skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What are you basing this on? Mathematics may lead to highly surprising and nonintuitive answers, but that doesn't mean that mathematical ideas drive people crazy.

While Cantor did take his work seriously and was said to have believed that he was indeed doing God's work, he was probably bipolar. Given the attitude toward mental health at the time, it seems that whether he was a mathematician, merchant, or mason, he would have become "mad."

While Cantor is the classic example of a mathematician gone insane, there was also a number of things besides grappling with concepts of infinity that could have also have been a factor, like always being passed over for professorships and many prominent mathematicians (like Henri Poincare) trying to keep his work out of the canon of mathematics.
I find this statement a little naive. Sure, the Greeks had religion. You are arguing that the Greeks believed more deeply in it that modern peoples? I can't fathom that. Just look around you. In the United States, at least, there are many devoutly religious people.

Sometimes it is hard to separate belief from custom. As outsiders, looking back on the Greeks through their intact manuscripts, I don't think we can make a judgment about their devoutness. Devoutness, after all, is measured only by someone's internal deliberations, not his or her outward actions or expressions.
"The best physicist in ancient Greece could not calculate the path of a falling apple. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse. If you compare yourself to others you will not see the biases that all humans share. To be human is to make ten thousand errors. No one in this world achieves perfection."

This seems almost to gesture toward a thought I've been tossing around my head lately. If you're basically a conventional person, with a conventional, average view of the world, conventional understanding of morality, and so forth, people who never knew you will look back at you from the future and ask, "How could you think such things? What was wrong with you?" We say it about people in the times when slavery was conventional, when segregation was conventional, when entrenched sexism was conventional, when Nazism was conventional. People will say it about conventions of our time as well, and, I must say, rightfully so.

The only way around this is to give serious and continual examination to the conventions of our time -- to quote John Taylor Gatto, "the great non-thought of received ideas." People of the future, with higher shoulders on which to stand, will probably still find places to criticize you. No one is perfect, and no one can escape entirely the influence of their time and place. But what shows one's commitment to the good is moving toward it -- which, in turn, helps others move toward it.

And the same applies to physics. Every physics major today knows about relativity. That does not make them better physicists than, say, Newton. That credit can only go to those who move conventions -- be they in moral philosophy, or physics, or medicine, or anything else -- not those who follow them, however advanced the conventions they inherit happen to be.
As you're coding you'll definitely do things differently. You can even learn from your competitors mistakes, because you can regard their product as your "prototype". And because you have a competitor you can be pretty sure there is a market and (potential) customers. This is a good thing.

There are always a million reasons to not go through with something. If you're excited about the idea, and if you're pretty sure you can turn it into something profitable there's no reason not to go ahead.
This is top on our list. We decided it was better to launch and start responding to market feedback immediately than delay launch while we integrated with a (more-reliable) payment provider.

It's good to see this getting such attention here, because it's something we discussed at some length internally as a potentially really big problem, and it validates that we're spending time talking about the right things.
Proofs are almost never "irreducibly ugly." What has generally happened in the past is that mathematicians have abstracted the "ugly" parts of a proof, so that one only has to refer to a mathematical object (object in the OO sense). Ugly proofs for basic theory are usually the primary motivation for mathematicians to invent new mathematical abstractions. In fact, when some mathematician is said to have "reinvented a field of mathematics," it usually means that he has found a particular abstraction or perspective that allows for a simplification of the given field.

In fact it happens in much the same fashion as you described. It's like writing a python port of a C program. You can abstract out the details until you have essentially reduced the proof to a chain of concepts.
I hate to go off-topic, but when did mm come to mean million?

When I first look at it, my brain says, "millimeters."

I know it is one thousand thousand in roman numerals, but being an engineer I find it hard to recognize mm as such. If anything, you should use capital M for million because that is the accepted prefix.
Idea is nothing without execution. So, it's glad that you are determined to continue working on your idea. And, you should be happy that at least you are now working on an idea that already has its market.

If you are working on a totally new idea, it means you are trying to explore a totally new market. And, thing tends to become even worse if your web app are trying to shape new habits among people.

And, if I were you, instead of spending time working on the research, I would rather spend the time start working on the idea. You may already a prototype right now if you started working on it the last couple weeks.

But, I do not mean that research is bad. But, I will try to keep the research time as short as possible. And, I agree with aneesh, try to keep your idea as specific as possible.

Besides, I assume that you are working on your idea alone, so, it is always good to target a niche market.
It's so amazing that one of the worst pieces of software ever conceived, the Acrobat plugin, is now supposed to be replaced by Scribd, a contender for the title of "mother of all UI aberrations". It's unbelieavable what can happen in the 21st century.

But to make this debate a little more productive, we should think about what the core problem is. It's that many people feel a need for monolithic page structured documents that always look the same (aka. document fidelity).

If we have learned anything from the web it's that data (semi structured in this case) and presentation aspects should be separated. So what we need is a file format that includes both, similar to an HTML file with an embedded stylesheet, only with much more sophisticated visual primitives.

I've read the PDF spec top to bottom. It can do that and a whole lot more, but its design is anitquated in my view. It's bloated beyond belief and encourages incredibly bad documents to be created. Documents that don't even include the the text proper as sequence of unicode codepoints. Documents from which you cannot deterministically derive the sequence of words it contains.

I know Microsoft is very unpopular here, but their XPS format is a much better solution to the problem of document fidelity. If nothing else I hope XPS at least forces Adobe to come up with a radically redesigned PDF format and a less bloated and more stable reader plugin.

All of this does not solve the UI issues caused by embedding these documents into HTML. In my view, the best solution is simply not to do it. Let's keep them separate for download by people who have a need for it. If Scribd wants to be part of the solution instead of the nuissance they are, they should translate PDFs to HTML, just as google does, only better.
Sorry for the self-link but I provided a list a while back of about 20 successful products that were not based on original ideas: http://firewatching.com/ambient/2008/06/06/products-that-wou...
i used to use FreeBSD until the pain kills me (had to rebuild kernel to activate nat)

openbsd generic kernel covers almost everything i need (no bluetooth support) - for complete hw support, i use ubuntu

overall, openbsd is simpler. Last week i just upgraded from 4.0 to 4.4 on remote machine in about 2-3 hours). I never bothered to upgrade before :D 400+ days uptime is normal

for desktop, i use dwm, firefox3, mrxvt, qiv, axyftp, vifm, vim (non-gui), mpg123, mplayer, ImageMagick, gimp, lighttpd, mercurial, newlisp, tightvncviewer (to control my Mac Mini GUI remotely)
Personally my feeling is that chemical imbalance is the symptom not the cure. It takes a very mature society to practice preventative medicine. We clearly aren't that society (look at the obesity epidemic).

I'm sure that people who are mentally unwell have a chemical imbalance, that doesn't mean it isn't caused by diet, environment or simply their human experience constantly training them to be a in a particular state.
The web is a great repository of HTML documents with hypertext. But there is so much more to it than that. So much content is locked away in PDF and DOC. I think Scribd is still a valuable service because for 90% of computer users out there, PDF/DOC to Scribd is still a more viable way to post specific quanta of content online than the vagaries of CSS/HTML.
OpenOffice five times more popular than Google Docs
What is undeniable is the culture woven under it all, of which lolcats are just an expression channel.

The article is worth a read. The author argues that, beyond those merely comic, best lolcat pictures spark a giggle because of the human tragedy they depict.
It isn't really "push". It is just a very high rate pull. It really hurts battery life.
< The baby boomers were hippies who did drugs, attacked the Vietnam war, questioned authority, promoted "free love",

How'd that work out?

> Contrasting them with the "Greatest Generation," whose lives were basically dictated to them when WW2 started, and supported the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities.

And the Soviets later revealed that there were Communists in the US govt and that they were trying to "influence" Hollywood.

> Can we call them the "Pleasantville Generation?" instead.

Whenever it comes down to "squares" vs "cool", you can be pretty sure that the "cool" will screw things up more.

In other news, truth is not beauty and you have to be pretty stoned to think otherwise.
Dell already sells systems with no PS2 or serial ports. (I don't think that mine has a parallel port either.)
I think many people enjoy being CEO for the same reasons people enjoy founding startups or going into politics. You say, "aside from the prestige, power, and money, it's not fun." If someone's job provides all three, I would say that they are doing pretty well!

Also, CEOs that focus on quarterly numbers do so only to enrich themselves (via stock options) to the detriment of the company. At my own company (a large test and measurement company), our leadership constantly makes big changes based on the stock price. Since my company pays no dividends, there is no "shareholder return" to maximize. My company will never do an additional offering so steering by the stock price doesn't make sense for the company in the long term. We are constantly delaying capital purchases to make the numbers look good. In reality, these delays cost our project's schedules to suffer. That hurts the company.

By focusing on quarterly numbers, who benefits? It may help somebody make a buck that quarter, but why should the company want to help traders? True investors think long term. It is the management team that is benefiting. Shareholder value is a myth. The only shareholders that matter are the management team.

I usually don't get too worked up about CEO compensation. The only things that don't make sense are massive golden parachutes like the former CEO of Home Depot had and paying executives in stock if they meet quarterly numbers. A company's vision should be long term. Making executives excessively interested in the stock price is dangerous.
Normal people are not interested in open source. You should make that optional, but it's probably an ideological decision on your part, not a business decision. I accept that.
You can pry my parallel port from my cold, dead fingers!
If they're doing a good job of it more or less the way you'd be doing it, bail. You want to be crusading for your future users, saving them from the crap they would have to put up with if you weren't helping them. If you don't think you are making a big difference for your users, you won't have the necessarily inner fire to win.

Ideally you do a startup where other companies are doing something badly, their users hate them, and they still make money.
The only problem here is greed.
I would have returned the necklace without a reward, it's a principle.
Truly original ideas are terrible things to base products on. It takes people a vary long time to accept things that are actually revolutionary.

Instead, its often better to just take something familiar and make it better or adapt it for a certain niche. Make an ipod, not a segway.
I agree, and it seems there's a very low chance of Obama being able to address any of these issues.
We like to believe in creation, but what's actually happening is evolution, not creation. Original ideas are like genetic mutations of old ideas and are not strong enough to survive and win.

I think that the strongest ideas are never really original, they are just better implementations of the existing ones.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/downloads/index.php
It is lightning fast.
1. It's a travel book for geeks

2. I followed scrupulously O'Reilly's guidelines on submitting an proposal. I went through their normal channel for proposals and then I asked a friend who's an O'Reilly author to give them a prod for me.

3. I worked with the editor I'd been assigned to convince them that I could pull it off.
About 10 years ago I started using a colocated FreeBSD system as the central location for all my email so the "desktop" that matters to me is whatever ssh window happens to have the screen session where my mh-emacs process is running.
Neat. But I can hardly hold a wiimote up for a half-hour. I work on computers 8 hours a day. I do not want to hold my hands up and wave at them for 8 hours!
Yeah, it's pathetic and Apple has really failed at this. But at least they admit it, and say they are trying to improve.
It's pretty much guaranteed that Obama is going to be remembered as a "great" President. I mean, look at FDR. By all logic, he ought to at least be considered an extremely controversial President. He presided over the longest depression in US history while supporting such questionable policies as price supports in the face of a falling money supply. He vastly increased the power of the Federal Government, well beyond its previous high-water mark.

Yet the historians and journalists that form popular opinion on FDR almost universally consider him great. Why? He made people feel good. In the midst of a crises, he connected with citizens through regular "fireside chat" programs on the radio. In the weak, Disney-weaned minds of journalists, emotion trumps substance. The general feeling of, dare we say it, "hope" that FDR instilled in people was more important than any actual policy decisions.

So, even if Obama's Presidency is an absolute trainwreck, he has been already guaranteed greatness. His face is already on the t-shirts and lunch pails of today's left-wing students that will be tomorrow's historians and journalists. The hope that he brings to the easily led will trump any actual consequences of his policy.
From TA, Obama faces three problems.

1 All his private mail exchanges will be archived.
2 Third parties listening on the wire (security breach or PR scandal.)
3 Potential PR disclosure scandal by someone who had a conversation with him (Lewinsky, anyone?)

He can diminish the amount of personal talks to deal with problem 1 (e.g. something he'd say to his wife.) Having encrypted client server conversation doesn't completely fix 2, doing PGP-style encryption mostly would do (there is still the issue of PDA security, usually it's not good.) But that would make problem 3 even worse as the valid 3rd party can now show the message(s) cryptographically signed by Obama.

This last bit can be addressed with Off-the-Record cryptography as it offers plausible deniability. http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ But the third parties should have to have a compatible client (that could be a nice filter for randoms :)

Anyway, the NSA can sure give him a PDA-based system better than Blackberry + Exchange, with all that and maybe more.
Some people were just speculating what the motive(s) might be. I read nearly all of the other posts before getting to yours and didn't notice any even imply that it was justified.
I still don't understand how Scribd adds value to anyone's life, either.
> Whenever it comes down to "squares" vs "cool", you can be pretty sure that the "cool" will screw things up more.

How can you be so sure? They've never really had the chance.
I like that Ira Flatow on Science Friday uses twitter.

http://twitter.com/scifritter
500x is a figure I'm deeply suspicious of. Average worker in the entire economy vs CEO of a Fortune 100, maybe. The "average" CEO is just the owner of a small company and probably makes <5x more than even their lowest paid worker.
Yep, unfortunately addressing key issues won't make any president popular with the ruling elite in the U.S. And since those are the ones providing most of the campaigning funds for presidential candidates, guess who Obama will be loyal to... If only Ron Paul would have made it...
why? the faster we waste resources the more motivated we'll be to come up with new solutions. necessity is the mother of invention.
Obamas weekly address on YouTube
Let me rephrase your question:

"What's wrong with, say, Psychology, that makes so few men enroll?" or "Why there are so few men graduating from fashion schools?"

I agree that looking at the whole picture explains it better than looking at a very small part of it and wondering, "if 50% of this picture is mostly green, why all I see is blue?". The answer could be simple: maybe you are looking at the sky.

When I graduated in a, say, 50 people class, 4 of them were women. Apart from the fact that we went to separate toilets, there was not much of a difference.
I'm not sure it makes sense to use FreeBSD on the desktop. Not that it isn't perfectly capable mind, but if you want a BSD desktop or laptop there's OSX. I've FreeBSD running in a VirtualBox VM; best of all possible worlds.
Go down a street and you'll see McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, In-N-Out, Jack In the Box...
I have a very interesting story about exactly this situation, but I am forbidden by regulations to share it here. ;-)

But the reply alongside mine nails it quite well - the HR staff has no authority to bump you up. You earn what they pay for that position and that's all the HR people can do.
How can content be "locked away" inside any digital non-DRM format? The purpose of a format is to represent content, and that's what PDF/DOC does.

Also, in regards to your other point, I find Dropbox's "copy public link" mechanism to be a far easier way to share content than to upload it to any website (not just scribd), because I don't have to use a browser in the first place. The content is already uploaded and ready to be shared.
The automobile was invented by a German, but it was popularized by Henry Ford. Also, consider that if that German hadn't invented the automobile, Ford still would have. i.e. Ford wasn't inspired by that German, because he was already working on an automobile. His autobiography is very good: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/hnfrd10.txt
That's not really correct. There's still no word on whether he'll be allowed to send and receive emails directly during his term(s) as president. The chances are that the risks will be considered too high to permit it.

If that happens, he'll be in the same position as George W. Bush, who was a fairly prolific emailer before becoming president but was not permitted to use the technology directly while in office.

As an aside, it may not always be a good thing. South Africa's former president Thabo Mbeki was quite well known for having a computer at his desk and a personal email account while in office. Unfortunately, he tended to use his to research crank AIDS activists online, write raving and offensive weekly newsletters on his party's official website and send off diplomatically-unsound emails to newspapers, unpopular researchers and other world leaders. Perhaps it is better to keep a president isolated to some extent.
That is true, but the volume of useful work that can be done on a computer doesn't decrease; the slowness is almost always in the user interface portion, not the computation.

Obviously this is different in fields were people actually are constrained by their processors and staying on the cutting edge is a competitive advantage. We have a couple of apps like that (e.g. Monte Carlo simulations where we can basically eat as much power as we can get) but for most people (including me), most of the time, computers became "good enough" for work on the desktop 10-15 years ago.
If I build a house there is more value in the world, so there should be more paper money too - without affecting inflation. This is what happens with fiat money.

Depending on what other goods were spent to build the house, the total value in the world could increase or decrease. Does your system burn some paper money to reflect that?
So he doesn't like its usability, he doesn't have to use it.

Scribd requires you to sign up for an account to access the original document, basically requiring you to sign up for their "service" when it is beyond obvious that the one thing you want is to avoid it.

I call major BS on that.
I use Windows and I'll use the Adobe PDF plugin any day.

From Adobe Acrobat 5 to 6 the changes were truly horrible, and the reader became bloated as heck, which made me stay at Acrobat 5 for quite a while since Acrobat 6 seemed to offer no real added value while pretty much every PDF on the internet worked in Adobe Reader 5.

Since version 7 though it seems like they got back on the right track, and I honestly don't get what people are bitching about.
I wish Hacker News allowed us to upvote or downvote individual paragraphs. I upvoted you because of your first paragraph, but would have downvoted otherwise. (Shareholders besides the management team still matter. :P)
Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (Ubuntu 8.10)
I'm going to start referring to American soccer players as "Adrenaline Bunnies" since the word "soccer" doesn't refer to the same thing in all languages.
FreeBSDs filesystem is one of the most reliable filesystems out there. It is old, but still performs pretty well and the age transfers to reliability.

There are 2 things creating problems now, though: first, it does not use journaling (by default) leading to expensive fsck times on big disks. Second, it could have faster meta-data operations.

The filesystem has a construction such that a system crash can only lead to unreclaimed free space on the disk. If that is not the case, you are facing a hardware error. The primary role of fsck is to put back this free space.

Journaling is now experimental in FreeBSD. ZFS is experimental in FreeBSD. As soon as these stabilizes, the problems mentioned here goes away entirely. Note that "experimental" means that the state is equivalent to most things linux: the crap actually works but have not yet seen the strains of time.
I just learned I shouldn't be drinking when I read the sentence "the lizard men would have gotten me if it weren't for the fairy tucking me into extra dimensions where my entire worldview fell apart like a glass chandelier shattering I feel like I'm dreaming but I'm wide awake get that guy some seizure meds"