skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This happens on many sites, and in many cases I'd attribute it less to a reduction in "quality," and more to a decrease in homogeneity: a successful site attracts more people, with increasingly disparate backgrounds.

For the original users, who were charmed by the fact that "everybody has (more or less) the right opinion, and we can discuss rather than argue!" this can be a shock, but I'd venture that it's often actually a rather healthy thing, even if you unfortunately also get more trolls and flamers along the way. Pleasant as it is to talk with one's close peers, one can often learn more by talking to people one disagrees with...

It can go bad, of course, but HN certainly doesn't seem to show the usual symptoms of an internet cesspool; based on my short time on HN (~1 year), the S/N ratio isn't bad at all.
Several years ago, I cloned the ESN of my phone to another phone of the same model (Samsung SCH-A680? on Sprint). When I tried turning them both on (next to one another) and calling them, they'd both ring, and answering both would result in hearing the audio in both ears for a short time (presumably until something got out of sync). If there is some token "encryption", it certainly isn't up to modern standards.
What a contrast a zoom and filter can have on an image... The actual image is him intently/genuinely listening to what I can only suppose is a question from an audience member of some kind. And the Venture Beat cropped version is supposed to make it look like he's coldly calculating someone's demise.
Smartass with the wacky TLD MX record and '@' user name may want to take advantage of your service... so it's down to their monthly subscription vs taking the time to "fix" your validation.

I'm still not sure which approach I prefer, but having been thwarted by zealous validation in the past I lean towards this double-check-on-weird-shit-then-send-mail system.

I will never have enough domain specific knowledge to reject a given email address with absolute certainty. That is how much fun that RFC is.
Looks like the main link is wrong:

http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2012/08/13/bsg-smartph...
Very cool algorithm. I wonder, can anyone explain in what kind of real-world application it would be used?
Because film captures details in molecules while a CCD sensor in your digital camera uses picture elements much, much, much larger than molecules.

Or, because it's analog. It's very similar to sound recordings. Whether magnetic or not (say, in vinyl) the resolution of the captured signal can approach the molecular. Digital has a discreet resolution limited by the capturing equipment; for example, CDs reproduce the volume in a sound recording only 44,100 times per second. But a magnetic tape has a resolution limited only by the number of molecules passing the recording head every second (the more [i.e. the faster the tape], the better.)
The general HUP has to do with the eigenstates of noncommuting operators. I feel like you've probably seen this before, but one more hand waving try! :)

In QM the state of a system will be a solution to Schroedingers equation for that system. The system is characterized by a Hamiltonian H.

If an operator commutes with H, then we can find a basis for the solution space such that every basis state is an eigenstate of that operator. (i.e. it has a definite eigenvalue for that operator; applying the operator to an eigenstate gives back the state times a constant.)

If two operators commute, we can even find a basis such that that each basis state is an eigenstates of both operators.

But if they don't commute, this is impossible.[1] That means that if a basis state has a definite eigenvalue for one operator, it cannot for the other.

What does it mean for a particle to have a well defined momentum? That means it is an eigenstate of the momentum operator. Likewise for position, and the position and momentum operators don't commute. This shows that if a particle is in a state of well-defined momentum, it must be a mixture of states in the basis for position.

With more work you can translate this into a well-defined lower bound on the product of the uncertainties of the two operators.

>HUP guarantees that the resulting real number will be ≥ ħ/2 (reduced Planck's constant over 2).

Well, not quite. You're making an observation of the standard deviation, and it might not accurately measure the actual standard deviation.

So we know that if enough measurements are taken, the measured value will converge to a number greater than /hbar / 2. That's different than guaranteeing that any particular such measurement will obey this.

1. If a state |n> is an eigenstate of two operators A and B, such that A|n> = a|n> and B|n> = b|n> (a and b are eigenvalues), then necessarily AB|n> = BA|n> = ab|n>. This implies that [A, B]|n> = 0 which generally contradicts the idea that A and B don't commute; certainly when the commutator is just a constant.
It's actually not (edit: it actually is illegal either way for cell signals in particular, see below), according to federal code. We'll have to dig up some old cordless phone interception cases, but if you weren't trying to defraud the intercepted line (like racking up a bill), you're more or less in the clear.

California and other states had stricter laws about telephone conversations in particular, but as others have noted: when laws are particular about their domain, that almost always means they are not applicable by analogy elsewhere.

Edit: ah, someone in the Ars comments brought up a good point: cell phone frequencies are specially regulated and auctioned by the FCC, and intercepting them is indeed prohibited (by my reading at least). Since your connection to your cordless phone base station is itself not a common carrier, though, it is considered publicly accessible (by federal code), and so it is not illegal to intercept it (when it's not encrypted).
pretty much agreed. I think people grasp a concept academically, but when it comes to actually facing the realit with cold hard cash, there's a lot of denial that floods to the surface. :/

Not everyone is like that, but it amazes me how many people want "rockstar" developers and sr-level engineers with 8-10+ years of experience in major metro areas in the US, and only want to pay $70k. I don't care how many foosball tables you have. Actually, I take that back - yes I do. 1 is too many until you're paying higher wages. Or you risk only being able to attract a certain type of developer... I may just be far too mercenary in my old age. :/
Or based on an assumption that YC gets more than just equity out of the people that get into it.
Such an inspiration to product engineers. He's very unique to be in so many new industries and execute so well, all focused on the product. With that, to be so level headed and ship focused without the hype. Elon's products are his marketing, first principle design is hard to beat. He was inspired by the US to come here and we need more like him to complete the cycle. Tesla as the company name is very fitting to the individual that started it.
A recovering non-coder?
Agreed, but holding any pose is a challenge - kids sitting on the hill - they'd fidget and move. The water moves. The sun moves if you wait long enough. I wonder how many 'bad' photos there are from the early days of photos where people tried smiling and they had smudged faces.
It's hard to tell, but the image has also been rotated, which makes it seem like he is leaning forward more intently. Click the little "compare" link on the TinEye result to see what I mean:

https://www.tineye.com/search/b2e69b229df764bf6bd92bb4ca65f1...
honestly, you are most likely for this subsidy because you are getting benefit from it, plus knowledge that other large companies get similar subsidies.

I'm all for this kind of subsidy too, as I'd say there's a significant public good for low-cost fiber. But most likely you wouldn't be so enthusiastic if you didn't value the service being rendered.
Users also might try to nest their comments under one of the top comments instead of under the submission where they belong.
> Try doing THAT with any other CLI one-liner!

Challenge accepted.

cat earthporn.json | \
jshon -e data -e children -a -e data -e title -u | \
sed -r 's/\<./\U&/g' | tr -d ' ' | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z].*//g`

I'll stick with Jshon for my routers and other little ARM devices.

But this utility is pretty nifty. Personally the whole select thing feels a little too magic for my taste, but when it works it looks quite compact. I'll probably be borrowing that colorizing feature tomorrow. And thanks for the link at the bottom :-)
The President May Act Alone on Cybersecurity
How does Chuck imagine the increasing popularity (read: affordability) of solid state drives will affect this paradigm?

Very interesting post btw. Thanks.
Your standard for the importance of things being useful might be slightly out of perspective when you consider the main goal here is to learn: when you first start programming it doesn’t matter what the program does just as long as it did something, you understood it, and you can build on that knowledge to the next thing. That’s why we start with Hello World.
That's exactly it. The exposures were much longer then than now. It's also the same reason the bodies of water have the rainbow effect on their surfaces.
They were black and whites taken with color filters over the lens (R, G, B).

Project each of the three in its corresponding color and overlap them to produce a full-color photo. Overlap them in that color in Photoshop to produce the digital images you see here.
Paul Irish: Some web standards people not feeling urgency of the platform war
Scientists Set New Quantum Teleportation Record
Why You Don’t Need Mac Anti-Virus Software. What You Do Need
Dead on, I have too much cultural experience. The term is abused.
Interviewing is a game, and it is expected that you play a certain way to get the job. Other aspects of the game include when they ask you why you left your last job. Your answer needs to be something bland or positive about how you completed all your goals at the previous place, and it's time for a new challenge. The fact that the last place was soul-sucking and terrible should not be mentioned as part of the job seeking process. Being positive is just part of the game. Don't give people excuses to count you out if you want the job. There are all kinds of jobs where lying is just part of the application process. Police, for example, it's just common knowledge that when they ask if you've done drugs of any kind, you say no.
I saw him say on twitter that hyperloop is not a vac-tube as most have speculated https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/224406502188916739. In this interview he says it could go as fast as the concord jet but on the ground and wouldn't need tracks.

Any ideas what he may be describing?
Our Lt. Governor likes his bowties. http://governor.mt.gov/ltgov/images/ltg_400.jpg
Note that those shown are all heavily restored (also cropped) versions of the originals. They are all from the Library of Congress collection (~1900 of the ~3500 he made). An example of an unrestored version for comparison is at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/item/prk20000025....
This had been in the "news" for the past 5 years if not longer. How many times can it makes the frontage? ;)

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/
The article glosses over the fact that fsync() itself has major issues. For example, on ext3, if you call fsync() on a single file, all file system cached data is written to disk, leading to an extreme slowdown. This led to a Firefox bug, when the sqlite db used for the awesome bar and for bookmarks called fsync() and slowed everything down.

http://shaver.off.net/diary/2008/05/25/fsyncers-and-curvebal...

OS X does a fake fsync() if you call it with the defaults.
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa...

fsync in Mac OS X: Since in Mac OS X the fsync command does not make the guarantee that bytes are written, SQLite sends a F_FULLFSYNC request to the kernel to ensures that the bytes are actually written through to the drive platter. This causes the kernel to flush all buffers to the drives and causes the drives to flush their track caches. Without this, there is a significantly large window of time within which data will reside in volatile memory—and in the event of system failure you risk data corruption
Previously seen 749 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621517
That looks familiar ... In the '80s, I built equipment for Westinghouse's nuclear systems division and love the view of the synchroscopes.
Did the original products have revenue sufficient to support the companies and their investors?
Google Ventures Contact
Hi All,

I have an idea that I am prototyping out and could use some feedback, help and funding...I was trying to find out how to get in contact with someone at Google Ventures or equivalent! I feel like this idea could really change the world!

Any and all help would be much appreciated!

Thank you!

-Jesse Litton
YC is an investor, putting money into lots of startups. As a result, it benefits from the law of large numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers), so luck isn't as big a factor as it is for individual startup founders.
"Turning the drama down..." Mike says with a nudge and a wink.

Mike knows how to stir the pot in more ways than Rachael Ray.
Good thing Facebook has a rigorous and innovative hiring process that gets them the best of the best.
I gave an example; Tim Berners-Lee.
So, a couple things.

1) The original question was how to convince his boss that C is a bad choice. My answer is a good way to do it.

2) Re: my direct experience...

If you're talking about writing C, that's not true. But it has been a while because, frankly, I'd rather not torture myself. If you're talking about embedded programming, you're right, I haven't touched it.

If you're talking about applications where performance is very important, I've been dealing with quite a bit of HPC type stuff over the last year or so. In general, the hardcore C/C++/Fortran guys are becoming less useful, for reasons I stated in my OP. Notice I'm not saying "useless", I'm saying "less useful". There are absolutely applications in which this just isn't possible, so use what works. But applications where C is your only choice are becoming rarer and rarer.

And while we're here, where exactly did I say that the linux kernel should be rewritten in some other language? I didn't. So why would you suggest that I did?

You're certainly welcome to disagree, but if you think that that warrants an insulting tone, it may just be because you're an asshole. It wouldn't be an internet first.
The spacial resolution of analog photographs is not at the scale of individual molecules. It is limited by the "grain" of the film [1]. Other factors include distortions from lens shape imperfections in the lens material.

Audio tapes record their signal in magnetic domains. These are areas of tape the are large enough to be written and read. Much larger than anything approaching the scale of individual molecules.

Sound recordings on vinly are similarly limited by other factors. To "read" the signal from a record groove a needle is dragged a needle through a v shaped groove. This needle jiggles up and down and left and right, hence the two channels in stereo. The time resolution of the signal (max frequency) is limited by the physics of the jiggling head. It's inertia prevents it from reading signals over a certain limiting frequency. Again, well before the molecular level.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_grain

[edit] - Changed momentum to inertia in the last paragraph.
...while positioning himself as the adult.
As many times as we're happy to recall the impressive technical feat of the original artist, or as long as we're fascinated by what life looked like a hundred years ago. The max of those two.
100 Years Ago, French Artists Predicted The Future With Eerie Accuracy
Huh, interesting. Well, there's a lot of new people here since 749 days ago (including me) so I suppose it can't hurt to see it again!
Judging by some of the artifacts i saw in the images i'm not even sure it was film. I think it may have been glass plates that were used for these. In a few there are areas where it looks like the substrate had flaked off of the negative when they made the positives.

Given that wikipedia says that film was starting to take over around this era I'd say that it's quite possible that it was all photographic plates since to do this well with something you'd have to have a good amount of experience with it and I wonder how much film and the processing would have reached Russia yet by then.
...at least not in the modern American political system, dominated by lawyers. China apparently has a lot of engineers (by training) in its high offices.
Developer vs. designer
I was first amazed at the quality, then surprised that these were taken more recently than I expected, in 1910. Then, I realized that, duh, that was 102 years ago. It's strange how even 100+ years ago is getting more and more recent. (Obviously, that's how it works. But perception lags quite a bit.)
The article makes it sound like Patri, et al., have forsaken seasteading, but this is not true. In particular, Patri is still chairman of the board of The Seasteading Institute (http://www.seasteading.org/about/staff-board-advisors/) and emceed the recent conference. More generally, most seasteaders are interested in improving governance generally, and view seasteading as only one possible route to achieving this goal. (Charter cities is another.)
Simulation Metamodeling With GNU R
#6 is especially spooky / accurate...
Just some Star Wars dubstep.
Personally, I feel such matters are resolved by the simple rule that things happening in public spaces are public, and things happening in private spaces are private. One can argue about public vs private spaces, but it removes intent and expectations from the equation.

Are you outside your house? If yes, expect to have all your actions recorded and available to be streamed on the internet.
I think smiling for a photograph must be some sort of social training that humans either take to or don't.

I, for example, still find it very difficult and unnatural to smile for photographs unless I am already smiling about something else and the picture is just a candid moment caught at that time.

I would imagine that this old picture taking process (3 separate pictures with different filters each time) took quite a bit of time and subjects had to be posed for a a longer period of time. It would be very difficult to hold a smile for that long, and especially in those early photography days when the smiling-for-pictures convention still hasn't been established.
Why would you expect "entrepreneurial solutions to government" to forsake human rights? Were the framers of the U.S. Constitution not political entrepreneurs?
Our time in South America has been very enlightening. For instance, Chile has a pretty sizable middle class, and thus software developers and designers and other qualified people we could hire. I've heard from others that this is also the case in many of the other south american countries.

But I don't think we need to find people local. I believe in telecommuting, and I think that talented people want to live in nice places. For instance, I know one american company that has several employees in Thailand and asia, simply because that's where the employees want to live.

I think letting people telecommute will be a competitive advantage for us in hiring. The office is such a mind numbing place to work, they seem designed to kill productivity. (we don't have an office, the founders share an apartment, having a larger apartment is still cheaper than having a separate office.)

But we're also working on businesses with a great degree of leverage. I think many businesses see themselves as mostly selling the product of their employees productivity, and thus more employees=more business. We're selling the product of ingenuity... and so a lot of places where other people would hire employees, we will outsource. For instance, when we can't do support in house, we'll have an employee or two who is in charge of customer service, but the primary front line customer service people would be employees of a customer-service-as-a-service provider.
Airbus predicts catapult takeoffs and formation flying by 2050
Tropo has Australian numbers. And 40 other countries. Has for years. http://tropo.com (disclosure, I'm the product manager).

But really, if all you're doing is dialing out, then you don't actually need a local number. Just use whatever service you want (us, Twilio, Plivo, someone else, etc) and set the caller ID to a local number or make the call as a blocked caller ID.
How would you project them in their corresponding colors, though? I'd imagine you would have to produce prints in the colors. Only other thing I can think of is to project the negatives with R/G/B colored light behind them and make those projections line up.
sounds like just a subset of the general rule:

"Don't hire only self-described awesome [whatevers]."
Strangely enough most of the photos now would not be considered those of Russia, but would be other distinct countries.
"Designing for quality will always be more expensive. It's not about expense. It's about the return on the investment." -Jared Spool

You have to take a look at your competition. If a high quality experience doesn't matter then yes don't do the 29 things. However, remember "Design and UX is the new IP" - Ron Conway

And remember Paul Graham has said "always run uphill". He meant that when he could solve either a regular problem or a hard problem at Viaweb he'd always solve the harder problem as if he found it hard, his competitors would find it almost impossible.

So you can use UX and Design as your "barrier to entry"/"hard problem" amongst your competition. If you are solving some other non UX hard problem, then have a mediocre user experience if it makes sense.
Oddly enough, it seems rather foreign to people with a sales/marketing background. The folks I talked to did not know what to do without a $100,000+ ad campaign to help them push or a structure refined enough to be the sales equivalent of a Mcdonald's frier. Sales is hard.

What helped me the most so far, in retail, is networking with a lot of people who are most likely to increase my luck surface area. Here and there I find a great win/win business deal that seems to fall into my lap. I use those successes to pay for the seemingly less successful but more standard approach.
Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer. But a lot of people didn't end up liking what he did. Some still say that he ruined the country. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what he should have/have not done, but I know a lot of people that despise the man.

After stating that, I still would like to see more engineering types in leadership positions because engineers are more data driven. However, most engineers are too busy building things to run for office.