skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Onion recently began parodying TED talks. This one is my favorite so far: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s .

The Onion parodies are definitely not entirely fair, but they do a good job of pointing out that a lot of TED talks are definitely more on the aspirational side of things. I've definitely seen a few TED talks where the speakers' abilities basically covered up the fact that they weren't actually saying anything. I was kind of heartened to see the onion parodies, because I had wondered if I was the only one whose bs detectors were going off.

This isn't to say you should be dismissive of TED talks out of hand, or that they're all crap, or anything. I actually think that if they didn't let a few bs-ers in it would be a sign that they weren't taking enough risks.

But it is important to keep in mind that some talks are little more than hand waving. And you definitely shouldn't automatically assume it's brilliant just because it has the TED brand behind it.
I don't really understand what's happening here. She's got orders, she seems to already have a design business and commissions, and there's talent aplenty. Let's go - get the fucking thing made and stack it into Harvey Nicols, Harrods and Fortnums.

Now if she was working her way out of a Scottish fishing village with nothing but a felt needle and a fistful of designs then yeah, let's dig deep. But she's in London, with a decent CV and access to all the support that's available there. I don't think people should be donating to fund a high-end product with customers already teed up and waiting.

I'd write a cheque to her for £5k today as an investment. Or she can go to the bank and get a loan. I'm not at all comfortable with this model of 'donations' to fund a business.

I know Kickstarter have said they aren't selling products any longer, but I felt much better about buying a Pebble way in advance of it shipping, and taking the risk that it may never arrive (a miniscule risk with pebble, I know).

Are these crowdfunding platforms simply turning into marketing vehicles? And does that risk pushing out the very projects that need crowdfunding?
And I totally agree with you, I just actually couldn't resist. I was ready to face some downvote (and I have been served…). Apologies.

However there already are some links on HN which leads to reddit style discussion, like the recent link to the "Great HN parody". I think it may be okay from time to time as long as it doesn't flood the discussion.
I'm sure they'd consider integrating a scope for a free music service. But the music that most people will be searching for is not (legally) free. And it's quite possible to support free software along with non-free music.
How Bocoup Got Its Name
I never said ignorance was an excuse. I never said "oh they were just wrong - go invest". Asking for money based on incorrect claims could be labeled idiocy, but it's not lying.

In fact - I wasn't making any comments on the gravity light thing at all. I was simply questioning a poster's odd use of the word lying. I haven't a clue how you are able to turn that bit of semantics discussion into a defense of the product, but I respectfully suggest you turn down your paranoia - you are seeing a scam where there wasn't even a request for money/favor/work.
Neat concept; though I would like to know what the price of these chairs is going to be. I see that for a donation of $2200, you get one of the chairs, and that's the lowest price tier you can get one in. Is $2k going to be the starting cost?
Has anybody noticed that the entire book is actually loaded into the page? All you have to do is remove the "hiddenhalf" ID from that div and you can see everything.
The developers clearly don't have Macs.
Can you keep pictures private on imgur?
Given its potential use in inertial navigation system of guided missiles, I would expect the state of the art in realizeable accelerometers to be classified. Can anyone shed any light on how this would compare with what is known about "weapon grade" accelerometers, even if the old ones ?
+1. Google is a C/Java shop, and App Engine doesn't have a motivated team behind it (some App Engine apps make a lot of money for Google, but the GAE folks don't provide them with adequate support, much less external customers). When I stopped working on Google projects there were large parts of what would have been in the SDK provided by random teams in Creative Lab.
Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for the iPad
The real reason math is hard to read is that it's the distillation of a thousand winding ideas and failed attempts that took hundreds of hours of thinking and hundreds of pages of scribbling, all condensed into the most concise possible three pages of unmotivated line-by-line proof with no context or explanation.

In other words, math is a language for formalizing intuition which, when finally written, unfortunately removes all traces of intuition and leaves only the end result of the thinking, not the path that it took to arrive at the critical insight.
Will examine tomorrow or laptop, but all examples are badly broken on nexus 7. Drop me an email if you want screen grabs and more feedback. Love the idea, thought.
here is the example of proper post on what tools to use and how to do marketing if you are startup. Its all about value you give to the reader..
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/ultimate-guide-startup-marketing
I'll pay for it NOW, despite it being available, as good faith to either provider that simply needs a cash injection to kick the project off.
Glad to see they're working on parts of the product that affect developers again.

Now, if they'd add sortable ticket priorities, fix the janky UI problems (like the thing where you can get stuck in the useless view where tags aren't selectable), and add other basic features like ticket up-voting and support for teams, it might become a genuinely useful tool for non-toy projects.
"Mega, go massive!" I hope this leads to more new users getting in the habit of using encryption.
No, that's not why math is painful to read. The reason math is painful to read is because it's either obvious, in which case it's not painful to read, or because it contains new ideas that you need to work hard on before you can grok them.

There is no short cut. You can't write math like a novel, you can't read math like a novel. There are ideas that are deep and difficult, and unless you actually spend time working on the material you simply won't "get it."

Time and again I have explained to people something that's comparatively simple, and easily within their grasp. I've tried different approaches, different formulations, different arcs through the material, and time and time again the person has followed every step in detail, and just not "got it." There is no enlightenment, there is no sense of what's happening. It's only after they've invested the time that they have come to a sense of what's happening, and then the light dawns. Occasionally they say things like "Why didn't you explain it like that in the first place?" Then I point out that I did, but at that stage, they weren't ready for it.

It's like following a SatNav. You get to your destination having followed the turn-by-turn instructions, and yet, in truth, you really have no idea where you are. You have traveled from one local pocket to another local pocket, with no understanding of the space through which you've been.

Math is painful to read because you're trying to follow the turn-by-turn directions, instead of taking control of your own understanding and working to gain knowledge and insight, scope and intuition.

You won't understanding it without doing the work, and complaining that it's badly written is the smallest part of the problem.
Whether or not the device works - this usage of minute is also apparently unit of radio power or backlight luminosity, if cell phone makers and reviewers are to be believed. Declaring crack-pot status based on that usage is kind of over-the-top, unless you're here to argue that cellphones don't exist and are mere crack-pot theories as well.
Okay, got it. I didn't even realize you had made a configuration mistake!
May Apple get a big one up the rear. Asshole patent-trolls keeping the software-business back.
You're right about the spectrum allocations, but given the way things are going, that might not last.

First, the spectrum allocations were originally driven by the need to deliver video signals that were compatible with analog TVs. Now that TV's are going digital, this might change the requirement for the traditional frequency split for upstream/downstream.

There is no "physical" reason why you couldn't have a 400Mhz upstream range that matches a 400Mhz downstream frequency range. There isn't anything special about coax. It's just RF in a constrained medium.
As someone said here, best charity is anonymous. Meanwhile, Brin is in the news for scooping up properties and renting them out "to the needy". I remember the press Page and Brin were getting 5 or 6 years ago for helping out a filmmaker... to the tune of 200 or 250k. Many people I know do more, and more often, without any kind of public praise.

This kind of publicity should really cost more. And if you truly care about helping people, make an anonymous donation, instead of milking it for all its worth.
It's crucial that they made fun of the PC, not PC users. (Remember, it was always "I'm a PC" in the intro.) In doing so, they clearly leveraged some stereotypes about the user base, but they avoided directly mocking the customers of either platform.

That said, I'm not sure this Microsoft campaign mocked anyone either. It didn't have any humor to it, and that's part of why it was such a lame effort. At least Apple's ads had a bit of self deprecation to them in how they depicted the Mac.
This is the antithesis to good law. Crafting laws to deal with potential problems to be used at discretion of police should be avoided at all costs. First, because it is unjust, and second, because it leads directly to either actual or perceptions of abuse of police power undermining faith in the system. These sorts of "nuisance" discretionary laws are often used against minority populations discriminately.

Prohibition was essentially a social/cultural movement that was very bad law making possession and distribution of alcohol illegal because it had the potential to lead to things that were already illegal (public drunkeness, etc).

These public smoking bans in theory are crafted because secondhand smoke (be it from tobacco or another source) has the potential to cause cancer in people standing nearby in a public park.

Of course, neither prohibition nor smoking bans in public parks were ever really about preventing minor incidents of public drunkeness or absurdly low risks of cancer from secondhand smoke. They were obviously about abusing the law in order to discourage behaviour (drinking, smoking) that were previously a cultural norm but for which no actual justification exists for ending.

Really bugs me, but I'm obviously biased by preferences for minimalism in regulation and law.
As can I. I think I have some natural aversion to having a boss.
They were similar in execution, but the joke was the anthropomorphizing of the idea of a windows pc and a mac.

The Samsung ads however directly target the users as the thing to be lampooned. Rather ad hominem, and not all that appealing of a way to sway me over marketingwise.
Yep, that was me. I strongly suspect that this may be what he is up to. It occurred to me at the time that there may be a way of doing it with files.

Ultimately I shut down the site as it got very little traction.
Android app with a Ruby on Rails backend: a three parts complete tutorial
Hi HN,
in the last months I wrote a complete tutorial that will guide through the coding of a Ruby on Rails backend with a Json API that can be consumed by an Android app.

It's divided in three parts:

Part one: the Ruby on Rails backend and the API -http://lucatironi.github.com/tutorial/2012/10/15/ruby_rails_android_app_authentication_devise_tutorial_part_one

Part two: register and login with the Android app - http://lucatironi.github.com/tutorial/2012/10/16/ruby_rails_android_app_authentication_devise_tutorial_part_two

Part three: task creation and update - http://lucatironi.github.com/tutorial/2012/12/07/ruby_rails_android_app_authentication_devise_tutorial_part_three

I covered topics such as the registration of a new user, his login and following authentication via a token, the retrieval of objects from the backend to the Android app through the Json API and many more.

I hope you can find it useful, let me know if I can improve it.
I use Ruby for light scripting on a Windows machine. RubyInstaller worked just fine and so do the irb shell and my scripts. Dropbox is a web app, so who cares about GUI toolkits? Perhaps you're right that the Python community tried harder, earlier, to support Windows and other non-UNIX platforms. But it's hard to imagine Dropbox actually selecting Python to build their web app for that reason. Maybe in their earlier days they used a hosting service that supported Python but not Ruby, Perl, etc.? Who knows...
It seems to me like the author approaches math looking for a concise & elegant programming language, but instead just finds...math.

The notion of scope as an integral part of mathematics is a particularly interesting suggestion. Mathematics is the study of abstract, quantitative truths (and falsehoods), and these truths, being universal, have universal scope (although you can constrain some truths as special cases of more general truths, but I doubt this is what the author had in mind). To consider this a problem indicates that the author is searching for a tool rather than a way of thinking.

"Math is such a cognitive overload of operators" because it succinctly describes a great deal of action. A program in a conventional language like C might take a hundred lines to describe what could be described in a handful, using some mathematical notation. If you want a programming example, just look at the average length of an APL program vs the average length of a Javascript or C program.

Math is inherently hard. So is programming. Not many people can do either very well. Even fewer can do both very well. The notations of math are meant to be flexible because math is a tool for discovering new ideas and analyzing their properties. Programs are meant to accomplish some real world task. Criticizing the language of one solely from the perspective of the other is not a useful activity.
you can learn english, everyone can. You cannot stop being a woman or being gay

That argument doesn't persuade me. Let's say you could stop being a woman, perhaps by taking hormones and having an operation. Would it suddenly be ok to have a male-only company, since obviously people are choosing to remain women?

Your second paragraph is simply arguing something I already agree with, namely the utility of everyone using English.
Does Ubuntu all you to turn this feature off?

If so, I don't have a problem with it.
For a counterpoint, see the article in this month's business week about former Seagate CEO Bill Watkins's new venture. Basically, he invested $90 million in developing new LED's that used a silicon substrate instead of a much more expensive sapphire substrate. He discusses the dangers of the Chinese stealing the idea, and comments positively on holding the patents to protect that investment from copying.
Simply saying an argument is baseless doesn't make it so.

The rest of your argument merely repeats what I already agree with, namely the utility of a lingua franca.
It's not clear why they're using public key crypto in the first place. But since the whole point of Mega is sharing files, people will definitely be sharing the decryption keys.

Do you trust that that copy of The Dark Knight Rises is really from who you think? Who cares?
How Many Times Should You Try? [Infographic]
I don't think anything, I was recalling what I heard Sussman say at a conference, which he makes clear in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SICM. Though I saw him a good 8 years after the book, so I'm sure he'd grown some new opinions.

He is of the opinion that if you can't write the algorithm, you don't understand it; forcing students to write the algorithm aids in teaching them a real understanding. He spent quite a bit of time complaining about the vagueness of mathematical notation due to its implicit assumptions for the purposes of teaching and the superiority of executable code for the task.

On a side note, the speech was aimed at both engineers and programmers and the audience was a mix of both. He did a wow demo with a circuit on the overview, calculating all the voltages and resistances on the fly from chosen starting values that made all the programmers smile really big and all the engineers jaws drop. Everyone was impressed because he flew through it, but the programmers much less so because what he did was just how a programmer thinks, albeit it very fast. He was demonstrating to the engineers the benefits of thinking like a programmer. As he is both and teaches both, he clearly connected some dots that they generally don't.
Yes. Except for okcupid. They pleaded with me via an ad of theirs (which was locally so it wasn't flagged by adblock) telling me that they rely on ads for income. They also said that I coud just pay 5 or 10$ and pay for my use for life. Which was a pretty cool thing to do :)

Ads should be quality checked by the site's owners. A crappy ad can turn away a visitor. At least I don't run the risk of that.
Hah, yes. I don't know if the comment before yours was intended to be advice to me, but I'm one of those python astrophysics people (professionally). I deal much more on the data and distributed systems side much more than the analysis side, or really... I write software and frameworks that the analysis guys (from several very large experiments) use.
What was Silicon Valley like after the bubble burst in the early 2000s?
Check out ld.so.conf or ld -rpath.
I don't think it's preposterous to note that there are people who don't speak English and wanting to include them, any more than it's preposterous to note that there are people who can't afford an education and wanting to find a way to get them one, or noting that there are people who don't like in the US but wanting to find a way to have them participate in programming.

There may not be a reasonable trade-off between utility and value, but preposterous isn't a word I accept for valuing the idea of being more inclusive.
I think for many, the problem is pacing. When you're reading text, your eyes are moving down a line at least once a second. But reading an equation takes much longer. You have to stop your eyes and ponder every piece of it. It can help to copy it down on paper.
This is funny and sad. Its funny like someone who just had their bicycle stolen is telling everyone it was an old bike anyway they are sure the thief is going to break their neck on it, and its sad because you know they are hurting inside because their bike got stolen.

In these situations folks who can't compete should just be quiet and figure out a plan. But they aren't, and often they don't. Sales folks are particularly hard pressed to say "Yup, that is a much better product than I've got to sell here." in part because their salary depends on them not saying it.

Prior to Google Fiber, I would not have seriously considered moving to Kansas City, even though my sister lives there. That goes from non-starter to 'hmmm....' which means a lot more to Kansas City than it does to Comcast. And ultimately, it is towns and cities that Comcast has to worry about, not the 'lack of demand' they profess to observe.
Very interesting story from one of the top lawyers of Myspace, Excite.
I hope never. I don't want fingerprints all over my monitor.
First: this is hardly a "guide" to quitting your day job. The only advice OP gives on actually quitting your day job is:

"Find a good partner!".

---

Does there exist freelance agents? Like somebody that helps you track down freelance contracts?

(I may be mincing words here)

If there isn't, will some of you bizdev people pretty please make something like this? I'm a hacker, I've been coding for a long time, and I fit exactly the descriptions that this person laid out in part 1, but I would have absolutely no idea how to find work even if it came banging down my door.
To me, the visa story shows just how resilient Eren has been in the face of failing external factors -- in this case, the immigration system. Udemy has a lot going for it.
Ask HN: Is Posterous "still" having engineering resources?
After the Twitter acquisition I have no clue if someone over there is still working in maintaining the product. I'm seeing a lot of bugs lately - ex: the blog search engine doesn't work anymore.
The App Engine team at Google isn't really "regular Python users".
December 21, 2012 : The end of communication?
I put the links here to be clickable:

Part one: the Ruby on Rails backend and the API - http://lucatironi.github.com/tutorial/2012/10/15/ruby_rails_...

Part two: register and login with the Android app - http://lucatironi.github.com/tutorial/2012/10/16/ruby_rails_...

Part three: task creation and update - http://lucatironi.github.com/tutorial/2012/12/07/ruby_rails_...
Do you fact check every single thing you say that you heard from someone that you believe to be a reliable source?
Time Warner provides good service in at least some places. I've gotten almost exactly advertised speed for the last ten years in Austin.
You're bringing a strawman. Obviously having an operation is slightly worse than learning english.

Regarding the utility - the final utility of male and female company is known to be better than a male only one, even if for a short period of time it drops. A utility of everyone speaking the language he pleases ends up with a situation of lack of communication, which is certainly worse than everyone speaking broken english.

What I would argue instead (and it has been on HN) is that we should allow more broken english and be less nazi about it. It's fine to restrict people who know english better to use only simple words (for example) to lower barriers of entry. It's also ok for people to use english that's not gramatically correct (like no doubt, this post).
Turn your Pocket Queue into a Physical Book
Structuring a Five Minute Pitch
I've been broke before. Not to toot my own horn, but I know what it's like.

There's a long way between "barely not broke" and "upper middle class". I am not particularly interested in struggling my whole life on the way up to wealth, but I am also not interested in living broke and trying to keep myself and my family fed.
For me, its simply really, a language is itself a program with too many users, and Guido has demonstrated good design, scale, and engineering skills in building such a program.
Thanks! I figured this is a good time with all the doom-and-gloom talk about a Series A crunch...
Speculation: maybe Python advocacy matters to him and that isn't something Google is really up for anymore.
Hungarian notation for formulas would be terrible. It would make it that much harder to memorize, as well as increase the difficulty of seeing patterns between various formulas.

The real problem here is trying to force programming notation into mathematics notation. Programming variables emphasize what you're working with while mathematics variables emphasize ideas and relationships.
Again, people are missing this: Google apps 'free' & even regular gmail have never been truly free. Anything you put in there is sold off to the ad partners. It has never been a charity.
50-100 Mbps is pretty widely available; where are the apps for that?