skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, "slope" is a rather useless concept beyond algebra. When you're plotting, say, a position function, the slope of the function at any given point is of limited meaningfulness--the velocity, on the other hand, much more so! Likewise, the slope of the velocity curve at any given point is of little import, but the acceleration is very meaningful.

Of course, the slope of the position curve is the velocity; what I'm suggesting is that referring to it as slope detracts from understanding, while referring to it as velocity enhances understanding. Consequently, getting all wrapped around the axle over the canonical definition of slope is a shining example of majoring in the minors.
I observed this with Google Music too. Nirvana is underrepresented in my music collection (1-2% tops) but I seem to hear multiple Nirvana songs every time I log in and shuffle all (4-6 hour period). I have wondered if Google Music is picking music that is related to previously heard music.

But I have no way to check without looking at the source.

Until Google Music gets smart playlists, I have no recourse I guess.
Some conservatives and religious types understand the construct of marriage to serve certain social purposes as well--primarily procreation and the raising of a family. I'm not advocating that perspective (history shows this isn't always the case), just merely pointing out the conservative argument isn't always "the Bible says so[1]"--it is also an argument that society functions at its best within the "traditional" concept of marriage.

[1] It is worth noting that while there are passages in the Hebrew/Christian bible that advocated "one man, one woman" marriages, there are plenty of examples of "Biblical heroes" who had multiple wives (David and Solomon come to mind).
I was responding to "Is being an entrepreneur more about winning or persevering?"
Dell Precision 6500 i7 with 32 GB ram, 275GB SSD and accompanying 275GB HD. I'm running the latest VMWare Workstation.
This man amazes me every single time. from his twist show to angel investing i don't know how he is managing to do it all together. great value
in my mind, identi.ca is a red herring. What really matters is the platform, StatusNet. This is a software package that, kind of like Wordpress, can be installed on your host allowing you to run your own microblog service.

This package, and the underlying OStatus protocol, is where organizations that want to retain control over their own reliability and namespace should be looking.
Apprenticeships used to be the way that people became masters at anything. Master craftsmen, master artisans, master chefs, and master sushi makers (http://www.magpictures.com/jirodreamsofsushi/). It wasn't until reading this story that I truly thought about the relationship between apprenticeships and the batches of graduates from "accelerator" programs.

Today, accelerator programs are largely exclusive. In fact, their popularity has risen in part to their exclusivity and privilege. The exclusivity stems from the fact that after the period of "acceleration" is over, the ability to raise capital is much higher. After the apprenticeship, the apprentice just has a "job", most likely for the master.

Accelerators have done a great job exploiting their "artificial scarcity" to a great extent, making them highly desirable. The "masters" or "mentors" in the accelerator model differ from apprenticeships in that they are multifaceted and have a variety of different backgrounds. In an apprenticeship, usually the masters are focused uniquely on one trade.

According to the article, "apprenticeships are still fighting an image battle. Only 0.3 percent of the American workforce are apprentices, according to a report from American University economist Robert Lerman."

This sounds like the job of a great design and marketing team. A project I worked on as a student in Design School called the New Options Initiative (http://www.newoptionsproject.org/home) sponsored by the WK Kellogg foundation sought to create new alternatives for people who dropped out of school. The project recognizes that school isn't for everyone, and we need alternative career/job paths for people that are similar to the apprenticeship model.

It'd be interesting to see what happened if we just changed the words apprenticeship to accelerator, and provided more means for self-employment and entrepreneurship to the participants. I'm willing to bet that more people would consider it a viable alternative.
I'm not saying it's a focus on the syntax. I'm saying it's a lack of attention to anything else.

Language is much more than syntax, and that main reason people leave PHP is because the various parts of the language do not work well together.

If this were truly a focus on the syntax, than PHP would have good syntax. But it's not, its a shallow "lets hack whatever works, damn the consequences" attitude. Those work in early stages of a project, when you're prototyping, to move it forward. I don't think PHP is in that stage.
Both of the patents mention using GPS as components. For example:

http://www.google.com/patents/US7343165

It covers a system for sharing information about users (e.g. location, how to contact them) who have GPS-equipped phones that transmit location and some other information back to a central server. There's also some tomfoolery in there about how the server needs to store data for different users at different memory locations, but that's not particularly relevant or interesting, and frankly looks like obscurantist padding meant to make the patent seem more specific and novel than it really is.

It does seem to cover what Foursquare does. Of course, it does this by being obvious, and not in any way advancing the state of the art. I can't think of any good argument for why the patent system should cover things like this, and yet here it is.

EDIT: The other patent is similarly obvious. It's short, so check out the claims:

http://www.google.com/patents/US7475057
is this a hatchet job? the article is suspicious.
Same-sex couples can already adopt children in the US, they just can't adopt them together. Technically, only one member of the couple gets to be the legal "parent".

The kid will still grow up in a same-sex household. He/she will still think of themselves has having two dads or two moms. The only thing you're denying is the ability for the other partner to sign their permission forms, visit them in the hospital, or be officially recognized as a parent by the government and society.
I'm not sure how you read that as I was suggesting just travel. Travel was suggested as one alternative, but so was working entry level or finding an apprenticeship, the implication there being you'll learn a skill and get paid.

I do think everyone should find time to travel at some point in their life, and it's usually easier when you're young. You'd be surprised how cheaply you can travel if you're willing to live on a budget. But if you just have no money, by all means work. And save.

But what I'm tired of seeing is the legions of teenagers who end up $50k+ in debt with a meaningless degree in communications or something, who then complain they can't get a job. They ended up in that place because they went to college because they were "supposed to", but had no idea how to make it useful for themselves. Doing other things for a few years will help you gain perspective into how you might use college for yourself, or realize that you don't need it.
The State of Facebook in India [Infographics]
Having thoughtful, and considerate responses like these definitely helps.

In my view there are two arguments within this discussion: Does college provide useful skills for later and is college worth these skills? I think sometimes both camps tends to talk parallel to each other. Yes there are a lot of anti-college people who believe college doesnt even provide anything useful, but I think its safe to say that thats not true.

That being said, concentrating on the cost-aspect is I think a lot more crucial and fruitful. And thats where my feeling of entitlement from the pro-college side comes in. We don't need your explanations of how college is an awesome place. It just makes people who can't afford college very angry, since the college degree is already so immensely dogmatized as a requirement for 'good' jobs.

It's a bit like saying having an iPhone is really cool, beneficial and everything. However, if there is a huge price gap to other phones, I don't it would be unreasonable to recommend cheaper, maybe less capable phones or ask for cheaper phones.

The problem with college in the US really is that it is used as a credential and almost absolute requirement for upward social mobility.
The Skakespearean Guide to Entrepreneurship
Why iTunes Shuffle Isn’t Random (and How to Fix It)
I don't get what an "open" twitter system will have over the current one. Unless I'm missing something, this is just RSS feeds.
I've taken projects from self taught people that just don't understand basic state machine theory. NFA-DFA equivalence? Thompson's Construction? Powerset construction? Probabilistic automatons and more exotic stuff like Petri-nets.

See we can all give anecdotal examples?

Besides I was talking about engineering, not programming which often more far more formal in industry then programming is.
A simpler way to re-connect with your website visitors
Sure, there are ways to get various Linux-like tools on Windows, or Mac.

But inevitably -- and I've been using Windows offerings since the mid 1990s and Mac for the past 6-7 years -- these are nowhere near as complete as what you'll find in native Linux, they're missing key bits, polish and bugs are less than optimal, host integration isn't what it is in Linux, host features lack key Linux bits (especially /proc and /sys, and all that they enable), and if you want full coverage, you'll almost always end up with several different toolsets none of which offer quite what I'm looking for.

And you're missing soup-to-nuts, all-encompassing, sane, bug-reporting-integrated package management. On other systems, I manage bits of my Linux-like environment through better or worse (Cygwin -- don't get me started -- but look at apt-cygwin) package management. But most of my OS is outside of that. Inside Debian, I might manage a very small handful of non-packaged software items, mostly browser plugins. Oh, and lately Ruby gems, which are their own brand of hell, but whatever.

I first switched to Linux when I realized that I was spending more and more of my time trying to make Windows NT look like what I got out of the box with a $30 Linux distro CD (bundled with a book). Other than a few distro hops (last to Debian, in the late 1990s, though I continue to evaluate / work with others), I've never looked back.
Automatically downgraded by an algorithm, not by a human analyst. Not terribly significant news-wise, since e.g. the algorithm can't realistically take into account the recent positive reviews of Tesla's new models.
Citnoven...

I appreciate you taking the time not only to read the post, but to offer your opinion and corrections to my article. I've updated those two mistakes you pointed out.

As I understand it, SimpleHTTPServer offers basic functionality to the user, which is all I use it for...a quick way to view pages using AJAX requests. I attempted to use http.server instead, but as I'm not running Python 3.0 I'm not able to use that option. Since Lion ships with Python 2.7, and many people are using that OS, I felt safe leaving the reference in place.

I do run the server function myself, many times a day in fact, but I made the mistake of typing it in manually rather than copying and pasting from my .zshrc file.

This post isn't intended for hackers, thus the title "...for the novice". The comments I've received about the article thus far, most likely from people not as advanced as yourself, have been positive and appreciative for the information. I'd love to hear some of the tools that improve your workflow daily...would you care to share them?
Microsoft's cheapest Surface tablet won't cost $1K after all
Note that the grandparent used the word "Claiming".
The problem is that young people make stupid mistakes. While you selected a career which will be fruitful and possibly pay off your loan debt, a load of young people make career decisions based on flowery statements like "change the world" or "make a difference" and end up being baristas in Starbucks. There is a certain value inherent in expanding your intellect by going through college, I am not so sure it is worth doing that at the cost of crippling financial debt if you are not absolutely sure where you are going with it. So maybe the solution is to spend a few years mucking out at different things figuring out what you like before blowing through a ton of cash going to college.
OnLive do have many centers spread out around the US (and a few international ones I think? I'm not sure) and their software tells you if you're too far from one (I think they limit at 1000 miles). I can tell you that about 15 miles from one (I assume they have one at or near their HQ and that's how far I am from it) the experience over a reasonably beefy cable connection (20Mbps) is pretty dang smooth.
I think their design goals is to make it easy and simple to build web applications. If they are building their own ecosystem its because they feel it is necessary to do so in order to achieve that goal.
It seems like an excellent project to work on.

Hybrids do well on gasoline because they have efficient undersized engines combined with light weight and excellent aerodynamics. This retrofit wouldn't change any of those things so I doubt it would have the claimed mpg benefit on a long drive. With a big battery pack, I could see it boosting MPG in city driving but it doesn't have gearing to use the motors at high speeds like highway driving. The big battery pack hurts city driving because you need to accelerate and decelerate that added mass.

It reminds me of similar retrofits that might be comparable and easier:

1) Replace the alternator (or AC) with a small 6-10hp motor. This is like a DIY version of the Honda IMA. I think GM was promoting something like this. You're limited by the power a belt can transmit, but it does go through the transmission and allows easy stop/start of the engine (ex: at a traffic light).

2) Remove the rear drive-shaft from a 4WD like a truck and attach a motor to the differential. This is also somewhat easy and a truck is better equipped for carrying batteries. There was a Jeep design that did this. Stay in "4wd" without applying power to the motor and it's like a front wheel drive. The downside is that the motor isn't geared so it's only good for one speed range (perhaps low end torque).

Unfortunately, both designs are just mild hybrids. To really go far enough with the motor you need lots of batteries. For example, the 80lb NiMH pack in my Insight can barely go a few miles. Regen makes sense but you lose a surprising amount of energy charging/discharging. I get the best gas mileage trying not to use the hybrid systems (even in city driving).
> Cows require 50 times more protein from grain as input than they provide after being slaughtered (you can google this, it's research from Cornell).

I suspect that you're referring to the research summarized at http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/aug97/livestock.hrs.htm... .

I'm not sure that it supports the conclusions that you (and its author) make. For example: (quoting)

"> For every kilogram of high-quality animal protein produced, livestock are fed nearly 6 kg of plant protein."

6 << 50. And, a lot of that "plant protein" isn't available to people.

"More than 302 million hectares of land are devoted to producing feed for the U.S. livestock population -- about 272 million hectares in pasture and about 30 million hectares for cultivated feed grains."

Much pasture land is pasture because it isn't all that suitable for other purposes. Unless you eat grass/hay....

"THIRSTY PRODUCTION SYSTEMS. U.S. agriculture accounts for 87 percent of all the fresh water consumed each year. Livestock directly use only 1.3 percent of that water. But when the water required for forage and grain production is included, livestock's water usage rises dramatically. Every kilogram of beef produced takes 100,000 liters of water. [wheat and potatoes take much less]"

It appears that he's counting rain as "use". While technically true, that water can't be used elsewhere. (Grain land is rarely irrigated and pasture almost never is.)
Twitter cuts ties with Instagram
I've been there!

We have trouble hiring Linux talent - and all they have to do is go to our website (IE only) and register for an account to submit a CV (Word only) and fill in a form which assumes that they were educated somewhere that has k-12 education and transcripts/SAT/grades in the same format as we expect.

Here is a tip 'recruiters' - if I'm a specialist financial c++ programmer with a maths PhD I am not spending my time filling in application web forms that ask what clubs I was involved in during high school.
RSS? DNS? camelCased JSON?

I don't know if you're going to entice many developers with that combination. What we need is a simple protocol (not an API), maybe JSON/MessagePack based with UDP signaling, that makes it easy to build distributed Twitter-like services, while also reachable by HTTP. The developer experience needs to be easy enough so that a distributed "hello world" service can be built in less than 5 minutes. It needs to come with a cross-platform P2P server component, and client libraries for a few popular languages. Make the barrier to entry so low that any dev can do "apt-get install <fancy-distributed-system>" to get the server/client bits.

The average user doesn't know DNS (username.twitter.com) as well as they do email addresses (username@twitter.com) and URIs (twitter.com/username). If this is going to gain adoption, it needs to prioritize UX familiarity over technical superiority. Everyone has an email address, so use that for identification, but don't clutter people's inboxes by using them to transport or store app data.

Make it super easy to federate with existing walled gardens by providing open-source implementations of server components so Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. can get up and running quickly.
It's OK, for the time being, APIs allow you to pump content into the walled gardens from the new open Twootbook. Users can be bled off over time.
"3. To identify users -- please use DNS."

Using DNS to identify users is unwise, in my opinion, because it means that people won't own their own on-line identities -- they'll have to rent them and for real money, too. And if some users are assigned a sub-domain on a shared domain, their identity won't be portable.

I think it is worth doing a little extra work to make a user name system that doesn't have those problems.
Were you in Paris? Seriously, we had no problems anywhere else we went. It was just Paris. We visited Nice, Lyons, and Toulouse on our trip and had lots more fun in those places.
i don't completely follow your argument, so forgive me if this is irrelevant, but i wasn't saying that cnc operators should go to elite universities. my points were, i guess, that: (1) even if you're going to university it's a pleasure to get workshop experience and (2) the taught part of the apprenticeship (at the poly) was very poor quality.

i don't mean by (2) that it would stop a cnc operator from going to an elite university. what i mean is that i am sure future cnc operators hated it just as much as we (future grads) did, because it was very difficult to understand or learn anything.
Way too much noise on that page. When looking to use a fun character in a message, I would be much less interested in the Wikipedia page.
Sony’s influence on the iPhone 4
These are patches to the LGPL'd components they use, not Sparrow itself, right? (The LGPL specifically requires that you only release your modifications to the library, not your own code.) The only interesting things are some images, and some patch files inside lib/ -- nothing appears to be Sparrow's own source code.

It looks like they also toss in some compiled versions of Sparrow-proprietary code for debugging reasons, which I _think_ explains their incongruous licensing terms, but they're still strange.
It's actually the only Street Fighter move I can remember off the top of my head. :)
Far from Silicon Valley, tech industry finds an oracle
You did what you had to do, and any success you have is hard earned. It is also not scalable and an enormous waste of productivity.
> I'm not sure why everyone is so gung ho about Sparrow

There just aren't enough good email clients. Having another one is good.

> I thought we'd all moved on from thick-client email apps

Speak for yourself. I hate using webapps for a number of reasons but email is one of the worst cases for them IMO.

> its one of the few technologies that has lasted any length of time and still be on top. nntp, gopher, etc all faded away, but pop, smtp, and then imap have flourished and become the de-facto way the world communicates

Sparrow uses those protocols so I'm not sure what you're getting at, but it's easy to cherry-pick dead/dying protocols. HTTP and DNS are also ancient protocols that still exist but it's not because of any technical superiority, it's because of having critical mass for adoption.
To be fair, most people going to php.net aren't looking to hack the PHP core.
The patents aren't on GPS; they're on obvious uses of GPS. (In both cases, the entire technical value of the patent could fit in a single Tweet.)
You know Facebook is profitable right? Maybe not VERY profitable compared to other internet giants, but they made $1 billion in 2011.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/facebook-1-billion-profit/
> Also, if you discover something and want to find out more, emailing the person who worked on it is a great start.

+1 to this. I've emailed people from other institutions for the source code behind their research and gotten it. Never hurts to ask.