skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I started Uni, my language elective was Japanese. I changed majors, and the school I eventually transferred to didn't offer it, but wowza, non-Latin based alphabets are tough!

If you have a basic understanding of the Latin-based sentence structures, you can use that to understand a foreign language: brush up on sentence diagramming. Seriously. Subject, Verb, Object, Direct Object, Indirect Object, Prepositional Phrases, etc. Learning the culturally-accepted syntax of a language is really valuable. Once you start to recognize and understand certain words, you'll be able to see how they fit into the larger sentence structure overall.
I've been thinking about tracking down an original Microsoft Natural keyboard, before they screwed up all the function keys. I can't stand how my wireless keyboard stops working every time my iPhone rings.
10 people is still a pretty small company, all things told. You can draw the line for "startup" wherever you like, but a million dollars goes pretty fast for most businesses.
Gmail's facilities for building contact lists are still abominably poor. I switch to the old version every time I need to build a list to, for example, contact all students in a class I teach.
this is the best techcrunch article posted in ages. (we've had a negative trend, just giving credit where it is due, even if it is just a guest article.)
However, as a longtime user of Lua, I would still greatly appreciate a default set of "batteries-included" libraries as an option, like what you'll find in Python, so that it could/would be that much faster to write simple applications in pure Lua, without needing to deal with compiling/bridging to C/C++ libraries...
I believe that book requires more background than the OP suggests he has.
Yawn.

Yet another "I don't like suburbs and/or people who do like them therefore suburbs are evil and/or said people are cretins." screed.

If a puritan is someone who is mad because someone, somewhere is having fun, what is the word for such people?

Note that he's pining for a past that (1) didn't really exist and (2) to the extent that it existed, people (mostly) abandoned it for suburbia.

There are still some instances and he's welcome to live in one. He's even welcome to build more, with his money. (If he's right, folks will flock to them. If he's wrong, well, shouldn't he take the hit?) The folks in suburbia won't mind.

And that's what makes them better than he is. They don't get pushed out of shape when someone has different preferences.
Start with the first links on this page

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=119...

and then work your through the later links.
with color coded output ;-)
Read this page to learn more about cosines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_circle
It seems like a well-designed program, but why are they targeting only 3 selections? Seems like a lot of work for just 3.
Shameless self-promotion, but I write about math in an intuitive way here: http://betterexplained.com

I think the key is realizing that math is about manipulating a mental model of an idea. The wrong model can make certain tasks impossible -- for example, thinking that numbers must be 1-dimensional makes complex numbers a paradox. But when you see that they could represent items in 2 dimensions, you see how complex numbers represent a rotation. And from that, numbers can have arbitrary dimensions (vectors), and so on.

Whenever I study a new concept, I try to find the mental model behind it. For a book recommendation, I'm going through Visual Complex Analysis (http://www.usfca.edu/vca/) and find it extremely well written, with an intuitive approach.
This is great advice. I did EE and I don't think it was until about the 2nd or 3rd year that we got a treatment of systems and signals that was sufficient to understand DCT. You seem to be focusing on the cosine part but it turns out that the cosine part of the DCT is probably the easiest part to understand. It probably won't make much sense until 1) you understand something about discrete signals and 2) you understand why transforms from one domain to another are particularly useful for solving certain problems.

I recommend 'Linear Systems and Signals' by B.P. Lathi. It was the book I used. It doesn't cover DCT explicitly, but it does have a friendly, Knuth-like treatment of the history of the mathematics. It makes for a nice break between sections of heavily technical material. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the book on the topic of complex numbers and why they are useful. It should give you an idea what the rest (and the general subject) is like:

"If we want to travel from City a to City b (both in Country X), the shortest route is through Country Y, although the journey begins and ends in Country X. We may, if we desire, perform this journey by an alternate route that lies exclusively in X, but this alternate route is longer. In mathematics, we have a simliar situation with real numbers (Country X) and complex numbers (Country Y). All real-world problems must start with real numbers, and all the final results must also be in real numbers. But the derivation of results is considerable simplified by using complex numbers as an intermediary. It is also possible to solve all real-world problems by an alternate method, using real numbers exclusively, but this would increase the work needlessly."
> Tom in Australia floating between cities.

In the ocean? Or on a zeppelin?
in the rails 2.2 release notes, it did mention 1.9 compatibility.
I think we were all just used to seeing even numbers as stable release versions. I don't think there's anything wrong with having odd number production release versions.

Also, 1.9 wasn't really an experimental place for Matz, it was initially YARV then Matz conceded it to be the next official ruby branch. None of the future VMs will/have been done by Matz. He actually joked about that during RubyConf 2007... the reason ruby VMs became fast was because Matz was taken out of the picture.
yeah the numbers don't really say that you guys have achieved the top spot...instead the numbers say that fansnap has failed.

12,241 users for 10 million "people" ends up being $816 per person.
I heard years ago that Ruby 1.9 was going to have tail call optimization, but I can't find it anywhere in the news file. Does anyone know if this made it in or not?
I'm in this exact situation and I am not sure if I can get the right person to answer the phone as effectively as I could.

I'm not dying to answer the phone - but until I have a good feel for what the "frequently asked questions" are, I can't pass that responsibility onto anyone else.
Magic school bus.
I still think it's too early to tell. I'm sure they still have a lot of the $10 million left.
Usually when people state that a food is X% fat, they are talking about its nutritional information values, and your link does in fact confirm that about 50% of the calories derived from breast milk come from fat:

"Human milk contains 0.8% to 0.9% protein, 3% to 5% fat, 6.9% to 7.2% carbohydrates"

Excluding alcohol, essentially 100% of the calories of any food come from those three macronutrients-- 4Kcal per gram of protein or carbohydrate and 9Kcal per gram of fat.

9(3 to 5)
/
(9(3 to 5)+4((.8 to .9) + (6.9 to 7.2)))
=
45% to 59%

Assuming the data in the wiki you linked to is correct, 45% to 59% of breast milk is fat, in nutritionist lingo.
Now I remember where I saw this attitude before.

"I still do look down, reflexively, upon any "profession" connected to real estate. I can honestly say I'd never marry a woman who worked in RE, and only a woman from a real estate family if she had been purified through an elite college, a filter I otherwise don't care about in the slightest."
I'm deeply impressed and I give him a lot of credit for pulling that off, but does anyone ever know what happens to these kids? I feel like there's a story every year or two about someone who pulls off some kind of bizarrely difficult academic feat like this (massive numbers of A's, graduating early, etc.), but then they're never heard from again and don't seem to show up later in either the high echelons of academia or industry.
How do you manage your ad inventory?
I have some apps on social networks, and have to juggle between multiple networks. I've used Socialmedia, Tatto Media, AdSense, AdBrite and so on. These companies are supposed to solve the problem of putting the highest paying ads in your ad slots, but in reality the payout from the companies can be VASTLY different.

How do you deal with this? Just bite the bullet and try every ad network out there, checking the stats every day to see which one seems to be the current best? I've seen some services that try to do this for you, but the ones I tried did not support the ad networks that I've personally found to be the best.

I went from $5 CPM to 0.5$ CPM on a network today, so I'm left hoping that I would have had some automatic system to notice the change and immediately switch networks. I guess I could build my own screen scraping solution to check the eCPM every hour and switch, but is there some existing good solution out there?
I use Thunderbird with Gmail. I still get the first two, and the last three too.
I had an idea about that very thing... what if there were yc-like firms in many of the notable cities/towns, and VCs funded them to fund the startups, thus outsourcing their management?
Backing up is like testing, everyone knows that they should do it, but very few people actually do. That said, I'm sorry to hear about their troubles. They are good people genuinely trying their best.
SBCL is not as "high-level", especially when you are aiming for speed. Yossi already wrote about this http://www.yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html , so there is no need for me to do it:

If you use Lisp’s static annotation
system, your code becomes uglier than
Java, and much less safe (I don’t think
Lisp does static checking of parameter
types, it just goes ahead and passes you
an object and lets you think it’s an integer).

Additionally, Lua only has "one data structure type" - that's also "higher-level" than what you have to do in Lisp, deciding among singly-linked lists, arrays, hash tables, binary trees, lexical trees, etc.

So while SBCL has its place, there's something about Lua you have to admire, don't you think?
yeah they have a nice chunk, since all the money is pretty recent:

Series A, 1/08 General Catalyst Partners - $5M

Series A, 11/08 General Catalyst Partners - $5.5M
I guess you ignore the last 20,000 years of humanity. Yes, maybe it wasn't cities where people lived; but it was small towns, villages, or caves. Humans have lived bunched up close together in groups for millenia. This isolation that the suburbs inflicts on us is just un-natural.

There was a great story in Discovery channel, on how immigrants from Germany, that moved in the USA mid-west, suffered heavily from depression.
People were used living in towns and villages, close to family, friends, and support.
Now, a lot of these german families, bought a lot of land in the middle of rural midwest, where everything was miles (and hours) of walk to the next house or town. People felt isolated, and women suffered the most.

In europe, houses are usually in hills, grouped together, with a town/village center, and the farmed land is outside the town.
I know one. She teaches children to play violin. Perhaps their happiness does not lie in the high echelons of academia or industry. Perhaps if climbing ladders does not pose a challenge, then getting to the top of the tallest is no sort of goal.
It could work, but I'd worry about fees and the build up of bureaucracy.
Actually, it's easy: time. Just put in the hours.

If you want specific books, you need to say what your current level is, which you kind of explained, but much more importantly, what exactly you want to do. While most math is useful, different fields have different bodies of math I'd learn first: machine learning vs stats vs algorithmic optimization vs 3d graphics vs fluid dynamics vs financial mathematics, etc. I'll try to watch this post and put up book recommendations if you are specific.

Also, the last thing to note is unlike most other subjects, math is cumulative. Calculus is really easy, and almost thing new, if you understand trigonometry and algebra. Seriously, only like 10% new material. The trick is math rewards really deeply understanding subjects and penalizes you for not doing so. Learning half the material but deeply understanding it is, IMO, more valuable than the reverse.
Yet another "I don't like suburbs [...]" screed.

Speaking of suburbs, or exurbs, have you seen the latest ones? This one is 51 miles northeast of San Jose: http://www.mountainhouse.net/town/technology.php

Mountain House is truly ready to be the town of tomorrow with its comprehensive technology plan. All homes and businesses will be wired with:

· A cutting-edge, expandable fiber-optic
broadband telecommunications infrastructure
· Virtually unlimited high-speed internet
access to online and electronic information
· Video conferencing capabilities in both
commercial and residential structures and the
ability to order goods and services online
· A state-of-the-art, community-wide intranet,
MyMountainHouse.com, that allows residents
special local connectivity, including the
ability to access children's schools or in-town
businesses without picking up the phone
What if you say you offer toll-free tech support to paid plan users?
1) That past did really exist.

There was towns/cities, and rural land (with houses miles apart). Suburbia tried to be a hybrid, something between country living and city living, but failed at doing both miserably.

There are other social factors. At least, here in CA, there is a huge adversity against building more density, (the NIMBY effect).
A vocal group of people are opposed to tall building/building anything close to their backyard, creating a lack of density, and artificially limiting the free market and real town-higher-density formation, at a reasonable price.
Open Table files for IPO.
I think it's been implemented in 1.9 for a long time, but it's not enabled by default. You have to set a #define to configure it, however I don't know why it's not enabled by default. Maybe someone in the "know" can tell us why.
This change in what version numbers mean definitely isn't known by the entire Ruby community. The O'Reilly books' statements about 1.9 versions being development versions and the fact that 1.9 has been in development until today has made this a little confusing.
Syntax checking for PHP in Emacs
Fansnap should acquire Ticketstumbler (This assumes Fansnap has not spent $10.5 million on coke and hookers).
In europe, houses are usually in hills, grouped together, with a town/village center, and the farmed land is outside the town.

And there are/were no farmers? U.S. urban population share, 1800-2000: http://www.demographia.com/db-usrur1800.htm

1800 6.1%
1850 15.3%
1900 39.7%
1950 59.0%
2000 79.0%

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib3/eib3.htm

Early 20th century agriculture was labor intensive, and it took place on a large number of small, diversified farms in rural areas where more than half of the U.S. population lived. These farms employed close to half of the U.S. workforce
The title of this post (not the related article) is misleading. While I wish Outlook would go down in flames, it's alive and well in just about every corporation in America. Gmail hasn't destroyed it. I'm not even sure that Gmail is all that great of a product, storage limits aside. It could be a heck of a lot better with some UI love.
Downloading Is a Packrat's Dream
according to the latest u.s. news ranking

http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/mat/s...

Princeton is first and Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley are tied for second. Harvard is always mentioned as one of the top Math depts. more so than MIT in my experience.
> 1) That past did really exist.

I'm referring to the delusions that he has about the "grand doings" of folks in town squares. (I do like the town squares that have an artillery piece set up by the local VFW chapter but I don't think that that's what he has in mind.)

> Suburbia tried to be a hybrid, something between country living and city living, but failed at doing both miserably.

Failed according to whom? Not the folks who pick suburbia over towns/cities and rural, which are still available for those who want to live in them.

> At least, here in CA, there is a huge adversity against building more density, (the NIMBY effect).

It's not NIMBY to point out that high density is often a disaster.

Besides - CA is a big and mostly empty state. There are plenty of places where you can build high density that is no where near someone's back yard.

And, it's fair to point out that CA also has govt restrictions that significantly reduce rural living.
Only 2.5 TB and he's a hoarder?

I am ashamed.
And betterexplained is one of the best sites on the web, too.
Actually, a lot of the 'angel boutiques' are funded this way. This is how the VCs get some of their dealflow from trusted sources.
An army of lawyers, plus a brilliant rock-star entrepreneur usually described as "the smartest man in the room" who can pull it off, based on smarts and bravado.
You can always get a higher rate with a dedicated chip, and they are pretty cheap these days. The max you can do the pwm trick is a function of the max clock rate, divide down pwm clock, and the number of bits you want for resolution. Take a look here:

http://www.designingwithsensors.com/applications/all_article...
We're not for sale.
How did you know what I was planning to buy with my share of the VC?
Are those the same as angel groups? How effective are those?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457100
Steam powered?
Press relations.
I disagree. I don't know how you can say that YC attracts the best startups. All these micro-funding companies are so new to the game that none of them have enough of a track record to make any difference in the real world.

Not only that, but these companies are becoming regionally specific, which means you'll go to the one in your city first before you apply somewhere else, or that's what I would do anyways.
I think PG is trying to jinx us

I certainly wouldn't have done this to everyone, but you guys are fairly indestructible.
Yup, but we're talking 10 million dollars here. Imho the term startup becomes a bit misleading when you're going at it with that kind of money. "Corporate spinoff" or something might be the better term.

I'll freely admit that I'm a bit jealous here (talking from the perspective of a self-funded startup), figures like that just make my head spin. You keep reading that VCs would rather fund 10 startups instead of one, because 8 of them fail either way. Then you read about A/B rounds in the millions...
Soul powered.
Google books could be your friend here. Sounds to me like you might benefit from a physics 101 type text, such as Halliday and Resnick. All these types of books will have a section on waves and their applications in the real world. Some, on fourier series too. Some of these books will have a preview mode on google books (though not Halliday & Resnick). Try to find the ones that do.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/195689/what-developer-blo...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/78955/what-are-the-best-p...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/188991/which-programming-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/151974/c-blogs-that-you-r...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/249044/best-non-microsoft...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380236
Whenever Tarsnap is mentioned, I have to mention Duplicity which does the same thing, but is Free Software.

I use this for my personal backups, as well as backups of our work svn (fsfs) and git repositories. I use it against S3, and have found it incredibly reliable.

As a bonus, it encrypts everything but still does incremental backups. It's a really nice piece of software, and you don't have to pay anyone to use it.
Everything is for sale. The only question is price.
Time Management HD Video by CMU CS Prof. Randy Pausch (2007)
"We're not for sale" often translates to "Our price is much higher than (we think) you will ever offer or can afford".

If the offer was e.g. $500M cash, "we're not for sale" would simply become "sale".
I enjoy ragging on Windows as much as the next guy, but this post reminded me how much of an accomplishment Windows really is. Few software projects need to deal with such a huge range of compatibility issues between hardware and software dating back nearly twenty years. Certainly no easy task.
I'd like to hear the other malloc/free stories whenever you're inclined.
Start about 7 minutes in. This professor had a presentation about time management some years back, and in 2007 was invited to lecture at University of Virginia. He is now more known for his "Last Lecture." Unrelated, but I think I saw YC.news user omarish at 22:26.

PDF: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Randy/RandyPauschTimeMana...

PP: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Randy_Time_Management_UVa...
I don't know, Tom bruises like a peach.
Ask HN: What do these startups need so much money for?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455687
For years you've been able to add "mp4" after the word "youtube" and it does a similar thing.
Not true. We both value disposable time and not having bosses more than money.

If you get acquired you almost always have to stay on for 2-5 years.
Google uses its home page and cash to try to beef up Knol
This man is a liar. And a thief.
What would you like to see in that quantum leap?
The fields are not all required, but the web page itself is certainly bad -- it's black with gray text that has so little contract to the background that I have to "Select All" just to be able to read it. They may be capable of doing great things but I am so turned off by their failure to provide a comfortably readable web page that I question whether or not they can handle the bigger issues.
s/too aggressive/completely retarded/
The problem is a tough problem. Its not MS. The goal is to prevent malicious code from tampering with a stupid user's machine.

Now what would be the ideal solution is: To open the UAC panel the user MUST type in their administrative password. After that all is fair. Sort of like what linux does to be able to configure, just need the root password.

After that don't notify of "my" security changes, just other programs making it. When it is critical then force the user to enter the admin password.

Knowing MS users though, they would say "wtf, windows is making me enter admin passwords?" and leave it to apple to make fun of that. Then you realize mac does the same thing: Need admin password? Ask for it! Need it again? Ask again!

Why can't ms just force an admin password and to make changes like that ask for the admin password with big sparkly things saying "if you enter this, the program can stick a stick up your pooper and you will be fucked, so you better trust this program or turn back now you damn idiot!"

Actually MS is being innovative by allowing things to happen, but asking for passwords or notifications only when it is deemed absolutely 100% necessary. I would say MS is more innovative than anyone else by trying such things, or they are too fucking lazy to implement root.
I'm not a very materialistic person. All my possessions can fit in to one room and I've never even owned a car. What difference does it make if it's 50 M or 500 M? I wouldn't spend it all. It would obviously be a team decision (and if a family/friend emergency came up that would change things), but my answer would be "No". This could change in the _long term_ if we want to move on to different projects.

You don't have to believe me, just know that money does not equal happiness and in my humble opinion success is the amount of life you control.
"Do we have enough soul in the tank to get furthur?"
Just to the bars. And with that we'll be back in a bit.

Songkick & Polleverywhere are in town.