skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a Ph.D. student. Including the time spent getting my Master's, I've been in grad school five and a half years.

If it wasn't for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and lifting, I would be lost.

Training BJJ and MMA is physical, skill-based and social. I train with people who don't care if I miss or make the next paper deadline. They only care that I show up, work hard, and be friendly. Lifting by myself has a meditative quality.

Most people go through a week without ever exposing themselves to real physical exertion, and I have no idea how they cope.
Build something that helps bridge the gap between 'wet-lab' biologists and 'computational' biologists. There is an absolutely humongous amount of biological/statistical/genomics data stored in Excel files. Build something that has dead-easy data entry, looks like Excel, but can still easily be accessed by us computational types.
Thanks. I have a friend working in Geneva. So perhaps I can combine the visits.
Or roll that together with incron/rsync for a more "in the background" approach.
diff in Excel. Against different components, whether cell contents, formulae, cell-associated comments, etc. If you want a headache, try supporting recognition of intracell text formatting.

Rereading, I see this is a "new" spreadsheet application. Well, hopefully then the data format and API's will be less... obtuse.

Interactive, visual interface to same diff functionality.

When I last looked, for Excel there was a product or two going partway in this direction; however, most seemed rather limited, e.g. export the cell contents to text and diff that.

Useful for number crunchers. Also useful for all the people who end up using something like Excel as a glorified table. In the business world, there are endless use cases of people managing documents, requirements, results, etc. in Excel. Providing such a "BeyondCompare" fucntionality for this content would be very useful to a lot of them, (Caution: You might also have to teach them how to use it, including the diff concept. And that could be a very significant bump to try to get over.)

Since Excel is so dominant, that class of people might not be your target market. Nonetheless, I see a good diff type utility as being a real plus.

I also can agree with Zain's comment regarding versioning support.

And, integrated regexp support. I wedged same in to Excel/VBA by defining a reference to Windows Scripting Host (back in 1999 or 2000). Very useful. A lot of problems people deal with in spreadsheets can be greatly aided by decent pattern matching and substitution.
Am I the only one who doesn't see anything particularly special about Norvig's collection of quotes? Why do quotes that he likes hold any more relevance than someone else's? It's much better to build your own collection that is relevant to how you live your life.
As someone who works in an investment bank, it would be great if this new, more powerful spreadsheet played nicely with Bloomberg, Reuters, and Factset.
It's interesting reading this right after coming home from and Apple store. Rows and rows of shiny new technology ready for you to play with, priced just at the top end of what you may be willing to spend.
Java the Platform (VMm libs, etc) plus JRuby or Clojure or whatever your preferred JVM language = the coolness.
Data-based startups will be implement internally before it hits popularity. This is supported by semantic-esque elements have shown up in many APIs (such as Amazon).

In my startup, we're using ARC (http://arc.semsol.org/) and microformats internally; however, we're not doing it just for the sake of new technology - data is managed better, databases can be designed well, and there is a performance gain in some cases.
Bono: Notes From the Chairman
I actually agree with Sussman and Wisdom (and the author of this article) that physics is taught in a very sloppy manner, and that the computational notation has huge advantages. But that's not the point I (or they) were making. Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics were perfectly rigorous before Sussman and Wisdom came along, even if they weren't taught very well. If mechanics had really been deep-down sloppy, then Sussman and Wisdom would now be heralded alongside Newton and Einstein for their incredible contribution to science! Rather than just creating a new notation, they would have advanced science incalculably, turning vague and untestable theories into hard empirical science for the first time!

But that's obviously not what happened. Physicists were always capable of making exact calculations and predictions from Lagrangian mechanics. SICM contains no new theories, theorems or proofs, just a more explicit way of representing old ones. Nothing new was discovered and no old notions were clarified. Instead, they just found a better way of teaching mechanics, one that didn't rely on the implicit knowledge that masters of the subject already possessed. They were only capable of doing this because Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics were well-defined in the first place. If they hadn't been then they would have had to advance a new theory of mechanics to replace them, rather than just re-presenting an old one.
(1) can be done with Visual Studio Tools for Office: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Tools_for_Office
Israel has also managed to block cellphone bandwidth, so
very few amateur cellphone photographs are getting out
of Gaza.

Is this Israel just pulling the plug on their own hardware...or is this a technology that attacks another country's hardware?
Counterpoint to "Tragedy of the Commons":

http://links.org.au/node/595
I don't think being interpreted matters. It may make your immediate development cycle faster, but that says nothing about long term development. I imagine the Scala guys would argue heavily that being compiled is a huge advantage to the power of that language, and would also strongly disagree that it isn't a high level language.

Objective-C properties are poorly done in my opinion, though you can add one in two lines with a given set of assumptions. But I don't think 1 vs. 3 lines is a meaningful indicator of very much either way; it's a small constant penalty, not some lack of expression at the core of the language.

Being verbose isn't a bad thing, and Objective-C isn't verbose in any meaningfully different way than most other languages. Header files may be a slight inconvenience, but they aren't even strictly necessary. Cocoa, the framework most commonly associated with Objective-C is verbose, and I think its a good thing. 90% of what you do as a programmer is read code, not write it. I gladly pay the penalty of 2x the keystrokes in return for half the mental overhead in reading the code. In reality, the penalty is less than 2, and the benefit may be more than 2, but its a matter of opinion.

You say you wouldn't like Obj-C as an interpreted language, I wonder if you're aware of Objective-J (http://cappuccino.org). It's essentially an interpreted version of Objective-C. It doesn't have header files, and it doesn't do properties the same way (it only does code generation for accessor methods, nothing else, but that generation is one extra keyword). It's interpreted, it has closures, and it generally has every feature JavaScript already has, plus dynamic message sending and classical inheritance courtesy of the Obj-J runtime (which is functionally equivalent to the Obj-C runtime). I'm biased, but I think its a great language.
Electric cars aren't really worth it until the gas hits the $4-5 mark. Look at the stats, the second the gas prices came down, everyone started buying up the SUVs again
"So is your local police force, in that it's an organisation with the capacity and authority to commit violent acts on behalf of the state."

We agree so far. I don't think it's just semantics, but my "politics" probably differ radically from most of the crew here (and I don't expect to change anyone's mind), so I'll leave it at that.

I get that his list of reasons was largely sarcastic. But that suggests he's (at least somewhat) cynical about the military. Given that, I don't understand why he'd join up. Especially when he implies that he had/has specific knowledge that he'd likely be sent to Iraq and told to kill people. I just don't find it funny. Maybe I missed the point.
I run a combination of rsync+git as cron jobs. They keep all 4 computers in the house in sync with each other as well as backups on a NAS.

Why even bother with rsync you may ask? Because for huge binary files (like RAW/JPEG images) I don't need a history of changes and they don't compress well, i.e. git would lead to an increased disk usage.

BTW using "any VCS" advice won't work here. Git can automatically pick up rename/delete/create actions on whole directory trees without explicit commands, which is what you want if you're going for 100% automatic operation: if I delete a file on laptop "A" it will automatically disappear on laptop "B" too. Perhaps git isn't unique in this, but its better among other VCS systems I'm familiar with. It also is very compact, especially if you don't want to have a full-blown uncompressed working tree on a server.

I love Dropbox, but I don't see how I could use it with my 55K/second upload speed, which is, unfortunately, quite typical for US users. (my server is in the closet). If I were them I would seriously consider selling a NAS+software kit. It's hard to imagine a middle class multi-laptop family that doesn't need one of those.
"Why? They're all competing desktop Operating Systems."

Exactly. The fact that Ubuntu Linux can compete with operating systems that you have to pay for is an amazing testament to the skill, determination, and efficiency of all the people behind Ubuntu, Debian, Linux, GNU, etc. Especially when you consider they're not strictly organized under a company with strong leadership, such as Apple under Jobs or Microsoft under Gates.
Pretty, and a worthy addition to the list for side projects and quick prototyping for things where I don't have budget yet.

For projects for actual business (your employers' or your own), I suggest investing in getting design a little more specific to the actual customers' needs than most stock free icon sets. This one, for example, would be grossly inappropriate for my non-technical customers, who are not yet up with the reflections on top of reflections Web 2.0 aesthetic. (I got my icons for them from http://www.icons-icons.com two years ago on sale for $25 and its probably the best $25 I ever spent in my life.)
Some measurements of air temperatures show failing temperatures but the sea has been steadily warming. The amount of heat stored by water is much greater than air and so the total heat in the system has increased.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14527
Weird, my experience has been exactly the opposite.

I reinstalled ubuntu 8.10 on my Asus notebook less than 2 days ago without any of these weird things happening, wifi, sound, trackpad, power management and sleep/resume all work perfectly without the need to tweak anything.

Coincidentally, with Windows XP I've always had to tweak the power management so that my machine was "always on" as when I closed the lid, it would sleep and when it came back, things just did not work right.
Two Google searches 'produce same CO2 as boiling a kettle'
Yes, I'm familiar. I was playing with double meanings ;-)
You can do a lot of stuff that overlaps with queries with just array formulas, and a lot of the rest with pivot tables.

This is true, you can do a lot with this. And if you're prepared to make a lot of columns with the various flags you need, you can build up quite complex queries - having an easy way to do this would be nice though.

I've spent a lot of time in Financial Services and it's surprising how much of the industry is run on spreadsheets, especially investment banking - and I mean online - they'll have Excel running all day, receiving real time price feeds, running a calculation and republishing. Excel is pretty much the glue that holds the whole industry together.

So I also agree on the maintenance issue - These sheets can get quite complex and it's almost impossible for someone to understand coming in cold. It would be very useful to have a workflow model on top - which I guess is really adding the algorithm aspect - but I've never seen a speadsheet metaphor that does this well.
Commonly used tools of the Chinese hacker
What other data will they "liberate"? For example, will they let you take your search history to another search engine?
To clarify, the plan is 20/mo which include 360MB RAM. I'm just saying it's odd the plan hasn't gone done in price in 2 years.
So what? Cycling to work produces more CO2 than boiling a few L of water, too.
Video games and children
Facebook has a history to incorporating other sites' features. When Twitter got big, they created added "status". We should all do that with our companies.
It makes perfect sense if they are depreciating the hardware over more than two years.
Once the government gets involved in companies, every interest group gets a say in what gets done except for this interest group: the customer.
No. I'm not really looking for blame-generation, although others would. I don't do auditing, but some larger financial institutions do.

When investigating bugs (and more than a few times, we're turning into real code something cobbled out of an Excel spreadsheet, so the reference standard is the old spreadsheet), it helps to know why something is different from another, and why the formula in E5 is different than the formula in E4 or E6. It is incredibly easy to screw up formulas with inserting/removing rows with cut & paste.

Two sample foul ups:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Great-Excel-Spreadsheet....
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Revealing-Spreadsheet.as...

I've encountered worse situations in the past than those 2 dailyWTF episodes (as well as seen one old employer's code on that site).

Word has a feature where you can see the changes, what was previously present, and who changed it when. Something like.
I have a strange reaction to this piece. I listened to the audio version and it made me tingle with emotion. Something about the drunken glamour of Bono's voice.

But if you asked me what it was about I'm not sure I could tell you.

Just like every U2 song I've ever heard.

If I had to summarize it, I would say it's about how Sinatra's singing became more poignant as experience added additional depth to his musical interpretations. But in truth I found Sinatra an uninspired musician with a narrow range of expression but with a great song catalog created by others.

Bono tries to relate this to the New Year and the recession with his millionaire optimism but what he says seems more seductively stylish than substantive. If someone of lesser stature had written this they would be derided as a sophomoric aspiring poet - which is ultimately Bono's greatest strength in his writing and his music.
Yes, frequently.

I kinda wish there was an "open in frames" option, putting both the comments and the page in one tab. I go to reddit/hn/etc and open many links in new tabs, then the "next" page in a tab. Then I just work through till I get to the end and process the next page.
Yes it would be potentially useful/lucrative to be able to license and rebrand the Dropbox technology (server + clients) but self-hosted.

[Edit: no, not the Dropbox technolgy; the Dropbox experience.]
typically a server with 16Gb of RAM is powered by quad-processors intel xeon quad cores, or the equivalent AMDs.

That's a bad idea; you should probably run away from any host that wants to sell you such an inefficient configuration. 16GB is 8 2GB DIMMs; putting that in a 2-socket server is no problem. Even 16 2GB DIMMs should be no problem.
Smart conversions. If I have a graph of something in Celsius, I have to copy the data, edit it, and create a new graph just to convert it to Fahrenheit. Same with any other unit of measurement. When I was an engineer my biggest gripe with Excel was that it didn't know anything about my data.
Crunchies Best New Startup of 2008 - FriendFeed
True, but have you ever been driving on an icy road and seen people going the speed limit, 55 miles per hour?

The psychology people seem to have is to believe that if the government regulates it, then anything that falls under the regulation requires no independent thought.

On the icy road, the safe speed maximum is probably about 30 mph, but many accidents are caused by people going the posted limit, as people seem to trust the wise planner above their own ability to judge.

Similarly, people assume that a firm that is regulated by the SEC and backed buy the FDIC is going to be a safe place to put money, which is not always true.

I agree with your last statement, but note that 1) the SEC required insufficient reserves, and 2) because the government set the reserve limits, there is the implication that it ought to bail out the firms that were "just following the rules".

Hence the view of firms being "too big to fail" comes from the idea that regulation is perfect and if only it's followed then everything will be fine.

In a better, more libertarian world, banking crises would result in some failures, and once-burned investors would look carefully at what reserves actually mean, look sceptically at rating-weighted reserve requirements, and expect that if things go wrong there will not be a bailout.

This would help put money into firms that actually know how to act in a trustworthy, sound way, not just the firms that are able to successfully lobby the SEC, the way Madoff's did.
Speed limit signs set a minimum and a maximum speed, yet I always see drivers careening along on icy roads at the posted maximum. They must have more faith in planners than I do, as I try to determine how icy the road is and go at a safe speed.

I don't think financial regulations are any different, but unfortunately most people take the fact that a firm is regulated to mean that it's totally safe. Similarly, many foods that will result in an early death are perfectly legal and consistent with the USDA food pyramid.
That is a good question. I suppose that the IDF is jamming the narrow band of the EM spectrum used by cellphones to transmit information. If such is the case, they would also prevent the enemy from using cellphones as detonators.

The jammers need not be omni-directional. After all, Gaza is an enclave facing the sea, so a few well-positioned directional jammers might be able to block cellphone bandwidth in the entire Gaza region without affecting much the cellphones outside of Gaza.

Just speculating. I am, by no means, an expert in RF and jamming technologies.
Recursion is fun, but how would you use it in a spreadsheet?
Previously on the idea of "consumer" vs "producer" roles:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=164014

A lot of that is fluff, but the basic premise was that the Internet could probably be built more effectively with some sort of built-in gauge to determine the actuality of a person's "productivity" versus their "consumability."
I could explain it, but it's easier to just show you an example. A game designer writes things like this: http://www.squidi.net/three/
If you are interested in Libertarianism but you instinctively are suspicious of capitalism or even currency, perhaps you would be interested in Anarchism. You can read about many interesting aspects of Anarchism with regards to its relationship to other ideas such as Capitalism, Marxism, State Socialism, and the current system we have in America.
http://www.infoshop.org/faq/index.html
If you think the abolition of money and markets is the abolition of economies, you are wrong and I invite you to read this very short intro to Anarcho-Communism, a post-capitalism way to live and organize.
http://struggle.ws/wsm/rbr/rbr10/communism.html
The comments differentiate good links from bad. I rarely read a post without checking the comments first.

(Though I do read the links before voting, of course.)
Not just facebook... every other company in silicon valley is doing that. Even google's adwords was first invented by overture. Latest eg. Palm Pre (and 15 other smartphones) incorporating iPhone UI elements.
I wonder if they've done something similar to GPS.
I will gladly sell you some ford stock at 26 bucks a share. Let me know.
Rails-like Javascript Date Helpers
well yes, and no. i guess it depends on your needs and the applications you run on the server. if you do virtualization, a 2 socket server should be ok. I was thinking of HPC or datamining
I hope these help!
Things About VIM I Wish I'd Learned Sooner
Damn, I guess I'm not making money every second of the day.

My life is meaningless. I am weak.

...all you need is love?
Ask HN: finding a more quantitative/researchish job?
Anyone have suggestions on finding a quantitative job (as opposed to a mostly software engineering job)? I've had software engineering jobs or internships in the past, and I've definitely enjoyed (some of) them, but I want to try something new and more in tune with my math/AI interests.

I've been facing two problems, though:
1. I have the knowledge (I have a math degree from a top college, and studied statistics and machine learning as well), but it's only a bachelor's degree, and I don't have any previous industry experience in a research position.

2. All the places I try for either automatically stick me into a software position, or say they'll have me work on research projects, but end up sticking me in a pure software position anyways. (For example, when I interviewed at my current job, I told them I wanted to work on research, and my manager said definitely... But he ended up having me work on UI, and when I told him I wanted to work on something more quantitative after my first project, he told me my "coding skills are too valuable"...)

Any suggestions?
Sometimes. If the headline sounds preposterous, I sometimes check the comments to see if it has been locally debunked before clicking on the link to the article.
That's easy. High level languages have data types other than "things that fit inside registers", structures, and objects. Objective C doesn't. High level languages do automatic memory management. Objective C didn't until 10.5.

Lots of high level languages don't have closures. Most of them have first-class string types. NSMutableString is a library.
>minimal is a term you can drive a truck through

That's why many Libertarians believe in a _Constitutional_ government. I.e. there is absolutely a standard for what size the US federal government should be (and what purposes it should serve). It's the US Constitution.