skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Usability isn't "tweaks", its the product. I gave up on Linux when it didn't have a "Have Disk" button for my new video card driver - no, it was not amusing for me to rebuild my Linux kernel, I had an actual job to do which was unrelated to hacking. And Windows does have a "Have Disk" button.
It's at the intersection of security and user experience. Changing your password because you think it's been compromised is a different use case from changing your password because you've been using it for years or forgotten it.
> People don't work for free. They don't pour out their passion in the cause of making you wealthy.

Which is true. They are doing it for 'free' because they obtain some other, non-monetary benefit. Think about this site, for instance, where we sit around churning out content for free.
I'd be hard pressed to argue that our imagination does not change our reality.
Did he just demand that twitter pay him for using their service?

No.
Verizon Lawsuit Makes AT&T The Villain Again
THe impression I got was he was, rightly IMO, ranting about the kind of people who:

a) pop up and demand X feature and whine loudly that it doesn't exist

b) then often go on to use the product/software in a commercial way.

And the poor dupe who wanted to please a "user" ends up doing the guys work for no reward.

Or something like that.

It happened to me a few times (not in a major way; but enouh to leave a bad taste)
MSN Web Page Finally Updated
Peek Launches $99 Twitter Gadget
Best Buy Offers Movie Downloads
Pay Pal To Help Developers With Open Payment System
Thanks for your clarification -- I was a bit unclear about exactly what the author was referring to in this post. Given what he's created I can definitely see now how companies would try to exploit his expertise.
LITL: New hardware is a cross between a TV and a computer
It might have been the understanding, but (as I understand it) that’s still blatantly monopolistic behaviour which has been illegal for a lot longer than the last 10 years.
Pardon my ignorance, but what happens when the datacenter hosting the load balancer goes down? Are the load balncers redundant across data centers?
I'm trying to make people think differently about their competition. Competition is a healthy thing rather than something to be worried about. Plenty of companies can co-exist even if they're doing the same thing.
Goldman Sachs loses money on just one trading day in Q3
Some suggestions (from HN over various threads)

Practical Foundations of Mathematics http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~pt/Practical_Foundations/index.html

Linear Algebra - Gilbert Strang (Book & Videos)

Linear Algebra and Applications http://www.math.unl.edu/~tshores1/linalgtext.html

P.S. There was another Introduction to Statistics book that I am not able to find the link for.
Could you be more specific about what kind of math you've been seeing in the papers that you'd like to understand (and/or link some of the papers)? What you need to know is on this list http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/courses/ml1-2009/cribsh... for the most part. Because math is layered, once you've got three or four layers of unfamiliar abstraction, it gets very hard to figure out what's going on.

The way to get around this initially is by brute force. For example, say you have a matrix function (from matrices to matrices). The formula uses the exponential of a matrix, and you're not sure what that actually looks like. So find the definition, and write it out. Think about what that means, maybe do a couple of examples to get a sense of it. Write out your matrix function with this definition expanded (which probably means you'll write it element-wise), so that you know what each element of the output matrix is as a function of the elements of the input matrix. Work a couple of examples, think about it.

Eventually, you get familiar with the exponential of a matrix, and you do the mapping in your head - so your brain has just acquired a new abstraction. The process above applies to basically every mathematical structure you'll run into. Sometimes you'll have to recurse a few levels.

It's not about books, it's about process. You can know how to do lots of math problems and still not grok papers - and you can learn to quickly grok papers and be able to implement them / reason about them without being very good at math problems (I'm in the 2nd bunch). In terms of books, you only really need Wikipedia / Wolfram MathWorld, plus maybe one of the standard math references like Kreyszig or Boas. Learning to use Mathematica can make your life much easier as well.

One last comment:

A book that totally changed my relationship to math is Peter Szekeres' Modern Mathematical Physics: Groups, Hilbert Space, and Differential Geometry. The explanations are uncompromisingly lucid, written in plain english, with minimal symbol walls. The book takes you essentially from zero, and introduces nearly all the math that underpins modern physics. This book really changed my conception of myself - I've lost my fear, when reading papers, that maybe this is the one I'm not smart enough to understand. When that fear goes, the stress goes - and you know it's just a matter of learning the definitions. Then it becomes pleasurable, like a puzzle.
Tote By Prada
You've never used it enough then :) all Operating systems have roughly equal "failure" rates in my experience (Fedora, W7 [this might change] and Server 2003 slightly lower / Ubuntu slightly higher than normal).

I work with a shed load of different operating systems working in a variety of capacities daily (though not so much in OSX). I haven't come across an operating system yet that recognises all hardware painlessly, doesn't come with a variety of random errors and doesn't ever crash :)
I don't usually reply to my own comments, but just to point out a few examples of the F'd up things people do, including "making others dead over the Internet":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=578260
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=909396
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=381095
Completely agree, and motivation is definitely a factor in how I've directed my own learning previously. Fortunately, my growing interest in this sort of stuff is related to my day job as a coder, and I would definitely be looking to jump in as early as possible with code to play around with new ideas learnt.
This thread comes up at least once a month. We really need an HN FAQ or Wiki.
Go back to school. I'm not sure how this works in UK, but here in the US your local state school usually offers part time masters degrees for people who are working. I started my masters in math a year ago and the change has been profound. It's like night and day, what I knew about math a year ago vs what I know now. If you are serious about learning math the right way there is no better option.
My understanding is this was not a RackSpace problem, but an employee error shorting out a high voltage circuit that took down a large section of their electrical distribution. Human error. Lucky the Engineer performing the upgrade was not electrocuted.

As far as the recovery time goes, server farms do not always reboot and come online like XP Pro on a laptop in Starbucks. Their people seem to have worked diligently to bring their infrastructure back up as fast as it humanly could be done. So personally, I think we should view Rackspace’s handling of this crisis as a homerun.
Not really a game, but I recently started learning Italian through Rosetta Stone. The interactivity, and engagement makes it highly effective. When I was in school I took French, but I had a hard time picking up the language. I feel I know more Italian from the 3 lessons I've completed then I learned from an entire year in French. Sorry if my comment sounds like a commercial, these are just my honest feelings...
You know, this started out as a terrible idea but the more I use my iPhone the more this seems reasonable. The lifetime service plan is an amazing sales tactic. All of a sudden wireless email and such becomes a known, predictable and sunk cost. I like that. Its a shame I'm locked into that enormous contract with AT&T. I'd love to give one of these things a try for a bit just to see how it works.

The Twitter Peek is pretty funny when you consider that it will probably sell. I use Twitter more like an IM client these days than anything else. Its immediate, public and private at the same time. All Peek had to do was build a new interface for their SMS tool and now there's a new use case.
Nasty Gmail Bug Erroneously Marks Unread E-mails As Read
How to get automatically rejected by an angel investor
I'd be interested in how that law works! I'm pretty sure lots of companies do this kind of thing, all the time. Apple, for example, likes to sell hardware and software that only works with their proprietary operating system. Lego likes to sell bricks that fit into Legos rather than other toys. Etc.

It would be pretty hard to create a law that bans what Microsoft did, without banning what lots of other people do, too.
Many, if not all, of the various restrictions I've seen put into place were done in reaction to a legal problem. IM gets banned because someone leaked a secret. Websites get blocked because of a rash of sexual-harassment lawsuits. On-access virus scanning because on-demand scanning didn't stop the last worm. It goes on and on.

There's a natural friction between developers and infrastructure. Developers consume the limited resources which IT has to manage. I've done plenty of both, and basically, both sides are correct. I recommend working on the "other side of the fence" for a little while to anybody in the industry.
3 Things Phone Manufacturers Should Get Right to Beat the iPhone
An interesting development might be the emergence of services that effectively function as 80legs resellers. Shortly after 80legs's debut, some guys from my company approached a vendor at a conference who offered SEO-focused crawling services. The tool is in alpha and we are still waiting for an invite, but based on the data points that this tool is capable of harvesting, as well as the price point (very similar to 80legs) I began to suspect that their custom code relies on the 80legs backend.
His commission is 10% lower, but in principle your customer doesn't care about commission, just total cost. If a stockbroker charges .2% rather than .1%, that's a .1% lower cost, not a 50% lower cost.
Giant Crack in Africa Will Create a New Ocean
I'm going to guess TFS/VSTS from Microsoft, which is both a relatively new product, and fits his description of aggressive expansion.
If they want this to become law in the US, they will have to follow the usual process. If they want criminal sanctions without trials, as the treaty proposes, the Constitution will have to be rewritten.

Anyone with a 6th grade reading level can see this is true. However, the courts apparently don't have this degree of understanding.

See, for example, the SCOTUS decision in US v Emerson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Emerson ). This case involved the so-called "Lautenberg Amendment", which forever denies access to firearms to anyone who has been the target of a restraining order in a domestic dispute. You'll note that such a restraining order does not involve any sort of due process. Nonetheless, the Court ruled that Dr. Emerson was not deprived of his 2nd Amendment rights.
Agreed, but would it be difficult to have a checkbox marked "revoke all permissions to use my account from all applications" to the reset password menu?
I actually think that you're not good if you think appeals to "pg" on an HN thread are in any respect a good idea. Even if you were "joking".

Sorry. I am not optimistic about your guys' chances for success.
Virtual Community School of Ohio: Login to the site
"Duck it" is used sometimes as a replacement for "Fuck it!". Also it suggest to "duck out of", ie avoid, something or just to "duck", ie dodge by crouching or bending down.

I can see the idea of a duck diving down to retrieve a tasty bit of food (weed!).

How about "pekin", it's the name of a duck and suggest "peek in" to me. Sadly pekin.com is squatted but then what isn't. It's slightly awkward for "pekin it". Or "scoter", another duck; sounds like "spotter" and could be used as "scot it" which also sounds like "[he]'s got it".

Not really there but, some thoughts anyhoo.
"Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain gets bored easily"

It's so nice when business writers take the time to catch up with the latest science! ;)
NetEe the Net Bvader | Evadrowse the net behind filters and firewalls
Www.google.com.cu
How Israel destroyed Syria's Al Kibar nuclear reactor
The UN is doomed to failure because of its twin, conflicting, missions.

On one hand, it aims to safeguard the freedom and dignity of people throughout the world. Doing so sometimes requires using force against oppressive governments.

Yet on the other hand, the UN seeks to protect the sovereignty of the world's nations. How can it protect the sovereignty of a nation against whom it is fighting due to its other mission?

When its soul is built on two mutually contradictory ideals, it can never be anything but a schizophrenic wreck with at least one of those ideals (and more likely, both of them).
They are bunch of shits manipulating entire market.
They truly are "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_grea...]
I often restrict searches by date on Google but rarely use the other options. It might be nice to have a refinement by focus of the site - is it a site mainly on the topic I'm searching for or is it a general site.
I've been using 80 legs heavily for the last 6 weeks. I've held off a blog post to give them a chance to fix some issues I've hit, but overall they're an awesome service.

A massive plus is their helpfulness. Shion, who commented on this post, even wrote a bunch of custom code for me!
The internet, startups, and the values favored by most people in this thread are even more Classic American than the tendencies you deride. The US is complex. The US government is complex. Angry reductionism sheds no light.
Fun With the Minneapolis Mayoral Race 
I pulled up my sample ballot for Minneapolis elections today, and found something absolutely fabulous. Take a look at the second-from-last candidate. Specifically, his party affiliation. God, I love this town. The ballot just gets better when you know what an Edgertonite is.
Actually, the right to privacy isn't entirely guaranteed (nor is it a law; it is however, generally guaranteed by law). Your right to privacy can easily be suspended if there is reasonable suspicion that you committed a crime, for example, so that a search for evidence can take place.

As a later commenter said, the real point is that the human rights as declared in 1948 were no different (in form and style) to the treaty under discussion here. It was a group of countries getting together to decide the standards in which governments agree to treat their citizens- and each other.

It should also be noted that many of the articles there are broken or ignored- and this treaty seems to ignore Article 6: "Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law." which would be suspended given some of the leaked terms.
Not quite. Current Linux packaging formats encourage the developer to build one package per architecture. This means presenting several download choices for the user which can be confusing. The user doesn't always know what his architecture is.

The problem can be solved in two ways:

1) Distributing through a repository and have the package manager auto-select the architecture. However this is highly distribution-specific. If you want to build a single tar.gz that works on the majority of the Linux distros then you're out of luck.

2) Compile binaries for multiple architectures and bundle everything into the same package, and have a shell script or whatever select the correct binary.

While (2) is entirely doable and does not confuse the end user, it does make the developer's job harder. He has to compile binaries multiple times and spend a lot of effort on packaging. Having support for universal binaries throughout the entire system, including the developer toolchain, solves not only confusion for the end user but also hassle for the developer. On OS X I can type "gcc -arch i386 -arch ppc" and it'll generate a universal binary with two architectures. I don't have to spend time setting up a PPC virtual machine with a development environment in it, or to setup a cross compiler, just to compile binaries for PPC; everything is right there.

I think the ultimate point is not to make impossible things possible, but to make already possible things easier, for both end users and app developers.
The Paris Hilton problem
There is a significant distinction between what you would expect of a free service (Twitter) and what you would expect of a service/site you are paying money for and building your corporation upon.

In both cases, I had clients that I knew were rational and logical. Those are the ones that we would issue an early release to, along the lines of "Something broke and we're on it, more info to follow".

However the irrational types seemed to far outweigh the logical types. Those are the ones where I can tell you from my own first hand experience that overall you are better off giving accurate information late than wrong or incomplete information early.

Today, I run a small bit of a data center as one of my personal side-project companies. I only accept low-overhead experienced clients. They don't give me a lot of headaches, and the 1 single time we had an issue (power related, natch) I told them about it as soon as I found out and thing was a completely forgettable experience for everyone.
Skimmed the article, but no mention of jeans....
At least one gigatime.
There’s nothing illegal about keeping things proprietary, but as I understand it (and I am most certainly not a lawyer) it becomes a monopolistic practise to do that when you already have a monopoly in the market. That is, it’s not having a monopoly that’s bad, it’s leveraging it to keep you in a monopoly that’s the issue.
I must be dense, because I'm still not following.

So the point is: whether its IE7 or FF, the fact that all of FF is greater than IE6 means that the goal of standards adoption has progressed?

Why wouldn't the main story just be that the rollout of IE7 is finally showing some signs of eliminating IE6 users? And if it's a web standards story, why the FF head?
This is a sad day, RIP str0ke.
The iPhone is the worst phone in the world
For all those who have the same confusion, the person refered to in this article and the Levi Strauss (jeans guy) are different.

Claude Live-Strauss referenced in this article is an anthropologist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss

The Levi Strauss who ran a clothing company is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss
Agile User Experience Projects
Anti-trust laws basically says that if you have a practical monopoly on one area, you are not allowed to tie your products in that area with products in other areas.

This is how Microsoft can violate anti-trust laws despite usually being more open than their competitors.

Lego has nowhere near a monopoly on toys (or even on building bricks), and Apple is not in a monopoly situation on computers or operating systems.

However, Apple's traditional closedness do bring them in trouble with regard to music distribution, where the iTunes store is in such a dominating position that tying it too closely to the iPod has brought Apple in the spotlight of EU anti-trust control.
Good point, but Objective J seems to have borrowed that as well.

i.e.

[CPApp sendEvent:[CPEvent mouseEventWithType:CPLeftMouseDown location:[theWindow convertBridgeToBase:CGPointMake(x, y)]

or

[CPApp setTarget:self selector:@selector(disposeOfEvent:) forNextEventMatchingMask:CPLeftMouseUpMask untilDate:nil inMode:nil dequeue:YES];

It's not that I don't applaud the creation of Objective-J, because I do. I think it's a big step towards the next generation of in-browser applications.

To the 280 guys: I'm not trying to insult you or your hard work, and I'm sorry if it came off like that. All I'm saying is that you're going to have a harder time making this a new web standard because of this design fact. It certainly won't deter me, but it will definitely deter others.
Google Friend Connect Becoming the Anti-Facebook
It sounds like you're interested in statistics from the words "a few interesting stats-heavy compsci papers". The MacKay book, "Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms," already referenced by benm is quite good, but I'd suggest on top of it Larry Wasserman's amazing book, "All of Statistics". If the level of calculus and linear calculus in that book is too much for you, you might need to review that material first before moving on to anything sophisticated in statistics.

In the interim, you could start with David Freedman's "Statistics" (written along with Pisani and Purves) to at least get a feel for the basic ideas of statistics from one of the great statistical writers of the 20th century.

If there are other things you want to learn about, I'd be happy to make suggestions, as I went in the opposite direction as you're trying to go now, having been a math major as an undergrad who picked up CS along the way. For cryptography, for instance, you'd need to learn number theory and then abstract algebra, but those things will be of little use to you in other contexts.
Never separate cloud computing from SOA
No, we require it of the Senate. (sighs)
Mozilla was a product people had already used for years without realizing it (Netscape), so when they were faced with the reality of using it, none of their expectations were disappointed, but there were useful new features (tabs, popup block, etc.).
Local oncology transcription services company California
Other Concurrency Sessions at PDC09
Why would it be hard? All you need to do is express it conditionally: if you have a monopoly in some market, then you can't...

This is exactly what the Sherman Antitrust Act did. If your interest is genuine, you can always read the Conclusions Of Law document from the case.

http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f218600/218633.htm

If you're also curious how the conditional was met, read the Findings Of Fact.

http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
Serenity Now Restore Peace of Mind in IT
Gadget geek dream car coming in 3 years
It's still confusing and redundant. Just write $0.30 / GB and that's it. Nobody cares if they will be paying 5 cent or 3,789 cent a month for their small-scale backups.

Also a little javascript calculator, right there on the frontpage, would be a nice gimmick.
FWIW, I would re-order those terms to show $0.30 / GB on top, with the picodollar equivalent underneath, inside parenthesis.

BTW, since your service is command line only, are you targeting only programmers?
I wouldn't say jealous, more like disoriented to realize that his business hypothesis might be invalid. He designed his company to be a high quality competitor among many, but now he's got to face a category killer which requires very different tactics. A core part of his business has to change to something he doesn't necessarily want.
Love it--this is hilarious!
He was about the same age as Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. Not only did he outlive his own generation, he outlived the generation that overthrew his, in intellectual movement terms. That's amazing.

Also, that photograph of Sarkozy visiting Lévi-Strauss is quintessentially French.
Tech's Forgotten Co-Founders
I've noticed that the increased width can make it a little awkward to read, too
Gross abuses? Because its being written in secret? The US Constitution itself was written in secret! That fact alone does not make this a bad thing- but it is certainly something to be concerned about- and I'm certainly very concerned about the alleged contents of this treaty. We can only hope that once it becomes public, Congress will be convinced by public outcry not to ratify it.