skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that "launch" is a relative term here. I mean that in the sense that Betaworks have been entirely open about the process from the start, and are aware that 90% of their audience right now is curious techies like ourselves. I very much doubt that they'll be promoting it much.

This is an alpha, or a beta, or whatever you want to call it.
Doesn't Sprint charge for tethering too? (I currently have a Sprint plan. I'm pretty sure that it's unlimited data, but they don't allow tethering without paying extra fees or rooting your device.)
I think that has to do with feynman's time at Thinking Machines:

http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...
Settling slope and constructive Khan criticism
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/25/vocus-buys-facebook-apps-ma...
A lot of the classic horror noises are made by people monkeying around inside pianos.

eg http://www.freesound.org/people/patchen/sounds/8962/
That does sound quite useful; thank you for the explanation.
My experience has shown their isn't a shortage of talented native engineers. There is however a shortage of companies willing to pay them a real wage. Hence they get H1-B's pay them substantially less money and essentially hold them hostage for a few years.

Most of the time this is just a way for companies to depress wages. Of course my experience is only in IT other engineering disciplines maybe different.
Why “just do it” is bullshit
Cool demo. Interesting questions. There are nobel prizes waiting for the answers to some of them.

Warning: The following is not precisely target at your post.

The core of some your questions are the kind answerable only with mu. Essentially, you are asking for some physical intuitions to relate the quantum world up to the world as we see it. But the thing is that there is very little in our macroscopic reality that relates to the quantum world. All analogies are broken. Here's the key thing to realize. Quantum mechanics is hard not because it is complex =). Far from it. It hard because we have no mental basis with which to represent its concepts. The opposite should hold too. A Quantum intuition would find our world bizarre, very hard to understand and - unlike how we feel about QM - justifiably complex. But if one takes a multicultural appreciation approach to how systems evolve, QM becomes a bit less offensive to one's sensibilities.

The only path to approximate intuition is to drill the math and think about the concepts. Simulations are another great option. They allow one to create a rope bridge from the math to something that feels a bit more concrete. Still not intuitive but better than nothing. The idea is to get to the point where you can use the math as a map. So you won't ever be able to feel as comfortable with it as galilean relativity but you can form questions, think about reality and use the map to guide your mind. I am the opposite of you - I think a lot of the physical or incidentals of experiments are useless baggage for building that map.

What does a particle with some particular wave function look like?

At this point it is not useful to think about how things look. Focusing on what things "look" like would again be just be a rough analogy, possibly misleading (similar in spirit to focusing too much on tangent lines for derivatives) and might create a false crutch by waylaying the brain from becoming more comfortable with the abstract surroundings. And then there is the question of: is the wave function? Does it make sense to think of it as something physical? (I don't think so).

Does it occur on scale of nanoseconds? Seconds? Hours?

While kinda opposite in direction to your questions, work on decoherence is answering some questions of timing. But nothing will shed light on entanglement, coherence and aspects of measurements better than quantum computers. Lets hope they get invented soon or less preferably, proven not to be possible. Each would learn us a lot.
It may very well be disastrous to Verizon's margins. I do not understand why protecting those margins are my responsibility, or anyone's responsibility other than Verizon's.

We're not talking about some cable in the ground upon which Verizon exerts a legal property interest. We're talking about the airwaves that are the permanent heritage of the taxpayer (or arguably land owner), which we as a landlord collectively and temporarily rent out for our sole benefit, in an adversarial negotiation. The whole point of a negotiation is to increase your own margins, often at the expense of the other party's. To say our analysis does this is to say it represents our interests.
The professional kickstarters
Why? Blocking competition?
Don't change too much, it's already a splendid format!
If you want more information about this Through The Wormhole Season 2 Episode 5 "Is there a sixth sense" explored this and presented some theories on how it occurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Wormhole#Season_2

The show is excellent and presents a lot of science topics in and interesting and understandable way. Highly suggested viewing.
Just tried drag and drop attachments, and no joy. That's a deal breaker for me. Sorry msoft.
Verizon is ending the grandfathered in unlimited plans though... (can't find the press release ATM)
Capitalism always tends to offering unlimited amounts of scarse resources. Just keep waiting!
I find it really messy and difficult to navigate as well, no idea why I should want to spend time there.
Yep, same thing happened to me when I was 16 (hypotension from standing for too long). Everything faded to white, but I could still somehow navigate the space well enough to go sit down.

Or, at least, that's now I remember it now (or remember thinking about it then). It's been a long time.
Digg re-launch features at least four stories from HN front page
I second this. I'm a scientist who also happens to program (as more of us are finding we need to do). The two languages I use the most are R and Python. Most of the time, I don't even give Ruby a second thought because it seems to be primarily geared towards web development. In general, I shy away from web development, but I know that Python is more than capable if I wanted to try it out. There really doesn't seem to be any incentive for us to learn Ruby.
No, they don't have to close the account, they choose to, rather than deal with the law's requirements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...

> While children under 13 can legally give out personal information with their parents' permission, many websites altogether disallow underage children from using their services due to the amount of paperwork involved.
wait a minute, no support for imap?
Interesting. I think most people here on HN also believe in gun rights (as a fundamental right, not that they actually own a gun) and so the saying "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" probably goes over well here.

BUT don't most people here also wish that nuclear weapons could be un-invented? Isn't that the general feeling among those that participated in the development of that technology, that they wish they never did it?

What about the responsible disclosure of zero-days? Don't we agree that those are things we don't want floating around so that anybody can potentially use them before it can be patched?

Or what about an intentional backdoor into an encryption system? Is it only bad if people use it? Or is it bad in of itself?

It is obviously more complicated than "never blame the tool". Some knives are designed for cooking, some knives are designed to inflict maximum damage and pain to human flesh.
Yes they certainly did:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/google-verizon-netneut...
It's three sections on one page. There's nowhere to navigate. You don't even leave the page to log in. I don't know how you're lost.
Makes me think the pedals should be used for something. Shift and Ctrl maybe? ;)
Even though it's no longer under development, I wonder if Thunderbird's default tabbed interface would meet your needs.
This is one of my fears with the complexity explosion called HTML5 / CSS3.

We are bequeathing the future a world where building new browsers is approximately an impossibility.

The Web is so much. Now all devices can consume the same files with comparable user experiences. There are reasonable standards. Javascript is a reasonably advanced and simple language (for the time being). But the web has failed much as well.

Hopefully the web will mature someday and someone will clean up the mess we are leaving them.
In Physics sometimes and approximated theory / model is useful, in spite it is incorrect.

The problem is that the Schrödinger / Heisenberg quantum states of a particle are a lie. If you have an electron, it doesn't follow the Schrödinger / Heisenberg equation. It can emit a photon an reabsorb it a little time after. This is not part of that equation and has a very easy to measure effect that is the Lambs Shift http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_shift#Lamb_shift_in_the_hy... .
And the electron can even do more crazy things, but they are luckily more difficult to measure. This is the reason to use Quantum field theory.

* If you are only going to buy a lens to put in front of your photodetector, then probably the wave/particle duality is a good enough approximation (in spite that it doesn't make sense).

* If you are doing quantum-chemistry then use the Schrödinger equation (in spite that it doesn't work for strong electric fields and is not compatible with special relativity).

* If you work near a big particle accelerator you should try at lest to use the standard model (in spite that renormalization doesn't make sense).

* And I hope that you never have to use string theory to explain and experiment.
What is "messy" about it specifically? I don't see much mess here. Good typography and a visually-interesting layout.
Do you think it was caused by HN? The link on bots clicking ads that went viral?
Disable adds on outlook.com
After developing ~8 products, I just wrote my first sales letter. Your thoughts?
The desktop Outlook application epitomizes everything I hate about enterprise software. I've been forced to use it by my last few employers, and outlook-induced frustration has been a frequent source of conversation among my colleagues.

If MS wants to start a new email service, the Outlook name is a sure guarantee that we won't want to use it.
Next step, make it smarter than blind A/B testing.

http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=132
It seems to be a rebranding of News.me, rather than anything to do with digg.
The 6 week "rewrite" did sound foolhardy. Now it turns out it wasn't a rewrite, it was a replacement (a significantly quicker thing to do).
This article seems to be all about the definition of "everything" in "everything is possible if you put your mind to it". For the author "everything" includes swimming faster than Michael Phelps even if you didn't start swimming at an age of 7. That's a tough one.

The saying is much more useful if you consider only the things that are possible given the current circumstances. I may not become as fast as Michael Phelps, but I can definitely become as fast as I can possibly be given my current situation. If you look at it that way, "Just do it" applies and it's a good motto to live by.
I wasn't very aware of the concept of a sales letter, even though I had seen those long, rambling pages trying to sell some scammy ebook.

However, I was recently told that they can help a lot, and that they don't have to be scammy. I feel like not many people know or talk about them in the startup world.

Has anyone written/used one? Did it work or not? What are your general thoughts about it?
Or there's always the lighter weight option pyspread[1] in which cells are objects, works with numpy arrays and any module.

[1]: http://manns.github.com/pyspread/
It is called a "Non-Apology Apology" and is not new to this field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology
Launching product is like having a crush
On the flipside, SAAS means you can augment the interface using browser plugins (user scripts, CSS, etc)!
How to Restore Backup in MS SQL 2008
IIRC, it's not free.
O had the same issue, and just hit tab + enter like in gmail. Now that I know where it is, no big deal. I like the cleaner look more.
"we do not proactively report or remove content on behalf of other users no matter who they are."

Except when they do.
Wow, I think it's time to open up another bag of popcorn this movie just got even more interesting. Although I am not an Apple fanboy by any means, I was starting to believe for a moment that Samsung were going to lose this and then bam, they release images of concept phones including one with a very iOS like interface before the iPhone was even released.

I think this situation goes to show that Apple aren't as revolutionary as they lead on or people think. Steve was a great sales man, but certainly not a visionary. Nothing about the iPhone appears to be revolutionary any more, considering Samsung amongst others were working on the same idea, it's evolutionary not revolutionary.

It will be interesting to see where this leads, could Apple lose some of their iPhone patents because of all of this? This of course doesn't change the fact Samsung copied Apple's charger design and accessory packaging, but ripped off the iPhone? Nah.
Messy? Three articles above-the-fold and there are only three sections to the page.
This email address was publicly available, and I can see how that would be tantamount to already having the address, as in Hamidi.
Interesting to note that outlook.com considers foo.bar@outlook.com to be a different account to foobar@outlook.com, unlike gmail
Reports like these don't take into account active users. And even when they do, they define "active" very vaguely, as in the case of Twitter's 140 million active users.
Got any data to support that? All the major browser market share measurements (Net Applications, StatCounter, etc.) disagree with you by a very large margin.

edit: I see parent deleted their comment. I removed my quote of them.
Amazing Digital Silver Art
it's too visually-interesting
Only if you buy a new phone through Verizon, I think. If you keep your existing phone, you'll still have an unlimited plan indefinitely.
>But if you have usage-based pricing (which Verizon does), it doesn't matter whether that 4GB originates from an iPhone or a MBP. A packet is a packet and it costs the same to route.

Potentially, but I think it's a fair bet that a lot of people with data plans don't use nearly 4GB. Will that set overlap significantly with the set of customers who tether? Hard to say.
Biomedical technology and Robot Evolution
On email privacy, Twitter’s ToS and owning your own platform
Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing.

The rules: http://www.writingclasses.com/InformationPages/index.php/Pag...

The book: http://www.elmoreleonard.com/index.php?/weblog/more/elmore_l...

The man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmore_Leonard

He's written a lot of books-to-movies that you've probably seen, or that your dad has.
That's funny, I had the almost same sci-fi scenario thoughts during one night. The thought of the nature of our minds being defined by a disease that we caught at some point in time and now completely identify with it, that that disease made us forget our true nature. It's pretty great as a sci-fi scenario, but I now believe it has a deep truth to it.

I later discovered the writings of Eckhart Tolle. According to him, we are diseased in the sense that we identify with our mind/ego, instead of realizing what it actually is: a tool. Part of the problem is we often don't know what exists underneath. We are 100% convinced we are our mind. But obviously we're not - if we were, we wouldn't be able to observe it. Once we realize we're not our mind, we're free of its control. Until we do, we're in a way, severely ill. We're actually not disfunctional in our true nature - but we're unenlightened.

At least that's what Eckhart Tolle says. I personally find it disarmingly logical - and reasonably easily provable within my perception, not to mention deeply liberating/changing. Finding out you can stop your thoughts and not only still be aware, but become the most aware you can be, that's quite a doozy of a realization.
Strange but True: Curiosity's Sky Crane
Judge Koh annoyed by Samsung media leak, demands explanation
The Ad Contrarian: Advertising And The Future Of Apple [2011]
Which brings "mistaken" back down to the average CTR for an ad of that type, instead of double the average.
Dropbox: Security update & new features
I'm very interested to see what happens with this. I think they've made all the right moves so far since the acquisition and I love the transparency. They're going to try to stay true to their roots while also becoming "fast and thin", in their words.

It also makes a ton of sense to have the algorithm factor in tweets, FB shares, and diggs. Nice. I don't know if it'll ultimately work, but it looks like a good start.
Well put, the article takes 'everything' a bit literally. Why strive to swim better than Michael Phelps? Just swim to swim and get better (forget trying to be the best in the world and just simply do it).
It's not an issue of giving up identity, it's about taking partial responsibility and I find the alternative far more frightening. Saying "the USSR did this" feels like too much of a cheat and a weasel word. It reminds me of the whole "mistakes were made" line. After all, the USSR never did anything. It has no arms and legs. Everything was done by people.

Now, the question just remains as to which people get to be counted in that "we". Here, I'll move back to your sports team comment. The players obviously have the right to say "we won", since they were out there scoring points. The coach, however, was not. Does he get included in the "we"? How about the athletic trainer who fixed up the star player after an injury. Does he get to count himself? The team's owner didn't score any goals or pick any plays. Her contributions were far more abstract and mostly economic. Does she count? How about the station who paid the owner for the broadcasting rights? It's more nebulous and economic than the owner's claim, but still largely the same.

If the TV station seems like a step too far, imagine that it wasn't a soccer game, but rather gladiatorial combat that they were paying to broadcast. If someone at the station said "We killed fifty prisoners this evening", would you correct them that they hadn't actually killed anyone? How about the network's sponsors? Or the audience? They'd have just as much involvement with the prisoners being stabbed as they would with the goal in the soccer game. If they shouldn't identify with their minor part of the glory in the goal, why should they have responsibility for the other?
The whole "mason" best fit I suppose. In comparison to say reddit and HN, no real linear flow of headlines. Your eyes tend to dart all over the place with this design looking for information. The F pattern seems to be proven as the best layout for information absorption http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
At my university, most of the upper-level classes had some kind of group programming project component. We were required to use SVN, although no formal instruction in its use was given. You were expected to figure it out on your own or communicate with other students who knew how to use it already. (This was an ongoing theme in the curriculum.)

The approach worked very well. From an instructor's point of view, you can see who is (and who is not) contributing to a project if you have access to the repositories.

Personally I don't care for Subversion, but it might be easier to grasp for a first-timer.
maybe i'm being over-sensitive here, but it really feels like you're making excuses and trying to hide behind details. surely it's obvious i mean drift velocity from the context (how can you call fermi velocity classical?).

i don't want to drop names, or pull rank, or argue from authority, but this comment is based on memories of a happy afternoon chatting with other students. none of them said "oh, i don't understand, do you mean drift or fermi or one of the many other velocities i can think of?" instead, to a man or woman they said some random large number than stared, then did the maths, and then burst out laughing.

they were smart people. and i admit i was one of the dumbest (and i didn't come up with the question - i can't remember who did). and none of them felt the need to make excuses or smokescreens about learning something new.
Goddammit, I hate it when sites intercept middle-clicks. Middle click means "open in new tab", not "run some badly-written open-in-new-window javascript".
ctrl-enter works as well(for both)!
> What bad scenarios do you see occurring with anonymous online payments?

How about an assassination market[1]? Especially as far as present governments are concerned, this would be an enormous downside to the existence of an anonymous payment system.

Disclaimer: I am not declaring that assassination markets would necessarily be bad for humanity (I haven't thought about it enough), but on the surface it's definitely something that most people would consider to be a potential "bad" outcome of any anonymous payment system.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_politics
That's whole 50:50 split was a corker of a mistake.
I'll say this -- this looks much much better than reddit or HN on my iPhone.

But, as always, such sites' value comes more from their community than anything else.
Twitter apologizes for suspending Guy Adams account
While his complaint about "stating the problem as the solution" resonates with me, I found this post gained a lot more meaning when I noticed who the author was: Buster Benson, founder of a number of startups with the explicit goal of helping people make beneficial changes to their own behaviour. He's not just whining "this stuff is hard, give us a break" - he's calling for more attention on techniques for doing hard things.

This post from the same blog is one of the most positive and insightful "my startup is shutting down" posts I've read: http://wayoftheduck.com/a-duck-bears-no-grudges

> I’m not going to wait until I have a success story to start telling it.
Digging through the source reveals a konami easter egg. Unfortunately all it really does is break the page though.
Well puzzle games are pretty girly. I mean why do they all have gems? Where is tetris with guns? </sarcasm>

Seriously gaming gender roles are the most sexists things I've ever seen.
Yes, someone really needs to do a fun Bill and Ted style video series (or even better - a full blown video game franchise) on a wide variety of topics. I would pay good money for entertaining, interactive, and highly educational trips such as: Life at Bell Labs with Dennis Ritchie, Finding Mario with Shigeru Miyamoto, Building and Selling Your First Computer with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.

So many great stories, and so much untapped storytelling potential... Wikipedia, History Channel, and random documentaries on Netflix aren't good enough!
Completely anecdotal, but all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome.

What compelling reason is there to use Firefox any more? All of the reasons that previously applied to switching to Firefox now apply to switching from Firefox to Chrome.

Chrome is faster, more light weight, more standards compliant, more compatible with broken pages, supports more standards/technologies, more actively updated/enhanced, and leaks less memory than Firefox. It's also open source and cross platform.

The one place Firefox may "win" is by sheer number of extensions. Even then, all the "big" ones (AdBlock, Ghostery, ...) are ported over, and I don't think gimmicky extensions are a big influence for most people.
Thank goodness for some sense around telecom companies. Finally!