skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know, I think this is the best explanation I've seen yet. I've done plenty of calculations for my classes on which operators commute and which don't. And if [A, B] ≠ 0, then the two are incompatible observables. And I already knew the mathematics behind the eigenstates/eigenfunctions.

But I think the key insight you provided to me is what most people mean when they say "well-defined" -- that the definition for "certainty" implies multiple measurements.

In other words, I was thinking: okay, you can measure a particle's position and momentum. You'll get real numbers for both to as much precision as your equipment allows. And I assumed that this was the definition of position and momentum -- the instantaneous values you get for the two measurements are defined to be the particle's position and momentum at time t. So I didn't understand why everyone was saying you can't find both simultaneously -- from my definition, of course you can find them both!

But from the definition you've given me, I am guessing most other people define position and momentum as consistent quantities, meaning they have to have the same values upon each new measurement of the system in order to be called "position" or "momentum". Is this what you're saying? If so, that makes a lot of sense.

But I would think textbooks would clarify that more, because there are a lot of people who, like me, get confused by this type of wording. You can measure a car's instantaneous speed and that is THE speed at time t. Not "let's measure an identically prepared car multiple times and call the average of its dx/dt measurements 'speed".

With regard to your last point about the standard deviations product always being greater than h_bar / 2, I realized my fallacy after I posted it, but didn't think anyone would catch it. Good eye for subtlety!
Anonymous and LulzSec combined forces in hacking FBI
Ask HN: Given these circumstances, would you switch to a small startup?
I currently work for a large consulting firm as a developer and have been for about a year now (a year out of school). I'm back on the job hunt (voluntarily), and I've been in contact with a small startup. They have a handful of employees, only 3 or 4 that are full-time. They got Series A funding (between $2-10 million) earlier this year, and the service they're offering doesn't require any ridiculous sums of money (no complex manufacturing, etc). There's no guarantee or anything that I'd be the right candidate, but I guess I'm just looking for general advice/insight should a decision to join the team arrive.

I know there are a lot of details I'm leaving out, but I'm hoping there's something to glean from what I've shared. Should I make the switch? What sort of questions should I be asking the team when I meet them? What sort of offer should I expect (again granted I'm the right fit)? What would be some positive signs that things are going well? How about negative signs?
Honestly, even those in the link are impressive to me. Just think of where technology was at that point in time, and what ingenuity it took to create pictures of this quality.
Don't forget second-order effects. Your proposal encourages people to post quickly, to try to get in before the costs start kicking in. Encouraging people to crank posts out faster is probably not a net win.

I've noticed that trying to engineer communities isn't entirely unlike trying to secure software. You're not defending against straight-line attacks, you're defending against a hostile adversary with more time, resources, and collective brainpower than you, who will actively react to any move you make. The miracle is that any community ever works at all/any software is ever secured at all.
Yes I am. To the extent I have a vested interest in Groovy, it may or may not be relevant to my original post. My larger point was, as I said before, if the purpose is to offer a 'taste' of dynamic functionality, a la ruby/python, to Java developers, Groovy is a much simpler way to go about it. Should people then get a real hankering for it, you've got more options, either with more groovy, or jruby or jython or scala or what have you. Nothing more.
Me and my colleagues had worked on a solution to this problem a few years back. The results were published and is linked here.

ACM digital library link - http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2056434

The paper - http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/cce-dsn11.pdf
Ask HN: reviewing a startup idea
I'm thinking about building a product similar to 99 dresses but for eye wear as sort of a side project. I believe many people will be more comfortable wearing glasses that have been used rather than something like a dress. Any advice or criticism you may have about the idea would be appreciated and ideas for "99 dresses for x" would also be helpful!
I figured my layman explanation would suffice. While we're in the realm of correct details, it's also worth nothing that with each use of a needle dragged through a groove (or even with magnetic tape dragging across all the bits in the tape machine) the surface is degraded and the original recording along with it. Less fidelity, more noise ... hiss, pop, crack

Digital gives us error correction so that even when the physical media starts to degrade (taking the signal with it) our firmware and our software work out where the mistakes exist and attempt to correct them. Of course, once the signal has degraded beyond the point of recoverability, you "suddenly" have a catastrophic failure. (And this is why backups are important...)
I spent a good portion of my career as a manufacturing engineer, so I just wanted to chime in with a few thoughts on the article and the comments I've read here:

- Broadly speaking manufacturing can be lumped into to production models: high-volume, low product mix, and low-volume high product mix. Most of the manufacturers that you will recognize from a consumer standpoint are the former, but most of the ones that I've worked for and toured in the local area are the latter. Many automation systems are not cost effective for high product mix mfgrs.

- There is a ton of software used in manufacturing - not just at the ERP/MRP level, but all the way down to the production floor. Some of it is COTS, but much of it is custom.

- 3D Printing may be buzz worthy, but I don't think it's applicable to most manufacturing operations. Wherever you are while reading this, look around you and count the number of things that could have been made with a 3D printer, and then ask yourself whether 3D printing cycle times (and therefore cost) would scale to large operations.

- "API's for Manufacturing" sounds a bit nebulous. When you run a manufacturing operation, there are 4 main drivers for improvement: quality, cost, delivery, and inventory. If you have a single factory producing good on demand via an API, it sounds like a job shop, and would have a limited range of capabilities. If the API interfaced with a network of manufacturing operations, each with its own specialty, then those 4 drivers become significant hurdles.
I'm advocating a mindset, I think, more than the claim that specific countries are right for people. I think the first step for most people is getting it into their heads that the country they were born in is not the greatest place in the world, and being open to the possibility that other countries are better.

But which country is better depends very highly on your preferences... for instance, Dubai and Singapore are good climates for business, but a gay person might not feel comfortable in either. (and we've considered both, fwiw.)

It also depends on your nationality- a treaty between the USA and the Netherlands gives us an opportunity to get residency in the netherlands much easier than it would for others.

So, any list I might give is going to be a bit too personal to our specific interests.

But people should consider chile. Panama has a new program which gives residency for anybody from certain countries (and there's a long list) who starts a business in Panama. (Panama City is the new miami- the cultural and financial hub of the region, or so I've been told.) Costa Rica has a lot to recommend it, such as a culture very supportive of americans, and no national military (if that's your thing). Nicaragua is poor, and thus your costs would be really low there, akin to thailand or cambodia. Thailand is really nice, but you can't easily get residency so you're border hopping to keep your visa up to date. Cambodia, though, I hear has a new residency program, but I don't know the details. Paraguay and Uruguay are also ones to consider, as relatively inexpensive and relatively pro-business countries. For some people estonia might be the right choice and for others it might be shanghai, even though china has aspects that others wouldn't like.

I've found a great deal of useful information in Sovereign Man: Confidential, and his free email list you can join at http://www.sovereignman.com
Why I switched to Arch
We're actually approaching, if not have passed, the resolution of standard film with some higher end SLRs [1, 2]; at least in a total-usable-pixels perspective; but of course at the sub-pixel level, we're still very far off with only 14 bits per channel. There's also the question of how the total pixels are arranged, since each bit of the sensor is only absorbing one color, etc; but in time, at least as far as resolution is concerned, digital will or has surpassed analogue.

[1] http://www.mindspring.com/~lorqvonray/Sticker-5mp-Velvia.htm...

[2] http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital.summa...

Some ludicrous camera resolutions. Please not I'm trying to bring up cameras that are full-frame and have ludicrous sensor resolutions, so the arguments of "light doesn't work right at these densities" doesn't fly as easily, since the density is still relatively low:

http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/dslr/d800/

http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/consumer/products/cameras/slr_...
Looking at these feels like time travel.
I'm a UX designer and I do both code and design.

You must know both to be a real UX designer. That's the person you want, and yes we're expensive. We may not be the best at either one, but our ability to bridge the gap between the two gives us a unique perspective that allows us to make experience improvements.
Growing up I really wished that I could work on things like that: I love switches, knobs, dials, klaxons, etc. but the best I have is vim and a command line. Obviously usability can be improved but I'll still lament the decline of big clunky switches and blinkenlights.
Russians don't walk around smiling, unless something good happens to smile about. In fact, smiling Americans look stupid grinning all the time.
My list will be different than yours. I do recommend Chile. Thailand and Singapore I haven't visited, but both have their appeal. Thailand's limit is that you can't easily get residency (as I understand it) and so you have to do the border hop every 90 days. Singapore is efficient and by the book, which means if their residency programs work for you, then they could be really good. The country is a bit rigid, so might want to visit to make sure its right for you.
Increase Your Opt-In Rate With Opt-In Skin (Review and Walk-Through)
Colored lanterns is how he projected them in color, according to the article.
Under more competitive governance, people could move to places that supported their values, leading to potentially better support for the things you list.

Perhaps the confusion stems from mixing two different levels of abstraction. What we're talking about here isn't a free market within countries, it's a free market in countries themselves. Since there is no true global sovereign, we arguably already have this, but due to various factors (including high barriers to entry, high switching costs, and the quasi-sovereign US) there is currently not much choice in governance. With few exceptions, pretty much every country runs some variant of Anglo-American representative democracy. Perhaps, with a little competition, we can do better.
Some Americans believe stormy weather interferes with cloud computing
> This is HUGE from my perspective. I am typically the guy to tell others constantly bitching about fb's privacy settings to move on. But alas, the day has come when I am officially scared to use facebook.

Um, what kinds of friends do you have on Facebook? Maybe you shouldn't be friending these people in the first place.
If you are asking this is because you definitely want this new job and need the acceptance for a community. You are looking for support more than anything else.

And if that is what you want to, and there are not risks, you should go for it.
I've probably seen this set of images half a dozen times. I still find myself scrolling through the whole set every time it pops up. It's really a stunning set of images, and absolutely worth enjoying more than once.
Thanks, completely missed that.
People Chose Bing Over Google Nearly 2:1 in Blind Comparison Tests – Really?
Professor kicked me out of the honors program, I sent him an email a year later.
I only have one wish for improving HN: randomly rotate the top comment. As it stands, the discussion usually veers off into a meta discussion around the first comment.

At the time of this posting, the thread is 14 hours old and has 239 comments, so even if HN'ers agreed with me on this point, the odds are they will never see it.
"Groovy 2.0 is nothing more than beta-quality software offered to production users"

Unlike, of course, every other piece of software's x.0 release, which are always 110% battle hardened and tested through years of rigorous process, ensuring no downtime, data loss or corruption, and smooth sailing. Yea, groovy's totally unique in that. I bet they just made some random commits during the final 2.0 bundling without even looking at the keyboard while they typed as well.

Groovy book sales were down. So what? Maybe groovymag has had an adverse impact on oreilly? :)
Phantom writes are one reason ZFS stores checksums separately from the blocks being written. If you store checksums with the block itself, then failure modes like phantom writes can result in reading data that you think is valid (because the checksum matches) but it's the wrong data.

The worst part of this is that often when disks fail, they just become extremely slow (100s of milliseconds) rather than explicitly failing. That can be significantly worse than just failing explicitly and having the OS read from another disk.

Nit: Remember the old fallacy: if there's a 50% chance of rain on each of Saturday and Sunday, that doesn't mean there's 100% chance of rain this weekend. The quoted number of nonrecoverable errors per bits read is presumably an expected value on a uniform distribution (which is ludicrous, since errors are not even remotely independent, but I don't know what else they could be expecting the reader to assume). In that case, the expected probability of an error on each bit read is 1 / 1E14. The probability of zero errors after reading 3E13 bits is ((1E14-1)/1E14)^3E13, which is about 75%.
I think that's an unfair characterisation of public opinion of the Euro "experiment". (North America did federated states a while back though, remember?) I mean maybe if you get all your information from the Daily Mail. Definitely got the scare quotes and odd wording going. Yes, there are groups that are opposed to it, although the most vocal all to often are later revealed to be complete bigots, but there are many groups in favour. It helps that even though there are poorer and richer member states the wealth and employment gap isn't that large. Certainly it's smaller than between Honduras and US immigrants. The common currency has been much more of a problem.
Sounds like something you could definitely make a small MVP for, and not have to spend much time/money on it.

It's pretty clear who you would target as a customer, so just test your market and see if you can't get paying customers to demand you to continue.. That's better than anyone on HN validating your idea!
Of course with a little makeup and hair styling you can prevent facial recognition software: http://cvdazzle.com/

I bet we will be seeing some interesting hairstyles, like those above, in counter culture after facial recognition software becomes pervasive.
Its certainly a sticky subject; but suppose the following situation exists:

You are a student at a university somewhere in the United States. You live at said University. You have the right to use internet there, but it only available through unsecured wireless. Would it be ethical for someone/some company to packet sniff the wireless traffic, without your consent (or knowledge)? Would it be ethical for the University to packet sniff the wireless traffic without your consent (or knowledge)?

Even assuming its unethical though, given the current ruling both situations would still be legal. How do you feel about the above?
Alas, my source for info is a private wiki so I can't link directly. I did read up on the application in the recent past, and the hardest part was the requirement to get letters from Chileans saying you've made a contribution to the country. As part of Startup Chile we've made contacts within the government so this likely wouldn't be too difficult for us. (and if you're doing an early stage startup, Startup Chile is one way to get a good immersion into Chile.)

But here's some links:
http://www.spencerglobal.com/chile-immigration-law/32/120-ch...
http://www.allchile.net/chilewiki/index.php?title=Immigratio...

Here's a good forum to ask questions about Chile:
http://www.allchile.net/chileforum/
Yeah, how cool would that have been. If you could do a JS port, you could you use that to build a super lightweight Skype clone :D (audio capture from Flash, or Mozillas audio capture..)?
My outsider guess: VB is unhappy YC companies seem to favor other outlets with their announcements.

I can't see how opining that YC is 'predatory' will help VB/O'Dell here. (Such a derogatory allegation would seem to require some on- or off- record aggrieved sources, rather than just an appeal to "acknowledge the obvious"... at least in the non-Marxist business press.)
The onion: the facebook as a cia op.

http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...
A couple points to add to that: with vinyl, the recording process itself (for which there are several techniques) also adds noise. The recording head (in whatever form) is also subject to physical laws. The materials used at each stage of the process are also not ideal substrates. Hell, vinyl is a polymer, which means it's a big tangle of chained molecules. Even if everything else were perfect, it would not be possible to write data at a molecular scale into such a medium.
Looking through the DOM of feed items it looks like this has been scrubbed from the web interface as well.
Here's what's considered harmful, assuming you actually have concerns about whatever it is you're licensing[1]:

using a license that is a cut and paste job (i.e. you took it from the web, or some other source; i.e. it was not drafted for you and your work specifically).

1. If you don't really care much about what you're licensing, the license doesn't really matter. Probably 99% of programs fit this category. With "99%" of programs, no one gets wealthy, no one gets sued, the license has no real impact on anything, life goes on as if there had never been a license. And in most cases no one even reads these licenses. Hence things like the "shareware" license, the "beerware", the "dowhatthefuckyouwantto" license, the GPL, "Copyleft", "Ty Coon", and so on. These are mocking the entire practice of licensing. There's a reason for that.

And for many years even the ones who do care about licensing, e.g. Microsoft, would have licenses that contained unenforceable terms. But how many Windows users cared about reading a license?

If you really cared about licensing your software (e.g. you thought someone might get wealthy from the software, or someone might get sued), then you'd spend a few bucks to have a lawyer draft a license for you, specifically.

And if users really cared about the licenses they were agreeing to, they'd probably complain. Because some of the licenses, the terms they contain, are beyond unreasonable. They are so one-sided as to be unenforceable.

It's amusing how programmers who post comments on the web are so tuned in to licenses, but in reality they spend little effort/money when it comes to licensing. And that's OK, because with "99%" of software programs, it does not matter. It's irrelevant. No one gets wealthy, no one gets injured, no one sues. It's neither here nor there. Some cut and pasted text that no one reads is good enough.

But licenses do make a great subject for programmer chatter on the web. It never stops.

Truthfully, in the context of the web, at the end of the day, the license is not nearly as important as whether someone is going to sue. Because if she really wants to sue, and has the means to do so, a copy and pasted license is probably not going to stop her.

Food for thought.

Public domain.
Even old-timers rarely browse the /newest page to mod those up. This creates a bias favoring the ranking produced at /news because said old-timers will upvote those more than the ones at /newest (or /classic)

The problem is not only the home page ranking: it's the discussions. I see a lot of low-quality (as in "it's more important to be right than it is to debate in civilized ways") discussions. I did not correlate that to account age.
Just my yow cents...I received 3+k in my PayPal acct around 3mon ago. I was shocked next day that my acct was freezed and when I called PayPal I was told to provide PROOF OF DELIVERY to have mt acct unlimited...ok, so I did...the misery just started...a week later my acct was still frozen and I decided to call again...another chick with a distant,lazy voice stressed I would need PROOF OF RECEPT to unlimit my acct...you know how long it takes for a sea freight from china to the states I escalated to a inexperienced supervisor...to no avail of course...so I have to wait another month for the shipment to arrive, and then I called again in urgency...guess what? No luck, I went thru a few more chicks only to realize they never wanted to be honest with me to unlimit my acct because THEY WANT THE MONEY FOR FREE FINANCING! My acct was still frozen 45days after receiving the payment...I had enough...I refunded the money and closed my acct last month...I ask all my friends, partners,and biz associates to stop using PayPal...this is what I tell you PayPal you do not suck, that doesn't apply to you,you are sleazy cheap
Why Exploration Deserves A Holiday
I wouldn't call it "technology". It's more of a successful experiment than technology, to me.

Color separation cameras came two decades after, and this was really a technology : making one camera capture at the same time 3 pictures on negative. (Where those very impressive pictures shown in the link are taken using the color separation process but without a color separation camera, and not on negative.)
Just think: in 50-100 years, the phrase "100 years ago" won't mean that much, in terms of technology.
This is only an issue if you use cookies to authenticate JSONP requests, which you shouldn't do.

I wrote a summary of the issues with JSONP on StackOverflow awhile ago: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1392153