skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Comparing Daring Fireball to Winsupersite is interesting. Every time a DF article is posted, there are many, many comments that are negative about Gruber. So clearly, it is posible for an author and site to beintensely disliked by a sizeable portion of HN readers but not get banned.

As you said, it is possible that stories in the past were flagged. And? Does that etablish that the stories flagged in the past were flagged by so-called fanboys? No, only that stories in the past were flagged.

Likewise, you say yourself that moderators may be killing the stories by hand. How is this evidence of so-called fanboys?

There are other possibilities: The HN software may have detected voting rings. What if a bunch of people were submitting stories and voting them onto the front page? Maybe the fanboys were actually pro-Winsupersite!!!

Again, we just don't know, and these arguments seem to come down to "People are flagging/banning stuff I like, so there must be fanboys at work, because any rational person would agree with my views."

Friend, many of my own posts get flagged or banned and I don't take it personally or think of the flaggers in opproprious terms. Shrug this one off. We don't know the whole story, why construct explanations for what we observe in a negative light?
Writes always go both locally and to the server unless told otherwise, yes.
Edit: That's strange, about 998 being absent. What follows is definitely nonsense:

Don't really have time to think about this, but you can sort of generate the sum (ie by looking at the pattern) with

(1/1000) * sum i * 1000^-i , i = 0 to infinity

You could try and do a sum of a sum of geometric series and make it work

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+i+*+1000%5E-i%2C+i%...

(998001 / 2997 = 3)
How to become a hacker (2005)
Right I agree, asking someone to drag you along through there thought process while they are trying to solve problem is not natural. It's akin to saying, hey give a public speech while you are writing an algorithm. How many times do we here people say hold on I am concentrating. Most people opt to solve a problem, refine it, and then say OK here is what I did, now that I have had time to think about it and write it down.
طعن موظفة من قلنسوة والشرطة تحقق
And you could substitute "Hollywood" for any other industry out there. Isn't this just how the business world rolls?
You don't need patents to create and execute big ideas. As a company or anything else.

As I said, this is a dream (and a pretty silly one at that). I can still hope though
So we're missing 998 here in actuality ?
Ha! To go further, we need an AI website which combines ITFT with analysis of Flippa's "Just Sold" section, thereby generating ideas for startups which are likely to sell.
You may play with the Champernowne constant :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant
Car traffic fundamentally isn't scalable in urban areas. The only failure on the part of city planners is attempting to accomodate that kind of selfish, wasteful behavior.
Thanks for posting. I'm trying to keep a collection of these type of things so that when she's ready, it'll be another tool to get/keep my daughter excited about math.
RetroPsychoKinesis Experiments Online
It will only sync it when connectivity is restored if explicitly done so, yes.

Atm our users trigger syncs manually, but we're planning to move to PhoneGap network events as triggers for syncs.
Really?
We are in a absolute computing revolution. Never before has small teams or individuals had access to so much cheap, available computation. We can spin up vast compute resources in seconds and tackle huge problems. Just a couple of years ago this was only possible as part of a huge corporate team.

The cloud and dirt cheap embedded and mobile systems will make computers truly ubiquitous for the first time. It is interesting that we now run the same platforms and code on tiny embedded devices and the cloud. The web is finally turning into the broad platform we hoped it would. All of this is truly empowering.

On the language front we have wonderful new ways to express ourselves. Functional programming and constructs like Actors, STM and nosql data stores allow us to scale properly for the first time (See Scala and Akka).

The only limit is our imagination.
For x < 1, 1 + 2x + 3x^2 + 4x^3 + ... converges to 1/(1-x)^2. When x = 0.001, you get 1/.999^2 = 1000000/998001 = 1.002003004005...
Corporate American seems to be headed far in the other direction. People seem to be more interested in being friends with everyone (while talking about them behind their back) than doing great work. Any kind of confrontation is seen as a serious issue.
Two-step authentication with Django
The evolution of Risk (the board game)
There's no 998 (and it's not a rounding issue)!

... 995 996 997 999
Why would they ruin their reputation by selling their email marketing company to a spammer, scammer or worse? They would have to be very careful when choosing the buyer - might be more hassle than its worth.

Also, they have a product called Postmark in the same space, Why create a competitor for yourself?

It's their decision to sell or not. They did right by their existing customers in first making an honest go of the business, then cutting the price when that didn't work, and then getting a transition plan for closing it when the lower price brought too many low quality (ie: borderline spammer) customers.

You can have an opinion if that's right or not, but ultimately its their decision.
Skynet has arrived (or at least one of its peripherals)
This is intriguing. I've spent a bit of time building Backbone projects that sync with the server (eg. https://github.com/napoleond/localModel) but until now have always resolved conflicts by choosing the model with the most recent time modified. (I have also played a bit with using WebSockets to keep the models up to date for every concurrent user, although that was mostly just for fun.) It would be way better to actually merge diffs in an intelligent manner, though. Thanks for the link!
It's true there is an exponential value to each successful IPO. It's also true that much of the wealth stays in the valley...partly because the most intense 1% of engineers keep migrating to SV. It's self perpetuating!
That is begging the question. The argument was supposed to prove that Lisp is "awesome;" if you have to assume that Lisp is a "nice language" for the argument to work, the argument hasn't proven anything.

I think Ruby is a nicer language than Lisp.
Why use a custom python script when you can just copy the screenshot into your dropbox folder? Ok, I guess it's for when you don't use the nautilus extension and don't link your filesystem with DB...

Would be cool if you could change the output location of compiz' "windows key + mouse rectangle produces screen shot" add on.
The article: http://www.csom.umn.edu/assets/166362.pdf

This excerpt:

"sex-specific data are not available for these kinds of aggregate measures, making it impossible to determine whether the relationship between sex ratio and desire for immediate access to rewards is driven by men, women, or perhaps both genders"

tells me their conclusion is a load of b.s.
"It's getting a lot of coverage and attention overseas where it should be"

I wish that would be true. Here in Germany, "Tagesschau" is the biggest news program on television. And they didn't report anything about the protests that took place in Poland today. Instead a collapsing house in Rio seemed to be more important... I haven't found a non-tech person who actually knows about ACTA yet!
Apple Factories In China Are Basically Slave Labor Camps
Jose Ferreira at Davos: There's a Reason It's Called 'Venture' Capital
There's some sleight of hand here. Not all the digits are exactly right. Look how it skips from 997 to 999:

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2012/01/08/math-notes-76/

Here's the math. Suppose you want a unit fraction 1/n with decimals that cycle through the 4-digit sequence abcd. Multiply by 10^4 to shift abcd into integer position, leaving repeating copies after the decimal point:

10^4/n = abcd + 1/n

Solving for n gives n = (10^4 - 1) / abcd.

More generally, if you want to get a cycle equal to the d digits of an integer k, you want n = (10^d - 1) / k.

However, this only gives a true unit fraction when k divides 10^d - 1, so that n is an integer. Otherwise you are forced to truncate n and getting an approximate version of the cycle.

That's exactly what happened here: 10^d - 1 is not divisible by the integer 001002...998999.

Here's a small Python program that will generate the unit fraction given the number of digits to cycle through:

import sys

n = int(sys.argv[1])
s = ''.join(("%0" + str(n) + "d") % (i,) for i in range(10**n))
print "1/%d" % ((10**len(s) - 1) / int(s),)

Usage:

$ python magic.py 3
1/998001
$ python magic.py 4
1/99980001

This has just the right flavor for a Project Euler problem.
Not physics the class, just the "how things work" aspect. I guess you could file chemistry under that as well.

I didn't actually find physics in college very interesting, because it seemed more focused on memorization. But I find reading Stephen Hawking books pretty interesting, even though I cannot think of many practical applications of his theories to my daily life, hobbies, or job. I like to understand how things work, and I do find "how things work" to be fun to play with. Materials and chemicals are pretty interesting to play with, as well.

Perhaps it is a fundamental difference. To me, building and understanding things (whether they're computational, mechanical, chemical, whatever) is interesting, but their ends aren't necessarily nearly as exciting, especially if the end is "a business". Business is necessary, sure, and I'd build things for business purposes as a job, but it's not my main interest.

That's probably even my reaction to the average startup on HN; for many, I don't really care about their SaaS or ecommerce solution or whatever, but they often solve interesting problems en route to getting it to work.
Startup Data Trends
Yes. And 1/9801 skips 98.
And even the suggested 1/9801 for two digits produces no 98

... 95 96 97 99 00 01 02 ...

And extrapolating it to one digit, 1/81 gives

0.012345679012345679...
The alternative to patents is secrecy. I think the patent system was originally introduced because it was deemed superior to make ideas public, but limit their commercial usability.
To evangelize what we're doing (I'm a software engineer here and I think we're a really cool company) we are a funded, New York-based startup in education. We're using cutting-edge machine learning to deliver personalized education, making it available worldwide rather than a privilege of the few.

We're looking for top-notch Scala (or more broadly, JVM) and Python talent. Experience with machine learning and functional programming are major pluses.
you could always do 1/99980001 - that would have a 0998
Does your startup have to make money?
an equally amusing solution is to just turn off fsync - DB calls should speed up, and data is buffered by the kernel before being written to disk, instead of in the app.
Care to share? Would be handy to have for my daughter... :)
Sneakers. Whistler is blind.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
It may be too niche if you are trying to build Twitter or Facebook, but I believe it is large enough to generate passive income +

Are you trying to do web app or physical product?
echo "scale=3000; 1/998001" | bc
Linode isn't cooperating -- here's a dropbox link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/145900/lbpb.pdf
What do you find so rediculously good about this? I find it complicated. If I understood it properly, it's just making inserts asynchrounous (removing durability) and batches data into single statement (removing atomicity). Or did I miss something?
At this level, yes. Go for 0 years experience but lots of passion and a basic skill set. Give them a shot on it. You don't want pros for a project like this, they're better used elsewhere, just a small team to keep the lights on and try to grow it.

My usual strategy works well here: Hire in @min wage, with a huge bonus linked to new subs.
We have websense here and it too seems to block perfectly benign things with bogus reasons. This link is categorized as adult content.
Nah, it's a focus thing. Juggling 3 projects instead of 2 has a pretty significant cost associated with it. Most people do 1 thing better than 2, and 2 things better than 3, etc.
I have several friends involved with philosophy, as students or lecturers. If you listen to them talk, there is some interesting stuff there, like formal logic, but the lion's share is just arguing about semantics and nuances of translation from the original German. I think of philosophy like chess: it's an intellectual challenge, with a lot of history, but at the end of the day it's just a game. It's not for anything.
Ask HN: Good articles/resources for creating SEM/Adwords Campaigns
Could anybody suggest good articles to read or resources on creating good Adwords campaigns (especially for newbies)? Everything from selecting the best keywords to actually creating the ad (best title to use, best description, etc).
It's clearly geek porn.
Link is broken. Link to Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Google exec questions Reding's 'Right to be forgotten' pledge
Collateral damage. Extraordinary rendition. Enhanced interrogation techniques. Surge. Undocumented workers. Obamacare. Death panels. Mis-speaking. Freedom fries.

We've actively regressed since McCarthy. The modern political vocabulary is dominated by doublespeak and thought-terminating cliche[1]. Most of the fundamental battle lines in American politics have long since been distilled into meaningless soundbite slogans, devoid of any real semantics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psycholo...
I disagree. You don't "take on a responsibility to keep that service going", Google can shut down Wave. Apple can shut down Ping. IBM can stop selling computers. Oracle can stop creating OpenSolaris. Companies (and individuals) have the right to make long-term decisions about what they want to do day-to-day.

Seems this company did more for their customers than most do. They didn't just shut the doors one day. They didn't lock in the user data and make it impossible to get. They made one of the toughest decisions to make - shutting a mildly profitable service. It's easier to shut it down if it's losing money.
I didn't know about this matching. Awesome.

Now I'm even more annoyed that our servers are all CentOS :(
And even hard drives, after all they invented them, too.
I think the merging and reordering stands alone as a solution; the extension where, in my particular project, I cache to avoid some common SELECTs is a distinct other subject. They complement each other, and are in the same post, is all.
details about the proposed bill http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3510487
Lookit https://launchpad.net/lookit supposedly supports CloudApp, I didn't test that however.
Funny thing is, selling to Google often also means shutting the product down anyways. For a product of this size, if Google had interest it would most likely be a talent acquisition more than product.

Outsourcing an entire product like this is a pipe dream. It would also likely screw over their customers, who may then pass word around that they were douchebags for doing it.

I think they handled it well, and very morally.
Are there any examples of REST API implementations that are actually true to the original concepts or is everything kind of a "Web API" compromise? As a follow up, does, and should, anyone actually care really?

Is REST really just a pipe-dream in practice?
Bill Gates: 'Have to raise taxes'
No no, they're turning off their old datacenter (afaict) and they're fully integrating with Rackspace who bought them a few years ago. They've been superstable.
If you're hitting the database concurrently with many sessions, you can get much of the same benefit by just adjusting the PostgreSQL commit_delay and commit_siblings paramaters, so the database batches things into fewer flushes and fsyncs for you.
AirBnB Passes 5 Million Bookings
Here is a more detailed explanation

1---------

If x = 0.001 then
the sum x^2 + 2x^3 + 3x^4…. in its decimal places will have all the three digit numbers except the the second last starting with 000,001 and then till 997,999.

As pointed out by someone below,the reason 998 is missing is because after 997998999 the next coefficient is 1000.This overflow 1 will carry over and mess up all the nines to the right until it hits the eight at which point it will make it a 9.Therefore the series will become 997999000001002003... as subsequent overflows keep messing up the last digit to the left.During the addition of the 2000th term a similar thing will happen and the series at that location will become ...997999001002003...... and it will keep losing a term from the beginning in the subsequent 998 repetitions.

More generally if
x = 10^-n,n>0 then the sum x^2 + 2x^3 + 3x^4 will have all the n digit numbers starting with (n-zeroes),(n-1 zeroes 1)…except the second last (10^n-2).

2---------

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_series

An infinite geometric series converges to a/(1-r) if and only if the absolute value of r is less than 1.

a + ar^2 + ar^3 .... = a/(1-r) if |r|<1 -------> [1]

3---------

1 + 2x + 3x^2.....

= (1) + (x+x) + (x^2+x^2+x^2)....

= (1+x+x^2...) + (x+x^2+x^3...) + ...

= 1/(1-x) + x/(1-x) + (x^2)/(1-x) + .... since x < 1 from [1]

= (1+x+x^2....)/(1-x)

= 1/(1-x)^2 since x < 1 from [1] ---------> [2]

4---------

So the number 0.000001002003004……997999000001002003....

= (x^2 + 2x^3 + 3x^4…..) , x = 0.001

= (x^2) * (1 + 2x + 3x^2 …..)

= (x^2)/((1-x)^2)

= (0.001)^2/(0.999)^2

= ((1/999))^2

= 1/998001

More generally the sum which has all the n digit numbers except (10^n-2) in its decimal places is given by (10^n-1)^(-2).
Yeah, NYC is great except for that Lincoln Tunnel bus congestion in the morning and the evening. It would help to have more rail lines to NJ. Let's start with the 7 Line:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Subway_Extension#Proposed_New...
First computer bug is stored in Smithsonian Museum of American History
I just want to know I appreciate you posting this. Some people might be interested in "wow math sure can do some funky stuff", but others like myself really want to know why. I figure that's also covers a sizable group of us here on Hacker News.
Corporate always had this problem. If you're not a 'yes man' then you are a potential threat to their job. Small businesses, for whatever reason, seem to react differently.
Again, I can only speak for how things work for Netflix Canada. It could be different in the US, or it could be the same but nobody realizes it because it's never enforced.

We never had a combined service in Canada. The only DVD-by-mail service I've heard of up here is Zip.ca. I looked into them recently and discovered they also have a streaming service now, but I'm much more interested in the service of theirs that was impetus for that search, which was their "redbox"-like DVD/BluRay kiosk I just found at my local grocery store.

I've often heard people speak online about these kiosks, but there weren't any near my current apartment until recently (either that, or I've just never known it was there since it's on the opposite side of the store from the self-serve checkout machines). $1 per movie is a wonderful price point for new releases, though between Christmas present movies and Netflix I haven't really been inclined to use it yet.
Take a look at teardowns of any modern mobile device and you'll see there's nothing really spectacular about the iPhone. It's kind of like saying workers at McDonalds suffer more health problems because their work requires more 'attention' than workers at Burger King.
Cars do not kill cities - urban planning without enough foresight into how cars actually interact with one another, and with cities kill cities.

A large portion of current urban plans date to Robert Moses - he essentially built New York, invented the ring of highways system used in DC and other places, and advised places like LA in constructing their major arteries. Moses was in love with cars, but never experienced traffic as his limo was chauffered with a police escort. He built highways and made them inaccessible to public transportation (see the West Side Highway) so that poor people could not use them. He had no real understanding of capacity utilization/maximization for transport and stopped learning long before he stopped designing. He never updated his understanding of the damages caused by simply adding more highways, but retained the power to keep building them.

The most pernicious impact of Moses's style of urban planning is not, however, gridlock or a lack of walkability. Moses decided that he could put roads wherever he wanted, and used eminent domain to put them right through vibrant communities - which he destroyed. He killed the bronx, parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and almost ran a huge raised highway across 34th street.

In any case, The Power Broker is an amazing book to read if you're curious about these issues and why cities are designed the way they are now.
Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.1 RC released
Its still ACID. Its the same callee code as you use in, for example, twisted already to have DB async. It just gets way better performance because the DB speed is measured in requests/sec and not how big those requests are. So merging many requests into a single one where possible means you get more throughput.
Travel-Virgin Islands, NYC, The World
Fair, but a lot of the city planners weren't planning for cars at all, because cars didn't exist.
It's necessary that one number is absent. The period is 2997 as he mentions. Can't pack 1000 3 digit numbers into that ;)
It's because the 1000 will end up adding one to the 999 which becomes 1000 which adds one to 998.
Anonymous Censorship Wars: eBay Supports Anti-Sopa, Pipa, Acta Cause
American lobbyists had direct access to the drafting of the treaty while the european parliament was told it was secret for them due to national security issues. No comment necessary.
Problem being that the patent system (much like the copyright system) is irrevocably hosed.
The majority of those lots circled are not for flipping real estate. The ones circled are mostly commuter lots and business lots that are often mostly empty.

It might be a matter of perspective, but a mostly empty parking lot is not in the business of being a parking lot. Flipping commercial real estate can take decades, the point is that the lot is not required and will likely help the area become more city-like.
Yes, that is funky.

def long_div(x,y,N=10):
"""Given two integers x and y, return us the N digits of x/y."""
#First work out the integer part
x = int(x)
divisor = y = int(y)
quotients = [x/y]
dividend = x % y
for digit in range(N):
dividend *= 10
quotient = dividend/divisor
dividend = dividend%divisor
quotients.append(quotient)

return quotients

def pretty_print(quotients, G=3):
"""Pretty print quotients by grouping digits by 3."""
strp = ''
cnt = 1
for n in quotients[1:]:
strp += str(n)
cnt +=1
if cnt > G:
print strp
strp = ''
cnt = 1

quotients = long_div(1,998001,N=3000)
pretty_print(quotients,G=3)
Facebook Timeline - A security guide
It has the word Boobies in one of the comments.
Thank you, I was about to ask for the same!
Sarah did a fantastic job in this article summing our growth story.
Fun fact, in some eastern European languages, coffee and caffeine are the other way around, kafa and kofein for example.
50 Cent Puts Up $1 Million Super Bowl Bet Against Birdman
Different kinds of attacks often play off each other, so that a small amount of known plaintext allows you to modify the decrypted plaintext of a message in ways that will reveal more plaintext.

So, for instance, a CBC padding oracle is an attack that allows you to decrypt messages byte-by-byte --- but it's stopped entirely by a proper MAC on the message.