skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked for Oracle for a little while after getting acquired.

For a developer, there are so many obstacles you need to overcome to ship anything on time there or of quality. Everything is bad, from the developer hardware/tools to the red tape.

The bug tracking system looks like an HTML 1.0 web page. The "database version" is a required field, even though the product you work on doesn't even use a database. I seem to remember having problems linking to issues, because the the URL was just a hashed session so you couldn't even bookmark things.

You want to use that open source library that everyone else is using and does exactly what you need? All you need to do is fill out a bunch of on-line forms where you explain the material impact of using this library and how much money your BU makes and how this affects the bottom line. Once you get through all that, your request needs to travel all the way up the food chain to the office of the CEO which can take months of harassing administrative assistants of very highly payed people for that to actually happen. This doesn't even take into account the legal approval steps that need to happen which also takes a while.

While this is going on, you have to work with your 3rd party library and hope that it gets approved or risk months of wasted work. In the end, you notice that other people don't even try and use 3rd party libraries because it's so frustrating. In the end they just try and re-invent the wheel, and because a certain percentage of your team has to be in a "low cost center", the library ends up sucking.

Recap: Amazon has nothing to worry about, because nothing innovative or powerful is going to come out of Oracle.
I have a Master's in Applied Math.

The comments about how "few students take [Real Analysis]" doesn't square with my experience and survey of an undergraduate mathematics education. Such a course is often called "Advanced Calculus", and is a required course for a Bachelors-level education in Math. I also understand in the European-style approach to teaching Math, students start off with a foundational approach to Calculus through Real Analysis, and not the hand-wavy & computation-driven Calculus course.

The equivalence class approach attributed to Cantor is more generalizable in discussing sets. The theoretical foundation of Fourier Transforms lies in a similar completion of functions.
Not a YC company, but Lonnie Johnson is an excellent example. Inventor of the supersoaker and now developing thin-film lithium air batteries and working with MIT on solid state thermoelectric engines.

http://www.johnsonems.com/

http://www.excellatron.com/

http://www.johnsonrd.com/ie/lj/ljprofile.html

http://www.parc.com/event/713/high-efficiency-solid-state-en...
You obvious know next to nothing about English syntax. Have you never wondered why you can learn python in a day or two, but not English or Chinese?

First of, you need a huge dictionary of all words and rules for their conjugations.
Then you need a huge rule set for bound morphemes. Which adjectives can you add 'ly' to in order to make them adverbs? There are literally hundreds if not thousands of bound morphemes and they can sometimes only be applied to certain words within certain word-classes.

Then you need a huge rule set for when each word acts as a specific word class (is bank a noun or a verb? Is anime a noun or an adjective? Is like a verb or preposition? You know, "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana", actually like can behave like several wordclasses)

These are not solved problems yet, but we are getting very good at them now. We weren't 4 years ago.

Failing that, you could also take and annotate word classes in thousands of pages of text, and then use a machine algorithm to apply similar annotations in the the text entered into the program. Unless you are expecting people to write articles for the Wall Street Journal, this might not be such a good route either.
Seems like the only one needing education to be a decent human being is you.
I once confronted the guy that broke into my car and stole my stereo. He gave everything he still had back (he didn't have the CDs anymore).

For what it's worth, I only went to him directly after the police shrugged it off and wouldn't pursue it. I gave them his address, description, other crimes he had been involved in (drug dealer), etc. They didn't care, and when the crime happened couldn't even be bothered to lift a couple of prints.

I was so angry when he said "sorry man, I figured your insurance would cover it, no hard feelings". But, looking back, he was just dumb as hell and stealing from a friend of a friend you met once made sense to him...In this sort of situation, handling the issue directly worked out for me better than going to the police.
If we've posited a desert based system, I'm going to guess it is closed loop with respect to water (which is to say the water never leaves the system as anything except perhaps evaporation during post processing.) So the initial water budget probably comes from the aquifer or is imported. Once the system is running an interesting question is how much water would it lose over time.

And while that is an interesting question, it doesn't change the situation that no farmland was harmed in the process. :-)
Added in edit to emphasise a point:

If all you want to do is differentiate and integrate,
then non-standard analysis is probably, for most people,
a faster way to be able to do just that.

Now read on ...

Non-standard analysis has been put on a firm, formal footing. Theorems have been proven showing that (largely) it's equivalent to the regular form of analysis. Some things are easier to prove in standard analysis, some things are easier to prove in non-standard analysis, etc, etc.

However, this is only really of use if all you want to do is calculus. If you want to go beyond calculus, almost everything (in this and related areas) is about sequences, limits, limiting processes, functions, and transformations. There, non-standard analysis tends not to help, and unless you've done calculus the standard way, you have to learn all this stuff in an unfamiliar and difficult-to-visualize, abstract area.

One of the main reasons for continuing to learn calculus in the epsilon-delta limiting process manner is exactly because it's not only formally sound, it's also giving you tools for moving beyond the rather limited world of differential calculus.

Speculating wildly from limited experience, it might also be the case that starting people with the non-standard approach in calculus is actually just as confusing. You may find that you really only got the insights you did because you had already struggled with the standard approach, and then were given something that made it all fall into place. Perhaps some people they think the non-standard approach is easier, but in fact it's only because they've actually got the foundations from the other. Just a thought.
It amazes me that Twitter exists. My marketing guy convinced me to start tweeting for business. The ROI we hope for is completely based on serendipity. Dropping leaflets from a plane might have a better result...
(Hmmm, business idea: p-tweets - physical-tweets. Messages printed on ping pong balls and dropped from 30,000 feet)
> Well, maybe it's a good example of how to handle numbers—although I find the lack of a positive-integer type a pain—

In another subthread I mentioned the absence of a Semiring type class, which should be a superclass of Ring (Haskell's Num) and provide addition, multiplication and fromNatural. So, yeah, I am not entirely happy with Haskell's standard library either, but the situation in other (general-purpose) programming languages is even worse.

> but it's certainly not a good example of how to handle general algebraic structures, which is what it seems to pretend to be.

How so? The standard library may be flawed, but the core language is perfectly capable of handling general algebraic structures. The only legitimate point of pain I can see is that a type or tuple of types can only be an instance of a type class in at most one way, for which the solution (admittedly, rather ugly) is to use newtype. A non-ugly solution would be to use something like Standard ML's module system, but in no way it would improve the situation to move closer to Common Lisp.
Man, I don't think you understand how these cultures work. But if you don't understand it by now, then you probably aren't going to learn it from a HN post. So... good luck with that.
The end-game for this scenario is for the whole package to provide enough polish and other features that you'd be stupid to cobble together the OSS equivalents after you reached a certain level of affluence. And then it's the business' job to make sure they can profit off that audience division. Good companies understand that and don't waste their time with needless software patents. Poorly run companies insist that "it's mine, you can't have it" and wind up stirring up trouble from amongst their user base.

Of course, it would seem iA is in the later category. Hopefully they've done some market analysis that they still have a critical audience mass who are either ignorant/apathetic to such tactics and buy it anyway.
The classic Emacs architecture paper: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html
Every time a site asks me to login with FB, their requested permissions include access to my friends list, my personal info, etc. -- a deal breaker. All I want is to not have to make yet another password and to have a "one-click" login experience, I don't want to share all my data too.
If you're right, and were this actually intentional too, well, that would be genius.

But given that their traffic is maybe off two-thirds now and that it is unknown how long google will leave the lights on (weeks, maybe months), during which time this will be long-flushed out of the news cycle and it becomes harder and harder to recover, and harder to secure things like more capital when you look this stupid, that's a high-risk bet. I'd say sabotage is more likely.
Yeah, the Expo Line puts Culver City in serious competition now too. That would be my top pick for anyone looking to start a company in the LA area. Koreatown could be interesting for slightly more adventurous people. Downtown's rents have skyrocketed now that it's become a desirable place to live, but office space is still cheap, and living space rents are still a lot cheaper than Santa Monica or Venice.
I would distinguish the dimming aspect from the selecting syntactic units of text aspect. The former clearly isn't new[1], and adding an obvious technique to the equation doesn't make the entire method non-obvious.

So then the question should be: Is selecting syntactic units of text unique?

I don't know of any specific applications that do this, but I imagine that there are programs or libraries used in the field of machine learning that do exactly this or make doing it trivial and obvious.

[1] It's basically applying a dimming effect to an inverse selection. Off the top of my head, this is a common technique for highlighting passages from documents in video documentaries.
I don't think Oracle dwarfs Amazon at all. They are comparable in size an Amazon is growing fast. And Amazon have 5+ years of experience in the field, they have special hardware, they know how to do it cheap and well. You can't get that fast, even if you have spare billions. This race will be tough for Oracle and they might need a few years to catch up with Amazon.
Not sure where the linked abstract actually was from (it's hosted with the Turing Centenary Conference, but I couldn't find a link in their public pages) - but here's the author's blog that may shed some more light:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/03/how_can_mind_act_on_ma...

And then some more digging turns up reviews of his 2008 book:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sacred-scie...

Yep, standard "Gawd in the gaps" stuff, complete with a helping of quantum woo. Also, the originally linked abstract is full of howlers like this:

"I believe Trans-Turing Systems are constructable, go beyond Turing, and may have powerful implications for the Mind-Brain system."

I believe you believe that too, d00d - but absent something resembling even an outline of a proof or an existence argument you're just tossing quantum word-salad.
It's intriguing how often HP's public cloud offerings are omitted from the conversation. I would think there would be a lot of interest especially because they're a heavyweight yet are using open standards (i.e., OpenStack).

No disclaimer: I don't work for HP (but I have used hpcloud)
As a non-Rails Rubyist, I will have to run benchmarks myself as usual, because people seem to be still equating Ruby to Rails.
Just Another Golf Coding
I didn't write my comment clearly, with the FF it was not an issue, but without the FF the display in interlaced mode was painful. I had a long phosphor monitor which I used to mitigate that but until I got the FF it was an issue.

That said, the points above about the mechanics of LCD's being different enough that I might not object are reasonable. I've really not tried using a 30hz LCD display.
Sorry to break it to you, but Columbus was a bit wrong about that. You see there's this thing called the Pacific...
let me know what kind of developer you are. Can you PM me on Hacker News.
This is a similar argument to sqrt(2) being "not a number", back in the BC's, because it was not rational. And yet, you can construct it in a straightforward manner by making a right angled triangle with catheti of length 1, giving a hypotenuse of length sqrt(2). I suppose this would have made you equally uncomfortable back then.

One can definitely "work with" numbers that aren't easy to write. a + (-a) = 0, and this is valid for every real number a, not just "the ones which I can describe with a finite amount of information", or the ones I've written down at some point in my life.
It's important to realize that "marketing site" and "frontend" are totally different things. If it's truly just a informational site, WP is probably fine. But, I would not build your app's UI, or even purchase workflow, in Wordpress and then your real "app" in Rails.
I was a happy user of iA Writer: loads fast, does what I want, prevents me from messing with settings for hours, etc.

Writer Pro is just BS. A half-assed product to make money off of people who already bought Writer.

The "workflow" involves just showing you the same text with a different font, depending on which step you selected (Notes, Write, Edit, Read). When you step into "write" mode, you're editing what you wrote in "notes" mode. If you step back to "notes" mode, you just see what you were editing in "write" mode -- that is, you cannot keep notes that are not part of the final output, something every writer does. Only the font chances, you're working with one document all the time.

As for the show syntax "innovation", it's just highlighting different parts of speech (verbs, nouns, etc). Nothing extremely worth your while.

Those 2 half-baked features (with several MIA from iA Writer) are not worthy of the "Pro" moniker.

Opinionated software I'm fine with (I like iA Writer). This is more: "software that has the opinion that it should scam you out of your money" (especially with the only way to check it out being buying it from the App Store).
The main problem that I see with this:

- most people dislike Oracle

- most people like Amazon

So I think at least initially, it will be about "approachability" rather than price and technical equivalency.

Everyone programmer can usually spin up an ec2 instance after about 10 minutes.
With Oracle, I have the feeling that just registering to see documentation will probably be more than 10 minutes and you'd end up in a database somewhere to receive emails/phonecalls a few weeks later.
That's not anywhere close to prior art. Syntax control highlights words based on their syntactical unit, not just doing a *ly grep.
what is with all the dog ones?
No. Northern Ireland didn't secede in any sense. It's the rump of the Kingdom of Ireland within the United Kingdom. The 26 Counties seceded from the UK to become the Free State, while NI stayed within. This is regarded as partition, not secession, and happened before the secession of the South. The partition was performed by an Act of the UK Parliament, and secession was performed by the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

All this is pretty well documented as it was of significant historical importance, much more so than the reorganisation of the borders within a US state.
"I learned many things from inmates that I never learned in my prior life. I learned that you should go straight to the person you're upset with rather than go to authorities. I learned that giving and keeping your word is the ultimate measurement of character. I learned that loyalty is easy to promise, but few really deliver. Don't be that guy. Prison is really a learning crucible since the reactions are so quick and amplified. If you have annoying habits, you'll find out fast. If you are not respectful to others, you'll hear about it and you may get a "tune up" to teach you respect."

Sounds like a better and less expensive education than Harvard and Wharton.
>Unless you're against all software patents on principle, I don't see an argument here for why patenting this feature deserves scorn.

Then you missed the fact (which he also mentions in TFA), the feature is a classic example of an obvious bullshit patent, like Amazon's "one click".
Haha what?
Of course my self-involved reaction to this discussion is "what does a geek do to land themselves in prison?" I'm guessing probably mostly drug offenses, and maybe occasionally hacking related activities. Anything else? I'm sure violent crime is pretty unusual. Maybe tax evasion?
For most, Internet == World Wide Web, which TimBL bears credit for creating. I think "Internet founder" is a fair enough descriptor for laymen. (Note also that it didn't say the founder, implying others, which is accurate.)
I'd say go w/ wordpress as a subdomain of the main app, and use the Json plugin to pull in data to your existing design, you can still linkout to the blog, but the main site will be easier to design using the data from the blog. ie. blog.yourappp.com and anywhere you want on the front page you could pull in recent posts or comments using the json api.

That's what I use for my laravel apps.
My roommate and I are working on a very similar video series. We have a differet angle (short breadth survey => depth on a novel or interesting discovery or inquiry; informed by paper review, but no PIs.)

I'll watch how you guys evolve closely.

Good job.
As someone who is a full-time WordPress platform architect, I completely agree with @deathspin here.
Unfortunately, the set of computable numbers, while countable, is more difficult to work with than the much more conceptually reasonable set of reals. Luckily, we have pretty great theoretical tools for dealing with uncountability, so I don't think the fact that the vast, vast majority of real numbers are unidentifiable is really that big of a problem. That, and the continuum is a really useful concept, even if it very well might not have any basis in physical reality.
>> Can you reliably parse handwritten code into your AST representation write it back and so on without any loss? What happens with handwritten styles that maybe don't fit into the projection's way of viewing the world?

Genuinely asking, is this really a problem? It sounds solvable to me.
Replying to self: Looks like Microsofts .net NGen _tends_ towards what I was imagining:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Image_Generator
Incisive? I can't think of a definition that makes sense in this context.
Maybe, but there are perfectly legitimate reasons for such functionality. It is essentially the same as the NYT paywall. It looks bad when someone clicks a link in a tweet only to be told that they aren't allowed to access the content until they take additional steps (either buying a subscription or making an account).

So they provide links to bypass the restrictions when they are shared over social media.

Can this be used for SEO abuse? Probably, though I couldn't tell you how.
And if it were a big factor, it would show in the statistics. Case closed, please move on everyone!
IANAL.

The definition of "obviousness" in a patent is whether there exist two works of prior art that can be combined to create the invention. In this case, any prior art that stylizes text based on syntax could be combined with any prior art that determines the syntax of natural language to invalidate a later patent that stylizes natural language text based on syntax.

Whether the output feels different and non-obvious to a user is unimportant. Application to a different domain ("programming" versus "writing") is irrelevant. Patent law is very mechanical, and the rule is that it must not be any combination of prior art unless the means of combination is patentable on its own.

iA appears to be attempting to enforce their idea through pre-emptive public shaming of future competitors, which could be effective in a community of creative writers, but doesn't legally hold water.
Actually it would be nice if we could get all Ayn Rand followers to relocate to their own society. Maybe the rest of the world would be a nicer place then.
Buy Bitcoin in Latin America with MtGox and AstroPay
One possible replacement is the computable numbers [1]; this includes the algebraic numbers and some common transcendentals (e, pi), and you can even build up something akin to standard analysis (computable analysis [2]).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_analysis
In some highly competitive spaces your competitors will spam links to your site which eventually leads to negative SEO. Which I don't think Google will admit exists but it happens.
Seems like PG's Submarine essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html) may be relevant here?
There is a good amount of complexity that gets added when you try integrating rails and wordpress, as you already mentioned.

I understand the appeal of the plugins, but its usually quite easy to work around, what plugins in specific are you interested in?

i.e. Which email marketing and sales plugins are you referring to?

Social media and AB testing are easy to implement in rails or most frameworks for that matter.
Lonnie is one hell of a guy. He should be a role model for everyone.
As you may have realized by now, this is HN, where you expect sense of humor at your own peril. In general, humor is not (much) appreciated here, except when used in an intensely witty context, as a left-handed compliment or couched in ten layers of pseudo-wisdom.
Because a life of mental illness is not easy.
HN without language wars? That would be extremely uncharacteristic.
>You obvious know next to nothing about English syntax. Have you never wondered why you can learn python in a day or two, but not English or Chinese?

And you obviously know next to nothing about how this is implemented in Writer Pro.

We're not talking about AI-level intelligent understanding of english here (which not even MS Word has in its syntax check). We're talking about a ho-hum, "this word is a noun, this is verb" etc kind of tagging, which just needs some metadata (you can even scrap off of an online dictionary).
In linear algebra, lines are sets of points, but in modern geometry, points and lines remain undefined terms, implicitly defined by their incidence relations (which points are "on" which lines).

You may find the Fano plane (a three-dimensional finite projective space) interesting:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fano_plane (brief description)
* http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/octonions/node4.html (connections with higher math)
I agree with your sentiment. I would have trouble putting trust in Oracle.

But regardless of my feelings, only the people making the decisions on where to spend the money matter. Oracle has made it their business to be very good at converting those people.