skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So there's one part of the explanation on the page that I don't quite get: she uses the example of a coin being turned 360 degrees along some axis as leaving all possible vectors as eigenvectors:

"If you rotate a coin by 360 degrees you preserve all directions and so each direction is an eigenvector. Because no stretching has occurred, all of these eigenvectors have eigenvalue 1. Rotating the coin by 60 degrees destroys all directions and this transformation has no eigenvectors or eigenvalues at all."

But in the 60-degree case, why isn't the axis of rotation an eigenvector? Its direction isn't "destroyed," is it?...
As I understand it, trademarks need not be registered:

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/tac/doc/basic/register.htm
You may want to read this:

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/pub/crosby-timing2009.pdf

Adding jitter will not defeat timing attacks unless the jitter is dependent on the input, like blinded RSA.
Hmm. Didn't realize that you had Farnell. I guess if you have the and you could get RS Components that would be a pretty good start.
Sleeping for a random amount of time will make it more difficult to mount a timing attack. But not impossible in theory. You just have to do more statistics --- significance tests and the like.
He's talking about legal threats and "confusion in the marketplace of ideas".

Definitely sounds like there's some confusion going on.
Django-mingus released
An interesting article. I definitely agree that business in general is definitely something learned experimentally.

In a related note, one thing I've found is looking at students and how they perform at a job based on how they were initially taught computer science. Students with more experimental learning made much different types of decisions than students that were taught more theoretical stuff. Neither of the decisions are better, but they are significantly different schools of thought.
Check out linux mint, too. http://www.linuxmint.com/img/screenshots/gloria/15.png
Still can't get it. What's the lag time normally from an app update being submitted/approved/reviewed by TechCrunch and actually being able to be downloaded?
New technology gives hope to Africa's amputees.
The devaluation of higher education

This is going to happen sooner rather than later. University education at this point is simply a trend - something that everyone does. You can see this not in the sciences as much as in the standard arts programs that 70% of the graduate population possess. The cost of these programs keep climbing, and the average wage does not.

Eventually, the tipping point will be reached and there will be more people in the middle class that cannot afford university without the promise of the high paying job that it gives - which it doesn't if a degree is commonplace.

Even better, European countries often fund their universities to almost 100%. When tax revenue drops off, these funds will eventually be cut. You can see this happening in Canada today.

Not many people are going to pay $70K for a four year program to become a career receptionist. Even less when it's perfectly clear that a high school educated trades apprentice can make a lot more.
Good article for pricing in general, but Joel doesn't seem to understand enterprise software sales. His analysis of bad idea #2 ignores ROI. This model works when there is real customer pain being solved by the application.
Young Entrepreneur resource
And 32-bit time. They may be using a representation that allows arbitrarily big numbers.
Seems a little overly pretentious, but also got some good resources on there.
> social reform must either be the republican or democrat position

Uhh, no. It just so happens that in this case some Republicans are the only people putting forward the idea of taxing medical benefits as ordinary income, to reduce the role of insurance in the system. I don't even vote, let alone think in terms of democrat vs republican.
hehe, yes I suppose. I was thinking two dimensional with the understanding that the number of dimensions to an argument (dimension == viewpoint) was infinite.

The argument itself though is very one dimensional. :)
Do you have anything more substantive?

Clearly some people make it work (Benioff, Ellison,...). Are you saying the people on HN specifically can't succeed?
I learned a huge amount from reading this book. I bought it second hand for perhaps 3 pounds. If it had cost 100 pounds it would still have been worth it for the gems I got out of it!
I work in enterprise software, and we have a fairly traditional sales and pricing model from what I know (a fair one, but nothing ground-breaking, aside from the fact that most of our licenses are yearly instead of perpetual). There are two things to consider.

First of all, as soon as you price as SaaS, you're seen as a cost center to be minimized, and you'll be able to charge far less even though you're providing a more valuable service by both developing the software AND running the IT. So ironically, it costs you more, and you can charge less for it. That just seems to be the way people evaluate these sorts of things: someone that would pay $500k per year for the license would probably balk at $500/user for 1000 users. Think of it as akin the app store effect: people are conditioned to SaaS being (relatively) cheap, but are used to enterprise software being expensive, so just like people expect iPhone apps to be irrationally cheap, they expect SaaS to somehow be cheaper for them than just buying the stuff.

Secondly, the software license is a small, small portion of their actual TCO of the software. A big company laying out $1 million a year for a software license might be spending 10x that in total to implement and integrate the system, do any necessary data extractions and transformations, train up new users, buy new hardware, etc.

I think about the best you can hope for is an enterprise vendor that delivers software that actually works and that doesn't price gouge you for doing it.
No, I'm saying that it's more enjoyable to poke your eyes out one at a time with tweezers than it is to make a business out of the enterprise market.

The whole reason that you can quote CEO's by name is that they are such an exception to the rule.

The people here at HN are much too smart to require the journey to success to be one of self induced torture - there is a much easier and happier path to success.
Did you consider an AppExchange App and piggybacking off Salesforce?

Also remember that the larger prospects are going to be more "old-school", so aim for the small early adopters.
Duff's device: do + switch fall-through = loop unrolling
In social software there's a big and important gap between the possibility of a social behavior and the existence of that social behavior. In this case, your theory (shared by TechCrunch apparently) seems to be that Facebook, which has proved that there is an enormous market for private social communication, is going to develop a massive volume of public postings, public discussion, and become a destination site for following public discussion.

Here's my theory: no way.

- Defaults rule. If the facebook default is for private than that will be the bulk of conversation and that will set the expectation about how to respond (i.e. it limits forwarding of good posts to strangers).

- Both sites benefit from being simple and easy to use. For Facebook to suddenly imbue every activity (posting, reading, and finding friends) with an understanding of access controls would make it a much more complex site to understand.

Facebook may be copying features, but I don't think it has a chance of becoming the primary tool for public asynchronous messaging any more than it has of becoming the primary blogging platform or primary email platform.

Twitter, is not copying Facebook features because those features don't support its goal for public discourse. Instead they are developing deep contacts with media.

In the end, Facebook may end up with more users than Twitter, but that's an indication of the size of the markets not of one company beating the other.

Both sites grew last month by the way, so it does seem like talking about the demise of either one is backward. Twitter's 6% monthly growth rate compounds to more than 100% per year (if only my investments would do that).
pretty great redesign.

I'd make the "add to divyshot" button say "add as friend" and possibly remove the "Home" menu bar icon (clicking the logo should do that)
C's default fall-through in case statements has long been its most controversial single feature; Duff observed that

"This code forms some sort of argument in that debate, but I'm not sure whether it's for or against."

hack^2 - it's so brilliant and so ugly, even his author doesn't know which is more.
Then you install packages the wrong way.

IE, yum install mysql* ruby* gem* will get you everything

> And compiling your own is trivial in Arch, a ~10-line description file vs the nightmare that is rpmbuild.

Now you're just trolling.
Paul is enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, the Inventors Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

"I had to build it, make it and perfect it," Paul said in 2002.

"I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it's the right one," he said in 2002, "and it will probably whip the guy with 20 notes."

A hacker if there ever was one. Most of us still enjoy the output of his output. RIP.
The argument from TDWTF that 'it's too late to change it now' is pretty much an admission of guilt. Lawyer up, spend a few hundred on a C&D and then register your TM.
The most difficult part here is probably around integrations. As you point out, piggy-backing on some existing system is one way to make that easier, but it makes it hard to replace core parts of the system, and it makes the SaaS model far less attractive. I think it's a great idea where it can work, but you're not going to replace the SAP/Oracle deployments themselves that way, or the legacy mainframes.
Which is of course the big problem with school vouchers. Much of the initial usage would be to subsidize religious education (since almost all private schools are religious here).
I've come to similar personal conclusions about what success means to me (although the speaker articulated it better I possibly could have).

The idea that you should define your success by what you are willing to lose/give up on resonated strongly with me. A few years back, I gave up a much better paying job and 'better' career prospects in the US after an Ivy League education, to move back home and stay closer to my dad (who'd just suffered a catastrophic stroke). While I might not be considered super successful in the popular sense, I've redefined the meaning of success for myself. I've realized I value relationships over traditional measures of success and I am willing to lose some of the latter to get more of the former.

Incidentally, this realization has been strangely liberating. I'm completely at ease at college reunions, even when I get the odd snicker from classmates who are more 'successful'.
This is the beginning of the beginning of the end of twitter stories.
This is the end of my reading beginning of the end of twitter stories.
Mint Receives $14m in Funding But Still Only In The USA Market, Why?
That makes sense, maybe sleep(rand(1.0 - time_spent))
What are your skills?

developer/designer/other
Or just sleep(1.0 - time_spent)
Right. Until the economy sours and vice presidents look to cut budgets to save their asses. Once one of them asks, "Why are we paying $100K per month in Phoenix when we have almost the same thing running in Cleveland for $10K?" That's when you have to be ready for a "corporate mandate".
Is that realy so? Can we create system where person A is realy good at X, and person B is really good at Y, and thus both are respected (and respecting each other)?

In other words, can we make satuts into a partially-ordered set?
The example makes sense, but it's not explained well.

Remember that he gave no specifics of what the software does.

Suppose the software is for calculating commissions and stores the data on a centralized server. Now suppose they charge by how much data you store. This would be the "variable price" he tries to portray and the price would be somewhat correlated with number of sales which may appeal to some agencies.
This model works when there is real customer pain being solved by the application.

I think the point here is that that is rarely the case. Mainly because the "customer" that buys is disconnected so much from the "customer" that will use the software that both the pain and the ability of the application to solve said pain are woefully misunderstood.
> I think that the name they've chosen ('pirate') is one of the worst names they could have picked.

If we'd given ourselves a more boring name -- something like Copyright and Patent Law Reform Party -- no-one would pay us any attention. Not only that, we needed to use the Pirate name so we could piggyback off Piratpartiet's mindshare.

So realistically the choice of name was a no-brainer.

And it's a bit like the gay community reclaiming "queer".
I assumed it was Sony being 'uncool.'
do you code or play more of a business role?
4Chan Cleaner And Image Expander
> However, it has the advantage, for beginners, of being very close to the picture of real numbers they already have.

Haha, no. And here's why.

> Because of irritating difficulties such as the need to carry digits and to identify 0.999999.... with 1

Not only does this not fit in with people's existing picture of real numbers, people become emotionally attached to the opposite with a fervor unknown in any other part of mathematics! (Second place would be Cantor's theorem for real numbers, but you have to know a little more to be passionately opposed to that.)

I think even for beginners who are willing to believe that 0.99999... = 1, they are going to have trouble agreeing that 0.99999... < 1 is a false statement.
> Before long you realize that not only is the 'catalogue' a lot larger than in any for-pay store, the quality is usually better, there is no need to part with your personal information and so on. Convenience always was a great selling point.

And there's no shitty DRM.

> Maybe it would be a good thing if everybody that ever downloaded a song would voluntarily report to their local jail to be locked up for a week or so. But all at the same day, just to show how ridiculous this is.

LOL. We may try that as a stunt.
This story is summed up very well by a comment on the page made by sorryoldman - "It sounds like this:
“You had her first all right, but I slept with her and she’s way too hot for me to give up now. So bugger off and dont come looking for her. She’s too sexy and she’s mine now.”
I hope this last sentence puts things in persepctive."
R.I.P. Les Paul
It's a cute hack and I'm sure it used to matter. I saw it used in djb's qmail. Is it worth even thinking about it? I don't know. I tend to not be a fan of these micro-optimizations on modern hardware.
Nine-Year Old Whiz-Kid Writes iPhone Application
Man charged with infecting 3,000 computers
I think you're confusing Trademark and Copyright.
He can trademark his site name, but it would be ridiculous to forbid the name "Programming Praxis" as a header for a column or subsection of another website. It's just too generic.
This man was phenomenal. Not just a great musician, but a real hacker, inventing the solid-body electric guitar and multitrack recording.

And he loved what he did, and kept doing to the end.
Microsoft Office Sales banned in 60 Days?
Trademarking the generic title "Programming Praxis" seems a bit over the board. There are too many trademarks -- everywhere! To me, this seems to be contradicting the open-source and free knowledge spirit!

As one commenter in the original article put it: "He’s a prick. You’re a winey bastard. Move on, yo."
200 Character Processing Competition
A fun competition to create eye candy in the Processing language in under 200 characters.
The value of this is extremely limited. The Perl that most people write can be parsed just fine.

(Just like many programs halt, even though it's proved that this is not the case for any input to any turing machine.)
Wow, that guy sure does have a stick up his ass, doesn't he.
alex responded on proggit

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9a7zr/programmi...
Sounds like opportunity calling.

Mint obviously doesn't want to go through the effort of customizing versions of the software for different markets. (Which, in the financial sector I'd imagine is substantial work) My thought is that they feel there is much more market to win in the US without a similar expenditure.

What an enterprising young person should do is - call them up and offer to do the work for them for a single market. You could take the risk in terms of the full cost of development and negotiate a cut of every user from the country in question.

Unless they can see expansion in the very near future, they should jump all over this deal.
Further anti-joeltest hints:

You are only posting the job ad on craiglist for free

You ask for guru level C++,C# and Java in the ad but the app is in VB6/PHP

Programmers don't get a corner private office, they share a room with the call center and sales staff.

They don't get an aeron chair and height adjustable desk. They get something government surplus with at least one broken leg in the corner of shipping and receiving warehouse.

Your office doesn't have views of central park. It has views of a railyard and the police regularly raiding the junkyard next door

And finally, if you are paying $40,000 you are hiring RockBand playing programmers, not Rockstar programmers - there is a sublte difference.
"School vouchers to get kids out of studying evolution and into bible classes is a much murkier idea"

But you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. You're basically saying "People deserve freedom! But not so much freedom that they can do things I don't like!"

Who draws the line, and where?
You don't specify a link, and your website has no jobs page with job descriptions, etc.

How do you expect people to apply?
Daily WTF maliciously infringes Programming Praxis trademark
When you say the markup is not very good. What do you mean exactly?

We don't have a graphic designer, so I can understand the lack of aesthetic appeal. However, are you seeing issues with the CSS/HTML? How do you measure how well it works?
I think there's something to be said for actually walking the walk, however cushy it might be.

And to me, the most interesting part of his setup was the use of technology to balance sources of energy generation and consumption, and report on all of it. It's not just finding new ways to make energy, it's about using it more intelligently, which is a place where computers can help us make great strides.
No harm done!

My response doesn't make sense anymore now that you edited yours! :-) I am leaving it unedited however.
Sounds like you misinterpreted your customer requirements, but that doesn't mean everyone has to.

If I make an investment, say in a mutual fund, I am "using" my money even if the mutual fund is "using" my money.

The "use" in each case is different, but the value needs to align with the buyer.

If a child wants candy, it's up to the candy manufacturer to realize that they have to sell "healthy" candy, because the buyer is the parent. But the parent "uses" the candy in giving the child a treat, making them happy, and not hurting their health. That has to come across in the marketing.
VCs forced to wait longer to see returns in most industries
Oh yeah, when I'm sick I really want my care to wait on the outcome of a bidding war between hospitals. How about a reverse eBay, where I post my life-threatening condition and hospitals bid on it in a dutch auction until the price gets low enough for my insurance company to click 'buy it now'. And if nobody bids, I just pay the auction listing fee, and die relatively economically. I mean, what could go wrong!

OK, I am not being entirely serious here. but I think market solutions don't work that well when it comes to healthcare because patients can neither be fully informed consumers (without a medical degree) nor can they exercise a free choice about when they plan to fall ill. Consider: having your house burn down is also a bit unpredictable, so you buy insurance for that. And indeed, the costs of a home fire can run into the hundreds of thousands, not incomparable to the cost of health problems. And yet, fire insurance is way, way cheaper than health insurance. Why?

Hint: it's not due to competing fire departments. We used to have those, but we got rid of them for a reason.
He's probably referring to the bulk of inline styling and javascript, and using tables for your layout. It should be fixed, but honestly the design has bigger problems than the code right now.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I talk about this a bit in my blog at www.newsforhackers.com
Health Reform and Small Business
You're generally right about complex specification and verification being popular in the defense and aerospace industries. However, I think that you may be mistaking a secure microkernel for a real-time one.

There are hard real-time variants of L4 out there, but unless that was a primary goal of the NICTA team, I don't think you're likely to see many copies of that kernel running a ballistic missile's avionics package.

A verified secure OS kernel like this would more likely be used as a substrate for building secure servers and workstations, network routers, or mobile communications devices.
Stats is one of the most important subject that modern, educated humans can know. We are confronted with a deluge of data and statistical figures that most people are not in any way equipped to understand.

What ends up happening is that people can make basically unsupported (or even erroneous) claims, and instead of those claims being rightfully recognized as bullshit or at least just conjecture, they are implanted in brains as "statistical facts."
New ICANN policy stops domain tasting
Anand Babu lives in the US, but Anand Avati (and others) work out of BLR. I have known them for quite some time and I think Avati is one of the best Engineers I have met in my life.

The kind of work they do is also awesome. I don't see ZR as an American company outsourcing easy work to India.
I would also like to state that I agree with you on most points. I am an Indian, trying to do a startup in India.
Touching the Hot Stove
"Anand Babu lives in the US,"

And that is what I said.

"I have known them for quite some time and I think Avati is one of the best Engineers I have met in my life."

I don't know Mr.Avati. I will gladly take your word for it.

" I don't see ZR as an American company outsourcing easy work to India."

This is a matter of perception. We don't have to agree completely to respect each others' opinion. With respect to ZR in particular (vs the Indian software industry in general) I only claim that ZR is an American company with an Indian office. No more. I am well aware of the talent level of AB and his colleagues.

The difference in perception between Jacques and me is on whether ZR is an American company or an Indian startup. I respect his opinion while sticking to mine. And ZR doesn't invalidate the point I made anyway (which was that ZR is an exception, not the rule.)