skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And this counterfactual example has what, exactly, to do with real life?
Can you guess the name of this Apple supplier?
>> If they are all zero before flipping then 0.11111... isn't there.

This helps. Since the first set has infinitely many zeros on the left, flipping around the decimal means there would have to be infinitely many zeros somewhere on the right. 0.1111.... however has infinitely many ones before these supposed infinitely many zeroes, which cannot be for the same reason that a finite string with one cannot be after infinitely many zeroes at the right of a decimal.

This means that the first set does not have 111111...

So if I keep incrementing binary numbers, I'll never reach 11111... within the limits of enumerability.

I need to think and read more. The above seems to imply that the simple infinity is not in the enumerable set. But I may be confused again.

>> You've stated that the n^th number has 0 in the n^th place. That means 0.11111... is not the n^th number for any n.

I have been confused about this. Somehow 0.11111... is not in the set, in spite of the mathematical induction proof I supply. I need to think more. The proof must be incomplete (or imprecise as you say).
This sounds profound, but is wrong on so many levels. In a sense everything about mathematics is arbitrary, but there's a consistency and structure that makes such a statement unhelpful and misleading.

Consider.

If you're content with the counting numbers then we can construct the negative numbers. These have the specific property that when added to the positive number of the same size we get zero,

But most people are happy with the integers, so move on. We're reasonably happy with addition, but what is multiplication? If you think of it as repeated addition you're screwed when you want to multiply by 2 1/2. It's better to think of it as a scaling. Multiplying by 2 means that you scale things up to be twice as big. Thus 1 goes to 2, 2 goes to 4, and 5 goes to 10. Also, -1 goes to -2, -6 goes to -12, and so on.

So what do we mean when we scale by -1? We look at the sequence of scaling by 4, then by 3, then by 2, and so on, each time asking where the number 1 gets sent.

Scale by 4 and 1 -> 4
Scale by 3 and 1 -> 3
Scale by 2 and 1 -> 2
Scale by 1 and 1 -> 1
Scale by 0 and 1 -> 0

Following this progression we see that it's natural in some sense to say that scaling by -1 means that 1goes to -1. And indeed, 2 goes to -2, and 73 goes to -73.

Scaling by -1 sends something to the same distance on the other side of zero.

So where does -1 get sent under a scaling of -1? It gets sent the same distance the other side of zero. -1 gets sent to 1.

Therefore it makes sense to say that -1 scaled by -1 is 1.

(-1) * (-1) = 1

Wecan use this to ask about the square root of -1. What geometric operation can we perform on the number line, such that doing it twice is the same as multiplying by -1?

An answer is to rotate anti-clockwise by 90 degrees. Another answer is to rotate clockwise by 90 degrees.

Pursue this, and you start to construct the Agrand diagram, and the complex numbers.
And, a few hours later, I queued up at the same Apple store and walked out of the store 20 minutes later with my iPhone 5. I suppose you can never know in advance, but this time they still had hundreds in stock at noon.
Cf, some previous discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4523380
The first time I ever heard about the well was when I browsed it with gopher.

That was 5 or so years ago. They seem to have turned the gopher servers of in '09. So PDF is properly the best they can do.
The worst start-up ever (The best way to blow $1,000,000.).
I am a former programmer of this company and the attitude that allowed for this to happen is the same that drives many other start-ups. It is toxic, awful, and uncalled for.
isn't frozen in usual unix terminology any SIGSTOPped process?
While I agree with you that KDE is awesome, I feel as though you may be passing up a really great distro that IMO meets all your needs. OpenSuse is developed solely on KDE's latests and greatest. They extensively test on KDE making it the most stable KDE experience possible. I highly recommend you give them a shot. I feel that OpenSuse gets all the things right that Canonical gets wrong.

Ultimately your point about fonts in the linux world is true, however there is a reason for that. The reason is that most fonts are not free.
Right, I think "you have macros" is a definite answer to any and all syntax-related issues :)
But their fee comes from the employer, not the developer. That sets up a regime where they do not represent the developer, but their client, the employer.

Contrast that to a Hollywood or major-league sports agent: they represent a client for years across many many possible engagements. They work to get the best possible deal for their client. And they get paid handsomely for that: 10-15% gross of an actor/athlete's earnings.
That's the mass taste. I am not trying to discuss with the mainstream taste, just made the tool.
For those interested in getting a personalized movie ranking I created another tool "Movie Galaxy" http://arek-paterek.com/movie-galaxy/
And yet we have continuously greater numbers of software patents filed every year. So obviously innovation is happening -- right? After all, Bubble sort was good, but Bubble sort on a web enabled device with rounded corners is defiantly the cat's meow.
Well, he made only 11 real movies (Killer's Kiss doesn't count IMO), and all of them are listed. So, I think the parent was implying that he's probably the only director with 100% "hit ratio".
I wonder what a better metric would be to account for this contemporary bias?
At first I thought this was an awful list, but then I filtered it by date up to 1995 and I felt that the list made a lot more sense. Is this an issue that it takes 15 to 20 years to get settle on what is truly worthy? Or is it an issue with the dawning of the Internet Age?

There are plenty of films made after 1995 that I think are highly deserving. But in 20 years from now, will we look and say Return of the King out ranks Star Wars? Or The Avengers is better than 12 Angry Men? (The Avengers was decent popcorn fun, but what was the plot?)
Why is 0.999... one? It's an ambiguous decimal expansion.

1 - 0.999... = 0.000... Some part of you might think that there "must" be a 1 at the end of all those zeros. The problem is that there is no end at which to put a 1.

And you'd end up with tiny holes everywhere if they're not equal. 1 = 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 0.333... + 0.333... + 0.333... = 0.999... oops. Where did our missing one go this time? Surely it's clear from this that we have nothing but 9s in that expansion and that three 3s can never be larger than 9, even if you repeat them over and over forever? And there can't be any funny business going on at the end, because infinite lists do not have ends by definition.

At some point you go through the rules and just accept that this is how they play out and that using other rules just leads to weirdness (AKA "nonstandard analysis").
A product launch is news, especially when it's something as absurdly popular as the iPhone. People lining up for days in advance, that kind of thing, is newsworthy, regardless of how you feel about the news cycle and advertising.
Fine. Make patents a side effect of the FDA's requirements rather than infecting every other industry with it as well.
I'd go so far as to say that phones compete with watches and physical clocks. I personally can't stand to wear a watch, and I almost always have an electronic device on my person. I don't even own a traditional clock anymore.
I was very disappointed by whalesong. Instead of a source->source translator like parenscript, whalesong generates a bytecode level VM inside the browser. Doing so provides support for any racket language, but it does so at the cost of immense quantities of "pre-obfuscated" JavaScript.

The genesis of whalesong was to support "World"[1] games on the web, and to that end it seems successful. I don't think it makes a good general purpose tool. Perhaps someone wants to port parenscript to scheme?

[1 | http://world.cs.brown.edu/]
I wonder if it would make sense to stop publishing a physical paper?

Subsidize an ipad3 for long term subscribers?
> We could easily have a distributed web search engine to replace google.

"Easily?" Distributing things is hard. The claims of those who don't know this are to be treated with skepticism.

> It could run on everyones machine, and it'd be awesome.

Until we get something like "Trusted Computing," there will be a few people who will run servers that "cheat" somehow. This has been true for distributed systems over the Internet for over 3 decades now. (SMTP, Gnutella, Bittorrent, just to name a few.)
Facebook Turns Off Facial Recognition In The EU
hah That was fun to write. Didn't think it'd actually get posted here, but hey, what's life without a little whimsy?
This is weird. There are a couple of reasons they would want to bully the United States: to dissuade us from supporting an Israeli attack on Iran, and to force us to ease up on our campaign of economic sanctions. Realistically, though, they can't bully the U.S. They aren't capable of posing much of a threat, and they aren't popular with the American people or with the international community, so the U.S. is free to retaliate (proportionately or disproportionately) against serious aggression. Meanwhile, they have ample reason to play nice. They want to minimize international support for potential Israeli aggression, and they don't want to make it any easier for the U.S. to get other nations on board with the economic sanctions. Why would they want to 1) piss off the U.S. and 2) paint themselves as a rogue aggressor in the eyes of the international community?
I would think ISPs would love to host folk's social network servers. Just think of all the social data they'd have at their disposal for whatever they could use it for.
The HN article title says "5000 best movies" instead of "Fairly decent jumble of 5000 best movies with many of the best TV shows thrown in".

The HN title and site title are both mildly misleading.

I understand that your sources (RT & IMDB) may have these mixed and it will take some time figure out what makes sense.
You should check out buddycloud.org. I'm not in any way connected to it, but I saw it mentioned on HN a couple months back. It is based on XMPP for the backend, but the documentation indicates a webclient, as well as mobile clients. Their documentation seems quite extensive and it was part of Google Summer of Code this past summer.

I'd be interested in hearing other people's take unless it involves "XMPP is too complicated."
Best movies(and TV shows) by decade (top 100 in parens):

< 1910: 4 (0)
1911-1920: 7 (0)
1921-1930: 48 (0)
1931-1940: 123 (4)
1941-1950: 168 (8)
1951-1960: 243 (10)
1961-1970: 297 (5)
1971-1980: 362 (13)
1981-1990: 583 (7)
1991-2000: 1030 (21)
2001-2010: 1937 (27)
2011-Now: 198 (5)
>> You can't say that with precision, because it is infinity you are struggling with. What you can say is that for every number n there is a cube with n on it, and that every cube has exactly one number written on it.

This may be nailing it -- struggling with infinity.

When you say "every number n there is a cube with n on it", what does "every" mean. Does every number include infinity? Or should not not consider infinity to be a number? If the latter, this is probably where I went wrong.
And so the demise of civilization continues.

Mind, you could just say that's my own cultural biases talking (I was socialized in a manner you could call the "equal opposite" to Japanese manners), but even when you ask the Japanese how much they like their modes of socialization and living... they mostly don't.

Why do we continue to import customs from sufferers of depression at the level of a national illness?

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20120212rp.html

EDIT: Very seriously, I'm not trying to start a flag-waving my country is better than yours contest, but I find it continually disturbing that happy countries are, by and large, ignored or ridiculed, while unhappy countries often export their mores, customs, and rules. For example, the very appearance of "group dating" as described in the article and in this comment thread pretty much demolishes the entire concept and point of dating: to get to know one person to the point of being able to form an intimate and (semi-)permanent emotional bond.
Tapstream’s Review Bar Helps Mobile App Developers Get Feedback From The Web
Great question, and I would invite any other developers in here to reply as well.

Where to start...having open conversations with your developers is a great place to start. It turns out we love studying and talking about our field.

If you don't have ready access to developers, you can try reading through "Coders at Work" that I linked to at the bottom of my post. Another great idea is to just go to Wikipedia with any of the terms you don't know.

Codecademy or things like it might teach you a little more about a specific language, but these are general principles that are not dependent on a given programming language. This is more about software engineering as a discipline.

You might also try "The Agile Samurai" by Jonathan Rasmusson. I've never personally read it, but it's in our office and I didn't hate what I saw in the table of contents.
Maybe it's interesting technically, but what's the use of this site, if the movies are rated by retards? I mean, any ranking that puts Avengers in the first 1000 best movies is obviously deeply flawed.
Or, you know, 'tent'.
I was going to post something like this but you did a much better job of it.

In some sense, TLDR: "Imaginary number" is a misnomer that confuses people. 1+2i is also just a convenient but potentially confusing notation to those who don't know what it is a short-hand for.

Complex numbers are basically 2D vectors with a funny multiply operation ((a,b)(c,d) = (ac-bd,bc+ad)) and it just so happens that defining it this way leads to some interesting properties and convenient formalism when dealing with many problems.

EDIT: there is also a nice graphical way of interpreting what the operator does. It adds the angles of the original vectors (wrt x-axis) and multiplies their lengths. Better explained has a nice article on this: http://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-arithmetic-wit...
EQUALIZE.JS - A JQUERY PLUGIN FOR EQUALIZING THE HEIGHT OR WIDTH OF ELEMENTS
As a funny little anecdote, I know of a Mac word processor company that, as a tiny update, added a live word count feature to their product.

Sales shot up 30%.

It turns out that a number of people who write for a living need to hit hard word count limits, and were willing to pay for a product that had that feature.

The dev I know who added the feature said he spent all of 15 minutes on it.
I agree. The problem is this moves from pull to push. Instead of hosting a status update on a server and allowing others to pull from you, which can utilize lots of caching and other optimizations, you're forced to push data to all of your followers on every single update. This adds significantly more overhead.

Since the protocol is new it doesn't include any specs for handling push errors. If I push a new status and one of my followers' servers is down what do I do? Do I retry later? Do I continue to try pushing future updates? At what point do I stop trying to send updates to their missing/broken server?

If my server goes down how do I handle missed updates? Do I need to query everyone I follow? Can I fetch statues since the last one I received like Twitter? The docs say "There are a number of parameters available to limit the scope of the request" for GET /posts but don't specify the parameters.

Error handing is crucial for a decentralized network like this, especially one that pushes to other servers.
e^(pi/2)

This is is because exponentiation to an imaginary power can also be thought of as rotation. You have presumably heard e^(pii) = -1. That's because it's a half-rotation away from 1. Half of that half rotation would be i, and is sqrt(e^(pi i)), which is e^(pi/2*i), which is equivalent to (e^(pi/2))^i, and the ith root of that is obviously (e^(pi/2)).
This is pretty much the standart e-mail I've been sending:

Hi X

I'm a startup founder in Y We have a product that is finished (functionality-wise) but we are not designers at all. We used twitter bootstrap to build a good of this app, which is pretty ok for now. Thing is, we can't get to build a good welcome page. The welcome page is pretty much a login/signup page with some text and screenshots in it. (see attachment)

I would like to know if you are available and if you could provide me some quotation to build us a single welcome page containing a login and signup. You would use twitter bootstrap and the html that is already there (we could customize if required).
Tent should take a page from Jabber and create gateways which will post for you on other social networks much like Jabber had for non-Jabber IM services.

That way you could have a backup of all your social data, stored on your server if you wanted but broadcasted to the other servers.
> But don't tell me Pandora is responsible for the total security of every moron on the internet, either.

Real security needs to work, even without the education and cooperation of "every moron on the internet" or it isn't going to work. Implementing systems that don't work in the face of this is just failing, then pointing fingers.
What, exactly, is Apple to test? They're not shipping updates to 10.5, and Chrome is Google's product to test.
While I know nothing about tent, the _idea_ of running an overlay among trusted peers (family, friends) if done right++ is not much work or liability at all. It is possible to not have data being forwarded through a third party server (after all what is the idea behind STUN, TURN and similar methods? the goal is NAT traversal not forwarding traffic) so your point about snooping being an issue for _any_ decentralized network seems moot. Tent might not be the solution you'd like, but that doesn't mean the very notion of decentralized networks is bogus. The internet started as one. Then we added "too many layers of crap" because the whole thing was a hack from the beginning, duct tape and chicken wire, and for some reason users can't be trusted to use an open network responsibly. Now we have to add more layers just to get back to the original idea. It doesn't mean the original idea sucked.

++ Simply because you haven't seen anyone do it right yet (for your purposes) or you can't do it yourself does not mean it cannot be done.

Third party services will always have their place. We need them. But the idea that _social networks_ (the networks, not the stuff you choose to do over them; not everyone wants to "hack on stuff", some might just want to do simple things) must all be run by third parties (whose "business model" is snooping and trying to guess intent) is absurd.

Hopefully that is not what you are advocating.
This really doesn't seem to solve the main problem that most current ranking systems have - it doesn't compensate for recency. Newer critically-acclaimed movies like The Dark Knight rank higher than much older but just as well-liked movies like Citizen Kane.
Do you guys have historical data for equity options?
How did you get this data? Did you screenscrape IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes?

If so, is there a legal issue with reusing this data? I actually don't know what the answer is, I'm curious if there is or not.
In my last job I wrote several automated backup systems for MySQL servers, and they continue to run as part of a SaaS hosting service. Holy cow, I'm an expert! Thanks for reminding me! ;)

Of course, one never feels like an expert, because part of being an expert is that one knows the names of some real experts, who are better than you. In this case, some real experts in MySQL backup work at Percona. Hire them. Alternatively, buy the O'Reilly book High Performance MySQL, which is partly the work of Percona's founders and has chapters about backups.

(If you are the foremost expert in a field, of course, you probably don't feel like an expert either, because you're at the frontier, where everything is confused and all the other experts are most lost than you. I don't understand this field! The references are irrelevant and confused and make no sense! I don't know how to make progress and I can't find anyone else who does! I must be really stupid!)
How do we handle errors?

(I posted this as a reply to someone else but it deserves its own comment.)

The docs don't include any specs for handling push errors. If I push a new status and one of my followers' servers is down what do I do? Do I retry later? Do I continue to try pushing future updates? At what point do I stop trying to send updates to their missing/broken server?

If my server goes down how do I handle missed updates? Do I need to query everyone I follow? Can I fetch statues since the last one I received like Twitter? The docs say "There are a number of parameters available to limit the scope of the request" for GET /posts but don't specify what the parameters are.

Error handing is crucial for a decentralized network like this, especially one that pushes to other servers. Without a method for handling servers that go down and other errors it will absolutely not work.
Why Mark Zuckerberg Is Absolutely Right About HTML5
I would master* Node.js as much as possible, and along with Twitter Bootstrap start developing "real-time RAD (Rapid Application Development) for Web".

I'm learning Node.js, and I'm excited, but my time is extremely limited...so for the time being my RAD is limited to PHP.

*If to "master" was even possible
Mountain out of mole-hill: the Apple haters get some fuel. Apple is a big company, one designer stole an icon (with or without realizing it was trademarked), and nobody caught it. Big deal. Not.

If Apple refuses to acknowledge its error, and refuses to fix (however it's required to), then it'll be a big f'ing deal, for anyone other than the anti-Apple zealots.
I take your point, but as an Arthur/RISC-OS user for many years now using Ubuntu linux on a recycled x86 PC I get

- audio/video encoding, editing and playback and format conversion.

- a lot more pixels (1920x1080x24bit vs 640x512x8bit - a 19 times ratio, plus accelerated desktop).

- I could browse the web on the A3000 (12 MHz/2Mb) but it was slooooow, just keeping up with the 14k4 modems.

And, yes, I do mostly the same things, LibreOffice and LaTeX instead of !Impress and !Sigma. Vi or Gedit instead of !Zap.

I can see me using a low power Arm based desktop when the SoCs become powerful enough to run GIMP and Audacity.
wc(1) to the rescue! :)
Agreed. I mean, who else but apple could have come up with rounded corners? Brilliant!
This is what I see in case it differs from you: http://imgur.com/jhjSV Im on Windows 7 using Chrome.

Personally I feel as though the gray box explaining what the page is, is taking up most of the page. Any way to make it smaller? This way I feel as though it would remove any scroll bars on the page and prominently show your "WordCount.is is a useful web utility by Joel Runyon"

Other then that, page looks clean and is simple to use.
Pre-order iPhone...
I genuinely don't get it. Can someone please explain why the hell anyone would queue up like this?

Food, water, medicine, supplies - yes.

Shiny telephone - no.
Tonido Sync (http://www.tonido.com/app_sync_home.html) provides the same private, local sync like AeroFS. the Tonido solution is very mature and it also has mobile apps for all the popular mobile OSes (iOS,Android, Blackberry and Windows 7.5)
The World Wide Web didn't exist back then...