skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is possible! Negative temperatures are perfectly well-defined (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature). In fact, they are higher than positive temperatures. There is a discontinuity in the traditional temperature system at 0, and the highest possible temperature is 0-, i.e., zero approached from the left. The lowest temperature (the traditional "absolute zero") is 0+.

Perhaps a more sensible system is one that uses \beta = -1/kT to measure temperature, where k is Boltzmann's constant. This temperature scale runs from -infinity to +infinity, with no discontinuities.

-2147483648 is still probably a bug, though. :-)
you have a long way to go.
Do you dispute the figures?
This is rough going but worth the effort. I've taught this material, and I still learned a few things.

N.B. The author, Terry Tao, is a mathematician at UCLA, and won both a Fields Medal and the MacArthur "genius" grant in 2006. He went to the International Mathematics Olympiad when he was 10 years old. He specializes in number theory, harmonic analysis, combinatorics, and making people like me feel stupid.
I wonder if anyone here has used the bitrock stack to install rails on a linux machine..it comes prepackaged with ImageMagick
I'm getting my forecast data from http://www.weather.gov/xml/#nonSOAP (You can read about that in my site's about (http://forecaster.ws/about.html) page). The current observations are a little more complex- you have to find the closest observation station to that zip code and look it up by the four-digit station code. Then you can look it up like: http://www.weather.gov/data/current_obs/KFTY.xml
Weird. It comes straight from the National Weather Service, so it must be something strange with their data. Some sanity checking would be advisable, though.
Dude, you have a kid!
How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time, Thanks To Internet
Yes agree completely. I've long been in favour of bringing back the apprenticeship system for professionals (in conjunction with tertiary education) - well at least for engineering.

In Australia, we used to have this - as an engineering cadet, you worked for a company while going to uni as well. Not only can you directly apply what you learn at work, but there is also a motivational factor for learning (seeing as you have a practical context for the theory).

A personal anecdote - I remember learning about generators and power transformers and thinking what the hell do these things even look like? It wasn't until I graduated that I actually saw them in action. I still feel that if I was actually working on them then, I'd certainly have had more incentive / motivation to learn. As it was, I had to go back and re-learn everything on the job. I've spoken to many other engineers and graduates since, and most have agreed and had similar experiences.

Universities were traditionally a feeder system for research and academia (and learning for the sake of learning), but these days it has become a prerequisite for industry. Clearly there is some misalignment between the needs of industry and academia.
have any good math blog recommendations?
nyt, economist, the daily show
33 Steps to Moving (your startup) Abroad [Checklist]
While it might be nice to get YCombinator funding, angel investors, Venture Capital, etc, that route may not be in the cards for all.

Alternatively, you can devote part-time to contracting, the rest working on your startup, while leveraging the cost of living advantages of some interesting foreign lands.

By no means do I advise this route to all (indeed, if you get into YC, go for it!) -- but it might possibly be a Plan B for your startup, if you so choose.
1> Early adopters come in

2> Because they are early adopters, they tend to know about lots of cool things

3> The site becomes popular

4> Late adopters join

5> Site gets diluted, irritating

6> Early adopters move on

7> Site is a large, popular wasteland

I'd point to Metafilter as a site with unusual longevity due to a closed subscription process. They recently covered the Hexayurt Project, however, and I was not impressed - a bunch of braying jackals who hadn't RTFA screaming their ignorance in public. So even Mefi is on the decline, apparently, at least in the comments. The front page is still pretty decent.

But that, really, is the key: you need to stop adding posters when the site is cool and hip, to draw out the period in which the site is providing early-adopter content.

Moderation systems won't do it: they get swamped by bad moderators over time, witness slashdot's meta-moderation corrective.

Good luck.
I think valleywag would do better - with more in depth articles (or atleast a read more... link)

I think this is a little too long tail for me, its a blog post about a blog post... :/

is it just me?,.rb
In ancient greece, voting was mandatory. If everyone on reddit were FORCED to vote, I wager that the quality of stories would be vastly improved. I believe that reddit is currently being run by a small minority of the users.
I think he already knew that?
http://web20.originalsignal.com/
-aggregates everything like a newspaper
I remember when I was younger there was a segment on the disney channel called "Great minds think for themselves", hosted by the genie from Aladdin. That segment always struck a chord with me. This article seems to echo that.
That's a pretty interesting article, but I found it nearly impossible to read. Every paragraph there's a link on an (apparently random) phrase. When there's a link to something like '"real" job', I expect a link to his former company, or a blog post describing is old job. What I don't expect is an ad. Boo.
Heh. AppJet is perfect for building & hosting things like this. I couldn't resist whipping up an AppJet app for it:

http://weather.appjet.net/

You can check out the source at http://source.weather.appjet.net/. It's about 75 lines of code. Feel free to clone/modify it.
But then you'd have to get to that network from your network. You'd need some kind of inter-network protocol for that to work. And then you'd have to worry about errors - you'd need another kind of protocol to control the transmission.

Frankly, whole thing sounds bunk.

Hogwash!

Balderdash!

Poppycock!

Twaddle!

nailer shakes fist
bbc news, the guardian
That was one of my primary gripes with my engineering education; a degree in a pragmatic field should have some relation to what is going on in the field currently. I can certainly appreciate theory and abstraction, but was completely shocked upon entering practice that most of what I learned was inapplicable and impractical.
Steadily employed for many years:

http://www.russellbeattie.com/Russell_Beattie_resume.html

...and he has a kid and can't make car payments after being unemployed since September 2006?
But, its got electrolytes !! Its got what you need !
Ssshhh.. you aren't supposed to share that.
Fair enough. Yes shrink wrap is not "in vogue" so the particular issues it has are often ignored on the internets ;)
I love it. The app is designed like a perfect iphone app, but when rendered on the iphone, the huge orange text caused it to render everything small. Other than that, it's perfect; easy to use, immediate information that I want!
The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science
I think outside of Java, and C#, there is a fair amount of IDE hate. So you tend to not see IDEs in that rich sense you are thinking about (the exception is smalltalk, which is an IDE and VM all rolled into one ball). Some would say language like haskell are so brief, there is nothing an IDE could possible do to help it.
If that is wrong (cheating) - then baby, I don't ever want to be be right !

code as data wins again ! (but with great power, comes great responsibility).
i don't know if I would call 20 jobs in 13 years steady...but yea
not really, it is like trying to realize there are some capable companies out there that could have some big advantages over you and trying to find solutions on how you will compete with them if they decide to do the same thing, instead of just being optimistic that it will never happen
I don't see how you can be hostile toward an institution that exists to advance education

More accurately: exists with the intent to advance education. And this is where your argument falls apart.
I find it highly amusing he's comparing highly exspensive hardware [iphone] to software that many people make in their spare time.
no you just have to be good at math.

zinnnggg!
you know i'm a complete noob with linux and i actually found it much easier to get everything up and running in linux than xp.

package management is pretty great for that stuff, and the support is vastly superior.

this is coming from a diehard windows user. i was midway through installing ruby/rails/mysql when i found out that instant rails 2.0 just came out. i submitted the link here, played with it for about 2 mins and went right back to linux haha.
The problem isn't people who are actively trying to break the site, the problem is people who think they are making valuable contributions but aren't. It's really easy to ban someone who is being malicious. It's much harder to ban someone who is well-intentioned but useless.
Dean Allen takes the piss out of usability people like Jakob Nielsen
You would have to define what anti-intellectualism means first. And the USA compared to what?

Most people in the world live in cultures that have an uneasy or hostile relationship with their educated classes -- namely, traditional and authoritarian cultures.

I think it would be fair to say that Americans don't have a sort of automatic, institutional relationship with their elites. Let me put it this way. If Canadians heard that all of their scientists said that X was bad and we should stop it, they'd nod their collective heads and get about to implementing the changes. The scientists are considered to be on the side of our general interest and enlightenment. This is the way it goes in most Western democracies.

In the USA, there's no such automatic acceptance. The urbanized half of the country is similar to the other Western democracies, but there's another half that has no such allegiance. They look to their churches for such leadership, and in their estimation, urban elites have caused nothing but trouble.
So if I just buy the mortarboard, I don't need all that fancy book learnin'...
Being hostile to the college system is not the same thing as opposition to book learnin' in general. I always liked books -- I just don't like paying thousands of dollars to people who give me crappy books and make me listen to them talk for hours and hours a day. I suppose good college is not for suckers -- but when I say "college is for suckers" I mean most college is for suckers.
> Are social news sites destined to devolve? ... How does one keep social news sites from sliding down that slope?

With moderators/editors who are responsible for the quality of content?

It seems that a social news site only stays relevant as long as the people in charge are interested in maintaining it. As it is, reddit's problem is that they put "everyone" in charge, and, as it gained popularity, "everyone" was therefore free to change their mind about what content is acceptable.

To use a successful example besides Slashdot/mefi, look at the n-sider forums (discussion community focused around Nintendo products). Although membership is free and content is provided by the community, the quality of the site has remained generally high for the 6-7 years I've been visiting it. Why? Simply because the moderators are quick to warn (and ban) members that don't contribute interesting discussion.

Basically, idealized sites such as reddit misunderstand where democracy exists regarding the internet--since the ability to found competing communities is cheap and unrestricted, it shouldn't be reddit's responsibility to give everyone a voice.
Nah, they repossessed him months ago...
A Sign Of The Times
Australia Joins China In Censoring The Internet
I take it you're ATL-based as well?
It's good to see another Rails related project still kicking alive. Hopefully this one will last longer than most Rails open source projects.
While there are papers about the problem of page rank, there is no paper describing the Page Rank.
The author doesn't really seem to get what Linux does:

My guess is that a poorly encapsulated, communal gloop of organisms lost out to closely guarded species for the same reason that the Linux community didn't come up with the iPhone: Encapsulation serves a purpose.

Since when did Linus and friends come up with hardware? Does he mean the "community of people who rely on Linux as the core of their product offering?" -- would he then include Apple in the BSD community?

By his own criterion, Apple would be the perfect shop for OS innovation -- but I guess they just weren't feeling innovative that day and switched to FreeBSD instead. By doing so, they got the benefit of evolution -- not as snazzy as innovation, but something open source has excelled at for its long life.
Now we just need some way to watch the watchers...
Most software is not innovative, though -- and innovative software has rarely been incentivized correctly. (How much is Xerox making for inventing the Macintosh?)

The author is one of many criticizing Open Source for failing to kick UNIX out of the white room, the sort of thing that, in its scope, would definitely be one to millions.
Well, what if, by law, you had to ship the source when you ship the software? That's as much as any Open Source license demands.

Software As A Service remains completely protected -- would it be so bad if people who wanted to cash in had to offer services instead of products?
Hardly: the US exports more than $1 trillion USD of goods per year. The fact that it imports more than that doesn't mean that "no one wants US exports", or that the US "has essentially lost its production capability". Your argument would be more persuasive if you cut out the hyperbole.
WhatsOpen shows you what nearby stores are open
A paid online service that will make up convincing lies for you.
Alibi Network is a full service agency providing alibis and excused absences...
Hoosgot: LazyWeb For The Twitter Generation
Something new for the New Year: SearchYC.com
Well, at least I can understand what Jakob Nielsen writes.
In all seriousness, math is just a tool. Its a powerful, complicated tool, no doubt, but even novices can learn to use it effectively.

Think of it as a magic chisel. If all you need it for is to pry a lid off of something, you can learn to do that fairly quickly. Those who choose to put in the time to learn to use it effectively can create beautiful sculptures.

There has been some discussion here before about "genius" and it has been (correctly IMHO) judged to be overrated in comparison to diligence. Decide if you need math to solve the kinds of problems you wish to solve. If so, put in the diligence to learn the math you need. It will serve you well, genius or not.
nycs.bigheadlabs.com

But this is nice, too.
nice, i can remember that name
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=82177
Not everyone uses Firefox...
True indeed, but (1) the link is still germane and (2) it's an OpenSearch plugin, so it's not actually Firefox-specific.
I don't think that's such a great idea.

There is not, IMO, a great technical "solution". There are technical things that need to be in place to put a floor in - to keep things from going to pot, but the most important thing is to put a lot of emphasis on creating a good community and communicating its values to new members. Some aspects of that that I think are valuable:

- No politics. I think it's even worthwhile to sacrifice things that are (to me) potentially interesting, like economics, where they get too political. As long as we keep things on the subset of subjects that we know about and are interested in (tech, startups, defined broadly), we're more likely to find common ground, and be able to comment intelligently.

- Don't vote people into oblivion unless they're being seriously lame, on purpose. A 0 or -1 is enough to indicate disapproval.

- Don't say things you wouldn't say to someone's face.

- If you see something by the user 'pg', be sure to vote it up;-)

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Has some others.
Based on my searches (for venture hacks of course), searchyc has many more results.

chengmi, this is a really nice utility.
Yahoo is seriously pushing a lot of open source stuff these days. Interesting, and very positive.
Don't even need no mortarboard if your head's already flat.
Being nasty to posters of articles that don't meet your definition of Hacker News sounds like a terrible idea to me. Spam/personally linkjacked articles are different.
http://google.com/search?q=something+site%3Anews.ycombinator...
Yes, because they are clearly not talking in constant dollars and therefore it's meaningless.
he got divorced and left Yahoo to do a mobile startup - Mowser - its a great service. one of the best mobile developers in the US...
I'm an American living in various countries in Europe for the last 12 years, and really, there's a difference. Americans have a wonderful distrust of those claiming authority. But there is also a lack of respect for education and intelligence. Americans worship the rich, not how they got there. They venerate Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, not Alan Kay or Steve Wozniak.

Trust me, there really is a strange element of anti-intellectualism in America.
It's not that they don't want what we produce. It's that they are stupid enough to trade us stuff for our fiat pieces of paper that we send in exchange that they hold in reserve.
But how would you force people to vote?
Ok, I'm being dramatic. But that export number includes, for example, when Ford produces a car in Mexico, with Mexican labor, and sells it in Mexico.

We've been outsourcing not just blue-collar work, but more and more white-collar work as well. While this is essentially inevitable, it will, in the end, demote America to a second-world country, divided into starkly wealthy areas and dirt poor areas.
You're right, the article is not new. I was just looking for something free on the web, and in English. A new article on this has just appeared in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 30 December 2007, economy section. There it says also that fish whose territory is so small that they can't choose between stations have been shown to get worse service and longer queues.
Has web development become any easier? How, or why not?
If I look at games development, I see a progression of tools that make it easier to create more and more complex games: 3d modeling tools, level editors, 3d frameworks, physics engines... You could just license a 3d game engine (or use an open source engine) and create a stunning game that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

On the other hand, for web development I see no such thing. There are MVC frameworks, but do they really give you that much an advantage over early days CGI programming with Perl? Somehow I don't really think so, but I could be wrong? Am I missing some tools?

I am asking because I wonder how I should approach my own web development. Should I start with my own framework? Or would it be alike to creating a 3rd person shooter from scratch using assembly programming, that is, would the competition walk all over me because they have the superior tools?
> I'm an American living in various countries

I've lived in various countries over 8 years and am otherwise well travelled. I say there's no difference. The popular media is a bit more dumbed down in the US, but that's no reflection of the intellectual pursuits of people in general.
Elastic Comet Scalability (on EC2)
The recommendation at the end, not to tag uploaded pictures with names, is not going to be effective for much longer. That's my 2008 (or maybe 2010?) prediction. You will be able to find other photos of people on the internet if you have one photo of them.
Many have assumed that he is a drug user probably because of his dreadlocks, but Jaron Lanier has declared that he has never used controlled substances.
[Ruby] expectations gem: a lightweight unit testing framework
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard

He discovered numerous aspects of crowd thinking, one is that they are generally less smart than individuals. Groups of people tends to act in the same way (conformation).

That's why the voting thing on websites doesn't work: leaders becomes unchallengeable.

(I'm not arguing against democracy, where lists are closed before each election, election are a discreet events etc.)

Moreover, what is the aim of collecting votes on this websites? If people vote or bury one of my comments, what does it means about my future or past comments? It is only a conformity problem.
I read Wired and the Economist (taking the laptop into the bathroom is just too much).

News.YC is generally the best filter for relevant news.
http://forecaster.ws/forecast?lookup=paris

Paris, Arkansas

Great !
I usually don't plug anything here but this is directly related to my latest weather startup: http://www.OtherWeather.com

Better interface and layout than weather.com (less ads), social influence (each forecast is rated and users ranked), Google map mashup, user profile pages and weather widgets/forecast RSS feed.

I just launched, and haven't had the time to promote but check us out.
digg, reddit and any other socially influenced news site will always "devolve" into the mainstream and people living closer to the edge will always seek out more focused and intellectually stimulating sources for news and discussion.

the networks that understand social influence and are brave enough to see where it can take them are the ones who will survive. Not the ones looking to control and guide the process with 'editors'.
That's great. If you add hour-by-hour and zip code cookie, it would be perfect. Thanks.
this is old, boring and obvious news/content.

I get clients online monthly with payment processors and live payment gateways and explain it to them a lot clearer and more concise than this article (and they arent web geeks that read 37signals blog).

Good rule; If it isn't Auth.net or Verisign it probably sucks.
Franchise? ;)
Mobile and wireless predictions for 2008
Yes, Paul.

(This is Erik Peterson. We met at ATL Startup Weekend. Damned Internet handles. Using your name is a good idea, huh?)
When I first saw the headline, I thought it read "How to prevent social news sites from developing."

'Cuz that might work, too.
MySQL clustering strategies and comparisions
NPR: you can't beat radio for multitasking.
CSPAN: I like my political news relatively unfiltered.
Hacker News: this is anthropormorphic. if not true, this comment wouldn't exist.
Slashdot: consistent quality. the response of /. on 9/11 made a lasting impression on me.
Google News: general overview.
Python Web Framework Comparison: Documentation and Marketing - O'Reilly ONLamp Blog
Instead of a "comment" link, have an "upmod and comment" link and a "downmod and comment" link, so that in order to comment on a story, you have to express an opinion on it.
You did a good job.
I've been using the forecasts on http://weather.gov lately. In fact, using the search field on the left, I entered my zipcode and got taken to a nice forecast page with an obnoxiously long URL that I then bookmarked in Safari and set up as a hotkey in QuickSilver. Now I type Cmd-Space at any time to be taken to a perfect forecast summary with a disgustingly rich set of maps, radar, and satellite images, discussion of the forecast by the forecaster, etc., all a click or two away.

My setup curve was a bit long, but now that it's set up it's unbelievably easy to check the weather. So if you could rig up an app that even approximates that without all the manual setup work that I had to put into it, then I'm sure you'd find hordes of users.

Nice job.
MIT's Open courseware expanding to other top tier schools
You're right that weather.com really sucks, but it's much better at finding locations. On forecaster, zip codes seem to work, but trying to type in Monterey, CA results in Monterey, Louisiana. Monterey CA results in Monterey Indiana. If you have multiple results, how about giving me a list?