skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
just received an email letting me know they've deactivated my account:

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I'm confused: how is "ETA: 13 Jun 2009 at 11:19:38 AM GMT" == "Friday afternoon"

Isn't June 13th Saturday?
That was the time it was expected to naturally occur. They made the decision to push it forward and force it to occur around 2:00 PM PST
Kinda reminds me of the time Robert Frost was a technical writer for a day :-)

The Thread Not Traversed

TWO threads diverged in a yellow stack,
And sorry I could not traverse so
And be one parser, long I stood
And looped through one as long as I could
To where it spawned in the overflow;

Then invoked the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the faster stats,
Because it was hashed and wanted wear;
Though as for that the data there
Had run them into third normal form,

And both that session equally lay
In objects no instance had trodden class.
Oh, I kept the version for another day!
Yet knowing how code leads on to code,
I doubted if I should ever unit test.

I shall be documenting this with a sigh
Somewhere many transactions hence:
Two threads diverged in a stack, and I—
I took the one less traversed by,
And that has caused the site to fly.
The article does have a point, though: The dominant rewards system of games has changed.

Games were once designed primarily to be challenging and only secondarily to be completed -- essentially equating difficulty with fun. Today, games are designed primarily to be completed and only secondarily to be challenging -- equating completion with fun. Of course, it's a matter of opinion which design is actually more fun.

This is why today we have difficulty levels, completion percents, unlockables, collectibles, achievements, etc.: to allow players that value completion to complete the game, but also to allow those that value difficulty to find a challenge. While these design elements are a good compromise between the two extremes, the author is correct that they diminish the value of the game's nominal completion and that they tend to reward time spent in the game over skill.

We can partly blame economics for the rise of these game mechanics: Games that have a reputation of being "too hard" rarely do well. Likewise, if a player has completed a game, he is more likely to buy its sequel than if he is still struggling with the original... The sooner players complete a game, the sooner they can buy another.
Yes, a function which has no large jumps.

Wind has no such constraint.

On top of that this only applies to "nonvanishing vectors", and again wind has no such constraint.

-------| | | | | |------
-------| | | | | |------
-------| | | | | |------
-------| | | | | |------
-------| | | | | |------

Assume the lines wrap left/right and up/down.

Wind can do this, and you have no pole.

(This graph is really bad, the lines are actually curved where the points meet the lines. Imagine drawing circles around the earth for 2/3 of it. Then perpendicular half circles on the rest.)

Applying a pure function like this to real life wind which is not so constrained is about as right as applying the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach-Tarski_paradox to a real life object, even if mathematically it's correct.
I tried to code on shrooms once.

I ended up writing a C++ program that just made the internal speaker beep in an infinite loop, and tried to compile it with a C compiler.

I started laughing hysterically and I became quite scared that the C compiler was going to get angry with me, so I went outside and stayed away from my computer in fear.
How about this analogy: taking away your driving license? UPDATE: Just like using a bus instead of a car, you can access the internet from a library.
Note the [Originally posted at http://www.allegory-of-the-game.com/] at the bottom of that post.
I put in House of the Dead and it gave me bird houses. Does it even use Amazon at all? Plus, it needs to search cafepress/zazzle.
Enterprise Cloud Risk And Security
There is a refresh button. And if your mouse is properly configured, middle click does open a new tab.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that even if Twitter vaporized in a puff of smoke in two hours and never came back, all hell would not break loose.
What about your service compels me to use it over something like Amazon or Google product search?
Programming Challenge: Letter frequency
I think it is funny that they tampered with all the serious news stories but dared not replace the sports section.
The point about layers is for each vertical cm around the earth you need to have that point with zero air speed. Same deal for any width you feel like talking about. You also need to have a line that connects all those points from earth to space. However, that line's path need not be strictly vertical it could wrap around the earth 3 times before reaching space.

However, "In meteorology, a cyclone refers to an area of closed, circular fluid motion rotating in the same direction as the Earth[1][2]." which is not nessisarily true.
My "unclean" peeve is when people prepare a git patch series with a separate commit for each file. If I can't apply the first M patches of your N patch series and have a usable tree, then you're doing it wrong.
Why does the article call them "Harvard math majors"? They're both physics guys. In fact are both are Ph.D students in the Stanford physics department.
Is it possible to shed some light on the practical application you are using?
> If the history of science has taught us anything, it's to not underestimate the power of the undiscovered.

well said
"Prude or Professional" is not the false dichotomy here. It's "Prude or Adult", where "adult" means far more than having your own credit card number to give to porn sites.

What an obnoxious little wanker.
And the suits think they have trouble with piracy NOW?
I think the writer is under the impression that Twitter is using a 32-bit signed counter and will start using negative ids when it rolls over. Evidently some people on the linked Twitter development thread had the same misconception. Actually it looks like Twitter is doing it right: they're just going to keep counting up past the maximum 32-bit signed int (after skipping a bunch of ids to move the Twitpocalypse up into business hours.)
I searched for "juice" and got one related result (juicer) and the rest were Leatherman-type of tools that have a brand name of "juice."

The results should be better. Or, if they can't be, there should be some sort of incentive for me to purchase from this site. Do I get a discount? Free shipping? If I already know what I'm looking for, why do I need to use BongoBing?
How Privacy Fails: The Facebook Applications Debacle
If I had to do all over again, I would take LSD again when I did. (I went on about 4 or 5 trips over the span of a month or two.) It caused a very desirable change in my outlook on life and for a time made me more open to new experiences. But it probably also caused me to do things that alienated my girlfriend of the time, causing that relationship to end. And if I had to perform somehow, e.g., find a new apartment or sue someone to protect my rights, in the months after the LSD, I might not have been able to perform adequately.

I was 32 when I dropped. That was over 15 years ago, and I have never seriously contemplated dropping again because I judge the temporary reduction in functionality not to be worth it because subsequent trips will probably not be as valuable or as transformative as the first trips were.
Agree; I'd rather see it in action on a dummy/demo site first.
I figure the majority of the challenge is in businesses. And there, changing the Windows adoption rate requires visionary people in charge, a complete set of applications on another platform, and a realistic transition path.

I haven't seen a lot of vision in current IT groups; more like, CYA. So it may take a generation or more before enough of the establishment changes to even consider moving away from the current stack of Windows/IE-based enterprise software (the quality of which is oddly irrelevant to many managers). Either that, or a catastrophe so substantial that upper management is forced to start over with IT.

Making competing applications on other platforms is technically doable. But, unfortunately, most of the work that needs doing isn't interesting. Years have gone by, and it shouldn't be surprising that people have avoided spending their precious free time developing open-source business apps when they could do something more fun. What's more, with each passing year, the number of new enterprise apps bolting businesses to Windows is increasing (as is their data dependency on existing apps).

And then there's the transition. How do you even convince companies to change, much less address the technical hurdles (e.g. different data formats, software bugs) and the user community (different user interface, retraining costs, etc.)?

For what it's worth, I really want Windows' share to decrease, but these are big challenges. I do what I can to help. :)
Henry Stewart Symposium: Vendor Shootout Session (June 2, 2009, NYC)
eh, not worth reading when the writer doesn't grasp the very basic concept of free will, which is the ability to act on one's DESIRES. stating a baby has no free will is completely off base. it doesn't want to build skyscrapers and sail the oceans, it wants to cry and piss itself, functions which are unhampered and therefore not restricting its free will in the slightest.

living consequences that restrict your ability to do what you want are ALSO NOT things that diminish your free will. your circumstances do not enter into it at all. if you accept factors such as not having money and not being able to find a mate as impeding your free will, then not being able to cure cancer by laying on hands or not being able to breathe in a vaccuum are also valid limitations...
Yes. Pain and suffering not worth the gain.
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/arch/ArchSearchResults...

haaretz search results for june 10th (hebrew only). google phrases for the full stories.
There's different "mistakes" that can be made. Unnecessarily squashing (what you described, in git terms) is a mistake, but not really of the kind Linus is talking about. He's talking about things like "I committed a couple of commits, then took a different approach with a couple of more commits, then realized that didn't work and went for a different answer, then took a couple of commits to clean up the resulting debug code". There's no reason to leave all the temporary debug code (as opposed to permanent logging code) in there, or to leave the abortive approach in the history for others. Extra stuff like that just imposes cognitive gain for no value, in general. (If you have a specific case where that's not true, go for it, but you're probably still better off just dropping some comments into the final code.)
Of course, the opposite of the "aliens just stayed home" hypothesis is the hypothesis that we're the first species in the universe to acquire technology, and that we'll spread throughout it within a few more decades, eliminating any possibility for any other species to do the same.

Personally I doubt it's possible to exceed the speed of light. I think it's more likely that we'll slowly spread throughout the Milky Way, and that while simple life and complex-but-unintelligent life are likely to be pretty common, the average distribution of technological species is probably something on the order of one per galaxy.

Just a hunch.
I like the simplicity, but the logo needs to be toned down a bit.
It doesn’t have to mean “exploring a jungle in the Congo”, or “exploring that nice little village in Tuscany”, it could just as easily mean “exploring the physics of this peculiar puzzle game”, or “exploring the inside of a psychotic milkman’s imagination“.

This reminds me of the sort of artist whom we're implicitly supposed to regard as brilliant simply by virtue of being audacious. They're always exploring stuff and it's usually stuff you can explore from your own comfy chair without much physical or even terribly much mental effort. Like, "A poet, sculptor, and political activist from Portland, Oregon, H. Remington Jackass explores the connections between race, gender, and the challenges to the nature of self imposed by modern capitalistic society."
No, it's a bad idea. It wouldn't work. Neither on a technical level (DRM on images is trivially circumvented), nor on a social level (idiots will always be idiots - no matter how many safeguards you build in, they always find a way around them).

And that's without even getting into the slippery slope aspects of DRM technology.
My favorite sports writer:

http://thebivouac.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/the-kentucky-derb...
As I understand your point, the existence of a cyclone is proven only if the thickness of the atmosphere is ignored. I agree with that.

On the second point, the hairy ball theorem does not guarantee circular motion. True.
'external hard drive' doesn't seem like a difficult query. Results? a bunch of hard hats.
Rails recipes site Cookpad IPOs - in Japan
I wonder whether Arc will end up in effect maintaining mutable-cons mzscheme. If this happens, I hope that Arc's focus won't shift to the implementation details.
A driver's license is a privilege, at least in the US, whereas speech is a right. I don't know if things are different in the EU/France.
$18.5 million in revenue, presumably mostly from subscriptions. Way to be.

Is this the first IPO for a Rails site?
It appears I'm more trusting of my Analytics data than most (could be because my site garners little traffic). The copy on the front page was clear enough for me to warrant a trial, and I felt that I knew what to expect from the very beginning.

I found the sign in process quick and painless--sign into Gmail, agree to grant access, and now sit anxiously awaiting my email of data. The "how it works" section that I was shown directly afterwards was also very clear. As I read the content and followed along with the screenshots, it all just made perfect sense. All in all, great job!
I was searching for "laptop" and the first result page did not contain one single laptop. The categories "Electronics" and "Computer" do not contain any laptops either. So, considering that your slogan is "Find the product you are looking for" I have to say I doesnt really seem to work. Also I think the logo has a little to many color combinations in it, looks a little confusing. Sorry I dont have anything nice to say.
We are being harsh. I apologize for this:
As far as the branding goes, people have a hard time trusting online shopping as it is. Childish colors and a monkey does not help.
http://twitter.com/twitterapi/status/2048659057
Zombie Operating Systems and ASP.NET MVC
Here's a different take on the conference events from flash-guy Grant Skinner: http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2009/06/hossgate09_fin...
You can't sell your startup like you can a successful startup.

(The odds of you having a successful startup are about that of you having a profitable beer cozy "company.")
love in the cancer ward (english) - http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1091702.html
What can we learn from this challenge?

- decide what your benchmark shall cover and what not (computation? I/O? startup time?)

- publish compiler version and compiler options

- if the benchmark involves disk i/o, start with disk cache in a defined state (full, empty)

- avoid ambiguities in the specification ("case insensitive" -- but in which encoding? Latin-1?)
MySpace’s tangled web (Google and News Corp ad deal)
Is this based on cuil? I am going to buy a washing machine soon. Your website gave me a "Lobster Hybrid Tennis Ball Machine with Pneumatic Propulsion" in first position, and many irrelevant links. "Individual Token for Slot Machine", really?

Only one link (a steel connector for washing machines) is getting close to my search, and that is for a very generous definition of close.
same here (Safar 4), but it stops scrolling back to the top of the page after the page completely finishes loading...
Cyber-pollution doesn't deserve an apology.
I think the first comment on the article has a decent explanation:

"How about differences in price elasticity?

We know that demand for big ticket items are very price-elastic, so they price those items very competitively. But, given that you're already in the store buying something, you may have inelastic demand for the peripherals that you didn't know you needed to buy (or, you didn't know that it wasn't included)."

People will drive to another store to save money on a television; they spend their effort comparing these prices. Once they're buying a television from a store, they're (usually) not going to then drive to another store to compare cable prices; they're going to buy the cable at the same store they buy the tv at.
Thus the popularity of unit quaternions in 3D simulation and graphics. They cover the sphere twice, so each rotation can be represented by two possible values.

My hack minds eye view of this is that you take two combed layers with nulls at the poles. The rotation then jumps between layers as it crosses the poles.
The Upcoming Large Datastore Singularity
Which is $3 Million more than Twitter has earned from Twitter
Eight dimensional hypersandwich making, obviously. No matter how you want the eight ingredients oriented, that sandwich will be cut in two nice, even halves.
Looks cool. Should have clear privacy policy given the sensitive business information that's being collected.

A hint of pricing would be nice, too, though I can understand you may just be in the collecting-feedback, sending-feelers stage.
I agree, the simplicity is really the strong suit here. I would say this is at least a solid start.

I first tried a search for a semi obscure product called a "grillmate". Got nothing. I then went to the opposite side of the spectrum and searched "hair dryer". Tons of hair dryers and no real way to sort them by any relevant criteria. This makes the service a bit useless in my opinion, but exposes an opportunity at the same time.

Your best bet is to guide people into finding that one product that they just can't quite put their finger on. Walk me through a process that helps me find that one keyboard that I saw at my friend's brother's house last week. If you can do that, then you'll really distinguish yourself as a product search engine.
The results come from the real-time community actions and from the Google index you use everyday. Basically, Webzzle is to 'explore' what Google is to 'search'. We all use Google to search but Google is using keywords. It's good when it's the first step of your search process but not convenient when you want to know more from a Web page. What keywords will you select ? At Webzzle, we analyse the Web page from which you want to know more (chen you click 'explore' and send one query to Webzzle (to get Real-Time knowledge from the community) and many queries to Google in order to help you find the best results in 1 click instead of multiples keywords queries by yourself in the Google search interface.
It does use CSS. See http://code.eligrey.com/visited.php?css&uri=http://news.....

You are quickly redirected away from that page, so you don't see it (unless you look at Firebug's Net tab, sniff packets, or equiv).

Edit: acutally, it's just included as a stylesheet (with a HTTP link header)
This is interesting, but obviously doesn't take into account people that were going to buy from Dell anyway. So the value-add for Twitter here is less than $3 million. I wonder if there's a way to figure out what it actually is.
Maybe I'm missing something. I thought you could do aggregations in Google Spreadsheets without using Fusion Tables?
It's not the redirect that hides it. View the page source before redirect and you will see there are no <link rel="stylesheet"> or <style> tags.
The best way to find a startup idea is to solve a problem, find problems or try to simplify or automate a task.
Bongobing may not appeal to you, but it is a valid attempt by a student who is attempting to learn. By that standard, they deserve our honest opinion. They obviously need to be pointed in the right direction, and I don't feel that "No." necessarily accomplishes that. I'm surprised so many people have voted this comment up as it does not contribute to a thoughtful discussion.
Since this has been known about, literally, for months, why didn't twitter setup a mock testing environment that generated this potentially problematic case, allowing twitter app developers to test in a sandbox and release a new version before the 11th hour occurs?
header('Link: </visited.php?css&uri='.$_GET["uri"].'>; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css";');

It's in your source, look.
Reminds me of this from Creating Passionate Users:
http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/06/...
The comments in here are competent, and it's semi-interesting news (especially if you're at all involved with the Twitter ecosystem) but it's just so hard to upmod yet another sensationalist/Twitter article from TechCrunch.
You can now subscribe to our twitter feed and get a new Rails driven site per hour ;-)

http://twitter.com/IsItRails
Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=652452
It doesn't apply to continuous vectors, it applies to continuous vector fields. There is a difference, and it does matter.

And I would be interested to see how you can construct a non-continuous vector field from an incompressible (which air at these speeds effectively is) fluid. Your graphic and description do not make sense - they do not allow that, macroscopically, air is a fluid. If it travels, it has to go somewhere. It can't simply stop at a boundary, it has to change direction, and such changes of direction cannot be instantaneous. This is why in electronics we need to deal with signal reflection, over-voltages, and similar phenomena.

Additionally, continuous technically does not mean "no large jumps", although that's how the technical definition was inspired, and how most people visualise it. In particular, it's possible to create a function that's continuous at every irrational, and discontinuous at every rational.

It's certainly true that the theorem is dealing with a theoretical approximation to a messy, physical situation, but broadly speaking it's applicable. It says that at the Earth's surface there is always at least one place where the horizontal component of the air movement (wind velocity) is zero. Errors are often made when trying to make folksey explanations, and it's the interpretations that often have errors. The theorem is true, applicable and in some cases, useful.
Curt negative feedback isn't helpful. Comments -- especially to students and others asking for help in good faith -- should include some morsel of information that can be used to improve.