skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, sorry that my description was a bit vague. I have not noticed a consistent linkage between where I post and whose comment page I end up on, yet; only that it tends to happen in longish threads. I get this about once a 'busy' day - say a whole day of being at the desk and participating in about 10 threads. So it probably only affects people who have HN permanently open.

Edit: looking at Tom's remark about the grandparent, I notice that the comment of his to which I replied was a 8th-generation reply to a moldbug comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3692241). I had replied to another comment at similar depth just previously (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3704308). So it may be a function of tree depth rather than overall thread size.
Traffic Sign Smile At Me
The revision of The Tau Manifesto that launched today includes a wealth of new material, including a rebuttal of the "Pi Manifesto" (http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto#sec:the_pi_manifesto_a_rebut...) and a new section on the volume of a hypersphere:

http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto#sec:volume_of_a_hypersphere

If you thought the original quadratic-form argument for circular area was good, prepare to be blown away by n-dimensional spherical volumes.
Olloclip Lens Kit for iPhone: Great at Any Angle
Why "More Bars in More Places" means shit for nothing now
One of my math profs in grad school called lower case xi "a scribble". And when he had to write it on the board, it was.
IPod Dock In The Bathroom And Poop Like This
Automated MySQL DB Replication in the Cloud
Good read and I agree.
This is a sad read.
If you use Gmail, you can easily work around this:

myname+394@gmail.com
myname+blah@gmail.com
myname+randomstr@gmail.com

all route to myname@gmail.com.
The best tool I have ever used for that is CodeSurfer: http://www.grammatech.com/products/codesurfer/overview.html.

It supports slicing operations: Which downstream changes happen if I change this variable? What upstream control structures influence the value of this variable?

Great stuff.
Nope, I'm in San Francisco.
Diameter is 2*radius, so 2pi as another constant isn't that bad. pi being expressed in terms of diameter and tau in terms of radius.
Patent Trolls Like Yahoo Will Ruin Silicon Valley, Says Yammer CEO
I agree that the Goldman response is funny, but that is not enough to dismiss the claims in the OP.

Several times now there have been internal documents and emails released that verify not only that there are people in GS that really are not looking out for their clients, but this was a fundamental strategy when it came to at least some of the derivatives they were selling, knowing that they were shit deals.

Sure, the argument can be made that it's just a 'few bad eggs,' but that argument just gets you so far.

Now, it's not out of the realm of possibility that that some of these things are taken out of context. In IT, it's pretty common to vent concerning some... difficult customers.

I think it's fair to say that you're right that some good people work there. Conceding that, I would like to see more by GS to address some of these other things.
"If you're a hacker and more than 5% of what you type goes anywhere other than your code repository, you should probably reevaluate what you're doing before you make it any easier to do it."

I'm a hacker but I'm also a blogger, marketer, entrepreneur and many other things. And I am sure many other users here also are. The idea that you should only write code all the time is flawed, at best.

And hard drives crash. And other backups also can get lost.

But I agree one shouldn't worry much about online data being lost. And for any data you really care about, have some backups, yes.
I would absolutely be willing to pay $24 a year for what Google offers for free if the alternatives were what existed before those services got big (i.e. altavista and hotmail).
Search and spam were both huge time-sinks.
He could be doubling down. Sorta like they did on Mad Men after losing the tobacco contract.

He figures finance is dead as a way to make people wealthy, so he's setting himself up for a career change into criticism of the financial industry, which looks like it's a booming business.

Michael Lewis ended his career in finance by writing Liar's Poker. But he jump-started a successful career as an author and journalist. Something tells me he's doing better than he ever could have in his old career.
...which is easily defeated by a regex, no?
Thanks for the post. Glad to hear Chrome is coming with a few fixes for those annoyances according to your respondents.

I can only comment on 4), in that I use both Resources and Audits frequently. Resources more-so, I'm always clearing site-specific cookies/sessions. Audits is useful when trying to improve site speed, it has a lot of good advice.
many sites, to my irritation, don't allow the + symbol in their email validation code.
The same argument can be made for any sufficiently complicated device or technology, not just code. I suppose I could deconstruct my smart phone and reverse engineer all of its drawings, designs and schematics. Practically speaking though I am bound to its original designer's implementation.

Furthermore, in a democratic society you're more than free to vote with your money -- I don't understand what having full access to someone else's intellectual property/the fruits of their labor has to do with democracy.
I'm not going to lie, it's more of an eye-roller at the "hip nerd has an iPhone" image that just irks me. I fume at people who (and this has really happened) ask me, "ew, you have an Android, why?!". As my original comment, I've not been to SXSW myself and I was just going off the impression given by the OP article.
I thought this was a good take on it:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=13682720&post...

It's impossible to separate Steve's rejection of cancer treatment from his brilliance as an innovator and CEO.

A more risk averse guy, with less of a sense of drive and infallibility would have got the operation sooner. But a more risk averse guy wouldn't have taken on the job of Apple CEO for a second time and rebuilt the company.

If a parallel universe was inhabited by 'sensible Steve' who got the cancer op immediately, I'm pretty sure that none of us would have heard of him. What sort of sensible person would continue to work long hours, if they had a great family sitting at home and a billion already in the bank? I wouldn't!

So this 'stupidity' is just the flip side of the coin of Steve's brilliant personality. Yes, he died sooner than he should have - but he also accomplished more during that time than most of us ever will.
Now that I have been programming for longer than doing maths, I just must wonder why math community seem so entrenched in using single letter variable/function names. How confusing larger source codes would be if programmers did the same.
> And I got the impression that updates of Arch broke things that required my manual intervention to fix more than updates of Debian did.

Maybe it looks more 'frequent' but when it does so it's in a much, much more limited scope each time. It's more like small, discrete steps vs a whole batch at once.

> you have the option of subscribing to just the security patches for your version of Debian -- an option that Arch Linux just does not offer at all.

That's because Arch subscribes to the opinion that upstream knows best, and puts emphasis on as much vanilla as possible (which contributes to its overall simplicity, leanness and elegance). Hence security update means version bump from upstream. Contrast with Debian which actively back ports security patches to the pinned version in each release.

> E.g., the upgrade to OS X 10.7.3 changed the behavior of sleep mode such that simply bumping the mouse wakes the system, which eliminates most of the value I used to get from putting the system to sleep, so now I have to ask on some forum for a way to revert to the OS X 10.7.2 behavior of waking only on key press or mouse button click.

Ironically (although I did not notice that particular behavior myself) this would restore the pre-Lion behavior.
Nonsense!

The Leibniz sequence is the most simple way to describe the equivalence class under multiplication by non-zero rationals of numbers that contains both pi and tau:

1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11 + 1/13 - ...

which sums to equivalently pi/4 or tau/8.

The fundamental simplicity of the Leibniz sequence makes this value the only natural choice from that equivalence class. Let us call it lambda, for Leibniz.

Then the area of the unit circle is 4 lambda, the diameter of the unit circle is 8 lambda, the volume of the unit sphere is 16 lambda, the surface of the unit sphere is 16/3 lambda, etc.

Should I start selling the t-shirts?
I'm not sure anyone can make depression a fun topic, unfortunately.
If only these tools would wirk reliably. I have seen too many cases when find all references did not find the reference I was looking for (even though it was in no way special or obfuscated). Goto definition works pretty well though.
JavaScript threads for Node.js
I took this class last year (Spring 2011). Hammerbacher's a great professor. He focuses on teaching real-world data analysis tools and skills.
New City of San Francisco Data Portal
The Tau Manifesto author here. Don't yell it too loudly, but I strongly agree: e is by far the most important of these numbers. But e is the natural choice, so I don't have any bone to pick with it. (Bob Palais made an analogy in "Pi Is Wrong!" Suppose e were defined as 1/2.718281828... Then there would be confusing negative signs everywhere. Exponential decay would have a positive exponent, etc. Such is the case with τ and π, with a factor of 2 in place of a factor of -1.)
Rechner: A gesture based calculator
Completely agree with you. How amateurish! Lock pattern is saved on the device, not in the cloud. I am not a hacker myself but FBI not having one that downloads entire OS out of it and either cracks the pattern or disable "wait X seconds to retry" and run a cracking app on it makes me wonder. Especially this is not some rocket science we talking about -- his lock pattern most likely is max 5 pins.
I think the greatest advantage of the SI system is that it's exponential. I don't care that much about what base is used, but switching is just confusing (12" = 1', 3' = 1yd).
I wonder if Yammer could issue some sort of legal covenant not to sue that would be binding even if they sold the company or the patent changed hands some other way? It looks like Yammer's CEO filed a patent as recently as last August:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=D-r_AQAAEBAJ&printsec=f...
The Beginning of the End of Anonymity on the Internet
Pi is better then tau because all of our damned engineering formulas have pi. SI is, however, the right answer (though useless without reference tools, whereas imperial isn't).
Pi Day on Slashdot Facebook Timeline
While his stance is perhaps extreme, I think it forms part of a larger rejection of Yahoo by the tech community. Sadly, that's going to hurt everyone- Yahoo has some phenomenal tech going on, but most of it generates no revenue. So, we stop using it, Yahoo just fires the developers and continues on it's "content portal" path. Sad.
Duda: Web Services Framework in C, to rivalize Node.js
> ...as far as I know there hasn't been a break in DirecTV
> for over half a decade.

Curious what you think of this commercial software which claims to break DirecTV's DRM. (I have no means to evaluate it, google found it for me.)

http://drm-removal.com/features/DirecTV-Save-Download-Captur...
Anonymous Hackers released their own Operating System
Yosemite HD
Euler's identity: e ^ (i * pi) = -1 will be uglier:
e ^ (i * tau/2) = -1
I'd argue that European gasoline is more expensive purely because European gasoline taxes are higher - the underlying commodity has a similar cost. European governments benefit from being able to charge higher taxes on fuel because US foreign policy helps keeps the oil price down. Thus, they're indebted to the US, which the US knows.

But yeah - I agree. Authoritarianism is definitely not the way to a prosperous world.
If going the Perl route is the way to fix your solution your solution sucks (doesn't matter what it solves).

Also, that's why we have subscripts.
Noticias Ciencia
well played good sir/madam
Drawing Stars
This goes a bit far. I am sure there are fine folks at Yahoo who have achieved seniority that they need to support their families. They may object to how the company does business, but can't just walk away job. Is the hiring situation in the Valley really so intense that anyone could find new work in 60 days?
There's a huge, internal backstory to mchurch at Google. Most of which I don't have the right to share with the public. Most Googlers' responses here are based on that. That's why there is a visible disconnect in their heated responses to mchurch here when viewed from the outside.
It's also pretty notoriously difficult to install, especially if you want LAPACK/BLAS.

I almost said "no way!" then remembered how difficult it was for me to get Scipy 0.9.0 installed and verified via tests.

Still, it's like Matlab ("it" being Num/Sci/Matplotlib) plus all of Python. That's a significant improvement over Matlab if you can get it installed.
MongoDB makes a full flush by default every 30 seconds, it can be forced with the fsync command http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/fsync+Command#fsyncComma...
Try the course name, minus the "intro to", in one word.
Freedom has nothing to do with practicality, my friend.
It has videos from last year (Spring 2011). Videos for this year's offering should be posted online later.
> * Google is resistant to any change that might improve engineer productivity beyond the rather plodding rate it has now. C++ and Java are the real house languages; Scala's not even on the table. Python is listed as a house language so Google can still hire people but it's rarely used and nearly deprecated in production.

Google is developing Go precisely to improve engineer productivity, so this claim is rather suspect.
This issue is completely orthogonal to whether or not a GUI was in use. The text UI could just have easily asked for confirmation, and a graphical UI could easily allow the user to shoot themselves in the foot.
Wisconsin Golf Course Discounts
I've no love for GS, but an interesting counterpoint to consider (from http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2012/03/14/unshocked-...
):

"'There are a couple of things out of place. 1) This guy has been at firm for 12 years and is only a VP…a pissant of sorts. He should have been an MD-light by now, so clearly he has been running in place for some time. 2) He was in U.S. equity derivatives in London…sort of like equities in Dallas…more confirmation he is a lightweight. Somewhere along the line he has had sand kicked in his face…and is not as good as he thinks he is. That happens to a lot of high achievers there.'"
Even though I agree with your statement, do you truly believe that if a GUI had presented the options Yes/No/Cancel/Force or whatever, that less people would have suffered from issues like this? I probably would have used that --force flag on a non production system and a GUI would even make that decision more easy for me...
"I don't always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production." http://i.qkme.me/22sv.jpg
Maybe read the linked page? Maybe see section 2.3?
Mind-Controlled Skateboard running on a Windows 8 Tablet
Geode - the universal digital wallet and credit card for iPhone
That worked for me. Thanks.
> " He's probably more concerned with generating publicity for the ideas than making a perfect investment."

And that's the problem. This strikes me as a Bioshock-y move - a libertarian who's sick of the "oppressive" government getting in his way, so now he's going to create his libertarian government-free paradise floating in the open seas.

... and has less to do with actually funding startups. The startups in this case seem like a means to an end, and as a startup I'd be very unsettled by that.

Not to mention, I can pay similar rent here in SF and not give up a big chunk of equity just to have office space.
Any talented engineer, yes.

So either you're soulless and refuse to leave, or you're incompetent and you're scared to leave. Either way, not hiring them seems fair to me.
Show HN: Bitdeli, a scripting platform for real-time data
Hi fellow HNers,

We just opened up Bitdeli for free public beta at

https://bitdeli.com

Bitdeli allows you to process real-time data with plain Python scripts and access the results over a friendly HTTP API.

You can use it to create live visualizations and dashboards without having to worry about servers. See examples here: http://bl.ocks.org/2009621 and http://bl.ocks.org/1983818

We would love to hear your feedback and comments!
Thanks for the feedback! Currently there are about 1000 songs in our database. We plan on adding more, and more instruments, soon.
Ask HN: What game development tool is this?
Does anyone know what tool is being used in this video - http://www.break.com/index/smart-video-game-design-tool.html

It looks pretty impressive.
Does anyone know of a Cydia app that will give a more meaningful or network quality signal bar as the article suggests?
"Furthermore, in a democratic society you're more than free to vote with your money -- I don't understand what having full access to someone else's intellectual property/the fruits of their labor has to do with democracy."

You have conflated so much economics and governmental policy here I don't even know where to start. We (at least Americans) live in neither a free market nor democracy, for starters.
I think they do though, not like that but. They will just generalise to all new products coming from places other than big well know companies. It will be more like "I started using [photo sharing app x] but then they shut down and I had to move my photos, I'll just stick to Facebook."
Does Yammer have similar policies against hiring people from Apple, Microsoft, or Oracle?

This reeks of publicity-seeking.
I'm friends with a guy who was 'bought out' of his startup for north of $8M and he said something I found interesting.

"Chuck its not about the money, until there is a lot of money and you're not getting it. I mean when its all hypothetical you can be generous, but when its not hypothetical, and the piece being offered is not what you had informally agreed upon, you tend to stop seeing what you're getting and instead focus on what you are not getting. That can be toxic."

I think its just basic human nature.
jig.com in another bottle ?
Amazon cuts distribution deal with Discovery Network - All TV available on Prime
The next 100 years people will ask "what is tau?" and one will say "it's 2pi".
Custom ROMs don't always follow spec, and often break apps, causing more fragmentation, so clearly this is not a full solution.
I really agree with his sentiments, but sometimes even if someone wants to quit in the next 60 days, they can't.

Example 1: Yahoo buys out your company, but it is more of a talent acquisition rather than a real tech/market grab, and the terms of the deal are marked accordingly.

Example 2: Someone takes a job at Yahoo as a sales exec, but differs all their compensation in favor of stock options that expire at a very specific date.

But yeah, generally I like the direction this is going.
A system and method for collaborative short messaging and discussion are described. According to one embodiment, a computer-implemented method for collaborative short messaging and discussion, comprises grouping users into client networks based on existing shared attributes. System resources are partitioned for messaging across client networks. Users in a client network are allowed to view or respond only to messages within the client network.

I know it's just a summary, but this sounds pretty much exactly like the early days of Facebook when user's were confined to their college "network".
I noticed that too and agree entirely. There is absolutely nothing in the article that suggests this argument was actually made and rejected. At the end of the day, judges are people too and can't possibly have the entirety of all case law in their minds at all times. It is up to defense attorneys to research the case and bring up relevant arguments. I just can't see anything in the article that even suggests that the idea of a wiretap warrant being more appropriate was even discussed.
Cool! I'm interested in NLP and might want to help out on this. Do you have a TODO list / roadmap yet?
If everybody would quit because of some (perceived) wrongdoing on part of their employer, most businesses probably would have to close up for lack of employees.
I guess the only way to accomplish that is to set up the new blog on my own server where I will have access to a .htaccess file. That is, I can't use any hosted blog like blogger, tumblr, wordress.com. Is this correct, or are there any hosted blog services that will give you this fine-grained control? Or are there any things I can do on the domain registrar side?

Alternatively, is it a good or bad idea to route all traffic to my blog through a VPS I have, so that all the old blog post addresses go to the right place on one of the hosted blog services? (I'm just trying to avoid hosting my own blog, since I assume there are a lot of headaches involved)
Ok, but "...a lot of useful expressions..." sounds like an anthropocentric argument as well.

Anywho, the point stands. They're simplifications for our benefit.
Greg Smith Doesn't Shock Me And I'm Not Selling Goldman
Show HN: Do/While in Python
I am a graduate student, first-year, so I have a lot of problem sets to work on. I've been thinking about tau every so often since the last time this was posted here, and so every time I work a problem, I think to myself: would this be clearer if I used tau? And the answer is usually "no". Sometimes 2 is next to pi because of the natural reason appealed to in the tauifesto, and other times it's there for some other reason, other times it isn't there at all; there's usually a huge constant factor out front anyway, and often a single equation goes across the whole sheet of paper, so even making it one character shorter doesn't accomplish much.

Not that I haven't learned notation that really helps. Gaussian units and Einstein notation are a godsend. If you could standardize introductory physics courses using these, I think it could help significantly, especially when people struggle to work out the curl of a cross product or some-such strenuous vector calculation. All hail the Levi-Civita tensor! But we haven't even been able to agree on this.

Furthermore, as a test grader of nearly-a-year, the work done by undergraduates is nigh-inscrutable in the maximally acceptable way already, and so the tau "rebellion" promoted here would just make my job harder. It's not too much of an issue: only the technically-inclined, who already do pretty clear work, are likely to use it; still, telling people "just start doing your work like this, let them figure it out!" means that I have to know if that scribble is a tau or a T or what-have-you, two hundred times. Pi is a very recognizable character.

Plus, tau is the letter I reach for whenever I need to introduce an adjusted time of some sort, such as proper time; it's also the natural temperature in stat mech (though thermodynamic beta is itself more natural and usually better), it's torque, it's a common time constant, &c. People generally avoid pi as a character which does not represent 3.14159, though it is the prime counting function and an adjusted momentum, in which case it usually has a half-arrow, so you can tell what it's doing. We don't avoid tau at all; it's everywhere.

So the tau-switch, as notational improvements go -- and math has had many over the years -- seems like a relatively large-pain, small-gain deal. Many things must change, since pi is all over the place, but few are greatly improved. So I don't see much reason to use tau in my work, or for my students to use it in theirs. If it works for you, though, good!
private track?