skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course tau * i is what's really fundamental; however it's much more convenient to have the notation refer to a real constant. Firstly, one might be working in a context where complex numbers are not present, and to have to use them just to even refer to a real constant would be an annoyance. Secondly, if one defines a real constant tau, it is then easy to talk about the imaginary version i * tau; whereas one defining an imaginary constant, and having to divide by i or multiply by -i to get the real version would be somewhat annoying. Thirdly, if one went with the complex version, there'd be the whole "i or -i" problem due to the symmetry of the complex numbers -- OK, I guess this is not really an actual problem, but it would be slightly annoying, especially in context where dealing with complex numbers at all isn't really necessary. Whereas defining tau to be a positive real number gets rid of that problem.
If you are curious what it sounds like, just hit this url: http://bellbot.com/sounds/up.mp3
The white noise idea is fascinating.
Awesome job to Allan and team. Can't wait to try it for our own software.
Really?

4 year to vest for most companies here so if you were hired in winter of 2008 into spring of 09 all of those shares will be vested by time the lock up expires.

That is assuming they file next week go through the 3-4 month quiet period and revisions to their S-1 and then IPO late spring, maybe June and then the lock up expires in December 2012.
Why Verizon and AT&T lost billions padding Apple’s record setting gains
A few things you missed here.

1. You just missed an opportunity to prove we should like your products. Here's why: you had a tale of a miserable product launch, but in the end there was no moral of the story. You should have explained what you should have done to get the notice you deserve, even if it means you scrub the product. Instead you post the first part: telling what happened, but you fail to offer any insight as to why it happened the way it did and what you could have done to correct it.

2. You're selling some small feature that most people already have or are not interested in because it's just a small feature: it's not a full product or a full service. If you really want to see something like Illico take off, you've gotta put the time into the product to demonstrate clearly how it differs from other products and even free stuff we get on typical smartphones.

3. You've gotta figure out your naming of things. Illico is confusing. There are three lines that have different letters "Ill" and that can visually be spelled with three capital i, or two small L, or any number of variations. The name is bad, therefore. Top products and sales companies have names you can easily pronounce, and the best companies have names you've pronounced since early childhood. FACT! If you don't have a good name, you've gotta have a good reputation and since you don't have a good reputation, you'd better find a better name next time.

4. Fail faster. Why the fuck are you still trying to push this flop? Dump it and start something fucking new. :)

I swear here because I feel like we're buddies. I used to know you because I used to look at you in the mirror every day, before I changed... before I learned the valuable lessons needed to be a successful developer. No it doesn't matter who I am. Don't worry about that. Just think about what I've said -- if it's beneficial, use it. If not, keep plugging away.

On that topic; I seldom care who is telling me things or who is writing about knowledge, especially business knowledge. I'm filtering the ideas I know are valid from the ideas that cannot be proved and then sifting through the unproven information for gems. It's a typical gold mining stream operation -- learning why failures happen and growing from them. You've gotta listen to the customers. Listen to the people on this thread. You are arguing with some of them and that's just you refusing to believe you were wrong. If THAT isn't bad enough, you've got the problem here that people are TELLING YOU what they WANT TO BUY and you can't hear them because you're still flogging this shitty product.

Find something new, or create a massive full-offer product out of Illico, rebrand it and rename it... revision it... that's a good option. Or dump it. Just don't keep pushing it.
Michael, your rails tutorial continues to be the best source for those who want to learn the basics of rails. I used it as an introduction, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to begin creating web apps. I am glad to see that it was enough of a success to warrant a second edition, and wish you continued success.
from a scientific standpoint

Agreed. But there are other things being looked at in space in the commercial realm (ranging from tourism to resource extraction to energy generation) that require humans.

There is also an argument for positive externalities. I don't think anyone concretely foresaw the technological developments shot off the side of the Apollo missions. That's not a sufficient justification. But if one has two nations, one pursuing manned space missions and one not, the technological developments will happen in one and not the other. A more cosmopolitan perspective would be if you had two universes, one with a species that did this and another without...

In this entire discussion I'm not bringing up national pride, either, which has real-world significance in terms of how it affects the flow of intellectual talent, i.e. the brain drain.
Microsoft's Windows 8 Tablet Apps Will Leverage Sensors in Big Way
Under the proposal, you can still keep /usr on it's own read-only filesystem. The difference is that it has to mounted in single-user mode.
I wonder why rc still has $path in Plan9.

term% echo $path
. /bin

What happen with Ape ports whom expect the path environment variable?
The point is that we don't know exactly when an unpreventable extinction-level event will happen. It makes sense to plan for such an event as early as possible.
Insulin.
So I guess you're at POPL too, Rickasaurus?

Context: we just had a paper presentation talk about Vellvm this afternoon at the POPL[1] conference, it was very interesting.

[1] http://www.cse.psu.edu/popl/12/
No you can't just walk away. You need to authorise a machine to play DRM infected media from iTunes and you cannot play DRM infected media on devices which do not support FairPlay.

I am referring to music purchased pre-2009 (which is a large volume of sales), current movies, books, and television shows.

I don't have a right to purchase but the majority have a reasonable expectation to be able to take their purchases away in the future in the same manor as they expect their purchased DVDs to be usable on every DVD vendor's equipment.
Facebook does provide Bing searches integrated into the platform.
While they're at it, they should move /usr/src somewhere else (/var/src?)
Anyone else surprised by how low the numbers are? Only 500 startups and 2,500 investors joined last year?

2011 was the breakout growth year for AngelList according to their Alexa graph[1]. And Angel.co has 740K pages indexed by Google, of which about 356K of which appear to be investor profiles, 159K appear to be company profiles, and the remaining 225K could be assumed to be entrepreneur profiles. Perhaps there's another large subset of indexed pages I'm missing?

I'd love to know the actual total counts of startups, angels, and entrepreneurs if anyone is privy.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/lsMCY.png
You don't need to "custom design a server supercomputer". This stuff is as mainstream as Dell. You can go to dell.com and order a Poweredge R815 with 64 processor cores and 512GB of RAM for $16,000. If you want SSDs, you can purchase SATA or PCIe ones from Dell as well.

http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-r815/pd
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/fusion-io-drive/pd
IOS App Viggle Will Pay You to Watch TV
hmm... interesting point. I can see the value of using GCal to enter past events. But what if I wanted to break down my achievements by category? Personal vs. professional? Would that just be different calendar entries?

But overall, it's a good suggestion. Thanks!
Whenever i read much of this anti-carb stuff, i'm always concerned about how different carbs affect the body. Taubes always blames the whole lot, but people like Lustig distinctly go after fructose. I get that carbohydrates probably affect the body in a negative light, but I certainly wish they would study sugars independently.
"...because of commuting." makes me wonder how much you hated commuting. If your habit was to wake up at 6AM for something that you disliked, I'd say that's your answer right there.

I have my coffee out on the fire escape, maybe do a few pull-ups, and dive straight into work 10-15 minutes after I wake up. I then break for a late breakfast and a shower 2-3 hours later.

I guess I forgot to mention that I work from home, freelancing right now - I'm not sure I'd have the same motivation if I was working full-time.
Sounds great to focus on one good solution and then support more providers. All the best wishes for glider ( for selfish reasons :-) )!
Gah! Made me jump!
rc has $path because rc predates Plan9, it first appeared in tenth edition Unix.

Inferno's shell doesn't use a $path variable.
So this would be more so for inspiration and not for a historical account? Just to be clear, you seem to be suggesting Pinterest as a means to motivate to accomplish a goal and not to keep track of pass successes.

Or are you suggesting both?
Excellent to see this, it's a western myth that eating fat makes you fat. It's carbs.

Carbs are cheap, carbs are bad for you and carbs are often marketed as health food.

We don't need carbs. We evolved eating meat and veg. Meat, veg and water is the perfect diet. It's hard to stick to that diet though as carbs are so highly accessible.
There hardly seems to be much upside left. Most of the potential for appreciation has already been milked by late stage VCs (DST), Goldman's preferred clients, and investors on SharesPost and Second Market. This probably won't be a Google or Amazon. But then, 5 years down the line, who knows.
Apple Takes Heat & Goes Buy the Book
> Mathematics is a way of describing nature, not the other way around.

I think this comes down to whether you are of the "realist" or the "Platonist" school of thought:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics
After 4 years of Gentoo I've switched recently to ArchLinux. Fantastic community, very rich wiki. The simplest Linux distro I have ever used. Everything works as you want -- zero debia/ubunto-nism. Rolling release just like Gentoo.

Also it has a very rich Arch Linux User-community Repository (AUR) + some AUR PKGBUILDs even install from Ubuntu's PPAs

Writing new PKGBUILDs is also very straightforward.
The impact of Go Daddy's two PR disasters in 2011 on iWantMyName customer growth
"iOS isn't the competitor to the Wii U."

iOS is the competitor to everyone. It's easy to pretend that niches aren't connected, but they are. With every brand of entertainment it's about money and time. You can't spend money and time that you've already spent elsewhere. If iOS games are first past the gate and successfully use up everyone's money/time allocations for gaming then they win. Regardless of whether they are competing against other touch-based games, casual games, or first-person shooters, MMOs, and even movies.

People have been declaring Nintendo to be on the ropes for the last few console generations. But that doesn't excuse the fact that Nintendo is facing far more serious competition than they ever have before, and they don't appear to be keeping up. Nintendo's previous problems were of the "not making as much money as fast as other companies were, for a while" sort, now they are seeing actual losses. Nintendo got lucky with the Wii. They innovated their asses off and came up with something that resonated with a new, larger gaming market. But now their innovation has stalled out, while that market segment is being cannibalized by other folks.

If Nintendo were trying something truly innovative (like the DS or the Wii) then perhaps there would be justification for people to mute their criticism to some degree, and give them the benefit of the doubt, but that doesn't appear to be the case. They appear to be flailing and clueless, that's not a good sign.
Free Embedded Linux Training at Yocto Developer Day on February 14th
Linux SysAdmin Job
Vegetables are mostly carbohydrates, so I don't know how you can say we should eat vegetables but not carbohydrates.
Does Apple tolerate 1 dead or injured worker per $291.4 million in profits?
See also the original announcement of the 2nd Edition, which includes a FAQ and a list of new features:

http://news.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-second-...

The biggest changes are:

* A full update to Rails 3.2, including coverage of the
asset pipeline

* A complete rewrite of the authentication & authorization
system, taking advantage of the new has_secure_password method

* A revised test suite using the latest techniques in
RSpec programming
> All that example would really measure is who has had previous programming experience.

This test is intended only for people with no previous programming experience. From the 2006 paper:
"none had any previous contact with programming, and that all had enough school mathematics to make the equality sign familiar".
Asus working on Kinect laptop, compatible with Windows 8
Agreed. I'm a huge fan of his work, but every time I visit his site I cringe at that header. Maybe he has a wall-sized monitor and he doesn't notice the problem.
Human space travel is a waste of money from a capital market sense, perhaps.

Think of all we've learned by putting humans into space. Think of all we'd have to learn to put humans permanently on the moon - from long-term temperature regulation to ecosystem habitats and materials science.

It's not the destination of the journey that matters. It's what we need to figure out in order to get there that does.
How the craziest f#ing "theory of everything" got published and promoted
It's ridiculous to claim that you can eat as much protein and fat as you desire and not gain weight.
What about fruit? I know little about our evolution, but I'd be surprised if our ancestors skipped over any fruits they would have found in the wild.
Refined carbs / refined sugar seem to be the problem with most foods these days. With the fear of 'fats' many food producers replaced the 'fat' with refined sugars to add the flavour with less fat (on paper).

- http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/sugar-problem/refined-sug...

- http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/nutrition/a/fructosedangers...
You can make a good case that /usr/local should be separate from /usr, where as /usr belongs on the same partition/slice as / on FreeBSD. /usr is the whole system as maintained by FreeBSD, where as /usr/local is where your ports are installed. /usr is going to grow slowly, /usr/local could get huge. Separate /usr/local out from /usr on a different disk.

FreeBSD recommends softupdates on all filesystems, including /.

Also, the LSB doesn't really apply much to the BSD's.
I saw a pre-intro programming class that took people who would otherwise have been in the sheep category and led them to succeed at the rate as those already coming in with successful backgrounds.

If we know that the problem is a lack of a consistent mental model, the solution is to learn how to teach adults to have a consistent mental model, not to throw up our hands as these researchers seem to do. To me this study suggests we aren't teaching the important skills necessary to program. We may need the equivalent of Drawing With The Right Side of the Brain for code.

After all, a 22% failure rate is still pretty pathetic.
This is a test with multiple right answers. If you have a consistent model in your head (say, X=Y swaps the values of X and Y) and apply it through out, you get full marks. They found that it was people who were consistent who did well in the class.
Twitter taking action to remove/block tweets due to individual court orders would fall under "governments are censoring twitter".

Twitter complying with requests to pre-emptively filter tweets would fall under "twitter is censoring itself".
Starting with near zero space capability in 1961, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) put men on our companion world in eight years.

The whole premise of this article, that we can't send people beyond LEO any more because of risk aversion, is based on this line and it is wrong. There are several differences between today and the 1960s that make manned space flight less feasible. This can be summarised as political and manufacturing, with the former driving the latter.

Politically the world and the US are different places, the cold war is over so the need for grand gestures for moral building and propaganda has gone.

However the OP's line of near zero space capability is wrong, ICBMs were being designed and tested at a furious rate throughout the 1950s. This created a massive pool of people with first hand knowledge, and a massive manufacturing base from which to draw upon.
Hawaii to Keep Track of All Websites Visited?
Publisher statements that may get me on the boycott-peer-review bandwagon
At my last startup

GitHub,
Pivotal tracker,
Basecamp,
Campfire,
Campaign monitor,
Send grid,
NewRelic,
Litmus

Good question, would love to see others chip in!
It could use a bit of an edit for English usage:

during 2 years > over two years

Projects versioning using > Version control using

involded > involved

parternship > partnership

Leading developer > Lead developer

that enable you to add description > that enable you to add a description

There are a few other minor things, mostly capital letters, that could be cleaned up as well but most people won't notice them.

Otherwise, I can't tell whether or not it's a good resume (I'm an editor, not a developer)
And?

Is that the claim being made here?

What's your point?
The Top Android tablets that received top response in the market – Part 2
The reported $3.8 billion in FB revenue is not an official number. It came from a CNBC reporter who cited undisclosed sources. Official revenue would have to be about $6 billion for FB to have the 16x ratio.
Exploring the mythical weekend project
Makes a great portal conductor, though.
The only counter-argument is this: I want humanity to survive long enough to ponder those questions.
What's your evidence for this? I've definitely lost weight going on a low carbohydrate diet, and I ate as much protein and fat as I wanted. (I tried to keep the fats mostly "good fats".) Maybe if you don't eat any carbohydrates, you just don't end up wanting to eat as much.
We've automated the whole DMCA process here at Oregon State University. We have Python scripts that parse the takedown emails, a Python suite that parses network logs to associate it with a user, emails appropriate people, disable network access if they do not respond, complete with django webapp and api.
Mystery box, who can resist! cant wait for my first :)

Backordering could be a great addition if it goes well. All the best with this idea!
Frankly I'm offended that having a seperate /home partition is not the default on more linux installs.

I Arch Linux for my last semester of school and didn't have any problems, I didn't find it unstable at all.
It's ridiculous to claim that you can eat as much X as you desire and not gain weight, for most X except maybe celery.

The point is that protein and fat satisfy hunger in a way that our bodies have evolved to process. And the fact is, after eating a bit of protein and fat, you won't DESIRE to eat any more.

Seriously, read this book, it will change your life. http://www.amazon.ca/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307272702
Honestly...down votes?
Android Tablet PC for Less Than $100?
It looks like that's 500 Startups WITH 10+ intros. # of intros is probably a good indicator of whether or not they got funded.

I would read that as 500 startups that got funded. I imagine there are WAY more startups that signed up.
You can make a lovely hat out of previously-used aluminum foil.
Is that supposed to be cute? Fuck you, Google. You introduce a new privacy policy that's gonna scan through my mail in my searches, and then you show me this message when I empty my gmail trash? Sure - it must be me that's a paranoid tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist, when the whole world's coming down in condemnation at the disgusting breach of public trust you're trying to pass off as just another change in your fine print.

Well, up your ass. I need to be tracked and monitored by you like I need a goddamn hole in my head. I'm not closing my google account; I'm just gonna poison it with as much false information as possible. I want your advertisers to spend their money selling me pink iguana slippers for my transsexual third lover. I want them to spend millions of processing cycles trying to figure out how a conservative christian can love matzoh ball soup and read the Koran. I want you to fucking die, already. And please take facebook with you. Thanks.
but algebra is specifically non-directional. If I saw "a=10 b=20 a=b" as a non-programming, I'd assume the answer was "not possible".
Secret Windows 8 Weapon: Kinect Built Into Your Laptop
I agree that satiety from your macronutrient breakdown is a huge factor here. But some go so far as to claim you can eat FAR beyond your daily caloric burn in protein and fat and still lose weight. I have yet to meet anyone who can credibly back up that statement.
Lustig goes after fructose but points out that fructose and sugar are metabolically equivalent. I believe he does so because fructose is more prevalent in processed foods (cheaper, subsidized, and other policy-driven historical accidents behind this).
Some time ago I went to reverse way, from Arch to Mint Debian Edition. Just to try out other distro.

Spotify doesn't work for me in Mint. In Arch worked flawlessly. Anyway, YMMV.

Now I'm willing to have time to switch back to Arch and enjoy the minimalist (and speedy) desktop experience and the easy way to use bleeding-edge software in a (almost) safe way.

But all isn't bad in Mint. I like the performance of its kernel with the 200-lines patch scheduler. For any archer: any idea of some AUR kernel with that? Or does it get in mainstream kernel already?
Steal this Idea - Personalized Retail Shopping
Like what?

Chat and games are excluded, as Facebook was doing that before having a global network of users assembled.
The most dangerous occupation in America, by fatalities, is fisherman. Yah, it's safer than it was in the past, but I wouldn't call it "safe", when compared to sitting in front of your computer.
Don't make the same mistake of oversimplifying diet that led to the "fat is bad" and "fat makes you fat" myths.

Neither fat nor carbs are "bad" for you. Eating too much saturated fats plus a sedentary lifestyle is bad for your heart, pretty much independent of your weight. Eating too many refined carbs (foods with a high glycemic index) is also bad for you and can facilitate weight gain and potentially lead to other health problems in people who are genetically predisposed (e.g. type 2 diabetes). However, eating a Mediterranean diet high in unsaturated fat and whole grains (fat and carbs) is one of the healthiest diets possible according to a huge volume of research, so just throwing around the "fat" and "carbs" labels is not necessarily helpful.
`quote'
Ask HN: Kindly suggest a reliable VPN provider?
Your expertise is humbly solicited. Mine is lacking.
Startup data trends (which gets its data via AngelList's API) shows 18799 startups in total when you search on location "Earth" http://startupdatatrends.com/?tags=1643

It's reasonable to think that most of these startups created AngelList accounts in 2011 (given hornbaker's Alexa graph).
Excellent point, I forgot that use case.
So the panopticon gains new eyes... Is it just me that covers my laptop's webcam during use? (I use tape+microfiber so I can use the webcam by unpeeling for the rare times I need it)
I wonder if the timeline being made mandatory is tied to the IPO somehow.