB Connect fails due to syntax error.
It's actually a valid point, but you would never get that impression from this article.

Ars Technica did a much better job of summarizing what makes WP7 "great" and how that greatness repels hardware makers and carriers: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/12/is-windows-pho...
I never understood why people lurked so long.

As a long-time lurker, I mainly visit HN to get exposed to new ideas that I know little about. This is why I don't (and shouldn't) comment very often.
While I, too, found that part intriguing, the article mentions that the guy has been working as a prison guard since being rejected. Could be that he just wanted to make money by being a police officer and that department missed out on a great hire. Not to mention the fact that the nature of the work can definitely change as long as they're promoting from within.
We're about to enter an incubator program (Startup Chile) and I have no idea what their funding rate is. I'm guessing that less than %50 of the startups get funded, certainly by VCs, within 6 months, mainly because Startup Chile supports very early stage companies.

I think the number funded is much, much less than that, and not just because they are funding early stage companies:
http://hervalicio.us/post/14915671294/on-startup-chile

Good luck - I hope your experience is better than that.
Phones are always about the carrier. Apple understood that when they started off with AT&T. Then, they showed people what a well executed smartphone can look like.

Android also looked after the carriers, as the author had pointed out, by flooding market with choices. The presence of these "choices" overload the consumer, making them forget about choosing carriers.

Microsoft, meanwhile, tried to persuade people that the phones they own are like the PCs they own. I don't think this will necessarily gel. The reason is I still can use my PC when internet is down, but my phone is a brick if it can't communicate with the network.
* people shop for new phones and usually aim for the coolest one as their new phone. *

I think you're discounting the invested value of apps. I've probably got about $400 worth of paid-for apps on my iPhone. The Windows phone might be the "coolest", but my migration cost is far greater than just the hardware cost to get back to a similarly useful handset.

Android seems to have more free apps, and less overall selection. It might be easier to switch from Android to Windows phone than iPhone to Windows phone.
In spite of your belligerence in this thread, you appear to be somewhat rational. No offense intended, but why is it that you can't tell that you're coming off as a crank? And by "crank", I mean somebody who has very high self-esteem but a seemingly very large chip on their shoulder when it comes to academia and research.
funny, its almost exactly what we do. we price 110€/h remote, 140€/hour onsite and we only do time and material.

After working in this space for many years this is still a problem to 'sell' to many customers in our space (entrepreneurs (especially 1st time) and startups building web applications). Many people still think in terms of "how much this project will cost with this exact but not-really specified feature-set and deadlines".

There is this expectation for a consultant to assume the business and development risks.

Recently I think I found the explanation that seems to 'click'. When a client comes to us their primary problem is not having sufficient in-house r&d capacity and thats the exact problem that we can solve.

If they had the in-house r&d capable of delivering the project most wouldn't be looking for any outside help.

But with the in-house team no business risks would go away, scope and budget would still have to be tightly managed.

The fact that instead of the internal r&d team an outside company is handling the development will not somehow magically remove the risks from the picture.

and the fact that client would happily use in-house team means that removing those risks was never the real need.