skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still primarily listen to mp3s via my own cloud based music player that lets you share your library with your friends. It looks like iTunes before they started to add extra bells and whistles (ping buttons) that in my opinion make it less useful. It's not perfect, but it allows me to listen to 320kbps audio files without having to worry about audio filters being applied by specific applications.

I have a couple albums on my iPhone (only need the 16 gig as the rest of my library is accessible when online).
And yet the fact that there is a difference does not mean that one should go punished while the other should not.

To bring it back to the question of whether it's appropriate to respond to unwitting acts of sexism with anger: Depending on the particulars, it very well can be. Calmly talking about things is preferable in many circumstances where civility is valued at a premium, but it has limited utility in that it isn't particularly salient. Whereas a few harsh words can really grab someone's attention, and can show them that what they said was hurtful, rather than merely telling them. And, this being the 21st century, oftentimes the reason why someone might still unwittingly ostracize women is quite likely to be because, to put it bluntly, they're kind of dense. Meaning that harsh words might get through to them where soft words won't.

Done correctly, it can still be a compassionate act. Especially if the attention-grabbing jab is followed up by more patient, civil conversation. A little pain now in exchange for a lifetime of improved relations with the rest of one's own species is a pretty good deal, all told.
I'll believe it when someone can explain why a search for "weather" returns the results it does.

The Weather channel utilizes Google search.

The Weather Underground...well name a Google service they could use and don't.

Accuweather provides plausible deniablity.

On the other hand, weather.gov employs some of the best meteorologists anywhere, provides the official hazardous weather warnings the other sites rely on, and has a wonderfully informative hourly weather graph for any given location.

In other words, Google doesn't provide the most relevant results first when it comes to local weather in the US, it provides the most profitable.

But I'm willing to read your statistical explanation for why this is so. Go ahead and make your case.

Be sure to explain how the special format for the weather page is based on statistical data and not hard coded.
"I think there is a fundamental difference between going after an initial idea, then pivoting, vs. jumping into entrepreneurship with no idea at all. With the meme of “team and execution are everything”, it’s easy to forget that ideas still matter."

I tend to agree. When I founded a chapter of a fraternity at my college, I had a really interesting discussion with the alum who helped us and almost all of the state start our chapters about leadership. Something he said during the initiation of our first pledge class (Alpha class) that will always stick with me: even though the Alphas are all great potential leaders, there is such a fundamental difference between them, the first group of followers who joined a group because they desired to be leaders, and us (my founders group), who went out with an idea and created something.

Mr. Lewis's point might have been different, but I think they stream from the same thing. While there may be people out there who have the capacity to create given an idea and others who have many ideas but don't end up creating, the rare combination of the two is what makes an entrepreneur, a true leader. Everyone else is a follower on some level. I might be totally off base and my point is tangential, but these are 3pm musings.

I'd love to get feedback on them, and I'm interested to see PG's response to the article.
The piano keyboard is actually pretty well-designed with a very consistent design. Every key (both black and white keys) is a half-step from each other. Learning scales sucks initially, but once mastered, the dance is easy and fun.
Credentialing is an (unavoidable?) product of scaling up angel funding. On the other hand starting my startup, convincing friends to join it, getting to the interview stage at YC and losing a nontrivial amount of my friends money on a stupid idea did make me a more mature person. Your friend might just learn a few things by accident.
prices have settled down as in they are fairly stable now, but a terabyte still costs roughly double what it did before the flooding.
I think there is a 3rd question that begs to be asked: Are you building yourself as a skilled professional?

"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four." - Paul Graham http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

When Paul Graham wrote that he was talking in the context of wealth but I think it just as easily applies to skill, knowledge, experience, network, etc.

I think there is a valid argument for frowning upon credential building but I'd be more curious to hear what HN thinks about this idea of building yourself? You could say its just as selfish as credential building but at the same time is it really bad if an accelerator ends up being primarily a talent generator for future generations of startups?
This seems like a direct callback to PG's "After Credentials" essay ( http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html ), in a good way. What I get from this post is that we might be in the middle of a credentials shift, from the credentials being good guidelines, to the period where attaining them is an end in itself, the period where people are gaming the system.
Nothing would happen if somebody stole their software. Exactly nothing. You think if you somehow copied Zuckerberg's hard disk in 2004, you'd have the billion-dollar business now? No, you'd have a pile of 8-year-old useless code. The code doesn't matter, the people building the company and writing that code to accomodate specific (and rapidly changing) needs matter.
(In normal workplace setting women are actually shielded from that friendly fire because men don't feel as comfortable/can't predict what's OK and what's not)

They didn't used to be shielded like this, because men didn't used to think "what women thought was OK and what's not" mattered. In the same way, "white" men used to feel universally entitled to make off-color comments about the silliness and inferiority of "non-whites". Now the power relationship has changed, and now there is some thought given to what's appropriate and what's not.

You want jokes, you have to acquire certain skin thickness. If you don't, then I don't want to work with you. Fun is fun.

"Skin thinness" has to do with a certain degree of wounding and the remnants of institutionalized injustice. Both the wounding and the echoes of the injustice in the culture might take some generations to completely fade away. That said, all people have fun. All people want to relax and be genuinely themselves with someone, sometime. Are you entitled to have fun with absolutely everyone in the particular way that you know? I'm sorry, but it might not even go as far as the small subset of your workplace.

"Fun is fun" is pretty naive. If one studies humor, one finds that it's mostly highly contextual and cultural. This is particularly true for what's acceptable between men and women. That's not some conspiracy to rain on your parade, it's just how things are in the world. Just get to know people first.
Well, no, I also mentioned that it was relevant for the startup scene. It involves a startup. There are lessons within to be learned about PR and handling complaints from users. It is of more relevance to startups than "Your boss shouldn't get your Facebook password".

It just seems like there are enough members of HN out there are unwilling to discuss a topic that makes them uncomfortable. Ostrich syndrome, indeed.
I think you might be overreacting. There isn't a "huge uproar." I think I and most of the other commenters I've seen are pretty calm. You can be offended and say so without being out of control or irrationally angry. I don't think that the two men in this case are evil or something. But they are emblematic of a culture that many here have a problem with.

You seemed incredulous that people are offended by the video. I pointed you to the link not because it would make mention of this specific case, but because it explicated the concept of sexual objectification and its place in feminist thinking. It's a fine example, if not an extreme one. She's being flirty in a sexy outfit because she expects that will sell shirts and bring attention to the Geeklist brand. She is trying to relate to viewers as an object of sexual desire, and to transfer that desire onto the brand. It happens all the time because, at least in our culture, it works.
nit: a big chunk of the web is powered by FreeBSD.
Open source Kinect skeleton tracking library released
The older age demographic may work in their favor --- the "about to retire" crowd might be willing to work with them on pretty favorable terms, especially if they are flexibile on location and hours. It would be a heck of a lot more interesting and rewarding than consulting part-time for Westinghouse or GE, which is what they would probably otherwise do.

I've been thinking a lot about this kind of problem because the foundry industry is in much the same state. My father has been working in it (metallurgy, process/lean, product design and test, etc.) for ~45 years and is retiring in a few years. The foundry industry is also a field with basically nobody between the ages of 25-55 in the US, and he's thinking about what he will do to keep busy once the pension and social security kick in, apart from the obvious occasional contracting gig.
It's just the standard fear. Shipping GPL code you didn't write means that you need to honor a license in ways you might not forsee. Some people view that as a scary risk and some don't. Rubin is firmly in the "GNU is for commies" camp. Shrug.
Search engines were never a content discovery tool for me. I use HN, Twitter, Facebook for that. Some others use Digg, Pinterest and Reddit. When I search on a search engine, I am looking for a solution to a question that I have.
The owner still has grounds, building maintenance, carrying costs from a mortgage, etc. Obviously the loss would differ from a strip mall with 10 tenants vs a giant commercial building with 2.

Third parties get f'd in criminal cases all the time. One of the asset seizure stories the WSJ recently covered involved a guy whose cash happened to be in transit with an armored car company. That was, until the companies assets were seized by the feds along with his cash.

Lucky for Kim Dotcom, New Zealand let him get a hold of some of his cash for living expenses. I'm not sure he'd be so lucky in the US. Carpathia probably should have had an insurance policy for this.
The math looks good to me. I think they are saying that it's costing them $128.41 per year just to continue to run it -- i.e. considering the hardware itself a sunk cost.
> but it's possible to make a balloon reach neutral buoyancy at a specific altitude see:zeplin

Only for a short time. Hydrogen leaks, and helium leaks even faster. Plus how do you keep it from blowing away in the wind? (Keep in mind that winds also blow up and down.)
LOL: Can users that don't pay be called customers? hmm. Return to that thought later
Im not frowning on credentialing. The question I have is whether we are becoming too credential-obsessed in Silicon Valley rather than focusing entirely on what matters: building companies of consequence.
I was going to hate on the parody, but you got the man himself supporting your jokes, so how can I hate on that :) Congrats on everything so far with 42floors. Excited to see where you take it.
Tennessee legislature boldly sets the science clocks back 150 years
I would guess that it's something like SICP introducing assignment halfway through the book, dramatic, unexpected, and you've been using a weaker version for many chapters now. (Chapter 6 is about recursive data types, and comes immediately after chapter 5's induction to give some perspective.) But it might also be because, as an introductory mathematics course, it wants to stay a good distance away from algorithms and messy concepts like big-O notation.
There was a thread here on HN some time ago, where someone argued that it's illegal anyway, because of some misguided law that makes it a federal crime to violate an internet company's TOS. I can't find that thread right now, though.
You should check out KDE--I think you'd like some of the standard window manager features there. They have some effects reminiscent of Exposé (as well as a bunch of other options). And the current version of KDE is also, overall, the best environment I've ever used (out of Unity, Gnome 2, Windows 95+ and OS X Leopard and Lion).
From what I understand, there are only two commercially available SS7 stacks, and the one we use is the better of the two (which I find a frightening thought). So there's a 50/50 chance. I don't know enough of the stack to start it (or restart it) so I can't say for sure if that's how our stack works.

And in our case, our signals originate in SS7 ...
Mozilla Planning to Use Google’s HTTPS Search by Default
Skip the Romotive and utilize a human going about their daily commute. They even come preprogrammed with the desire to locate and utilize power sources!
Several companies used Hecl code, including one that was later sold to BlackBerry, so there was some demand for it commercially, just that apparently the code was good enough or clear enough that they didn't need any further involvement from me.

My point is that for people to start hiring you at a high hourly rate, there's got to be a burning demand, whereas with a product or app, the costs are much lower, so it's easy to spread them around.

> Certainly if you make something people want, people will pay you to develop it

Only after a certain critical mass, that is a lot higher than what it is for a proprietary project, where all sales feed back into the project. I mean, I certainly don't pay people to develop Linux, Postgres, Ruby, Rails, gcc or any of the other projects I use, although I do try and contribute back where possible.

BTW, strange but true story: I probably made the most money off of Hecl doing a BlackBerry port for... of all people, PASOK, the Greek center-left political party. This was all before the country ran out of money, and I did get paid.
From a societal point of view, I'm a bit troubled. It's an encouraging trend that high talent individuals who would have gone into finance or consulting are considering startups. Should we really be turning them away? That said, I certainly understand your hesitations.
I got out of nuclear engineering and into fine art oddly enough :). But mostly cause I like that the web doesn't regulate what I can and cannot do.

I'm really pulling for this new generation. Heck, I want to get back into nuclear engineering once I have a startup or two under my belt. But a lot of what it takes to be successful is gonna be politics and bureaucracy. Knowing the older engineers who have moved up to NRC is a huge boon. Also being able to work utility company execs that want to take a chance. Then there's the actual politicians to convince. It's a lot of work. Most of it isn't going to be actual engineering.
Any attention from powers that be coming about this? Still struggling to understand why anyone would bother sweeping something relatively mild like this under the rug.
In Grand Deceivefest, Swedish Parliament Just Voted For Data Retention
Exactly; my take is clients connecting over Internet via SPDY to a gateway that uses HTTP keep-alive over LAN to your servers confers most of the advantages of SPDY.
I didn't understand the reasoning behind the retort.

>Are you aware that Google runs an entire ad network?

Which would mean that they would want to keep such third party sites interesting, fast and high quality as well. Chrome, Analytics and their other similar products/services are hence justified.
I had tried that and it didn't work for me; I suppose it's still random even for new visitors.
>Do you really want an averaged across all searchers answer? California is probably the state the generates the most Google searches for dmv, but the California DMV is likely relevant iff you are in California."

My state has a Motor Vehicle Division.

"DMV" gives me California's.

This page which does not appear on Google's first page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMV - though perhaps it should.
His turn of phrase suggested to me that said overtly sexist common would me delivered with sufficiently dripping sarcasm to make it clear he wasn't in favour of the idea.

I think I might say "yes, boss, because the possession of a penis renders one incapable of note taking, obviously" instead but that's more about the turn of phrase of my sense of humour than anything else.
Why Kiva Is Worth $775 Million to Amazon
Getting into and surviving top notch elite business schools requires a whole lot of credentials.

The guys and gals that spent their lives accrediting themselves with clubs, sports, extracurriculars now want to join in on the entrepreneur revolution David Fincher crafted for them.

To do so they're applying their way of "success" to this new field. Because that's all they know. And as long as there's money, there'll be support for these guys. The fervent frothing is a sign of the bubble.

You think brogrammers are bad? Welcome the sharks. We've arrived at the jump zone. What's the real life equivalent of flooding Hacker News with Perl articles for 24 hours?
Agreed, I was doing budgetary napkin math here... there are a lot of factors, though it does seem that the 9000/day while MAYBE 20% higher than reality is fairly realistic.
IRobot and Willow Garage Debate Closed vs. Open Source Robotics
Taking advantage of the system is what humans do; as much it can be despised. I hope the people that are in it for the wrong reasons get weeded out. With all the experience that pg and the team have, it can't be too hard, right?
March Madness - SQL Azure - sys.dm_db_partition_stats - Index Cost
What a coinky-dink, hipsters in Williamsburg have this same dilemma.
No, I posted an entry myself (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3741395) asking why the items were being flagged. It got flagged itself- should have seen that one coming...

I'm wondering if there is any information out there about how many flags it takes to delete an HN entry. If it's small enough, it's entirely possible for a group of people to coordinate and remove content that damages them from the site. Concerning.
Facebook should try and do something about this, because it's in their best interest. If this keeps going, people will either simply quit Facebook, or start making mock-accounts to show to the employees.
I get weather.gov at #3 after weather.com, and sfgate.com/weather (probably because I'm in the bay area.) Where does it rank for you?

I can't get into detail explaining what goes into our rankings to you. I can tell you that I can bring up a debug view that shows all the signals that enter in to this ranking, and none of them involve "uses google products."

We love for people to complain about queries. That feedback is very useful, and we always need more of it. But when our search results suck, the reason is that our system is too stupid, not that it's perversely smart at funneling you into money making opportunities.
Recurrences are partially covered in chapters:

13 (Sums and Asymptotics)
15 (Generating Functions, as you mentioned)
19 (Random Processes)
20 (Recurrences)

and though they're not explicitly named as such in Chapter 5 (Induction), several of the problems in the chapter make use of them.

It seems to me that the first half of the chapter on recurrences covers recurrences more from a CS viewpoint such as the recurrence they list for mergesort:

T(n) = 2 T(n/2) + n - 1

which is arguably less fundamental than the study of linear recurrences which come up more often in math. The second half of the chapter covers techniques for solving general recurrences, both for general linear recurrences and general divide-and-conquer recurrences using the Akra-Bazzi theorem (which is an extension of the Master Theorem).

Thus, perhaps the chapter "Recurrences" is misnamed – the authors certainly cover elementary recurrences in the earlier chapters and leave more complex topics recurrences (such as how to solve them in general) for the end because they are less important than most of the other topics in the book.
and $50Mill is probably not going to pay for building a test reactor and all the research that will need to be done before that plus you will need some decent HPC grunt to do you CFD modeling then real world physical models (1:1 and over scale is not cheap) to prove the math works.
Asking for you to provide such information, or asking for your permission to request such information from third parties (as is done with employment or credit references, for instance) seems fine. What seems to cross a line here is asking for sufficient authority from you to permit them to pose AS YOU to a third party in order to access that information.

It's like if, in order to perform a credit check on you, they asked for your SSN, mother's maiden name, etc., and then applied for a couple of credit cards on your behalf to see if you get accepted.

There are ways to perform credit checks without committing identity theft. I would think there must be ways to obtain 'social references' without identity theft either.
And if you induce a memory physiologically that wasn't there previously -- inception!
Bespoke software for tiny problems
I question what the relentless seeker of credentials is trying to achieve. Not just here, but in general. If life is an infinite set of boxes to be checked, what's the point of it all?

It seems our society places an unduly large value on achievement, rather than accomplishment. The point of going to a top school is to say you've gone to a top school. The point of working at McKinsey or Goldman is to put it on your resume. The point of being on the board of X is to get onto the board of Y. And so forth. This is the cold, seldom-questioned bargain of achievement. It is a paint-by-numbers approach to success, and it certainly guarantees its devout adherant a substantial degree of material comfort. But at what cost? And is there an end goal? Or is life simply a contest to see who can build the most prestigious obituary?

I, for one, hope and trust that YC is able to sniff out the achievers from the accomplishers, and to select the latter. It is the latter who build great companies. The former make fantastic lawyers, consultants, and bankers.
Why does this have a single up vote?
From just the quote you provided it sounds like he's being melodramatic, but with the full comment + the post I think he's saying you'll only get to be a good enough coder if you try to support yourself solely from your coding efforts.

Plenty of examples to counter that, although it might be true for some. Having to get good fast in order to put food on the table certainly sounds like it'd be motivating, although in a way I'd find unpleasant.
Just a data point for you to consider - US and China have roughly equal manufacturing output now, despite US being in recession last years and China having 4 times more people. That is if we compare whole population, if we compare manufacturing sector it is 10 times difference in employees. So US workers right now are on average about 10 times more productive than Chinese workers (note I do not mean to imply anything bad about China or Chinese people - it's just statistical facts that do not reflect on anybody personally :). I would not describe this situation as "we're China's bitch" just yet.
Prooflink: http://www.manufacturingdigital.com/news_archive/tags/us/chi...

Of course, China would improve. I hope so would US.