skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've run into the same problem that you have, in the context of Wikipedia articles on physics.

Fundamentally, Wikipedia is very good at helping you move from step n to step n+1, but it's a pretty poor textbook (which is to say, it's not great at moving you from step 3 to step 303).

I'd say that you want to reframe your question as "what textbook should I get?"
this code does not work. it tests if the graph is a tree, not a directed acyclic graph.
Actually I just realized it's pretty easy to do with delicious right now...

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'open-uri'
require 'digest/md5'

url = 'http://love2d.org/'

del_url = "http://delicious.com/url/" + Digest::MD5.hexdigest(url)

html = open(del_url).read

tags = html.scan(/<span class="m">(.*)<em>/)

puts tags
This is great! Do we get to throw things at Supervisors if they're using a limo now?
looking at the two side-by-side, you can see the few places they had to substitute their own text, which almost always sucks.

phew, what would you do about such a thing?
Hi guys, Dan here from TicketStumbler. While it was kind of PG to post this, there's still a long long way to go. Fansnap has done a good job with their maps and including many ticket sites (even if most of them post their tickets on Stubhub and Ticketsnow).

We've had a recent run of press recently (Financial Times, Boston Globe, Local News, ABCnews.com) and our interactive maps have been a huge hit, but we're not even close to having breathing room. Aka me on a tropical island drinking, Tom in Australia floating between cities.
Agreed. It's way too early.

I think PG is trying to jinx us ;p.
Do other humans even pass your test? How can you be sure that they are not producing behavior simply consistent with sentience, rather than actually being indicative. Animals too have behavior consistent with subjective emotional experience. What separates theirs from ours, except our prejudice?
But congratulations anyway, you've made it further than most :-)
You can't learn all of everything, and you certainly can't do it quickly. What you can do is learn something that you're motivated to learn, but you can't do it by simply reading. You need to work on it.

Math requires work. Euclid said, "In geometry there is no royal road."

The DCT is a complicated thing to "understand", and I'm not sure I do myself. I would guess that the people who wrote the code you're seeking to modify didn't necessarily understand it either - they may simply have coded the formulae they were given.

So don't despair. You can learn things like this, but you can't do it all at once, and you can't do it quickly. You need to start somewhere.

What do you really want to know?
EBS does deltas too. Is anyone else using it? I like the ability to mount a volume or clone a volume almost instantly and mount it on another machine.
http://planetmath.org and http://mathworld.com are other encyclopedia-like sources that are useful for things Wikipedia doesn't explain well.

Other people will be better than I am at suggesting good books, so I won't try to do that. If you have a software development background, consider getting involved in an open-source project that deals with the kind of math you want to learn.
Summary:

Some site had some unidetified database troubles which were resolved in an unidentified fashion. In the future they plan to partition their hot table into a less frequently used part and a more frequently used part.
http://kickyoutube.com has been doing the same thing.
Tell us what the future is like! ;-)
That's the question that astounds me. What do web sites do with that sort of money? After servers, maybe marketing, maybe a round of hiring a graphic designer, what's left?
You believe there is a link between; how much it costs to build a site, how much to ask for and how much a VC will invest and of course - how much money it will make?
The market is $4 billion. We think there's room for both of us to succeed.
6) use those eye clamps from clockwork orange to ensure that they are really looking

7) now you're going to need eyedrops, too
this is something I've never understood about DRM. If I can watch/listen to it I can capture it. Period. DRM is supposed to simply make the barrier to piracy higher so that less people overall pirate.

But this is a total misunderstanding about how piracy works. Someone will take up the challenge of breaking your DRM, and when they do everyone will download it from that person and then each other. DRM is completely ineffective in a situation where a single point of failure means total failure.
read this from mysqlperformanceblog
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/08/04/128gb-or-ram-...
10 people at 100k per year plus benefits plus taxes/fees plus office space adds up really fast.
At the prices SmugMug is charging, bandwidth cost is negligible. Just download the data to your office and burn it.
You submitted this site, what, a week ago? Two? Give it some time, remodel it a lot, and once you have a significantly newer version show it off again.

The feedback I gave you last time still stands: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442736
Or maybe you could even rig it up to light up based on what programs were active on your computer.

IDE/text edit open -> red light, web browser -> yellow, game -> green.
LimeWire Creator Brings Open-Source Approach to Urban Planning
"The best e-mail program ever"? Hardly. "One of the least shitty of the bunch" is probably more appropriate.

Gmail easily beats the old-school bunch, but the quantum leap of email is definitely still ahead of us.
And this is what prompted my initial comment. End users don't care how good your software is - they care whtehr their informaiton is leaked or not.

Designing this sort of secure software is akin to building the Maginot line - it may work as designed but will not fulfill the purpose.
Huh! I'd have thought a start-up would work from an apartment or something to save costs.

And forgive my ignorance, but isn't 10 people a lot for a start-up? Isn't 100k a year rather a lot? And when you get investments, is that what part of the money goes toward, your own salary?
Fansnap has been at it for 2.5 years so they have more maps & providers than us, but we like to think our UI is a little better :). Also, most of the long tail providers they include also post tickets on Stubhub and Ticketsnow so we include them indirectly.

We'll be introducing maps every Monday from now on:

http://ticketstumbler.com/new-stuff/category/map-mondays/
The answer to that is "What is Mathematics?" by Courant and Robbins.
American Express using collaborative filtering to lower credit lines
I'm talking about them, not necessarily the typical startup:

http://www.fansnap.com/leadership
No need for the "you should study that" remark.

In fact PCs were bought as minicomputer replacements after their performance caught up, and that is the classic disruption pattern. The difficulty of netbooks penetrating the corporate environment isn't just performance, it's also a combination of the desktop form and the support that corporations want.

Soon, netbook performance will become comparable with laptops, but that alone won't make Microsoft's empire fall. In time it is likely that the same commoditization happens to the corporate market. It just won't be with netbooks, and not as fast as Eric Raymond would like.
Gmail isn't perfect. The only two real reasons why I use Gmail and not Outlook are:

- I can access it online from anywhere without configuring much.

- Because of the good spam filter, saves me from installing Mail Washer or other anti spam tools.

Couple of things I don't like about Gmail:

- Still doesn't have folders (labels are OK but they don't have any kind of hierarchy).

- I miss the drag&drop functionality from Outlook (e.g. mark a couple of emails and drop them into some folder or the trashcan, much faster than having to select the label from that pulldown).

- It's missing desktop alerts. Sometimes they are annoying, but with some configuring they are pretty useful at work. I have that Firefox extension to check incoming emails @ Gmail, but I can't configure it to show only certain emails.

Of course Outlook isn't perfect either, but I don't think it has been "destroyed" yet.
Windows has had 64 bit versions available since XP. Just like Linux. Hell, I'm running vista 64bit on my desktop (well, I can dual boot into it) right now.
If you're really interested in learning a lot about mathematics, I would definitely recomment the Princeton Companion to Mathematics (see below for URL). It came out very recently, and while i'm only about 100 pages in (of well over 1000), it's down to earth writing and low prerequisites are very appealing to me.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691118809?ie=UTF8&tag=...

or if you'd rather not use my affiliate link:

http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timoth...
EBS does deltas, but there are a few caveats. The most important being that you need to be using EC2. For many, $72/mo plus bandwidth might be a bit much for what they're doing if it can work on a 512MB Xen instance for under $40 with a few hundred gigs of transfer included.

Beyond that, drive snapshots aren't the easiest things to do. I know that Right Scale tells their customers to freeze the drive so that no changes can occur until the backup is complete. With S3 performance around 20MBytes/sec, to backup 1GB would take around a minute. That's not bad and only doing deltas it's unlikely you're going to have a huge amount to backup at any given time, but it isn't exactly good either. With file-level backup, you can do a mysqldump and then just back up that file. Eh, maybe I'm just preferring the devil I know in this situation.

It's a little more complex to set up (doing file-level backups), but if you're going the volume route, you need to make sure you don't leave the drive in an inconsistent state.

All that said, EBS is awesome. If it fits what you're looking for, then go for it!
I'm already running 64 bit Windows and while it was terrible when it came out, it's basically well supported now. What do you mean, 64 bit as standard?
I agree - great tips on iwillteachyoutoberich.com. For more in depth and targeted tips check out his other project scroogestrategy.com too.
If you're using Safari, you can just hit Command-Option-A, look for the googlevideo link (or .flv/.mp4 file) and double-click to download.
140649691 The most powerfull, wealthiest add to win
You are trying to run a marathon without training.

Here's what I would do:

1) Look at a signals and system course online.

2) Look at the course's prerequisites.

3) Do you understand concepts in the pre-req? If not, goto 2)

4) Once you get to a course you understand reasonably, move on to the next course you don't understand. Do this (unwind the stack) until you reach the signals and systems course.

A reasonable chunk of an electrical engineer's education is required to get to the point you wish to reach, so there is a lot of effort involved.

edit: that said, this link might also be helpful: http://www.redcedar.com/learndsp.htm
I have learned the Persian alphabet in the last year or so. At first I avoided learning it because it seemed like a daunting task.

But once I figured out that I'd be better off knowing the alphabet, it wasn't hard at all. There are only a very limited number of symbols to learn after all.

After that it's just practice, practice, practice.

Which leads me to highly recommend using a SRS (Spaced Repetition System); think automated flash cards with an algorithm built to optimize the time you spend reviewing. Anki is the open-source multi-platform and web SRS software I use and recommend.

http://ichi2.net/anki/
Teenage genius takes 23 A-levels in a single year
I'm convinced that startups that receive very large amounts of "not strictly required" funding are far more likely to fail than startups that are slightly underfunded.
Very interesting article. I think this is where the VC business is heading. Startups will either bootstrap or take very little capital and then receive larger investments when they have matured to profitability.
Yeah, I guess I could make the price outrageous like theirs (whatever it took to justify it) and go from there. If it got popular (or if requests piled up with "I'd use that if only it were cheaper") I could come up with a better solution.
There are so many great books written that I would suggest buying a book and enjoying.

Among my favorite authors are:

Keith Devlin (check out his latest: The Unfinished Game about the invention of probability.)

William Dunham (check out: Journey through Genius: a survey of historically important math proofs that does not require too much background)

The book that got me to return to mathematics after college was the Mathematical Experience by Reuben Hersh and Phillip J. Davis.

There's also been some fantastic NOVA documentaries (my own favorites are "The Proof" about Andrew Wiles and the "Trillion Dollar Bet" about the mathematics of finance.)

I find Wikipedia is fantastic for reference material but not so great for study material. Better for self-study is MIT online. (Here's a link to a series of excellent video lectures on linear algebra: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-06Spring-2005/Video...)

I have my own blog about mathematics (http://fermatslasttheorem.blogspot.com) which attempts to provide complete and clear proofs for famous results in mathematics. Some months, I get as many as 20K unique visitors so you might find it helpful.

There are also fantastic links on Hacker News on mathematics. I've found some great ones about Bayes' Theorem, for example. (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Bayes+Theorem+site%...)
Network security software, reverse engineering, and (a bit earlier in my career) streaming video/multicast.

I got a 7x performance improvement in a performance-critical component at Arbor Networks within a couple weeks of starting there just by profiling, finding malloc/free at the top of the profile, and switching to an arena allocator. I have other malloc stories, but that's the simplest. I've learned to fear malloc.
The table length "#" operator returns the index of the largest integer key continuously reachable from the index at 1. (i.e. there can be no integer keys with nil values in between). This, as well as a handful of standard library operators, rely on the index-from-1 convention.

That does not always hold true. The '#' operator is weird. Here is an example:

Lua 5.1.3 Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> x = {1,2,3}
> x[1] = nil

ipairs() stops at the first nil, as expected:

> for i,v in ipairs(x) do print(i,v) end

However #x is inaccurate now:

> print(#x)
3

Luckily, we can always see all the values with pairs():

> for k,v in pairs(x) do print(k,v) end
2 2
3 3

And watch what happens when we add a single non-integer key to the array:

> x.a = 10
> print(#x)
1
>

Looking at http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/ltable.c.html#luaH_getn I think the problem lies in the assumption in luaH_getn that if the table doesn't have an 'hash' part then it also doesn't have any gaps.

/*
** Try to find a boundary in table `t'. A `boundary' is an integer index
** such that t[i] is non-nil and t[i+1] is nil (and 0 if t[1] is nil).
*/
int luaH_getn (Table *t) {
unsigned int j = t->sizearray;
if (j > 0 && ttisnil(&t->array[j - 1])) {
/* there is a boundary in the array part: (binary) search for it */
unsigned int i = 0;
while (j - i > 1) {
unsigned int m = (i+j)/2;
if (ttisnil(&t->array[m - 1])) j = m;
else i = m;
}
return i;
}
/* else must find a boundary in hash part */
else if (t->node == dummynode) /* hash part is empty? */
return j; /* that is easy... */
else return unbound_search(t, j);
}
cperciva is the resident crypto person here. =)
My first stop of the day is non-tech: Glen Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer turned political pundit.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
Could someone enlighten me on why VCs put millions in a few companies with concepts they deem a multi-billion dollar industry and yet come up empty most of the time?

Why not invest smaller dollar amounts in more companies - they'll have more chances for hitting more home-runs.

With our current economy and the cost it takes to build a start-up I should hope VCs change their ways!
good coding music: http://www.dancefloormayhem.com/; http://noiseporn.com
The Pragmatic Programmer Quick Reference Guide
The last shdh event I actually made it to (23) was pretty fun. For some reason, such environments tend to be very conducive to my productivity.

To this event, I'm bringing some zentu*nix stickers, free for anyone who has defenestrated Windows (or who at the very least has a dual-boot). :)
It's true about there being a ton of talent in Austin. The problem is that most of it works for the really big hitters like Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, AMD, Dell, etc. Most of the entrepreneurial focus seems to be centered around well-paid consulting work.

When Google opened their soon to be closed downtown office, they had a mixer and invited alot the Austin tech community. I went expecting to find a serious startup crowd, but it was largely the same big names you see everywhere in Austin. It was rather disappointing.

I hope that Capital Factory is successful if for no other reason than to give some of us the opportunity to escape our corporate jobs and do something really interesting for a change.
This doesn't work. You can't just copy the files and expect them to be in a sane or consistent state.

You either need to a) use InnoDB hotbackup or b) use a slave, stop the slave, run the backup, and restart the slave to catch up.

At delicious we used B, plus a hot spare master, plus many slaves.

Additionally, every time a user modified his account, it would go on the queue for individual backup; the account itself (and alone) would be snapped to a file (perl Storable, iirc.) Which only got generated when the account changed, so we weren't re-dumping users that were inactive. A little bit of history allowed us to respond to things like "oh my god all my bookmarks are gone" and various other issues (which were usually due to API-based idiocy of some sort or another.)
His talk certainly is passionate, but there's not much evidence here. In particular, I see no attempt to grapple with how unnatural cities are. Humans evolved in small hunter-gatherer bands on the African savannah. Therefore dense urban cores are needed to create a sense of place? Non sequitur.
I have an insane amount of bookmarks. I can still back them up in a few seconds via wget.

Of course photos and whatnot are much harder.
I don't use either site, but there is little question that you (ticketstumbler) have a better UI and overall look.

Your attitude is right, it's far from over, but you are off to a great start!
> I just don’t think they have the key to startup success.

Nobody said that YC had "the key".

They said that YC involvement (1) correlates with startup success and (2) recognized as such.

YC is too small a factor in the market to say that lack of YC involvement has any meaning and no one has said that it does.
that sounds like a blog
> I got up to geometry in high school (i.e., I know cosines in triangles but have no idea what a cosine wave is, how it works, and/or how they're related if at all).

Hmm... I guess these could work...

http://www.coolmath.com/algebra/index.html

http://www.purplemath.com

If you want video tutorials, this might work:

http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy

For a calculus resource based on analogies and stories, try this:

http://www.karlscalculus.org/

Trying to create an implementation of a lossy compression is a bit over-the-top, especially when you are trying to learn it through Wikipedia. Try a Google search and filter through those results. Maybe there will be a less technical, but still informative explanation. Also try Youtube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sckLJpjH5p8

(Haven't watched it all the way through)

Going from basic Trigonometry all the way to Discrete Fourier Transforms isn't exactly a 'overnight-hack' type of thing. Grokking everything will take a lot of time, if you do attempt it. Please don't hurt yourself.
The whole foods list is quite interesting, but I'm getting alarm bells from the contradiction between:

"Healthiest Way of eating as long as it is a whole, natural, nutrient-rich food"

And the "reduced fat cheese, skimmed milk".

Cheese is not "natural" food and skimmed milk is certainly not "whole".
I really didn't like the blog post, it looked more like wishful thinking than reasoning with facts. Microsoft is clearly going nowhere in this recession, I would say it is one of the companies along with Google that will come out stronger than it was. Microsoft's competitors are already feeling the recession pinch and might find it very hard to survive. Also with cash-reserves of Microsoft, I surely think they will be buying valuable companies for cheap. Again have to wait and see, no one has seen the future including Eric Raymond.

Also just read his previous blog post about Israeli offensive in Gaza. Eric Raymond surely has some extreme views on the conflict, saying things like Islamofascists and other things. I was a fan of Eric Raymond but i surely didn't know he was a right-wing nut.
I am of course talking about something much harder. With big file sizes, the likelihood that users will regularly (much less in an automated way) download their own backups decreases.

I broke this out...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458921
Microsoft's Windows 7 Blog: Our Next Engineering Milestone
Got it, thanks to you both. Wow, it's obvious on the first visit. That map is pretty nifty from them though. I can see why you're headed in that direction.
Yeah, it's true. I was a little simplistic. I usually use A, but I'm not dealing with the amount of data that delicious is.
If DVD backups mailed every month could be cheap enough to actually subscribe to, it would be an awesome add-on to some of these SaaS sites (including the one I'm building).
From what I can tell, Fansnap has spent a lot of time working on the business end of things creating real relationships with secondary market ticketing companies.

From watching Ticketstumbler succeed admirably, they've spent their time on tech side and are running with affiliate relationships. Lower margins, I'm assuming.
Nothing really bad, just unpleasant states of mind. Brief lapses of panic, paranoya, etc. This is why meditation isn't recommended for people with history of mental illnesses.
Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle
This isn't the best place for this discussion, but the short version is that you can't take the amount of capital VC's are dealing with and invest it in tiny ways because you don't have the ability to manage all of those investments. Also, VC's don't need to win most of the time to generate great returns for themselves and investors.
Ma.gnolia: To.ast?
Ya but at least with StreamSend you get your own private IP address to use, and not a shared IP.
For once Eric gets it wrong (IMHO). "The death of Windows has been greatly exagerated".

He basically assumes that Microsoft will do $0 in revenue soon, which is so unrealistic that it destroys the whole argument.

What's funny of course is that if you believed in his argument that a recession will hurt OS companies that charge too much for an OS, then Apple should be in even worse shape than Microsoft. Not quite.

Eric fell in the tempting fallacy of drawing two points on a chart and assuming that you can draw a line to extrapolate. Linux is free and growing, Microsoft charges money and is losing ground. Therefore eventually Microsoft will die. Now try to add Apple to that chart and see how well extrpolation works...
Introduction to Parallel Computing: Part 1
Just went back to the article to have a look, totally missed the footnotes the first time. Personally, in-page hyperlinks satisfy me.
This same "new reality" can also be applied to Twitter vs Yammer.