skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand that their systems may be simpler for their uses, and it's possible that for this reason they use Maxwell's equations and things like that: But how can they not mention it, even once? I would personally expect these equations to be revered in every Classic Electromagnetism book. Okay, so they are not revered, maybe my taste is a little peculiar, but they are not even mentioned! I just can't understand it. Think how much Maxwell's laws are revered, and this is one formula that contains them all and more, in one line. Don't you think that they would mention it?

That's what's baffling me. Do they not know this? Do they not care? How can they not care?

About your PS: Yes, I'm working on writing this.
Wow, I really got downmodded for saying you have to work to make money?
Separation of presentation from content is good, but presentation is a task of arbitrary complexity and requires arbitrary computation (aka a full programming language) to do properly.

Many current frameworks are inadvertently used to bring the power of a programming language to presentation, but most of them don't seem to realize it yet.
This is a piece of advice that falls into the category: "If everyone followed these, they'd be worthless!"

Much like: "Don't vaccinate your child. Your kid can benefit from the herd immunity with none of the risks!"
Colin Powell: Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America.

Same with being gay.
It would also be nice if we started writing abstracts for the lengthier & more technical posts.
That's not true, at least not in the US. Solvent banks can access effectively unlimited liquidity from the Federal Reserve in order to prevent bank runs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_reserve#Lender_of_last_...

On the other hand, investment banks (which are legally different from banks) can be wiped out by runs very quickly if they take on too much leverage. Or at least that's what used to happen before the federal government decided the largest ones were too big to fail and bailed them out.
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I'm not the only person who thinks so:

"Clay Shirky looked like Tom Hanks but I didn't ask him about his latest movie role (I hope)."

(http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2003/11/usercreated_co...)

"If Shirky ever has a movie made of his life, it’ll have to
be Tom Hanks that stars. I think he sounds and looks a lot like Shirky!"

(http://blogs.technet.com/johmar/archive/2008/09/18/web-2-0-e...)

"Imagine hair on him and Shirky looks, talks and acts exactly like Tom Hanks. Not just similar, but eerily exact."

(http://www.chrisroberson.net/2008/04/cognitive-surplus.html)

"One thing I’ve definitely gotta say about this guy though is that he sounds
and looks a lot like Tom Hanks. Not that there’s anything wrong with that."

(http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=5885#comment-229940)
What political campaign isn't a startup?
I am in Shanghai UTC+8, I've noticed the moon was bigger than ever before I read this on HN. It's so beautiful.
I was tech lead on a project that involved both Firefox and IE extension development. We tried to keep the extensions very simple, so there would be as little to port and keep synchronized between versions. Both platforms were relatively new to us, but I don't think we were stupid.

The IE plugin was about 300 times more work. Seriously, people have asked me about this a lot, and that's a pretty accurate judgment of the relative workload.

Also, it's shockingly hard to find a competent COM+ developer, and the IE extension docs are actually worse than the Firefox docs, though both leave a lot to be desired.

In general, installing an extension is a pretty huge barrier; don't expect users who aren't already familiar with your service to bother installing one just to try it.
Welcome to "union rules" which are a big part of the point of the UAW (at least at the big 3 - Toyota-US has only one classification for assembly line folk - "production").

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/archive/2008/12/1...
Edible Electronic Birthday Cakes
On my way into work this morning I noticed that the tide was about two feet higher than normal high tide in the channel near Rowes Wharf in Boston. Some navigation lights on piers were even underwater. I was wondering what the heck was going on, now I know.
Lotus builds the whole car (in England), and provides almost everything except the drivetrain, which Tesla ships to them. Most significantly Lotus provides the bonded aluminum chassis, which is still one of the lightest, strongest chassis ever built.
The word that comes to mind to me is arbitrariness. That's not quite right either because it is a self-consistent arbitrariness rather than an arbitrariness for arbitrariness' sake.

If you want to get different results, you have to change the rules of the game.
Go Pat! Congrats on the success of the book!
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Samsung G810 Silver one of the most recent fabrication of Samsung ever launched by the company with outstanding powerful camera of 5 MP with high quality clarity of images. Camera and music player is so miraculous with digital.
Nope. I wrote that.
I'd like to see some rigorous analysis of the anti-smoking ads run in California. Moreso than the messages 'smoking kills' or 'you shouldn't smoke', they emphasize the message 'tobacco companies/executives are evil'.

That's always seemed to be an unfair use of public funds for nasty politics, to me. (The ads are a lot like election campaign hit pieces.)

I wonder if by blaming third parties for smoking, rather than individual decisions, it subtly enables smokers to avoid making a healthy personal choice. It also fortifies the self-righteousness of anti-smoking crusaders: "we good, they evil, ugh! ugh! ugh!"
Looks like a bit under 200km

http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/pacalc.html
Yes, I am a coder. And yes, I've been thinking about issues surrounding the delivery of content since before YouTube. And I am considering quitting my job and living off savings to do personal projects.
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Twitter in Gmail will further distract me from using it for email
Everyone I've talked to on this says the opposite. They say they spent 90% of their time on IE and only got 5% of their users from it.

If its going to be viable MSFT needs to build an addons page.
"To the contrary, the warning labels backfired: they stimulated the nucleus accumbens, sometimes called the 'craving spot,' which lights up on f.M.R.I. whenever a person craves something" - maybe they were craving to be non-smokers.
I would love to see this calculated quantitatively. I've heard that the bailout amounts to $50,000 per worker. That sounds pretty good... However, if the bailout is able to keep everyone in $70,000 other jobs for a year, that might be a better deal, even if it just means postponing the inevitable. I recognize that this is very complex, one should account for e.g. if the economy will be recovered in a year, and more able to take the hit of these industries going under, how much more value the workers might produce in new jobs, etc. It's beyond me to calculate, but I would love to see an analysis that presupposes that this is straightforward charity for those workers, and how to get the best bang for our redistributive buck.
"Meaninglessness" is the exact wrong word for this.

The test shows that those who consistently apply the same meaning to the types of questions they are presented with end up being the best programmers.
It isn't relevant that they didn't use MPEG. What they build was a great platform to browse what content is available that can handle the enormous amount of traffic they receive. That wouldn't change if they offered the video in a different format.
Yes, the detail is a bit scant on this I'm afraid. I was lucky enough to attend the London Geek Dinner where they presented and asked question in greater depth about how they scale and why they made their decisions.

As an aside, the head of iPlayer was CTO of Kazaa which I find an amusing turn of events
A cheaper alternative for the desktop -- buy an already quiet conventional drive and place it in an enclosure:

http://www.quietpcusa.com/Smart-Drive-Classic-Cooper-HDD-Enc...

The Grow Up Japan drive enclosures are good at conducting heat, so you get the benefit of sound dampening without sacrificing longevity. Yes, I've installed one in my desktop.
Actual good advice about keeping a team together from Valleywag regarding Flickr
I wouldn't call it 'comfort with meaninglessness' but rather 'ability to find meaning'. Those who succeeded were the ones who came up with a theory about how things could work and then applied their theory consistently. The problems must have seemed more meaningful to them than to the others who answered at random or thought there was no answer.
Thats exactly what they will do and business in general. Every lawsuit filed against a company violating GPL is another reason for companies not to use FOSS in the first place.
How exactly is carbonating fruit an "Edible Electronic Birthday Cake"?
Every book that Art Garfunkel (from Simon and Garfunkel) has ever read
Wow.. Did the first comment actually say 20 20?
"If you look at the specification there was only one property in CSS1 that could be used to effect layout - float. position didn’t even exist, and in HTML 2 neither did <div>, the two essential tools without which no modern design could be achieved (without resorting to tables)."

Lost me there. A <div> is just a vanilla block-level element. You can turn anything into a <div>.

"CSS can only be applied to elements that have semantic meaning"

You should see the CSS that developers I've worked with write. Even worse is that DreamWeaver has its "style1", "style2" way of doing things which makes picking apart a stylesheet very tedious.
Huh, when I hit the link it was: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9790953...
Exactly. If you remove the pensions that are lumped in with all the reported hourly rates, it is not that big of a difference, and what is there is in the healthcare benefits not hourly pay rate. I think the Republicans were just happy that their spin factory came up with a way they could pin an excuse on someone else for not passing the bill. I wasn't really in favor of the bailout plan (mostly after the idea of a car czar was introduced), but I think these guys need to be honest in why they were against it.
The researchers posit that the students who start by applying rules consistently across problems learn programming better than those who don't. For me, this raises some questions:

1) Can this mindset be taught?

2) Can this mindset be taught to anyone?

3) Can this mindset be taught more easily to the young than the old?

4) Is this mindset a disadvantage in some areas? E.g. does it hurt you if you're a psychologist or a novelist?

I'd love to see some research to answer those questions.
"Recent research has identified beneficial neural changes engendered by exercise, nutrition and sleep, as well as instruction and reading. In short, cognitive-enhancing drugs seem morally equivalent to other, more familiar, enhancements".

An isomorphism:

"Research has identified beneficial changes engendered by exercise, nutrition and sleep, as well as instruction and training. In short, performance-enhacing steroids seem morally equivalent to other, more familiar, enhancements".

The problem is that exercise, nutrition, and sleep are categorically positive enhancements. Neuropharmaceuticals aren't. Do we even have data on what happens to large populations of people exposed to them on a regular basis, as they age? Meanwhile, because the playing field is unlevel, people could be induced to use these drugs whether they're comfortable with them or not.
Okay, I did use the words "big issue." But I didn't mean that the way you took it. I'm a mac user since the 128k mac days as a child. It's not an actual big issue in most cases when using the OS and machine. It's perceived as a big issue by those used to something different. It's not a marketing plus -- it's actually the opposite!

The fact that Jobs "stuck to his guns" for so long when it was apparent that the one button mouse was a big loser is the salient point. My point isn't that macs are crap because of the one-button mouse. It's clearly trivial in practice. The fact that Jobs kept up with that for so long, even featuring it as a key marketing point, in the face of overwhelming preferences the other way is a big potential Achilles' heel. (As I said before, it's also his strength. The trick would be to get him going against the grain in a way that actually matters.)
I don't know if I would go so far. But I agree that a certain amount of caution should be applied here because of the obvious career risks to a move like this. However, one strategy someone could take would be to conduct their porn experiment simultaneously with a legitimate venture so that there are no experience gaps to account for later - just one example.
I think it has to do with a deep-seated desire for complete self-sufficiency. The ability to create things and not just perform abstract mental work or do service jobs is a key symbol of that yearning.

The USA started out as a colony and had to fend for itself. That mindset has not left.
"The ability to synthesize general rules from specific examples" isn't snappy enough for a title.
Sony's Touchscreen Walkman Has Web Browser
Reminds me of this scene in Bruce Almighty:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1725338/bruce_and_grace_romant...
Do you think this could be as big as Oprah's book club?
This is a very interesting list. One of the most surprising things to me is how consistent it is. He doesn't seem to change much. It's as if his algorithm the entire time was to choose at random from the Penguin Classics. One could do a lot worse.
Odd... I'm getting linked to: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9818482...
Yes it does. It has at least 4 different ways to loop, 4 different types of arguments to functions, 5 or 6 different lets (functions, macros, let* , normal let, ...), 3 or 4 different kinds of variables (with no unifying underlying theme), and at least 3 different flow models (the nested lists, tagbodies, loops with returns, etc...). That is exactly the same problem with C++. Instead of finding unifying abstractions which give the same functionality with 1 idea, they have chosen to add in multiple specific quick fixes to the language. They have chosen to amend the language with a thousand small changes, each suited to its own little use case, and have ended up with a monster of a standard that takes up 15 megabytes in 2300 files with 110,000 hyperlinks. Thats 15 mega bytes mostly of text.

Scheme is a lot better but its going the way of CL, slowly but surely.
I'm going to resist following you down the NAT rathole and focus back on Web standards. Where I might be inclined to agree with you.

People expect innovation to happen in "Internet Time" -- but that is a myth, born of hype and bubble thinking. In the real world, it takes on the order of decades for people to even grasp the full potential of the existing HTML/CSS/JS standards and de facto standards. [1] I just don't think innovation in computing is being particularly held back by these technologies. [2] They're not the bottleneck.

Consider some popular Web 2.0 sites: Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, even Google. If you were transported back in time to 1996, you might find it difficult to replicate some aspects of these services (for example, your hardware and software bills might cause you to lose consciousness -- do you have any idea what 1GB of RAM used to cost?!) but the primitive state of the HTML standard would not hold you back. Your site would be butt-ugly (no CSS yet!) and/or employ dozens of horrifying <table> hacks, and you'd be stuck doing lots of full-page loads (no JS yet!) but it would work just fine.

Why weren't all these things built back in the 90s? The reasons are different in each case (Wikipedia and Facebook required a critical mass of web users; Flickr awaited the development and growth of the digital camera market -- the Apple Quicktake, one of the first digicams, was released in 1994; Google arguably did exist back then but it was called "Yahoo" or "Altavista"; Twitter just hadn't been thought up yet!) but none of them had anything to do with poor web standards.

You might argue that Ajax apps like Google Maps or Gmail are being held back by web standards sluggishness, and that's a stronger argument. I do think we'd see more innovative apps if we further lowered the barrier to delivering cross-platform, cross-browser apps over the web -- that's been the lesson so far. But it's not as if the situation is hopeless: you can build pretty good Ajax apps now, you can resort to Flash, or you can leverage the power of web-based education, development, marketing and delivery to ship (brace yourself) old-school desktop apps better than ever before. Nor is it the case that the standards bodies are the bottleneck here: The problem is insufficient market penetration of Webkit and/or Firefox. In other words, I'm not sure that inventing more and newer standards would be more helpful than trying to get more use out of the standards we already have.

----

[1] Witness how long it has taken for blogs, online news, and Craigslist to start actually killing newspapers, an event that has been predicted for a very long time.

[2] Of course, that's easy for me to say -- I'm not a designer or a typographer. Typographers are tearing out what remains of their hair for the lack of a better CSS standard for specifying typefaces.
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6 more Harry Potter books to go...
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4) Is this mindset a disadvantage in some areas? E.g. does it hurt you if you're a psychologist or a novelist?

It depends on what kind of novelist you want to be, I think. A good illustration of the differences comes from Brandon Sanderson in his essay on "hard" versus "soft" magic. Hard systems give the reader the satisfaction of solving puzzles and difficulties along with the characters. Soft systems preserve a feeling of mystery and wonder. Both can make for good writing.

On the one end you have Tolkien, and on the other, Asimov.

http://www.brandonsanderson.com/article/40/Sandersons-First-...
1, 2 - Uh, it's a work in progress. Please read!
3 - He's writing it himself. So? Projects don't have
to *start* using version control. Hopefully they
will grow to where they really need it.
4 - This is the only valid criticism
5 - It's meant to be minimalist. Please read!
6 - Same sort of shallow objection as #3
7 - Code is not meant to be English. "no" is just as
good as "not"
8 - It's a work in progress. Please read!
See also: http://speechlab.bu.edu/prosthetics.php
Also the suppliers are going bankrupt for the same reason. Has nothing to do with the Big 3 doing poorly, it has to do with the entire industry suffering.

Also, there are stories of Toyota and Honda paying for lots in California to store all of the cars they can't sell. There will be no lag.
<p> <div> <ul> don't have anything to do with UI.* They are document markup elements. UI is applied to a document (html) via CSS (style) and JS (behavior).

This is all pretty elementary for someone reading this site... Maybe I missed some sarcasm? :p

*Well, they do in a lot of instances, but when properly used, they have nothing to do with UI.
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Visa Launches First Financial App for Android
How is it to be enforced then? Its been 5 yrs. If uptake was the goal, it would have been BSD or public domain.
General Motors produced electric cars over 10 years ago, it just wasn't profitable at the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

It is also interesting to note that 50% of the electricity generated in the United States in 2006(latest report available) came from burning fossil fuels.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html
The twin paradox cannot be handled by SR. The difference in aging comes about due to time dialation caused by the differential acceleration that the twins experience (the twin in the spaceship is accelerated and the other is not). SR can be used to judge the middl period after the acceleration but it will not give any useful information because you can always switch viewpoints. If you have two bodies moving at some relative velocities, both can claim that the other is moving slowly in time. The mathematics of communication and speed of light work out so that this system is consistent. The difference in measured time comes from the acceleration that one of the bodies must undergo to enter the same time frame as the other.

Secondly, electric fields have intrinsic effects as in EM radiation (colloquially known as light) and need not apply any force to have effects. The movement of emitters of electrical fields through space and acceleration thereof actually give rise to magnetic fields. Read Berkley Phys. Vol. 2 ch. 5 which shows how this happens in the framework of SR. It later hints how tensors can be used to generalize this result to GR. So... in response to your question, if force is applied, either it must be approximated in a Newtonian or SR context, or GR must be used in its full generality. Usually, the forces and particles involved are sufficiently small that approximations work (see success of Newtonian mechanics), but that is not the general case. Also, very common is the tendency to derive general results and then use them is special cases. Maxwell's equations are an excellent example. They refer only to EM fields and are exact (uptil QM of course).
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Totally broken in Opera.
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Wrong title is wrong! The good programmers take a guess at the laws governing what's going on, and apply that law consistently. They are capable of seeing laws apart from ordinary, everyday situations. They see more meaning.
Ask HN: Question about an earlier post
I had recently seen a HN post from a founder regarding his startup on analyzing a piece of writing. The founder was an ex-army guy.

I was wondering on how to get feedback on my writing skills and remembered that post that I had skimmed through. It will be great if someone can post the url if they have it bookmarked.
Would you trust this network anyway? I wouldn't. It would (by necessity) be a public network, meaning no encryption, meaning everything you do can be viewed by your neighbors. I imagine it would become a major source of phishing/spam emails, since it's basically impossible to block a semi-skilled user from an open wireless network.
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I don't know whats all the fuss about programming being so "special".Everything is hard - music is hard, carpentry is hard, poetry is hard, designing a effiecient vacuum cleaner is hard , but wonder why only we programmers make so much noise all the time
I always ask "if I started this position today, what tasks would you assign me?" It's a really informative question.
I personally enjoyed tis one:

In related news, Forks and Spoons are the #1 cause of obesity.
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