skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One interesting thing that comes to mind is spinor calculus.

Spinor calculus is a bit like geometric algebra; there is a mention to them in the paper (more precisely, to "twistors"). The central idea of spinor calculus relates like this: take your 4-vector (v^0, v^1, v^2, v^3) and form a 2x2 Hermitian matrix by:

V = v^0 I + v^1 s_1 + v^2 s_2 + v^3 s_3

where s_1, x_2, and s_3 are the Pauli matrices. Then it turns out that det V is the 4-norm of v^\mu:

det V = v^0 v^0 − v^1 v^1 − v^2 v^2 − v^3 v^3.

The Lorentz transforms must preserve the 4-norm and hence det V, but they must also be linear and map Hermitian matrices to Hermitian matrices, so that given a lorentz transform t, there is a Lorentz matrix L such that:

matrix (t v) = L (matrix v) L†

(that's not 100% accurate because it can't do PT flips; I think P is something like V → V^-1 while a 4-flip is V → -V; combine them together to get T). The Lorentz transforms are just the group det L = 1 -- the Möbius transformations SL(2, C).

The elegance of this comes when you look at null vectors, where det V = 0, making V a projection -- so V = u ⊗ u† for some u. The action of a Lorentz transform on u is then just u → L u, where L is the Lorentz matrix. Moreover when you work out what the ratio of the components of u are, tracing back through the mathematics, you get varios stereographic projections (x + i y) / (R - z), depending whether it's future-pointing or past-pointing.

So all the light that is coming in towards you is a bunch of null vectors that you can paint on a celestial sphere, projected to the complex plane by a stereographic projection, with Lorentz boosts as Möbius transformations of those points.

Immediate freebies: when a marble is speeding past you it still "looks like" a marble to you; it just seems "rotated" in a strange way, because Möbius transformations map circles to circles. Yes if you try to "work backwards" in your coordinates you'll construct a warped model of the system which is Lorentz-contracted, but that's not what you'll see.

Another freebie: as you accelerate faster and faster, the stars all "tilt" in the direction that you're going, crowding around the point you're travelling to. This is in sharp contrast to all those spacey TV shows where the stars "streak away." One can imagine that for a photon's timeless life, the event of its origin is the only thing behind it; and the entire rest of the universe is in front of it.

It actually gets even better; it turns out that you get to unify the spinor equations for the massless neutrino ∇_{AA'} u^A = 0; the photon ∇_{AA'} u^{AB} = 0, and the weak-field limit for gravity is something like ∇_{AA'} u^{ABCD} = 0 for the graviton. (That may not be 100% correct; I am working from memory here.)

All of that comes from something which is basically a quaternion/geometric algebra application to spacetime.
Huh? RAII is basically the only way to write exception-safe code in C++.
That looks really cool. I'll have to read more about it. Thanks!
Haha, that's true. But I'd also need a lot of capital that I'm willing to risk... I'll check out sx though. Thanks.
That's US stuff, I don't deal much with US politics. Our (German) politicians chose to ignore the growing numbers and problems, instead opting to mistreat refugees in order to deter others from coming.

Brave New World.
This has also been going on in New Zealand (Auckland), heating up considerably over the last 2+ years, with all of the same concerns. California is just one more place that newly-wealthy young Chinese find as an attractive immigration destination and they are moving and buying accordingly.
The 'save' side-effect provides an incentive to upvote which, in turn, improves the quality of the site for all. Separating save and upvote would break this.
That's a very long article. Does it make the claim that the fradulent fraction of the foreign investor (which I predict is small) is large enough to have a significant impact on the housing price?
Swing Copters Is The Latest Game From The Creator Of Flappy Bird
The Invisible Skyscraper Of Software
Virgin Trains apparently offers £12.50 (one-way) service to London every 20 minutes. http://www.virgintrains.co.uk/go-by-train/manchester/
And there's nothing that would preclude you guys from simulating geothermal with them.

1. Dig down 50-100 feet

2. Make a foundation and catch pan

3. Put in an elevated platform to hold containers

4. Lower 5-50 containers onto elevated platforms

5. Install first order heat exchangers downstairs

6. Put "roof" on

7. Cover with 30 (or more) feet of dirt or whatever you prefer

Perhaps install a bridge crane and a shaft to the surface so that you can swap power units out without digging down again. Just make incredibly massive covers (like 10ft thick concrete) without cranes on-site at the surface so that terrorists wouldn't be able to hijack stuff once they made it through the front gate.

It might look something like this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/10/google_data_center_v...

The idea of simulating geothermal is that you'll have a bunch of power generation equipment on the surface that runs on heat. It just happens that it's not a "natural" geothermal well but a man-made one.
It also completely forbids the use of exceptions. I can understand that for their stated purpose of working with non-exception-safe legacy code, but it shouldn't be extended to other circumstances.
>it wasn't in Visual Studio last I checked

The upcoming version has it.
Solve Problems in 4 Steps
Robotics and machine learning are two entirely different beasts. If you want to go into machine learning, definitely opt-in for the statistics side. Machine learning is arguably more about statistics than about AI.
To elaborate, The idea is that this is our Tesla Roadster to get to disrupt an out of touch industry, and to get to in-pain, in-need markets, and to get through regulation quickly. The next step is the scaled, grid-competitive reactor- our "model E".

The first ever commercial reactor was a micro reactor, just 5 MWe, outside San Francisco started by GE. These huge companies have lost their way in innovation and off-grid markets have changed dramatically in recent years.

How appropriate is it then for a new Silicon Valley company to start again, disrupting with a new competitive micro reactor...!
There's no better place to start than Alexandrescu's eponymous Modern C++ Design http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Design-Generic-Programming-Patt.... Scott Meyers will soon come out with "Effective C++11" which from the table of contents looks like it will do a great job of covering the new language features.

As for coding standards, I suggest a book by the same author plus the current chair of the standard committee: http://www.amazon.com/Coding-Standards-Rules-Guidelines-Prac.... Another commenter has suggested the Google C++ Coding Standards, but despite their popularity they do not conform very well to "Modern C++" as I understand it.
It has been the policy of my lab, and many others, to ignore journal policies on publishing manuscript versions, and post them on our website after the journal publishes the paper. We've never heard of any complaints about this practice, and it results in the papers being available on Google Scholar.
The problem is where the money comes from: in Russia and china, alot of it is corruption based and buying property abroad is a great way to launder it as well as prepare an exit strategy. This isn't all of it: we just lack decent domestic investment options in china and have no choice but to look abroad. But the sort of balance that will lead to is bound to be bad for the global economy.
Fair enough. I do think there's a middle ground between "actively seeks to write new patents" and "full RMS." It's not typically realistic to avoid working at places that hold software patents, but in my (limited) experience you can at least avoid adding to the problem. Ideally, you could negotiate for the patent clause to be removed from the employment contract before you even begin the job. I understand that's not always possible.

I used to work at a company that started out without any software patents, and at some point management decided to encourage the engineers to help generate some. I politely informed my manager that I wouldn't be participating, a few others did the same, and as far as I know none of us were penalized. Sometimes it's possible to just say "I'd really rather not" and have that be the end of it.

I realize I'm speaking from a position of privilege, in that I have only myself to support and I live in an area full of employment opportunities. But I do think it's valid to encourage people to put some thought into the outcomes of their actions in this area.

Regarding another comment in this thread about Facebook's patent attitude being purely defensive: that may be the case now, and I do believe it is, but in five years, who knows who'll be running the company?
We have 300 million guns in the USA, of course there are going to be less shootings in the UK vs the USA.
Too late, sorry.
It works in that context too. It would have to be a Small Frog (proper noun) to make sense as "green Small frog".

What an interesting and unexpected thing to find on HN :D
Exceptions have a significant performance impact, and making code exception safe distorts your interfaces. Insisting on no exceptions is reasonable for these and other reasons, even for new code.
Mobile’s “One Game Wonder” Problem
It seems like the point isn't to gain anything unique or fundamental in physics or mathematics directly, but rather that, since it has the potential to unify the language used across a number of fields in mathematics and physics, that the adoption of a common language could eventually lead to significant progress. So (if it is in fact an effective unifier), it is something unique and fundamental in the realm of tools—though not within the fields the tools would be applied to. Or do you not think it would be an effective unifier (in the sense of communication) after all?
Maybe you are thinking of Detroit... Chicago's doing pretty well economically and culturally.

Washington, D.C. and Las Vegas are not known for the same style of grafty, political-machine corruption as, say, Chicago or NYC Tammany Hall. The former two don't internally operate at the same scale as a Chicago and I doubt most of the rest of the US cares about their internal goings-on.
Next up: Mandated GPS tracking in the black box with dial-in ability. For 'public safety'. O ya, and we should have new cars spy on the other cars and automatically report back to the mothership when they misbehave.
(Upvoted. Seems like something worth further discussion amongst people that know the field.)

Other than tradition/inertia, are there reasons that trials are held in particular rooms and the ways they are? Could there be an electronic equivalent involving securely identified participants?

Could someone tackle this as a startup?
For everyone that hasn't read the article by Neal Stephenson on under ocean fiber optic, here it is: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend it. It covers how under ocean cable is laid, how the construction industry works, how the telephone industry works, and the history of the telephone/telegraph.
When it comes to Rust, there's no stable version of the language at this point. There's no stable version of the standard libraries. There's no reliable production-grade compiler available. As the Rust home page itself states, "Rust is a work-in-progress and may do anything it likes up to and including eating your laundry."

Maybe Rust will offer such stability in the future. But that's of no use to people and organizations who need to develop software today, and who need to be able to trust that the code they write now will compile and work tomorrow, a month from now, a year from now, and perhaps even decades from now.

C++ does offer stable, standardized, well-supported versions of the language. C++ does offer stable, standardized, well-supported standard libraries. There are numerous high-quality free and commercial C++ implementations available, for just about every platform imaginable. It provides a robust and predictable platform that serious and massive software systems can be built upon.

The theoretical benefits that Rust may bring are pretty much irrelevant as long as it isn't a production-ready language in the way that C++ is.
Don't let the truth get in the way of the HN anti-patent circlejerk!

It's in Facebook's best interests to file patents for anything that may be inventive; their shareholders would definitely expect that of them. If they've got the cash to fund a useless application, then by all means, go for it; it just makes it easier to find prior art for obvious things in the future for more idiotic, uninventive applications. The total result of this application is that it discloses what they've done, giving others a resource to work from (not that this particular case needed it). the public has benefitted from this, Facebook has not, and yet people still complain.

Also a rejection doesn't mean the application is dead, but from reading the claims it's pretgty clear this will die; even Facebook aren't percistent enough to try to follow through with this nonsense.
Star ≠ Endorsement
I know. I'm arguing against this use of terminology. Nuclear batteries are things, and nuclear reactors are things. Describing your (excellent) operational model should be straightforward and should not require calling a reactor a battery. What you are really doing is demurring from confronting misunderstandings about nuclear energy.
Oh my Come grab dinner in Oakland Aug 18
"...to create an image via a rather complex mathematical process called a Fourier transform"

rotfl
I think the key-est takeaway is the need to persuade people not to be terrified of nuclear energy. That's likely to require an effort on a par with any technical advances you make.
This is what throwaway accounts and BugMeNot are for... there are probably millions of sites if not more out there where you have to register free-of-charge to be able to download content; whenever I find one I check the usual account-sharing sites and if it's not there, then I create one and usually end up submitting it. FakeNameGenerator+AutoFill makes this really easy.

If you want to do it "100% legally", then this is probably not an option, but I see giving in to these unreasonable demands as a reason for them to impose even more draconian restrictions and data collection policies.
If you're looking at WebGL, check out StackGL. It's pretty much intended as a low level WebGL wrapper with a modular codebase, and lots of high level modules built on top of it.
Were Maxwell's equations still condensed to 4 equations (Heaviside's equations in Gibb's vector notation), or something less concise, as I believe they were with quanternions?
I was specifically referring to boilerplate and type level programming: Algebraic Data Types's, and type generation in general.

C++'s type system is actually pretty strong, but the amount of boilerplate that is needed to create a new type means that it is very difficult to program in a type safe way... without being incredibly verbose. Creating a type safe "Length" type is too much of a pain in the ass for anyone to actually do it.

Which is what I mean by "too verbose". It is so verbose that instead of securing the "specific and obvious" in strong compiler guarantees, we fake it with implicit conversions and typedefs.
Ask Sam: Break down of web/mobile startups vs. 'Other' Start-ups
I've been seeing a number of interesting start-ups in areas (energy, biotech) outside of YCs historical focus on web/mobile based start-ups (as you had written about). Realizing there isn't a well-defined dichotomy between the two, do you have a rough % breakdown of the two types of start-ups in the current batch and how this might change in upcoming batches?
I work in Melbourne's Docklands area and the situation here is similar with many of the local RE offices obviously catering to the overseas Chinese market. From my office window I can see a nearby condo where 2 bedroom units sell for $550k+ but the ground floor commercial units are almost all vacant. And another building is going up next-door. In the other direction I can see a massive new tower going up next to the Crown casino in Southbank.

A month ago my neighbour sold her old 3 bedroom house for $650k whereas the same sized house I rent with a much nicer backyard costs me only $21k/year.

Australians are in for a shock when economic reality kicks in and the consequences of a speculative real estate bubble become apparent...
Depends on if you need to gracefully handle malloc failures or not. Otherwise any write operation on an STL type (like appending to a string) will potentially throw an exception that you need to care about.

In the C world this is extremely arduous since need to bubble the allocation-failure down through every level of code, adding cleanup to just about every function call. If you're using C++ and RAII you can just catch std::exception in one place to cover a huge number of places that an allocation can fail.
On GNU and on hackers
How does this patent APPLICATION harm anyone? It discloses some technical information (though clearly this is already a well known idea), and Facebook will never be awarded a patent for this. The public benefits from dud patents because they disclose in fairly precise (though esoteric and overly longwinded) language some technical idea while the applicant does not gain anything when it is eventually rejected.
Nuclear plants certainly do "explode" when things when wrong. I assume you used scare quotes because you were thinking of a nuclear detonation, but there was plenty of damage done by the non-nuclear explosions at Chernobyl and Fukushima, to cite the most famous examples.
I'm sure many will say that the failure is the exact implementation of Linux, or miscalculated expectations, or incompetent sysops, or, or...

They're all right. But it's also exactly the problem with Linux in a corporate environment. For better and worse, Microsoft have made Windows a single, predictable entity. While we developers see the myriad of Linux options out there as the result of freedom, customers see them as evidence of confusion and lack of focus.
Interesting, because there is a group that actually proposed actually doing a smaller scale version of this in Sydney.

http://www.smh.com.au/data-point/swap-you-chinese-skyscraper...
> Nextdoor also cross references with sex offender databases as well as "some" criminal databases so that they are banned from joining. It's also a safety feature.

Ugh. Those things increase recidivism and violate fundamental concepts of justice by not allowing people to ever 'serve their debt to society'. If I can pass someone by on the sidewalk or walk by their house, I don't see why they should be banned from talking to me on such a network.
Microsoft technology turns shaky first person videos into smooth timelapses
FFS. Their site says "Login with Facebook" so I try. Apparently all this does is give them access to your Facebook profile, it doesn't actually give you an account on Nextdoor. You still have to provide your email address and establish a password.

In other words, even their signup page contains a scam, designed to steal your friends list. And I'm supposed to trust this site with anything? Fuck no.
Hey Jake, congrats on S14!

I see it's described as a battery -- does this mean you're focusing on keeping everything as small as possible? How small do you think the whole operation can get? Could it fit in a semi truck and be driven around?
I've always assumed it was the equivalent of Australia's strata management fees and the resulting decisions you get with strata-titled properties.

Sadly, I think any time you have amateurs involved with administration and decision making, you cop the resulting amateur politics and it can quickly make the process miserable.

I wonder if somehow anonymising the process and removing personalities could even help? Leave it purely about the issues, funds and votes?
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/adam-carolla-headed...
The article was written in 1964, and as noted in the post above about Robin Kelly's book, is not uncontroversial. Today, a title like "high priest of jazz" would probably elicit snickers from jazz lovers and musicians.
Can you be a little more descriptive here? I suspect you really are reprocessing, and shouldn't be afraid to say so.
The fears aren't so irrational. They reflect the fact that we don't know how to assess and manage risk over the kinds of timescales required to safely handle nuclear waste.
Funny. I work at a place with extensive MS systems and we get lots of complaints and have no shortage of issues aside from the complaints.

I often dream about how nice it would be to replace crufty sharepoint with some web apps on a Linux server do our own in house mail.

I guess the grass is often greener on the other side of the fence.

But for me personally.... I chose Linux. It just works better for what I do and doesn't annoy the bejeazus out of me at every turn with push buttons and hidden stuff like MS products seem to. Maybe I am just more tolerant of open source stuff. But push buttons and hidden settings do annoy me. Text file configuration and the command line. It's fast, it's simple, it's what I like.
Would there be risks (to the online community) in putting control in the hands of whoever set up the web app? That is, unless it was significantly redesigned to remove that as an issue.
America’s half-century of polarization
Hey there-

I am pleased to see a company like yours cropping out of YCombinator. Not for nothing but: get some help with your website. It might seem like such a frivolous thing, but having a well-designed website goes a long way (or rather, having a bad web design mars your authority and reputation undeservingly).
It feels very dependant on your company's individual use cases. Sysadmin work is probably going to be easier on Linux, but each time a user has a problem adjusting something it makes more work for a sysadmin.

The best of both worlds would be Windows running on a *nix system I suppose, but that seems really unlikely.
Sometimes I really hate this city...
A couple side notes on TC article specifically for those interested:

1) NO reprocessing as somewhat indicated in article ("processing"). We use the low enriched used fuel from the reactor to make new fuel for the next deployment. We don't isolate dangerous parts as done in reprocessing which is the main concern with reprocessing.

2) True waste elimination- it's not just "less of a pain", which is definitely good: the reactor actually eliminates waste instead of just using it for fuel as some thermal types do (eg some startups seen in the media). Without fast neutrons, a reactor cannot burn the longest-lived parts of waste.

3) History on reactor regulatory process: Never before has a reactor been fully built and operated before licensing as somewhat indicated in final paragraph. That would cost $Bs. So, in all history of nuclear, they have built scaled models and spent hundreds of millions in scaled testing and modeling to prove that the scaled tests are accurate to what the full reactor will be like.

The UPower test reactor can be built to full scale for on the order of single digit $millions, which can be said with confidence because even a national lab built a similar reactor and produced electricity with tons of red tape for $100s k.

The heat transfer process has no moving parts and can be shown at full scale and tested to failure on the order of just $thousands, unlike the big boys with outrageously complicated flow loops, pumps, valves, secondary pumps, etc etc etc.

This means the UPower reactor has a chance at being the first commercial reactor able to use the streamlined "license by test" process.
I've seen convincing results from amino acid therapy, but I sit among the skeptics on multi-vitamins. Without some sort of differentiating research for their products, this doesn't seem vastly superior to a recurring amazon purchase.