skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gowers has a few dozen short pieces of this sort, listed at http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/mathsindex.html. Another one that might be of interest is "why study finite-dimensional vector spaces in the abstract if they are all isomorphic to R^n?" (http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/vspaces.html) The answer, roughly, is that the notation is less ugly if you don't have to keep track of coordinates, and that the abstract theory carries over better to the infinite-dimensional case.
object arrow attribute is just not as smooth
Could This Really Be the Apple Tablet OS?
PHP custom framework!
An integer expressing dollars, cents, or hundredths of a cent depending on the level of precision you need is the usual best practice.

Using floating point math for money is just asking for trouble.
No doubt. To continue the analogy, I usually want some guy who's played a hundred gigs, with all kinds of different musical styles, and is going to be focused on doing his part well so he can go home early.
I'd love to get feedback on the implementation and idea. I want to make this more useful.
> you ideally want the guy who, first thing, explains to you why doing it in PHP is a bad idea and how he'll do it with a more powerful tool in a day

No, you don't. The last thing you need on a team is a person who's first thing is to start whining about things that cannot be changed. That kind of thing can quickly spoil the atmosphere. Rather, you want the person that accepts that things aren't perfect and use the strengths of the situation and works around the weaknesses. He'll need to do that anyway, even if you use the best "language du jour"...

Not accepting the weaknesses just leads to constantly chasing the perfect state while never completing the project.
That's a good question really. And one which the site kind of just wishes to raise.

What makes Apple & Microsoft products closed, and what makes Red Hat or Neuros open? Clearly it's because their products and the companies themselves have a set of qualities which determine that.

Those qualities aren't completely clear, or defined, and yet, it's pretty generally accepted that Apple is closed and Red Hat is open.

Most people interested in open-source are aware of a some of those qualities and look them up when deciding on purchases, but they're shifting and changing (as Apple recently showed with the introduction of the MacBook Air which didn't have a removeable battery - does making it more difficult to swap out a specific component in a device make it more 'closed'?).

I think our target market has an idea of the qualities we're trying to quantify, but the real question is, do they care? Do they care enough to submit the products that they do the research on for themselves, to a site like isitopen?
That's already been posted to HN in the last few days.
What's so difficult about having a PR person contact a blogger who is getting significant play on a story he wrote? Just contact him, clarify the situation. If he is reasonable, he or she will write an update and we move on.

I don't care about who Dvorak is, or his history, or "satisfy"-ing his need for attention. I'm looking at this from a broader perspective: is this administration as in touch with the minute by minute news cycle as they claim to be? Are they able to recognize a story as it grows from one blog post to thousands of retweets and facebook messages? Do they know how to handle that kind of brushfire exposure?
Lucky Sleep Mutants Need Fewer Zzzzzs
"Beginners" here mostly means "first-year undergraduates reading mathematics at the University of Cambridge". I can assure you that those people very seldom have any trouble agreeing that "0.999... < 1" is false.

[EDITED to insert the word "mostly"; I expect WTG wasn't thinking only of his and his colleagues' first-year students.]
"It goes to show that thinking up the right regression to run can be worth millions."
Maybe one should write an engine for deciding which regression to invest in.
Ten Minutes That Mattered: Marc Andreessen
This is my first time posting... can somebody tell me how my submitted title got changed to something else? :)
Same reason startup founders take VC. They might be able to do it themselves, especially these days. But they want to be BIG.
Hacker News has editors, mostly YC alumni, who patrol the site to delete irrelevant articles, and try to ensure that titles are clear.
The menu REALLY pisses me off. It's like being buggered by a traffic cone.
I have spent a lot of my time contemplating "big ideas" both when I was a PhD candidate (various set theory proofs, signal processing ideas) and in my own software (machine learning methods and application to gambling etc) and I find that mostly thinking about this stuff is just mental masturbation. I typically found some flaw later on and I would have been much better off with more manageable problems that gave more direct, smaller, higher probability of success profits. Basically, I think if you don't have the resources to implement it, it's not a good idea for you. Of course, if you have some amazing insight into a hard problem (how many $$$$$ problems are out there that haven't had serious attention from seriously smart people?) then you can build a prototype and seek funding but I would be very very cautious.
Radiohead Says No More Albums
And compare that to the battery solution:
20W light at 12V: 1.7amps continuous
4 hours x 1.7A= 7 Amp-hours

That's about the capacity of a small 12V lead-acid battery that you can carry in one hand. Weighs about 4 lbs. I use one to provide LED lighting in my chicken coop because it's too far from the house to run AC power out there.

No contest: in the absence of extenuating factors, a cheap battery is better than the "innovative" (?) water storage method for such a small amount of energy.
Though less well known than Les Paul, Tom Dowd (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Dowd) was another amazing recording industry hacker. If you're interested in the Les Paul story, you might also like the documentary about Tom Dowd: Tom Dowd and the Language of Music.
It's a special (and quite trivial) "kind of equivalence".

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_class
Yeah let's hear some guesses as to what the name is. My guess is The Leibniz.
Hmm,

Great point: not only does optimization cost in understanding and system fragility but it can become stale over time and invisibly so.

If you're working on the application level, testing and segregating optimizations like this seems important. Systems level people would operate differently though ...
I don't think this theorized tablet is for coding your giant Ruby on Rails site with a massive Textmate project list on a memory consuming Safari debugging session. (Actually I don't even think the Macbook Air with non-upgradable 2GB fits for that either.) If you're doing "real work", which usually means Photoshop, all kinds of coding, and other heavy duty activities, this probably isn't for you. The sheer thought of anybody doing those things on a tiny, slow netbook with a 9" screen is just insane to me.

The tablet is probably meant for surfing websites, sending emails (take a pick between built-in MobileMail, GMail app, or GMail through Safari), SaaS website apps, and most likely some games.

Think Crunchpad competitor, not netbook or full sized laptop competitor.
Computer viruses slow African expansion
Oh, and I should add that you'll be well-prepared for Ruby or Python, if you go this route.
I think the people who buy enterprise software should read this. It's about "how to get raped" and can teach you some policies to counter things like this.

They also forgot: Try doing a cash back-hander to the CTO, which is considered almost standard practice in the consultancy business in the UK. I could name some rather big names on that front.

Best buy (which I will get flamed off the site for): Buy SharePoint, MS CRM and a number of Office licenses and hire a couple of decent people permanently to look after it and build your apps on it. It's cheaper and you get what you want, according to your schedule.
Ok... I'll refrain from "Apple WIN" titles from now on. :) Thanks!
Book Review: How to Talk to Anyone (Leil Londes)
As my last little review (of Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear) went down very well and several people commented that it would be nice to see more of the same here's another go :) This is the first book since then that has really seemed to be HN material (still finishing off "Snowball", the Warren Buffet biography - man it's long!). It's a neat book called "How to Talk to Anyone" by Leil Londes (as an aside the writer is female in case the gender of the name is bugging you too :D)

The tag line to this book is "92 little tricks for big success in relationships"; and that's pretty much what it is. In essence it is "hacking" your social interactions - or perhaps tweaking them is a better word.

If you had to sum it up in one go it is basically lots of tips about speech, language, stance, body language etc. to be used when chatting to people. The tips aren't actually "short" either (this is not a pocket book type of thing) but rich in lots of detail (though they are summed up into a single boxed out paragraph at the end of chapters for easy reference). Just flicking through those can be useful. best of all she assigns each one a "fun" name which makes it a bit easier to remember them (well, for me anyway)

Now, applications. This was on my reading list becase I am currently interested in body language and social interaction (and how to improve it) inspired by the 30days social sky diving another HNer has been posting about. The most obvious use that strikes you is socialising with the opposite sex (and quite a few of the chapters of focused on the idea of "seduction") - something I guess the stereotype says some of us HN peeps need help with. The beauty is a lot of the tips are (is?) tweaks everyone could use (no matter what your current level of social interactivity).

While the opposite sex examples are those generally used throughout the book all of the tips apply to any social interaction; one way it's helped me (and I see this as the main relevance for HN) is in my work relations. A lot of the tweaks are about coming across more trustworthy and with more value. Since adopting some of the ideas I have noticed slightly better relationships with current and new clients.

I freely admit not all the tips are useful. And some are things you could probably work out in 10 seconds on your own - but it is facsinating to see it all really explained by an expert in social interaction. If nothing else it has opened my eyes to the fact that we respond to each other in so many different and tiny ways - I think that more than any specific tweak has been most beneficial.

In a sentence; This book can help you understand, hack, tweak and improve your interactions socially and in the workplace - possibly giving you the edge in important business situations.

(on a related note I have "What Every Body is Saying", a book on body language, by Joe Navarro lined up next - looks like a good read along the same lines).
There are a litany of economical, cultural, geographical, and other issues at play here. Plenty of opportunities for enterprising startups to solve problems.
1) Connect 2) Nauseate me 3) Go
That would be the user wearing the boot up his ass. Running unapproved software (e.g. portable FireFox on my locked down machine) would be grounds for immediate dismissal in this org. IE 6 forever (sigh)
It's more than that. A label takes care marketing, sales, and other things in order to free the artist up for art. Selling music and film, esp. through the normal channels, is a complicated process, and it's a lot easier with a label to do it for you.
Just like Aids....
Yes agreed. But if the section is identical in theme to that of the Programming Praxis blog I think he has a legitimate point (or at least has some rationale for making the point)
I thought my screen was just dirty! What does it mean?
I find it interesting that someone, assumably high up enough in the pecking order, is sourcing information like this. I've always been interested in the psychology of it. What's the motivation? The cheap thrill to see your handy work through a third party on a popular website? Cashing in on a rise in stock (+3 today)? Or maybe it's false information being planted and this is all sanctioned by marketing?
Microsoft backs long life for IE6
You must obey: Unwritten laws of technology
This is great, a few years back I was working with a local highschool to setup remote terminals using the NX protocol, the project ended up going nowhere though due to a lack of hardware.
In other words, you would need such a ridiculously large tower that the idea is not really viable. 3 tons of water for 80 watt hours? That's 37kg of water per watt hour. I use more like 4 kilowatt hours in a night; that's almost 150 tons! You're starting to talk about a serious, and seriously expensive, engineering project.

Maybe it would be viable if you lived next to a convenient cliff or other ready structure to simply place a big tank on top of with a pipe hanging down but if you actually have to build the structure yourself it sounds like a non starter. And that's without even considering the other engineering hassles you'd have, like corrosion, filtering seawater, maintenance, etc.
swiss ???
The quote three lines in from Yorke is: “None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. Not straight off,”

which doesn't strike me as sharing the finality of the story's title.
I don't see a contradiction between the article's title and the subject you mention. Various economic factors distort the provision of healthcare to the point that it kills people. The title naturally highlights this crucial point, understandably so given the author's personal experience with this.
New Screening Could Lead to More Potent Cancer Drugs
So we use it because it is simpler to say, not simpler to understand. Makes sense! :-)
Have you attempted to take advice and apply it to your daily interactions? Thoughts or comments?
I've only read "The Architecture of Happiness", but I really enjoyed it.
Care to explain for the sports-impaired amoungst us?
I thought the iPhone supported server IMAP searches since 3.0?
I'm tired of health care articles based on anecdote. His entire article is seems biased by the fact that his dad died.
Startups and The Economy. (NPR Audio - 16 minutes in)
So this operating system has 'flawless operation'. I take it the C compiler has also been verified, then, not to mention the cpu microcode.
Trinity....named after Newton's notebook?
Appealing when presented in the abstract, but I have nightmarish visions of such a system.

On the one hand, you'd further motivate those consumers who were already likely to avoid preventive care and ignore symptoms until they require costly (to me as contributor to the catastrophic plan) emergency and intensive care. And the author's position that folks would be able to withdraw funds that exceed a certain ceiling adds the perverse incentive to risk not spending this money, with the downside being absorbed by the catastrophic plan.

On the other hand, you'd do nothing to discourage consumers with irrational fears about their health from distorting prices upwards, or to discourage unscrupulous providers from fomenting those fears. The plan he describes takes fee-for-service and all its problems to a whole new level. I think of things like the celebrity anti-vaccine mess and the healthcare debate with its distorted media coverage and disingenuous advertising, and I have hard time accepting a consumer-driven market succeeding, even with all the government-collected and -analyzed data in the world.

Even worse, I fear that such a system would result in a tiered system, where the best and brightest providers provide excessive care to those with means while the rest of us continue to struggle with barely adequate, barely affordable care.

I don't think that any system that relies on healthcare consumers making the choice between limiting their usage of healthcare services and spending money is destined for success. Providers need to be rewarded for providing the best outcomes for the lowest cost with the fewest mistakes, not the most and most expensive services. Significant efforts must be made to improve the public health of Americans. The conversation should be about how to make those things happen. All this debate about who pays when is just a side show that is obstructing real reform.
Subject line only
Deletionists slowing Wikipedia's growth
In a company like Apple which has a careful crafted brand image and huge marketing clout, I the leak might not be unintentional.

The thing is, speculation will happen, so it makes sense to manage it by controlling the most credible speculation (thereby ruling out the more wildly speculative stuff that could reflect negatively).

If it is released as a leak then Apple has no obligation to live into it if things change, but they get to co-opt the chatter so it's the best of both worlds.

-edit- grammar.
Sounds interesting, although I wonder how closely related a startup would have to be to Red Gate's area of expertise.
iirc they do databasey stuff?
Bad example. The whole discussion is about reporting percentages of percentages.

Look, it's pretty clear that hackers have left the building and let marketroids rush in. Feel free to use your ill-defined metric. If you have the least bit of intellectual curiosity, you'd let everyone know what you'd report when the value goes from 0 to a non-zero value. That is all.
Actually, we tend to use a limited set of things that's designed to parse sanely.

people using a 'sub ()' prototype for anything except a CONSTANT_NAME will be taken behind the bikeshed, shot, eviscerated, cremated, resurrected, shot again, and then told it's now their responsibility to project manage the repainting as penance.
Both, and very efficiently. Experiance in UI design(I make people say DAMN! when they see my design), coding(PHP(CodeIgniter and Kohana framework), MySQL, jQuery, ...) along with good marketing(just call me Seth Godins son, for now) and good team management skills.
Developer and designer AND business guy, and very efficiently. Experiance in UI design(I make people say DAMN! when they see my design), coding(PHP(CodeIgniter and Kohana framework), MySQL, jQuery, ...) along with good marketing(just call me Seth Godins son, for now) and good team management skills.

After all being an entrepreneur is all about using the tools you have and making a good opportunity out of them, right? :)
I have one or more openings for the role of 'entity that pays cash or equity in exchange for me helping them'. I offer several benefits, the primary of which is excellent code and craftsmanship from someone who's a true geek and been programming for over 25 years. Readers of HN will get special consideration. Bonus points if you allow me to work with Python, Clojure, Linux or iPhone, and work from home (most or all of the time; though occasional travel and on-site meetings are cool.) For more info and the means to "apply" see the link in my profile. I am serious.
Microsoft isn't going to kill something that indirectly keeps businesses on Windows.

However, businesses that "can't justify" upgrading their software are kidding themselves. It's not even a software problem...maybe no one educated them about the realities of hardware failure. When your PCs start dying, that's a heck of a time to figure out that you can't even buy something that will run your carefully-unmaintained business software.
Advances? The fact that some fraction of major-label artists get promoted into superstars?
It's more likely that Facebook (or Ning) would begin to dig into your desktop (or Jetpack) versus the other way around.

(unless Rockmelt is itself a desktop shell replacement)
bustaname.com is your friend, type in a bunch of different keywords and pick the one you like
Registration is not required for a trademark in the US.
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/tac/doc/basic/register.htm
"ICANN said the new policy resulted in a 99.7 percent decrease in domain deletions from June 2008 to April 2009."

Looks like they nailed it. Can't ask for much better than that.
Where tech and philosophy collide
HiPPO stands for "Highest Paid Person's Opinion"
Launchly - The StackOverflow of Website Feedback
perl tries to be more human friendly; the trick is to write the code in the way that seems to best express your intent to a human reading it, and assume that the compiler will do the right thing.

Later you'll be able to work out the rules that it uses to resolve things and take advantage of them, but perl is designed for people who -don't- want to be thinking about what the compiler's doing while writing code.

Alternatively, you can simply -not use- the syntax sugar and thereby avoid needing to worry about it for your own code.
Turn HTML5's audio tag into a drum machine with JS
it was the iphone safari useragent that was detected in the wild before the release. here is a link, dunno if it was the first sighting though...

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/iphone-user-agent/
> faster discharge rates

This phrase is the key to understanding why flywheels are seldom used. Read up on what happens if the wheel jams, cracks, or otherwise malfunctions.
Ask HN: Testing your site for XSS exploits
What tools or techniques do you use to test for and secure your site from XSS exploits?
Another interesting idea: Even in the absence of home-based electricity generation, the cost of energy varies based on time of day and based on season. In a lot of areas, power used at 6pm is more expensive than power used at 3am. So in cases where this discrepancy is greater than 3 cents/kW-H, it would make sense to have this battery charge up and 3am to handle your evening power usage.
I think a regex with # in it is common enough, but passed to a one-arg function? And followed on the same line by another statement? No. The example takes several things that could be individually probable and packs them into a single rather unlikely line.
Embrace Minimalism
500MB for 100K equals something like 5KB per message. And that's in the compressed form I assume. Since it's all text, with a decent compression, that's still 20KB of text per message (which I think can be achieved if you strip out the excessive html, styling elements..etc). Still not bad at all to have all mails in your pocket.
[Disclaimer: I am a big fan of Radiohead and at the same time listen to music almost exclusively album-for-album. No shuffle play for me, thanks.]

I seriously hope that they at least always release a couple of tracks together. Whether they call that an "album" doesn't matter to me.

I fail to imagine myself to buy a new song every couple of weeks and listen to each of them separately. Am I supposed to listen to new music for just four minutes and then skip to something else?

Complex, good music (which, for me, includes that of Radiohead) deserves attention. You cannot build up attention in such a short amount of time. An album is more tan a collection of songs. Every song not only stands for itself but also serves as a frame for all other songs.

If I had a short attention span, I would listen to the radio. (Ok, I actually do have a short attention span, but well...)
Hacky perl can't be highlighted

Sensibly written perl highlights just fine - and you really need to commit intentional pathology to break the modern vim/emacs/etc. highlighters.

Personally I find syntax highlighters less helpful and more annoying than the wavy green line grammar check in word, but as a consultant I get to use editors with highlighting often enough and don't remember the last time I broke one ...