skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, what the heck. Here's how I think about this, which is heavily influenced by working on some problems related to lattices (from the geometry of numbers).

How could you generalize the cross product to higher dimension? What the cross product does is that it takes two linearly independent 3-dim vectors and gives you some kind of canonical vector orthogonal to both of them.

Can you find a reasonably canonical operation that, given two linearly independent d-dim vectors gives you some kind of canonical vector orthogonal to both of them? The answer is basically no.

However, you can find a reasonable operation that, given d-1 linearly independent d-dim vectors a(1) ... a(d-1), gives you a canonical vector v orthogonal to all of them. This vector should be the unique solution of a system of linear equations aj * v = 0, z * v = 1.

One way to resolve such a system is using Cramer's rule: each coordinate of v is a determinant of the matrix A of the system with one column replaced by the right-hand side, divided by the determinant of A.
There are a number of reasons for not liking this division: (1) it is impractical if you prefer to work with coefficient in a ring (such as the integers) instead of a field; (2) the cross product is defined without any divisions; (3) the determinant of A depends on your choice of z, but the determinants in the numerators do not depend on the choice of z. So we just forget about the division, which is the same as choosing z such that det(A) = 1.

That gives you a higher-dimensional generalization of the cross product. Okay, so now how long is v going to be?

Well, for that you have to understand that the volume of the parallelepiped (skewed box) spanned by linearly independent vectors is equal to the determinant of the matrix that contains those vectors as rows or columns (or the square-root of the matrix multiplied with its transpose if you don't have a full-dimensional set). There are a number of ways to see this; one of them is that the parallelepiped is obtained via a linear transformation of the unit cube by that matrix, and linear transformations scale volume by the (absolute value of) the determinant.

So the determinant of A is the height of z over the hyperplane spanned by a(1) ... a(d-1) times the (d-1)-dimensional volume of the parallelepiped spanned by them. This means that the height of z is the inverse of that volume (becaues we chose z so that det(A) = 1). But then since z * v = 1, the length of v must be equal to that volume, so that the volume and its inverse cancel.

Now go back to the case d=3 and compute the size of the parallelepiped (aka parallelogram) spanned by your two starting vectors. Voila, you get exactly the formula for the length of the cross product. Compute the square-root of the determinant that you get when you multiple the matrix containing the two vectors as rows with its transpose. Voila, you get exactly the same formula again :)

(In fact, if you look at how the components of the cross product in d=3 are computed, you'll find the 2x2 subdeterminants of that 2x3 matrix - and that fits perfectly with what I wrote above about using Cramer's rule.)
I think that only proves my point more: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-10/apple-the-ot...
Ember Handlebars Helpers, Bound and Unbound
I guess the best ad campaigns are the obvious ones, but I tried using Bing and was not really all that happy...
I switched to DDG which basically searches all engines and actually gives me a lot more useful results than googling/binging does anyways. They're also pretty privacy happy so thats a big win for me.

Now if I could only convince people to ditch gmail...
Dick move by Microsoft taking advantage of a dick move by Google. This is major news if you weren't already aware that giant corporations are giant dicks.
Social Media Share Analytics - online service
Thanks for the suggestion mate. Really appreciate it. :) I might open up registration very soon.
Lawsuits aren't always about winning. Sometimes they're about bullying and showing dominance. Sometimes they're about stalling a competing product while you finish your own. In the case of a big company or troll going after a small company, drawn out legal battles are used to bleed the company dry until they settle or go bankrupt.
How to Create the Perfect Home Page
I'm just going to handle this one point:
"Nowadays every time a human trader tries to beat the market by predicting short terms swings in prices, there is a computer on the other side of his internet connection that is relying on much more information and even models of the human's own personality and biases to trade against him. This means that unless the human has inside information that is not accessible to the computer, (and I'm sure those who operate these computers try to feed them or make them infer the greatest amount of direct or indirect insider knowledge as possible ) it will tend to be impossible to beat the market."

This isn't accurate.
Computational trading uses models and algorithms. Even if the computer has all the information necessary, sometimes the models themselves have flaws. We're not at the point yet where the computers are making these perfect, predictive models. The humans who make them will make incorrect assumptions. We saw this issue big time in 2007, and we'll see it again.
People don't like what's unfamiliar and a lot of parens are unfamiliar. That's mostly OK with me; people need to evaluate what they think is worth their time. But typically this evaluation manifests as a gripe about syntax. Syntax does matter but not nearly as much as we like to talk about it!

Myself, I only picked up Clojure a couple of weeks ago, give or take. I don't use it at work so this is in my spare time (which seems ever more shrinking).

Parens aren't a big deal, and it's kind of crazy we spend this much time talking about them instead of something more significant. (Hell, maybe people just enjoy trolling.) Omit all indentation in Java or C++ and you'll be doing the bracket-counting that you assume Lispers spend their time doing.
What's This Entrepreneurship?
I think it needs more functionality. The problem with competing with Craigslist is that everyone is on Craigslist. When I need to sell something (even thought I despise craigslist) I still go there because I know ill get a response. Find a way to appeal to the people who despise craigslist.
I have been using Titanium for about a year. My past painful experience tells me to never ever use Titanium again. It is buggy. Q & A support sucks big time unless you pay for it. For any advanced project, you will absolutely need to develop custom IOS modules. It will save you so much time and headache to just use objective-C. (note: for simple projects, it might work for you)
First time I tried to get a consulting gig, it was a group of college or just-out-of-college kids trying to sell what we today call Incognito mode.

IIRC I mentioned a price of $5000, and the eyes nearly bugged out of one guy's head. Clear sticker shock. They wanted to spend about $500.

As the podcast is saying now, it was a very very good thing that I did not end up doing anything for them. People who want cheap are to be avoided.

To date I have yet to successfully get a contract gig, but I have succeeded tremendously in not getting bad clients, and that's something good.
Thanks for a great suggestion! I'll definitely adjust the button sizes. :)
RE: Trust Score -- Am I missing something?! The trust score would not fix the problem of people gaming HN by organizing to vote on your friends submissions. If there is indeed a group of people that are organizing their votes then this would most likely benefit them rather than deter them.

For example -- if a group of people start to vote on a "new start up" blog post of something that the group wants to push to the top.. you are only increasing their trust score and pushing the casual users out.
Pharmaceuticals are also the classic case for an existing massive public and charity funded research and development network for absolutely vital medicine, that the industry is not willing to do because the existing model is completely and utterly broken from a public health perspective.
Cool. Strange they show an 'enlarged photo' of it. Also strange to say 'Alien' every time they say 'planet'. What else could it be - a planet right here on Earth?
It's not hate. If I ran Apple, I'd be doing the same thing. But JOURNALISTS are not supposed to carry water for business--let alone a multi-billion dollar corporation that could more than afford to get these messages out another way. What is Apple announcing at these events? New products they are selling. That's "news" under only the saddest of definitions.*

There are some great books written about this, namely Daniel Boorstin's The Image
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_event
The iPhone 5 can really take a fall
No sooner had people got their hands on the iPhone 5 did they gleefully chuck it to the ground to see how well it could take a drop.
What? Voting rings are a well known problem for HN.
The "frozen" terminology is amusing to me since I would normally say that processes in tight loops are "burning CPU".
True, but the article makes the point that the causality doesn't go only one way.
I am surprised by the upvotes.

I would say that cheating is sleazy even if it isn't at the top level of sleazy. A four-person upvoting ring might not seem as sleazy as a thousand socket puppets and twenty Turkers but, like the gp says, the first is a step towards the second.

The best that can be said is that there should be a way for more-effort to be translated into somewhat more publicity.

If an reddit-or-HN-like-site had a system of "minor leagues" where smaller groups got together, decided their favorite posts and then sent them to a larger group, those who put in more effort might wind-up with more results without the sleaze factor. Of course, then the larger would have to rate the value of each smaller group, keeping things somewhat honest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol
Is possibly just thermodynamics.
Because it's not a protocol, it's just a spec. If you want to develop developer interest, give them something to work on. The web was so successful because it provided developers with very specific things that they could work on. Browsers focused on HTML, web servers focused on HTTP.

I find that all of the open social initiatives are either too broad or too specific. OStatus is entirely too broad, from their FAQ:

> First, rather than being a stand-alone spec it builds upon several existing (and evolving) open web standards including: PubSubHubbub, Webfinger, ActivityStreams and Salmon.

So if I'm a developer I can't just learn OStatus, I have to learn 4 other specs as well. Diaspora has the opposite problem, it's too specific. Their recommendation for contributions is to fork their rails app. Developers don't want to fork working apps and fix bugs; they want to write their own from scratch.
> This set now includes all possible bit strings of infinite length since the way these are iteratively generated includes all possibilities.

That's not correct -- in fact, it contains no infinite bit strings at all (to prove this to yourself, ask at what position the first infinite string appears).
I disagree that the market can't grow faster than the economy. Derivative markets for example.
isn't it common sense to let the owner open up his own product?

When I order large things (Televisions, Furniture) it's a luxury to have people come into my home, open the product, and take the packaging away. That's common sense, too.
SeedBoxer - Distribution content system for your Seed Box
Kindle Nation Daily: http://kindlenationdaily.com/kindle-nation-daily-free-and-ba...

100 Zeroes: http://hundredzeros.com/
Also, they're spending close to half of what Microsoft is spending, but they have a fraction of the products, and they don't advertise to nearly as many audiences.
The "Lifecycle of a post" section on the homepage is a pretty straightforward description of how it works. But I would also be interested in comparisons not only to Diaspora, but also to Statusnet.
It's mainly because of the data and open graphs yes. :) Facebook really provides a viral way of exposing my app to other potential users. The app is initially designed to evolve around Facebook but during the process, I decided to step away from that.
I'm curious, what do you mean by "extended surprise expectation inversion"? Google didn't turn up much.
I could not agree more. If the op isn't comfortable airing the laundry here, then join a resistant force and do it there (GitHub).

While it wouldn't help the community, it would help the quality of content to hackers if we open sourced something like a user script to override HN's algorithm and simply blanket out this entire consortium.

An explicit, and specific blacklist for these jokers along with their snake oil websites and ideas. Oh? You're offended by your being listed on The Blacklist? Earn our trust back so we could pay a small bit of mind to your vaporeware or opinion like we used to, when we called it vaporeware and a bad opinion.

I apologize for the rant, but at least i'm offering an idea to put the brakes on the gradual degradation of this website.
Yes, this is mainly the point. :)
"Developers: It's time to start writing apps for Tent and adding Tent support to existing projects based on the current specification. "

It's time for you to show me why I should invest my time in writing apps for your platform/protocol.
Search engines and social networks are very different things. Build a better Google, and people will gradually switch. That's how Google got started. Build a better Facebook, and nobody cares because their friends aren't signed up.
Take away the financial incentive: high fees.

Good luck with that.

The only way to stop this troll problem is to stop these patents from being issued. Nip it in the bud. There will always be someone willing to pay for an exclusive license to the patent (i.e. buy junk patents) with the sole intent of using it to sue startups. Sad but true.

Even if the junk patent was filed for and obtained by a person who was intending to build a product or see that products get built using the technology, what we all know can happen is the product never gets developed, the patent is never practiced, and it gets sold or traded for something or acquired through bankruptcy or some other means. And... eventually... it can wind up in the hands of a troll.

Having these junk patents "floating around out there" (or maybe we should say lurking in the depths, like dormant but functional submarines ready to take out any ships who have set off on a journey to build products and made it far enough... it puts every startup at risk.

The essence of a patent is a government-granted right to sue. That is really all it is for the grantee. Nothing more and nothing less. The often cited language from the US Constituion only relates to the creation of a patent office and the purpose behind it, not what the patent office grants you. The USPTO does not give you a free ticket to a monopoly (modern US patents are not "letters patent") nor does it even ensure a successful business. You have to accomplish that on your own. Being able to sue infringers or having rights to sue as a bargaining chip in negotiation _might_ help. But it won't ensure your success. (Unless your "business" is pure patent trolling.)

Ideally (as the Constitution suggests) the patent is intended to spur innovation and (we would assume) protect a growing business of sharing those innovations (e.g. as products) with others, but that doesn't always happen. Businesses fail for a variety of reasons. But a patent, no matter how poor in quality, remains a right to sue, as long as the maintenance fees are paid. Thus even a long forgotten junk patent with no associated product or innovations is still a "live" right to sue, a potential threat, laying dormant until a. the owner gets bitter enough to adopt an extortionist mindset (e.g. look at what the co-founder of Microsoft, one of the wealthiest men in the world tried a number of years ago- no one is immune from this mindset) or b. the patent falls into the hands of a natural born extortionist, e.g. someone who actively looks to buy junk patents in order to sue people for a windfall. The patent troll.
Perhaps he should have applied for one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Shannara#Sword_and...
If they have any use for a command-line utility to manage the server, it should be named 'pitch'.
Not really, it's just a case of measuring correlations of voting habits. Plus new accounts with no comment history submitting stories is a spammer red flag anyway.
Thanks mate! I did everything my self. I don't usually do this kind of design so for this project, I went all in with skeuomorphism and this is the result of that experiment. :)
What problem is this solving? I know users of social media who are unhappy with what they're using. But I've never heard my mom or any other Facebook user for that matter say: "You know what I want? A decentralized social network where I can own my content!"

For this to get traction, it'll need at least one server with a strong user base.
Getting Slower And Slower: How Slow Can You Go?
Twitter devs aren't flocking to it because its userbase is quite small. It's hard to make a profit off a small userbase.
Original story is here: http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2012/09/20/microsoft-tells-s...
The market will, indeed, tend to allocate scarce resources (like the time of skilled engineers) onto the projects which get the highest return from utilizing those scarce resources.

(I'm not saying this to nosetweak: despite this being one of the most important ideas of the last several hundred years -- a reproducible technique for ameliorating scarcity, holy cow -- it's either buried under the mechanics of demand/supply curves or presented as a political statement alongside others which sound like "scarcity: kinda groovy, particularly when you can steal scarce stuff.")
Up in Arms
What Happens When You Merge Search Into Payments?
This has the potential to replace Facebook. And it might do just that with a couple of endorsements.
or 0.008983291.. Are there countably infinite solutions or otherwise? See infinity discussion few days ago at HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4526049

PS: Just curious, i am not a mathematician.
If only AT&T could get lte outside of my cities airport I'd agree.

In addition, Apple doesn't release 8 products a year so their announcements are more notable in that regard.
Add the mythical man month to the list. SO many non-technical folks fall victim to the idea that by putting more people on a job you can get it done faster, when in reality as we all know, efficiency drops sharply after a point. It takes a woman 9 months to carry a pregnancy, 9 women can't do same the job in one month, and the same is true for solving any complex problem.
Steam Workshop is coming to Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux soon
newly made and patented Screwitall-B

I assume this is the new trade name for a variation on Viagra.
Help, I’m the first data scientist at my company
As a user of the WeLL from the 1990's, I'm glad to hear that the community that owns its own words will now own its own destiny.
Thanks for your suggestion mate! I'll definitely try to fix the font rendering on Windows.
It's a shame that PC can't render the same way as mac. It's so much more pleasing to look at the design on a mac. :)
It seems every comment you've made here in the past few days has been about Nokia's new device. Astroturfing or just a fan?
There's something ironic about one of the oldest and biggest BBS's only describing its acquisition via PDFs.
Survey: patterns of coworking space closure
They don't even charge until the funding round is over, actually.
I just want to see what's happening. In the case of nginx, I'd like to be notified when SPDY is mainlined.
There isn't much more you can do with the key names really. The issue with them using a static key for encrypting the local password is another thing...
There are too many sarcastic comments in this thread. Seriously. There are 10 comments which are essentially the same. I hate to use the cliche comparison to Reddit, but it's hard not to.
Decentralizing things like this is never ever going to work. In terms of running it... my mom/sister/dad/cousin are not going to host this themselves. They might depend on me to do it, but even I'm not going to run a decentralized social network myself. There's too much liability involved. Not to mention, it's a pain in the ass.

I want to hack and work on my own ideas. That's why I trust my mail hosting to Google. Sure, they read all my emails and analyze me for marketing. That's a small price to pay though. I get a rad web client, Apple Mail + iPhone support, and never need to worry about my email server. Anyone remember qmailrocks.org? I used to sit for hours messing with and playing with qMail back in the day. I've done it. I've hosteed mail servers for friends and family. What a pain in the fucking ass!

Same for hosting. I love configuring infrastructure. I taught myself HAProxy, load balancing, nginx, and clustering years ago when people were still using mod_python. I built a FreeBSD box for fun with old parts an an old SSD the other weekend. I have quite a few linodes running right now. But it's also a pain in the ass. Because of that, I also enjoy pushing my personal site to Heroku and not worrying about it ever again. git push, boom done.

A lot of people take things like Facebook for granted. We all bitch and moan about all kinds of issues it has or features it lacks, but it's a gargantuous network that virtually everyone that I know or care to talk to is on it. My family and friends back home in LA where I grew up, my new friends in Sweden that I met while abroad recently. It's got a handy mobile app (that was luckily redeveloped recently) and best of all it's 100% free.

This decentralized stuff is nonsense. There's too many layers of crap. Even if there was a one-click-deploy social network for people where all they needed to do was rent a server somewhere... someone is still running that server and you need to worry about them snooping your data or whatever else the neckbeards are worried about.

Remember Diaspora? Hah.
I build websites , computer software and mobile apps

too.... do what?

My top tip would be to stop talking about building web sites or mobile apps.

Instead talk about what those web sites and mobile apps are doing for the businesses you built them for.

When you have that mom and pop operation who are stressed out about meeting their mortgage payments you need to sell them something that will reduce their stress.

You're 100% correct they're not looking to "drop a chunk of change on any kind of bespoke software".

They might be looking for something that's going to regularly remind their existing customers of the great service they had last time, with almost no effort on their part, bringing old customers back into the store so they can focus on new sales. How much did that run of paper leaflets cost them to print and deliver? How many of them do they do a year? How much time and money would they save by trying an electronic newsletter / customer reminder service?

People don't want software. They want solutions to their problems. Sell those.

(This does involve doing lots of "talking to and understanding customers". This is not writing software. However - if you want to have a business writing software you, or somebody else, needs to do it.)