skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The major flaw in your reasoning is that you've failed to identify a correlation between thinking positively and surviving cancer. Given that several large studies have also failed to show a correlation, I am forced to doubt the therapeutic benefits of positive thinking for cancer.

That is not to say that there are no health benefits from optimism. For instance there is evidence that it helps with the risks from cardiovascular disease. But it is far more dubious as a treatment for cancer.
True. Nevertheless it amazes me that you would pay $150,000 for that.
It seems to me the real bug is that everyone assumes that a sexual performance necessarily degrades the person doing it. Everyone seems to be making that assumption, from the mouth-breather geeks who called up rent-a-lapdancer, to the prudish, sometimes hypocritical, bloggers wagging their fingers.

Don't get me wrong; I understand the problem. Being asked to make the coffee is fine. Being asked to make the coffee just because you're a woman is reprehensible. The actions take place in a context, and just because there are empowered women doing sex-charged performances in San Francisco doesn't mean the event in Taiwan was empowering.

Still, I feel the disconnect from the sex-positive culture I know in SF, and the generally sex-paranoid culture of corporate America. There are subcultures at least where neither being 'professional' nor being very out front with your sexuality matters at all to how respected you are. I kind of wish mainstream culture would catch up. If people would just get that, they wouldn't have to see a sexual performer as an inferior, and the nature of the entire exchange would be different.
This was an issue recently with the Google Book Search deal. Even though the books were out of copyright or orphaned, Google owned the copyright to the scans, and would only give a non-transferable license back to the universities.
Scientists find brain cells that keep track of time with extreme precision
Safari also uses some pretty clever tricks when abbreviating to preserve as much information as possible -- it uses interior ellipses sometimes instead of trailing ones, and I think it has a blacklist of low-content words to strip out first.
> "Mathematicians are always right."

A math professor once complained to me that all the cars in line should just go when the light turns green. I could tell this had been bugging him for a while....

Besides that example (that wasn't math related), do take the simple route and agree with the mathematicians, unless you wish to continue studying more and more nuanced math.

(posting here mainly to share the car story)
Dropcam: Another fire-and-forget camera system
Status Messages - They Work
Which is why it was defined as even. Similar reasons apply for why one is not considered a prime number.
Gotta pick what you're defining and what you're deriving.
Canon EOS-1D Mark IV coming December
I love my Palm Pre, but I agree, the calendar load time is really absurd. One of the things I loved about my old Palm Treo was being able to be out and about and quickly add an event to it when I came across an interesting flyer or article about something that was happening. It's such a royal pain on the Pre.

The phone features on the Pre are horrible and utterly unacceptable on the Pre -- you often can't conference two calls together, and if there are two calls on the line (conferenced or not), you can't hang up only one of them.

But I still think it's a fantastic device overall.
>I had a similar problem with accepting that 1/inf = 0; to me, there could always be a smaller number

The issue here (the same issue as the .9999=1 debate) is that people intuitively perceive the hyperreal numbers. It is absolutely not wrong to intuitively perceive the hyperreal numbers; it's not like one number system is more correct than others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreal_number

http://theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbook.cgi?book=770 is a textbook of the calculus constructed rigorously using infinitesimals.
Beauty and the Bento Box
7 Reasons Your Online Dating Profile Photo Sucks
A math professor once complained to me that all the cars in line should just go when the light turns green.

That happens in Sydney
That's disappointing to hear, but sort of inline with what I expected.

Too bad, looked nice :)
Zero is not defined to be even. A number is even if it's twice some integer. Zero is twice an integer (namely 0), so it's even.

If you try to bring personal intuition into mathematics, you'll just repeatedly shoot yourself in the foot

I disagree. Intuition should always be foremost in mathematical understanding. You may have gotten a different impression from your math classes, and that IMO is a consequence of bad teaching.

I had a similar problem with accepting that 1/inf = 0

As you should; the statement is false. The limit of 1/x as x->infinity is zero, but there is no x at which the quotient "reaches" zero. In non-standard analysis, if x is positive infinite, then 1/x is positive infinitesimal, meaning it is infinitely close to, but still greater than zero.
I haven't tried the Pre myself, but if jwz's experiences aren't unique (most likely), it's really a shame. The specs don't look so bad- is it webOS dragging it down?

It looks like Motorola's Droid is the best hope at this point to drive some innovatin' by competing at the level of the iPhone.

Or is there another contender I've missed? Is the HTC Hero/G2 worth looking at?
I always thought that Dilbert is a source of consolation for beaten down engineers.

Now I understand that in reality Dilbert is meant as MBA HOWTO on managing engineers :)
forces you to take a functional approach

I don't think Clojure is really a functional langauge, it's more of an imperitive/OO mix with immutable objects. Immutable objects aren't "functional programming", they're simply common sense.

Functional programming is about composing parts of programs ("functions") with generic combinators. I have not seen anyone in Clojure doing this. Haskell is a different story; combinators are very reusable, and there is no way to combine functions (and other "categories") without them. (In Clojure, you combine program fragments by typing a closing paren and then opening a new one. Your program doesn't control its sequence of operations, a Magical Runtime does that for you. Inflexible.)

The reusability in Haskell is quite interesting; for example, application in a monad is defined as "liftM2 ($)", the usual function application operator ("($)", itself a function of two arguments) lifted into a monadic context for functions of two arguments. Cool.

The reusability is everywhere; you use the same Arrow combinators to traverse an XML document as you do to parse plain text. (See HXT and PArrows.) And of course, you compose Arrows with (.) (the function composition function), because (.) works on all Categories, not just functions.

That is functional programming; Clojure is just immutable data and parens. (Both good ideas, mind you. But it's not doing anything that Pure Java can't.)
This must be a different Sydney to the one I'm in...
E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAK_members_bank
There isn't a preexisting stereotype of racing drivers being sad, pathetic, overly horny. Public tends to look for perception reinforcers. This is one example
Isn't that possible considering planes in more than two dimensions?
Be careful with your language here. Zero isn't defined to be even; rather, it has the property of being even by way of the definition of an even number. Usually, this process involves making a conjecture and then proving or disproving it.

On the other hand, definitions are, well, whatever we want them to be. We can define a sheep to be woolly, and we can define a collection of crows to be a murder, but we have to justify conjectures that all sheep are black or that all corvids are crows.

Think about it this way. In Scheme/Lisp, consider the notions of functions and macros. The mathematical analogue to a definition is a function; they're defined in very much the same manner, and the idea is effectively the same. Likewise, the analogue to a theorem/corollary/lemma is a macro. A theorem allows one to traverse a logical chain from P to Q very easily, and a macro allows the Schemer/Lisp hacker to abstract dull, repetitive tasks into short, succinct statements.

The humdinger: the proof to a theorem is analogous to the macro expansion. :)

Now, I'm hoping I'm not being too terribly nitpicky, but 1/inf does not equal zero. It's still undefined. (See also: 1/0 does not equal infinity.) This mess hinges on the idea that infinity is not a number, and in general, it holds true for the kind of real analysis one would typically learn as an undergrad.
Is this surprising? An integer is even if it is congruent to 0 mod 2. 0 is congruent to 0 mod 2.
You can ban smoking in your house all your want, but once you sell it is up to the next owner to decide the smoking policy.

Apple doesn't own your iPhone - it is the user who does. Neither does Apple own the app made by the developer. Neither is Apple a part of the US court system. Then what's their job in meddling with all of the above?

It should not be legal for Apple to control a device that you fully paid for and own any more than Microsoft gets to decide what applications you should run on your PC.
Arguing along those lines has some interesting results. How can -2 be a number? If you have two apples, and I have none, you can give me two apples. <b>You can't give me -2 apples.</b>

You want zero diamonds? I can SHOW you zero diamonds. You can take zero diamonds from me anytime you want. I'll just make more!

There's something special about 0. And it's right next to 1, which is the mother of all other integers. And zero looks way more pregnant than 1.

Zero is more like the absence of a number (which is why it was invented to be a placeholder). In physics there are electron holes, etc., they're called quasi-particles. There are no magnetic monopoles (yet) but there are quasi magnetic monopoles ... that carry current.

So maybe the day will come when zero becomes a quasi-number. Or better still, a DWARF number. And some people's mathematical kids will write threatening letters to the New York Times.
A minimum viable product experiment is good at measuring whatever a minimum viable product experiment measures. You definitely can't make exact projections, but it is a piece of info that is useful. At the very least it can tell you not to build something.

It might also be good to test several ideas with this method to decide which one to pursue. Again, they shouldn't be the only factor but all else equal, better fake conversion is better.

It isn't an accurate projection, but it is info. It is also a chance to get an understanding of the adwords environment, click costs, etc.
Not really. The set of even integers is 2Z = {2k | k is an integer}. 0 is in that set.

The set of odd integers is 2Z+1 = {2k+1 | k is an integer}. 0 is not in that set.

The reason we don't like 1 being prime is because it makes stating lots of theorems that involve primes (in particular, the fundamental theorem of arithmetic) really tedious. Instead of saying "For every prime p" or "Let p be a prime" you'd have to say "For every non-unitary prime," etc.

Zero being even is a consequence of the above definition of even, while one not being prime is a choice for our sanity.
It's too bad, I thought the Pre's card metaphor, along with its pervasive notifications and multi-input open-API contact/message/lifestream datastore was the best hope yet for a great multitasking handheld.

The Verizon Droid is the only hope for an iPhone competitor at this point. It looks like it fixes all the hardware issues with the previous devices:

* shipping the latest virgin Google build — no carrier or manufacturer fuckery
* CPU + RAM as good or better than everything else (600mhz OMAP3 + 256mb RAM)
* a capacitive touchscreen with 3x the iPhone's resolution
* only a bit thicker than a current iPhone
* a motherfucking headphone jack
* nice hardware (landscape) and software (portrait) keyboards
* 16gb of built-in flash AND a micro-SD slot
* a camera that they made a cursory attempt to make decent (a flash!)

Now the only problem will be the Android software — the spartan builtin apps, the craptacular APIs, and the abysmal/non-existent third-party apps. Hopefully that will all improve quickly once Verizon is shipping millions of the things. Having hardware that's not worse than the iPhone will be a huge help.
At one point, no bank was considered too big to fail, Greenspan said. That changed after the Treasury Department under then-Secretary Hank Paulson effectively nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac...

Uh, actually I think the first "too big to fail" bank was Continental Illinois, bailed out in the seventies. Funny how this claim might give one the impression that the Fed under Greenspan wasn't indirectly pumping up the market based on investors relying on the credit of "too big to fail" institutions. But it absolutely was. Indeed investors relying on the "too big to fail" assumption underlay the whole subprime/AIG/etc episode and Greenspan was at the helm at this time.

Though to be fair, the collapse was somewhat hastened by Paulson and company being inconsistent in their judgments about who should fail, killing Lehman but saving AIG. This, and only this, is something Greenspan might complain.

"Look, my house of card, you Cretans let it collapse"
What would it take to make you feel comfortable about it?
Hm, I would've taken jwz for a G1 kinda guy...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1314732/scala-vs-groovy-v...

From what I've read, Groovy is monstrously slow. That alone should rule it out.
Why planes haven't gotten faster in the last several decades
Did you know that the keys hjkl on the home row are left, up, down, and right respectively?
Boston theater tickets
This is a site that sells tickets for boston theater tickets and other popular theater, sports and concert events.
Would you prefer that they instead do research on giving people bad memories of things that never happened?

http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
The reason we don't like 1 being prime is because it makes stating lots of theorems that involve primes (in particular, the fundamental theorem of arithmetic) really tedious.

No, it makes the FTA wrong! If one were prime, then every number would have infinitely many prime factorizations instead of one unique one.

you'd have to say "For every non-unitary prime," etc.

In the even/odd case, one could just as easily say "for every non-zero odd number." This isn't somehow an argument that applies only to the question of one's primality.

Zero being even is a consequence of the above definition of even

...as is one not being prime a consequence of the definition of primes. A prime is a number with exactly two distinct factors. One only has one distinct factor, therefore it is not prime.

If you don't buy this definition, or if you claim that I'm gerrymandering the definition to suit my preference that one not be prime, be aware that a reasonable person could make the same claim about the definition of even numbers, viz., that it was chosen for convenience. While it's might be entertaining to argue about such chicken-and-egg problems, at the end of the day the evidence is pretty clearly in favor of the properties proceeding from the definition in both cases.
Turbocharged Twitter Followers - Yahoo Pipes and YQL App
Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age
Not sure why suddenly jwz is considered to be a consumer electronics guru? There's always churn and any particular device isn't for everyone. He's just very vocal about it.

The Pre suffers from some slowdown issues which as some commenters point out is almost certainly a software issue, which means it's fixable :) Would like to see Palm take up the community created patches, but it's the wealth and quality of these open modifications (tweaks/patches) as well as the rate of new additions to the app catalog that leave me hopeful. It isn't gonna be a market buster, but I think webos is fairly solidly staying around.
The technology I can use for real work is to a certain extent dictated by what is acceptable to the organization. Backing from a major vendor goes a long way towards assuring that.
Google Street View Gets a New Vehicle: The Trike
Well, it was made clear from the start it was mainly a talent acquisition. Any technological merger is just a lucky bonus for us the users.
Absolutely agreed on the lag. My fiancee has the Pre and the experience has been going downhill from day 1, worse and worse each day.

The lag is absolutely unbearable and one thing jwz forgot to mention is the shit battery life (< 1/2 day).

She just uses her work old blackberry now with like a 5 day battery life. It gets the job done.

I can't agree on jwz's Android opinion based on some random baseless rumors. I have an Android phone and it's a lot better than Pre (almost no comparison) and to me it's better than the iPhone. With Droid's muscle, it will be the best phone (unfortunately it won't be available for Sprint).
How long has it been since you started that AdWords campaign till now?

How long did you tell those that signed up, it would take for you to get back to them?

I, too, would love to see some more hard data. I have actually been thinking about doing this for some time now, but am hesitant about the quality of the feedback.
I subscribed for a while some time back, but I couldn't find an option for an online-only subscription and I started running out of space to put the dead tree versions, so I stopped. Do they have an online-only option?
His chart has log scale on the x axis. I suspect it would be in fact close to linear if we stretched the axis.
I can't believe there's a Wikipedia article about this. The best part:

[Prospective elementary school teachers] found it to be
a "tricky question", and about two thirds answered "False"
That's relatively recent thing. In the early days of the MBA, in the 1950s, the point of them was to teach real actual engineers the skills they would need to move up the organization (e.g. if you were a civil engineer who knew all about concrete, the MBA would teach you about the commercial aspects of dam construction so you could manage the whole project).

The modern MBA is a rite of entry into a club and not much more.
Wolfram, in a previous startup school talk (transcript)
Great news for the community. I imagine that the Mitchell had the same arguments against as Computer Science had 50 years ago.
This is the link of the paper that he wrote as the argument of why Machine Learning is a discipline of science.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/pubs/MachineLearning.pdf

Also, his book about machine learning is a good start for graduates that are diving in the field.
"Look, my house of card, you Cretans let it collapse"

It sounds like you're talking about Knossos.
Moral Of Galleon Insider-Trading Bust: Only Fools Try To Beat The Street
In the UK, Apple's deal with O2 is coming to an end and both Orange and Vodafone have indicated that they will offer it. T-mobile have said they're sticking with the G2 as their preferred smartphone. Ha, ha, good luck with that[1].

[1] T-mobile are being acquired by Orange so whatever they say about anything is subject to change... Can't imagine their new overlords will be happy about them dragging their heels.
Sure, but it all depends on the coder's goals. If there's a competing option that's easier to install, prospective users may go with something else. If the coder doesn't care and isn't looking for users, then that's fine.
But I remember they were explicit in saying it has to be similar/same in the guidelines.
In my previous jobs, there were visible lines drawn between management and workers, with different colors representing each.

On a serious note, my first job I ever had was at a startup, as the ~25th employee. There was a culture of promotion, and people who started at the bottom eventually worked their way to the top. The most recent job I left before starting my own company, however, was a relatively large corporation (though I was in a very small division). There was relatively little promotion through the ranks, and a lot more direct hiring into management positions.

Has anyone else observed such an inverse correlation between company size and the likelihood of promotion?
Ask HN: War stories on implementations of Eric Ries' MVP ?
This post - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=891467 - really piqued my interest, because I have been thinking about running an experiment like this on a number of ideas I have floating around in my head.

But, at the risk of sounding dumb, even though I love Eric Ries' talks, it all seems too complicated. I understand what he is saying, and I understand the concepts, but I would love to hear some real live testimonials of HNers that have actually implemented any of these tests and their results.

This question is actually inspired by this comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=891517

So one and all, bring yee stories hither forth and shareth with thee.

Thanks :)
Hey guys, in order to make this post more hacker-ish, I'm going to answer any technical questions I can here. I used to be the Principal Engineer at Xobni, so while I'm not a YC alum I've been around these parts for a little while :)
It happens in Italy, and woe unto you if you don't 'step on it' when the light turns green and you're the twelfth car in line.

For unsuspecting tourists traffic in Italy can be quite taxing.
The Top Fraudsters You’ve Never Heard of...
AskTog: Restoring Spring to iPhone/iPod Touch Springboard
Don't forget that Gates started Traf-O-Data before making it big with Microsoft.
World of Goo Pay-What-You-Want Sale Results
"The problem with using data like this is that it's completely anecdotal and self-selecting."

That was the idea. I'm not Wolfram Alpha, I'm a human having a conversation. I didn't make any predictions about the future, I'm just expressing my own personal take on the situation. I'm sure I'm going to get down-modded to hell for this especially since you've been up-modded pretty high for contributing basically nothing.

"Just because the world around you looks one way doesn't mean it's the same everywhere."

The ironic part about your AOL/ICQ/MSN example is that, like Facebook, there are network effects. I used ICQ pretty much right up until nobody else did. People are communicating by Facebook so much that even though I don't use it much, if I want to be in the loop that is where I need to go. There are 250 million people communicating on Facebook -- clearly there's a lot less need to communicate by email.

My own personal experience is that for the average user trying to communicate for non-business means, they get a far better experience from other tools than from email.

Now, of course, this all just my personal option. If you want some actual data, you won't find it on hacker news.
You'd think it would rule Ruby out as well, but no...
I suspect that Oracle is responsible for a lot of "invisible" software that runs some really important systems. Apple is big because of their portable consumer electronics as much as because of the Mac, and the typical consumer probably spends more time with their phone or music player than their computer. FWIW, I use Microsoft software maybe once a week at best, and I don't use anything by Apple (unless you count CUPS).
Announcing CEO Office Hours
I was coming from the airport to the hotel yesterday and the light turned green a bunch of times and no cars moved at all.
Engineers live in ideal world. MBAs live in real world.
Adam Lambert Revelation "For Your Entertainment"
Why does everyone think Droid is the only hope? Nokia's Maemo-based N900 looks promising as well.

Their latest Symbian/series60 phones (e.g. E71, E75) are also pretty decent nowadays, although I would compare those to Blackberry rather than the iPhone.