skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Based on that sentence, there is an interpretation that would make that true. The idea that the matter may be discrete rather than continuous is quite old; the word "atom" after all from ancient Greece. Wikipedia also mentions Indian philosophers had the idea. Of course, they never were able to prove that the idea was correct, and a modern educated viewer can not help but bring in the modern view of the atom when they see the word "atom" (protons, quarks, gluons, etc), but the modern view would not match either the Greek or Indian conception. The word choice of "stated" is correct enough; they did not prove, they did not demonstrate, they could not resolve the argument, but the very fundamental root idea was recognized.

Similarly, the modern ear hears "relativity" and can't help but think of Einsteinian relativity, but the adjective "Einsteinian" is not redundant as it is not the only idea of relativity. Relativity as a concept also goes back a long way, but it looked more like Galilean relativity (if indeed it was even that formalized, which it probably wasn't), which contains certain contradictions in it which can be determined with pure reasoning, and indeed may have been (see [1]).

The summary leads to misleading ideas about what the Indian philosophers really knew/discovered/thought, if for no other reason than there is no way to accurately summarize the ancient ideas in modern words that briefly; it is not clear to me whether the author of the linked web page is himself confused or being deliberately mendacious.

[1]: http://mathpages.com/rr/s3-07/3-07.htm , and indeed, the entire first half of that book or so. Among this book's many points is that physicists were seriously beginning to consider whether they were going to have to give up on the general idea of relativity until Einstein was able to rescue it.
It isn't in the search results for me, but there is an ad for portraitquilts.com. So i guess they bit the bullet and paid for advertising.
Eric Schmidt said he was sorry but he couldn’t help.

Now I’m angry.

Wow. I think I respect Google more now. I don't like the "take it to the people" approach needed to get action out of Google, but I like "I know people who know people" approach even less. The chairman of the company should not be dicking about with search results because a friend asked.
The US government actually has a calculation on what the minimum cost of living is. There's the living wage, the poverty wage, and the minimum wage. For my city, two adults and two children is a hair shy of $20 for living wage and $10.50 for living at the poverty line. Minimum wage wouldn't even get you close to that.

For the record, the US government does not tend to view a warm coat and two bowls of soup to be surviving in the US.
Thank you for your comment! First off the explanation regarding det(A) = the volume scaling of the transformation T_A associated with the matrix A. I've been stuck for over a week now trying to word this any other way possible because, in the current ordering of the sections, I'm covering determinants before linear transformations.
Perhaps there is no better once sentence than talking about the volume and I should reorder the sections...

You've raised a very important point regarding "routes to concepts" which really should be asked more often!

> (ii) you can't teach key insights just by saying a few words.

Generally true, though we have to say that the key difficulty in communicating insights is lacking prerequisites. Therefore, if you think very carefully about the prerequisite structure (i.e. model of the reader's previous knowledge) you can do lot's of interesting stuff in very few words.

> (i) the key insight varies from person to person more than you'd think,

Let G=(V,E) where V is the set of math concepts, and E are the links between them. Then there are as many ways to click on a concept x, as there there are in-links for x! In this case we have at least three routes:

Route 1: geometric
lin. trans T_A = {matrix:A, B_in:{e1,..,en}, B_out:{f1,..,fn}}
---> what happens to a unit cube 1x1x1,
represented (1,...1) w.r.t. B_in,
after going through T_A?
---> output will be (1,..,1) w.r.t. B_out
---> observe that cols of A are f1..fn
therefore
det(A) = (hyper)volume of (hyper)parallelepiped
formed by vectors f1..fn

Route 2: computational
det(A) = { formula for 2x2, formula for 3x3, ... }
---> a easy test for invertibility of an n by n matrix
sidenote: see Cramer's rule for another application of dets

Route 3: algebraic
given a 2x2 matrix A,
find a coefficients A T D that satisfy the following matrix equation:
B*A^2 + T*A + D = 0,
the linear term is the trace T = sum_i a_ii, the constant term is D = det(A).
sidenote: B*λ^2 + T*λ + D = {characteristic poly. of A} = det(A-λI)

So perhaps the task of teaching math is not so much to try to find "the right" or "the best" route to a concept, but to collect many explanations of routes (edges in G), then come up with a coherent narrative that covers as many edges as possible (while respecting the partial-sorted-order of prerequisites ).
It's an ad for me. Of course, Google's been doing all it can to make ads look like organic results. Looks like she bought into the protection racket.
Show HN: UberCLI + uber.py, a CLI and a Python client for Uber
"You might receive these offers or ads online, via email or through direct mail." http://att.com/InternetPreferences
> Eric Schmidt said he was sorry but he couldn’t help.

This is a good thing. It's incredibly frustrating that Google has no way for people to get help with the search engine. Allowing the few people who happen to know someone who knows someone to get help doesn't make Google any less frustrating in this situation - although it does help that one person.

It would be interesting to learn why the site got delisted (if it did). Often someone complains vociferously, then a Googler points out all the weird SEO links that exist for that domain, and a bunch of odd things happening on the site.
That's what I assumed, but if you look at the history, the prices have been trending like this for over a month now.
The thought experiment is proposing a drug that promotes sustained, unconditional high levels of happiness, with zero drawbacks.

This doesn't compare with anything a normal person experiences during life. There's no rational expectation to be had of how anyone's behavior would be if such a drug existed.
Sorry for the author's sister, but it's kinda reassuring to know that even Google's CEO won't tamper with the results algorithm. Which might or might not be fair, but still...
The more comments about IntelliJ IDEA I read, the more it reminds me of apple fans... It's just a tool and not a miracle! But hey, everyone is special and has the right to opinion, right? :)
Or even https://blekko.com/#?q=portrait%20quilts and https://blekko.com/#?q=photo%20quilts

EDIT: By the way, the reason we have this site lower than other engines is that we tend to put howto and non-selling sites over selling sites.
And apparently Mr Cringely doesn't know anything about Webmaster Tools, which would probably be the first stop of anyone wanting to know about a sudden change in rank.

Sudden changes are usually the function of 'action' rather than 'inaction' so I'm guessing that somewhere there was an action. Did she succumb to some black hat SEO marketing pitch? Did Cringely piss off some black hat SEO person? Did her site get compromised and have malware installed? Did she not actually update the content for the last 5 years (including Copyright notice) so it doesn't appear to be a dead site.

The 'OMG I don't show up in results' is a good starting point but hardly the ending point of these stories.
I've had this sort of thing happen myself, client's who's websites lose out on <company name> to some spammy site for no obvious reason. People seem to assume that google operates as some sort of public service which provides free services to website owners.

Now I just tell people to factor adwords spend into the development costs for a site.
This is what I see on Google: https://i.cloudup.com/7ymLpPBmma-3000x3000.png

The first organic results don't even show up with the size of my window.

The whole situation these days on the SERP for any purchasable item is pretty sad. Luckily, I don't use Google that much when pricing or shopping. Results for data are much more helpful and useful for me.
It's often interesting to perform the same search on google.com using different proxies. Sometimes I get things in my proxied results that don't turn up in my unproxied (and vice-versa).
I don't think it's very realistic to consider them doing that. The backlash would be immense, and there's no reason to do it in the first place.

All they have to do is work with existing ad networks. Then, when the user hits a page (the page already has an ad on it) and the ad network determines that the user is an AT&T subscriber, the ad is targeted using that data, and AT&T gets a cut.
It's the unfortunate reality, I honestly feel like Google's algorithm has gotten really arbitrary lately (just had a huge drop off of almost all traffic for a month which was completely unexplained, only to come right back a few weeks later). The fact that they hide keywords now will make it seem all the more arbitrary.

The real world comparison is not a mugging, it's as if your small business was on Main St one day, and the next there are literally no roads to get to you.
Too many, didn't click: (the result order for me; yours may vary)

DDG: 1 2
Bing: 1 2 (but ads before)
Yandex: 1 3
Baidu: 1 2
Yahoo: 1 2 (but so much ads/images/cruft before)
Blekko: 3 x
This is more of a story about the danger of relying on search ranking than it is about Google abusing anyone.

Presumably Cringely knows this, but he also knows that carping loudly about it will increase portraitquilts.com's Google rankings.

Unfortunately, this is a zero-sum game. If portraitquilts.com deserves to win, then that's also saying that the other businesses, how-to sites, Pinterest boards, and so on deserve to lose. Is that obviously true?
Has this sister ever engaged in any dubious SEO practices, such as hiring "backlink providers" on fiverr, spamming her link on unrelated websites, or too much prolific use of using the anchor text of "portrait quilt"? Any of those will signal to Google that they are unnatural links and as a result, the site can be penalized and show up less in results, sometimes being removed altogether.

I apologize if this comment is too obvious -- I have worked as an SEO consultant for a while. The first thing she should do is check her Google Webmaster Tools, as this is where she will receive any unnatural link warnings. If it is there, she can start taking steps to remedy the situation by undoing any of the questionable SEO tactics she may have used, and request reconsideration from Google.
It came up for me in the adwords section, either at the top or on the right, for the first two pages. But I scrolled through five pages of results and in never came up as an "organic" result.
Why not break the numbers down more granularly to like 25% 50% 70% 90% 95% 99% ?

Understanding where your users are on the curve is probably more interesting than a single number. Worrying about that last 1% really only makes a meaningful difference if your user base is huge enough that fixing something for 1% of your users can jump revenue by a significant multiple.

Mentally, I try and think of the 80 or 90% of users with a similar experience, needs, etc. and make it better for them. In this case, speed is good for everybody, but I care very little about the needs of that last 1% if your customers are all paying the same. No sense in putting the needs of a small number of users in front of the needs of a much larger set of users.
Reddit's New User Agreement
If you're going to write an article criticizing how Google lowered your spot in the SERP, then at least try to make a substantive argument for why it deserves to be higher. Otherwise it's just whining.
I think it is quite terrifying, that one company can singlehandedly shut down business, even if you have never used a Google service in your entire life; because all your customers only discover you through Google.
And what is to be done about it? you aren't a Google customer in the direct sense, so they feel no obligation to assist, and it seems as if even actual customers get negligible support.
The only way out of this seems to be either Google collapsing, or a MS-esque antitrust/monopoly court.
>Sudden changes are usually the function of 'action' rather than 'inaction'

This is not necessarily true and I have plenty of first hand experience. Also Webmaster tools is useless if they were not directly affected by a spam penalty.
I agree if there was a button to click to jump to the next one it'd be less frustrating.
a very unfortunate name. There's a long un-known, part of the population that very likely has a genetic aversion to the stuff. It's a really strong aversion. And it may be up to 5% of the population, if you believe 23andMe.

http://ihatecilantro.com/
Reverse Abstraction - Real Art, Real Geeky
http://www.jordanm.co.uk/post/69537440164/the-web-designers-...

browserstack.com

safaribooksonline.com
Certainly, I will grant that it is possible to blindly shoot in the dark and get lucky creating something that we don't understand, but is nevertheless deadly. Absolutely that could happen, and another commenter upthread gives some very plausible scenarios for this that I had not considered. But we've had the technology for blindly shooting in the dark in the lab for probably 20 years at least.

But that's not the point I think Sam was making. I read the article as discussing a purposeful designing of a virus with specific properties. My contention is that the knowledge required to engineer something that can evade the immune system, spread easily, and cause high mortality is very likely the same mechanistic knowledge that would help you to defeat such a virus.
If I were running a business providing free advertising for such companies, I'd wait until a company relied on me and then make them pay for it. Given that google is a business, doesn't seem that odd that this happens. In fact, seems surprising if it doesn't.
Think harder! The vehicle only has to arrive when you are actually there to pick up whatever it has. Robot drivers don't get tired, need bathroom breaks or get impatient. You can share your location if on your way home so it can meet you exactly as you arrive.

The vehicle can then have lockboxes. You enter a code and it opens up letting you access your stuff. (Or you use your phone or whatever.)
"Based on current data, you are about 35,000 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack."

Could we please get a link / source to this current data?
Demystifying the Higgs Boson with Leonard Susskind
Reverse Abstraction Article in LiveScience
I use sbt idea. I can try play, but it would be great if it just worked.
Car locks hacked with a single swipe device.
You can TURN ON change tracking (more on that in a moment) in Office applications. It doesn't exist on the web interface of Skydrive at all.

The change tracking in office is nothing at all like the "See Revision History" in Google Docs. The Google Docs one is miles better.
"Super simple interface, and it's even written in Erlang."

Meaning that you probably still can't read email in it, but it can already do conference calls. ;)
I don't think I've ever disagreed with a statement that stated "System A is different than System B, and I prefer {A/B} because I find it easier to use." My comment simply disagrees with adding an unqualified ranking to a system. "A is inferior", "B is superior" without some definition of an exemplar. Someone could say "Windows Office is superior to Google Apps when working on documents without network connectivity." That is a ranking, and a basis for the ranking. I can agree or disagree with the choice but I understand it.

To the extent that I could understand it, the OP argument was that it was worse because it was different. And it is that claim I disagree strongly with.
Dell Chromebook 11 Announced
One of the other big factors that hasn't been touched upon here is the cost of boxes vs the true cost of carriers. As we know, one of the largest cost's for these employees is the benefits and pension. So without numbers, just guessing, I would say that it would take a lot of boxes to cover the cost of salaries, benefits and pension for 8000 federal staff.
Hey everyone! Just posting some of my tech related art here for you to discuss. I am looking for some feedback. If anyone has any comments or questions feel free. Cookie points to someone who finds the flaw in my concept. Hint: there is one.
> This also commits the logical fallacy of ascribing superpowers to the bad guys cooking up viruses while assuming the good guys are sitting on their duffs letting bad things happen.

[...]

> If we're instead talking about a mythical time in the future when we do understand enough biology to engineer something like this, one would have to assume the good guys possess the knowledge to develop countermeasures.

------------------------

The amount you need to destroy is more or less a constant. When the efficacy of your technologies is limited, then a technology that only gives you a small percentage edge over your opponent's technology - say Iron vs Bronze - is survivable for the defender provided they have an edge in some other area, though not necessarily pleasant. However, as the efficacy of technology increases, you only need a small percentage edge over your opponent in terms of relative efficacy of technologies to have more than enough power to destroy all that you need to in order to remove them forever.

Consider that armies could be separated by hundreds of years of technology in the past, and still fight on a roughly equal footing. Technology did not more very fast, nor was it very powerful. Then imagine what an army of today would do to an army of a hundred, or even fifty years ago. In the Iran-Iraq war two armies with Cold-War level technology faced each other off for eight years. The Iraqi army were, however, swept aside very quickly by a more advanced force.

The timespan in which there's a rough parity in power shortening. Even small difference in development with respect to time can rapidly become insurmountable when you're dealing with a high rate of change and powerful technologies. What you're defending is more or less static: people, land, resources, they're not getting any more durable, while weapons are always becoming more powerful.

You only need one world ending plague. The defender has to be on top every time, the attacker only has to surpass them once. There is no chance to adapt to what they make, or to try again any more than biological evolution can adapt people to a bullet in the head - because any minor adaptation in that direction makes no difference when compared to the sorts of forces that are imparted.

And I don't think we should have much confidence in the idea that the defender is going to be on top every time.

The questions seem to me to be ones of whether a reluctance to destroy the world is characteristic of organised systems, and whether organised systems will always have the edge over individual effort. If we get to a level where someone can create a suitably devastating bio-weapon in their garden shed, will we also be in a position where that's effectively analogous to creating any other outdated weapon in your shed?

I don't know, computer viruses don't lead me to much hope on that point. Enormous energies are being expended to restrain the energies of a few, with no clear victory in sight. The playing field is not always slanted the way we might like.
> Ghostery does not call itself a tracker-blocker, our users do.

Sorry, I cannot accept that answer.

From your home page, in big letters, right now:

https://www.ghostery.com/

> Knowledge + Control = Privacy
>
> See which companies are tracking you
> Block over 1 6 0 0 trackers
> Learn how they track
> Ghostery is FREE

What do you call yourself then?

Please be honest with us. How do you view your operation internally? What services do you provide, and to whom?

Thank you.
> where machine learning is used to sort out mail

A few minutes spent setting up filters goes a long ways to nullifying the (frequently wrong for me) machine learning advantage in sorting emails.
Led Zeppelin comes to Spotify
"sharepoint/svn avoids these issues"?

Utter fail.

It's like you're telling me to send a TELEGRAM rather than use IRC.
the point is to make competitive analysis available to any startup. So, if you signed up, I would manually do the research for you on any 3 competitors you like. This competitive analysis would be sent as a pdf, and the data would entail recent milestones reached the company, how many users they have, their current marketing strategies, what new products or features they are offering, etc. Essentially, it will allow you to examine the 4 p's of any company: product, price, promotion, and place.

I hope that helps. The first report would be free.
//Ancient India was a land of sages, saints and seers as well as a land of scholars and scientists. Rishis were the sages who built our great culture. They devoted their life, energy and experience for the welfare of people. They wrote Vedas - the manual of vibrations. Following this many field of science evolved in India.
//

This is typical hindutva propaganda, where they claim that anything and everything originated from Vedic scriptures, which are for welfare of people.

Before buying into it, I would suggest the readers to review the works of Dr. Ambedkar such as Riddle In Hinduism. http://www.ambedkar.org/riddleinhinduism/
Let's make people rank, so they could build businesses from traffic we drive, and then cut the traffic. That would be a good business plan for Adwords, no?

Now, seriously, I don't think this is Google plan. I think Google just got many billions websites and pages to rank. Google aim is not to be fair for every website, but instead to give the best results.

Given a huge number of websites (and people running them), these occurrences would obviously happen.
Maybe you're being funny, but it's scary to think that google has a quiet policy of letting businesses develop revenues through organic search and then intentionally changing the algos.
IVP?
Add the biggest amount of C and H you can on a molecule with it remaining a gas (easier on Mars than on Earth). Then, replace some of them with N and O, in a way that you create the biggest diversity of shapes you can.
Free O365 reporting for small business
Is "founder liquidity" exactly like what it sounds? Does that money go right into the founders' personal bank accounts?
This is neat! Thanks.

I have wanted to learn Sanskrit for a long time, and I think the stuff you could read after learning that would be interesting.

And then there is NASA (apparently) using Sanskrit for AI: http://www.vedicsciences.net/articles/sanskrit-nasa.html
The first one is still wrong. "Underestimate the technical feasibility" means, "They think it is less feasible (harder) than it actually is." I think you mean the opposite: they think it is easier than it actually is. I.e. you're trying to say it's harder than we think.

You can say instead: "underestimates the difficulty" or "overestimates the feasibility."