skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are correct that the definitions are usually motivated by a particular problem or attempt at modeling something. However, if a mathematician arrives at a "bad" result, the reaction is not always to revise the definition.

Sometimes we think it's really awesome that the definition is general enough to capture additional phenomena in the same framework. Sometimes these degenerate ideas lead to interesting areas of research in their own right, like how adding some strange Godel-related axiom to number theory leads to Supernatural Numbers. Sometimes the theorems that are developed are not applicable to their original subject of study, but can be applied to another by re-interpreting their meaning, like non-Euclidean geometry. Sometimes the unintuitive result is simply accepted, like Godel's theorem. Sometimes our intuition is simply wrong, so unintuitive edge cases like Dirac spikes end up being fundamental tools in physics and signal analysis.

Intuition is often used to motivate the definitions or the axioms, but they are clearly labeled as definitions and axioms. What I was trying to say is that the chain from axioms to conclusion must be complete, with every step explained and approved. It's this method of explicit exposing your thought process, to yourself as well as to others, that I've found really useful outside of just the realm of mathematics.
We already use pressure sensors in the road to control traffic lights, which works well (other than the high cost of installation/maintenance).
I agree that Arrington got kicked off what is essentially a sinking ship and that he should count his blessings. But he doesn't seem to know that. He admits he was willing to go ahead with supporting this product until a week ago.

Also there's no doubt he got played and on his own blog to boot.

The fact that anyone even covered "The JooJoo" shows that. Always Innovating Touch Book is a cheaper product that appears superior in just about every way and it never made it to the top of Techmeme. Arrington got strung along and then cut loose after he'd outlived his usefulness and that's got to p*ss him off
You would have to make sure that all your users have a (working) version of a compiler that is compatible with the libraries. For C++, this can be a royal pain. Even on Linux, where a compiler can reasonably be expected to exist, there's no way of knowing whether the system's compiler is what you need. And don't even think about Windows, where only developers have a compiler, unless you'd like to ship GCC/mingw with your original app...
I'm sorry but I really don't get the logic of how Arrington won? He may not have lost, but nowhere do I see him "winning".

If the logic is that he "won" because otherwise he would have lost bigger, relatively speaking, maybe, but that is some twisted logic and seems like sour grapes.
From TFA:

"But Bing hasn’t grabbed one-tenth of the world’s search engine traffic in just a few months by luck, or by advertising."

Hm, maybe they grabbed it because:

- microsoft sites (msn, msdn, etc) use bing

- live.com redirects to bing

- bing powers yahoo search
I've posted it before & I'll post it again:

http://wholesale.alibaba.com/product-gs/268088826-touch-scre...

http://wholesale.alibaba.com/product-gs/268087366-10-2-inch-...

10" touch screen, Atom Processor, standard netbook specs in a touchscreen tablet, prices from $288 in bulk. (I suspect it isn't a capacitative touchscreen but it's still inaccurate to say there is nothing like it out there)
Could you elaborate on how much it actually does cost to produce a prototype in China? Further, how about a finished and consumer-ready product? I understand that what you are alluding to is a cornerstone of the modern economy, but I find it difficult to believe that the affects of manufacturing costs are essentially null on a small firm from Singapore.
Pentagon Web Site Pwned
I suppose you're right. We felt that it was more worthwhile to price our services lower and avoid going overboard with HA, because our application is arguably not "mission-critical". If it's down for awhile, it's bad, but no one dies and money is probably not lost (at least not a lot).

The investments we do make in infrastructure are geared more towards disaster recovery, because if we went down and lost our customers' data, it would be a much more critical failure on our part.
I get that your blog/tumblr site design is a joke, but my eyes weren't laughing. It looks like Geocities and the 1980s had an illegitimate child.
It's not just about distribution. Production is extremely costly. Renting professional equipment costs a fortune every hour. You have to pay producers, sound engineers, technicians, etc. Music videos aren't exactly cheap to produce either. The costs of the production of an album can quickly reach five zeros. Record labels invest a lot in artists (on not very friendly terms for the artist, but that's a separate issue). Additionally, they provide them with connections. They help them getting performances in TV shows, getting their music played on the radio, etc.

These days a many bands chose the alternative route of becoming independent. It's not impossible to succeed this way but if you go down that part you as an artist have to invest a lot more time in marketing yourself than you would had to if you signed up with a commercial label.
It's difficult to take someone seriously when the site looks to be circa 1999. Aesthetics matter, and I don't know if the layout is supposed to be ironic, but if it is, that intention doesn't mix well with this post on a serious topic.
$499 is a dealbreaker? How much do you expect the (imaginary) Apple Tablet to cost?
and how many people use the 2880 plan?

I would guess > 90% of linodes users are on the $20pm plan, and look towards other areas when they start growing anywhere near 2880
Can math study everything that is true? No. As far as the things it studies goes, are they true? Yes.
I don't think anybody believes that sales and marketing are as important as engineering. I think instead that most people here believe that all the sales and marketing people treat engineering as if it doesn't matter at all. And we'll cheer for anyone who says it's not the case.
these days I use github+github pages, even although I wrote http://drydrop.binaryage.com ;)
It seems really odd that he'd use his real name in the byline. Getting caught after doing that is not exactly an unforeseeable consequence, which means he was probably ready to move on to the next phase anyway, and getting the byline is more valuable to him than maintaining the status quo.

My guess? He's going after a book deal or something.
The best term I've heard used to describe working hard with an end income goal in mind is 'time compression'.

For example, my friends who are doctors in residency are going through time compression in that they have given four years of their youth and their life to medical school. However, when they finish their residency and pass their boards - they will earn many multiples what most people make.
Most undergrads imagine they'll effortlessly pay off their loans when they start getting paid the big bucks; they're living in a state of denial, disregarding the implications of a tough job market and how many extra years of work their spending sprees have sentenced them to. But "facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored," as Aldous Huxley famously said.

No, they don't. The facts are that your prospects as an English major are, on average, fairly dim. However, your assumption that everyone will be in your position after graduation is woefully self-absorbed.

I have sympathy for my fellow students. I did many of the same things when I was an undergrad. Plus, escaping student debt -- no matter how frugal they try to be -- is nearly impossible. Even if they do resort to purchasing a large creepy van, most will still have to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt to pay for tuition.

I think not.

The idea of "thrift," once an American ideal, now seems almost quaint to many college students, particularly those at elite schools. The typical student today is not so frugal. Few know where the money they're spending is coming from and even fewer know how deep they're in debt. They're detached from the source of their money. That's because there is no source. They're getting paid by their future selves.

And? He states this like it's prima facie ridiculous. The world runs on non-liquid assets and loans. If he thinks that he's somehow permanently escaped loans and debt he is going to have a rude awakening when he goes to buy a house and needs to take out a mortgage. Of course, he could always choose never to buy a house and live in a van for the rest of his life, but that completely ruins his idea of how "sensible" he is for avoiding college loans.

In essence, if he enjoys living frugally and does it for internal reasons (Thoreau's ideal) then that is perfectly fine. However if he believes that he is somehow in a better living and financial situation than the rest of his peers he is simply deluding himself. Yes, college education is exorbitant and yes loans make take years, even decades, to pay off. However, the idea that loans are obviously a negative thing have no basis in math or economics. One can construct situations in which loans and debt result in disaster, sure, but one can also create similar situations that have no negative consequence. That is, it is not the loan itself which is prima facie negative, but the circumstances surrounding it.
Lala, Apple, Mobile Music, and Cloud-Based Streaming (Part 1)
It's more about the reading than the writing. All of the extra words interfere with what's actually going on. Even in this most minimal of cases, there's so many extra things to read that it obscures the meaning.

Also, have you seen those studies that show that everyone has a number n, and every n lines, you make an error? If you're writing 3n lines in Java for every n lines you write in $LANGUAGE, you're making 3 times the errors.
as I alluded to in the other comment,

I run a few popular websites, can experiment with new fancy server technologies, and have pretty much every need covered for $20pm.

why would I possibly pay $150 setups and 150% times the monthly charge if I dont need anymore?

I think my case is where linode has hit its sweet spot, obviously if you start needing some heftier processing / bandwidth you would look elsewhere. I would take a guess that most of the people on the bigger plans are people that are growing and mostly looking elsewhere
> tablet PC with PC laptop innards

plus mass and and power consumption.
Like I mentioned above, it depends on how cutting edge your product is. I can't give you any specifics but you can try contacting a Chinese supplier through Alibaba.com they will be able to give you a rough idea. I know from the downvotes I've received that I won't be wasting more time trying to convince people about their misconceptions.

As a rule of thumb, the more exotic and cutting edge your product is, the more savings you will get from mass production obviously. The JooJoo/Crunchpad is not unusual. From what I've read, it's a commodity touchscreen attached to an Intel Atom motherboard.

If your product is unsellable due to a small difference in the quantity you are able to sell, you have bigger things to worry about: namely the quality of your product. There's a reason why the cost of new products such as consoles or cpus are sky high in the beginning. Why should your company be any different?
Cracking Jokes at a Wake
The Lean Startup Video
http://www.pictranslator.com/

I attended their launch party last month in Seattle. Works surprisingly well.
> our massive advances in optimization, control systems, search technology, computer vision, etc

Ok, I'll bite. What advances? I'm talking about real change, not incremental bug-stomping by plodders.
Double your productivity without doubling workload
Oh, it isn't dead. It is undead. Animated yes, but with no life behind it.
Easy Framework: all-in-one HTML/CSS front-end starting point
Sounds like there may be routing trouble between your ISP and the Linode datacenter (unless you're getting a _lot_ of reports from users). During the downtime, get a traceroute to your server and report it in a ticket. You might also want to try requesting a migration to another datacenter, where you might have better luck.
There are probably several people around HN who are science-y, grew up with sci-fi and space fiction and have $200,000 to spare...

Anyone willing to own up to booking a trip?
It will be $599 and only come in white, but it won't matter. Everyone will buy it anyway.
If the device succeeds Arrington can brag about how it was his vision and was ripped out from under him. Also how it succeeded despite not being something as good or as cheap as he imagined.

If the device fails he will claim it was a result of price point and not falling in line with what he originally envisioned.

There we have a win-win situation, kudos for Arrington getting to it so publicly.
I'm surprised that actually worked. They have separate databases for the right and left hands and only search one or the other based on which hand is being used? That seems very dumb.

Maybe they'll just move to retinal scan now. That should be pretty hard to fake without blinding someone.
The essay leaves out "more clue" as a reason why web design has stopped being clunky, unreadable Myspace-worthy technicolor evil and started to look like something to read.

Typography is not a fashion statement. It serves an important functional purpose. This writer actually holds up Hotwired as an example of the sort of "exciting" web design he misses. I beg to differ. The designers at Wired single-handedly prevented me from finding out about Bruce Sterling for ten years and more. Sterling wrote for Wired, Wired gave me headaches, ergo I did not read Sterling. I figured, what could I be missing? Surely nobody who actually knew much about words would exhibit them
in this unreadable fashion.

What happened to the web is that it grew up, put the fluorescent crayons away next to the blink tag, and realized that print designers had between five hundred and a thousand years of practice in designing readable type and layout, and perhaps this new medium should leverage that.
Why I didn’t like Java 5 years ago, and why I don’t like it now
I agree that for some specific tasks OpenCV is not particularly useful (I have to write detector and trainer from scratch even there is opencv haartraining. The OpenCV crowd are most interested in applying it to real-time video processing and put little effort on Internet scale problem).

But for assembly optimization it is really not as useful as it used to be. Scalability is more about how to get sub-linear time complexity and efficient communication pattern. Nowadays c compiler can get fairly good assembly code and for low level optimization, human cannot compete with machine (how many people knows the particular cache line alignment trick on old core i7?). Multimedia instructions (SSE/MMX/3D Now) are useful but most of them can be done by function call instead of hand-crafted assembly.
your analogy would be really cool and interesting if it applied in this case, but it doesn't.

I was involved in the Crunchpad from day 1 and we actually built a lot of things - long before anybody else came along.

You might have a different viewpoint if you have ever had anything you built or were involved with stolen from you. It sucks.

Not just from an IP perspective, but from a 'lets ride this wave while it suits us' perspective as well.
Show HN: my weekend project, jetsetter
I've been traveling quite a bit for the last few weeks and thought it might be cool to have my laptop "check in" every few hours. So far, so good. The idea is for jetsetter to generate cool maps and other info about your habits... sort of like Dopplr, but for your laptop.

It's still pretty ghetto, but becoming kind of interesting... thought I'd share it and see if you guys find it useful too.

For now, you'll need to drop your API key into the sample bash script and then set it up as an hourly cron task. Or, you can help me roll other versions too. :)

Check it out here: http://js.resultsjunkies.com

I'd love any feedback you have, this is definitely a work in progress.
FF 3.5.5 currently
I'm trying to imagine what the Apple Tablet is going to be. What "breakthrough" feature does the Apple Tablet have to have to be game changing? How will it be any different than something like the Joo Joo? Besides a shiny case and slick UI of course. Why do we even need a tablet computer? What will it do better than laptops/netbooks currently on the market?

Microsoft's Courier looks game changing, especially compared to their current Tablet PC offerings. Very slick looking, albeit vaporware at the moment. I'd imagine Apple would have to be just as amazing, though possibly in a different direction than the student/business note-taking market Microsoft is targeting. Microsoft seems to be in a very niched market here.
However, if a mathematician arrives at a "bad" result, the reaction is not always to revise the definition.

Certainly not, I meant that as an example, not as a full description of all cases.

What I was trying to say is that the chain from axioms to conclusion must be complete, with every step explained and approved.

But this is what I am trying to say does not always happen, or at least does not always happen right away. Another commenter, mreid cited Thurston's essay "On proof and progress in mathematics" which discusses this in far more detail and far more authoratitively than I possibly could. Hardy also touches on it in his "A Mathematician's Apology".

Mathematics which is long settled, the type of thing generally studied in high school and for most of undergraduate mathematics education, is often (but not always) presented in this format, with axioms and definitions cleanly laid out and tiny steps form one to the other to arrive at the theorem.

Mathematics for working mathematicians does indeed involve this, but it also often involves intuitive leaps, thoerems where the first proof is only vaguely sketched out, and reasoning from diagrams. They normally try to clean this up by the time it is published, but for a variety of reasons even there it is often not perfectly rigorous and hardly ever in tiny steps with every step justified by axiom or previous proof.

There are many things held in common knowledge that are never cited. This is of course fine if the proofs are available, but steps away from that school house rigour immediately. Even beyond that, it is not uncommon for some ideas to only be sketched, and occassionally errors are found in the omitted steps in those sketches years after they have been formally peer reviewed and published.

These sketches are used in proof of absolute formalism often just for the sake of time and space in the journal, but occassionally because no one has ever actually gone through and filled in every detail at all, trusting to the more intuitive logic of the sketch.

The assumption in most cases is that it could be made perfectly rigorous if the need arised, but that is often only actually done if there is some question or debate.
Both times I've had issues it was definitely not my connection. One time the disk went out on our cluster, and they also 'took the opportunity' to apply an upgrade. The next time it was 'network problems' at the datacenter. Both of these were reported on their status (except the second time, I couldn't even access their forum/status pages).
I recently got screwed over a project, too, and it does suck. And if anyone from TC contributed code, designs, and energy, then, of course, you deserve your take. This is a legal dispute between two parties and I hope a fair conclusion can come out of that.

But I don't have any more information on the matter than the author of this blog post--unless you guys sent him all the legal papers or he's the arbitrator in the dispute, then by all means I'll eat my hat--and I find his use of flawed logic, piling on to the drama, and a mention of an unannounced and unseen Apple tablet is just... lame.

Especially the part about wanting a tablet for $200. I want a pony that poops ice cream.
I am using this more at my current job for a year and I still don't get used to the framework.
Rupert Murdoch makes the case for paying to read the news
That's kind of... scary.

Lots of things in Smalltalk evoke that reaction. But while others get to tremble in fear of imagined disasters, we Smalltalkers get to know the truth: that lots of the "conventional wisdom" is nonsense!
I have another server with Slicehost, and it's been down once in the past year. Overall I'm somewhat more please with Slicehost. These are the two linode issues that affected us:

http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4822&sid=1c...
http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4908&sid=1c...
I'm not saying this is a good product. I'm not sure it is. That is besides the point.

I think the point is that it is a different approach to what the Archos 9, a Windows tablet. This is a browser in a box. Maybe browser in a box isn't a good idea. Maybe it will bomb.

There are two main features/bugs to this: Browser in a box & tablet. Saying "why does it only browse the web?' is like saying 'Why doesn't it have a keyboard.'
The adventure of van-living isn't always fun: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=917395
This reminds me of an experiment I did in college to see how small of a food budget I could go on while still maintaining three healthy (and delicious) meals per day.

I think I got it down to under $2/meal with a carb, protein, and veggie/fruit component to each meal. Pretty amazing when you factor in that I did ~50% of my shopping at Whole Foods. (they have quite competitive prices when it comes to frozen veggies and dried pasta)

Amazing how far money will go when you don't have very much of it.
Hands on with the JooJoo/Crunchpad
A bit pedantic, but those are generally inductive loops, not pressure sensors.
That could be with the Barnes & Noble and the Nook, but I doubt the Sony's generate much revenue beyond the unit purchase.
> There's a very low chance that someone will be determined enough to use tools like these to hack into your LAN

To use you LAN no... but to use your internet? Imagine someone is determined to get an your internet connection already and doesn't care if it's legal or not - he starts looking for information on wireless password hacking and finds that site. Now his choice is between a contract + installation fee + monthly fee -vs- 17$ once.

Why would you care? For example if your country/ISP uses a 3 strikes policy. Or you don't want police asking about that child porn distribution network. Or .... (many reasons)
So how does one make the world a better place?

Most methods I can think of cost a lot of money.
So Arrington's contribution is the price point and because Garage is selling it at a higher price point and cutting Arrington out leads to the conclusion that Arrington won?

Not quite following that logic.
textmate (only for os x though)
Great game, fondly reminds me of Portal.
...it's probably a good interview question for a C++ compiler programmer?

I just figured a good language lawyer, like a good real lawyer, would be able to both interpret the law (spec), but also tell you what would happen in reality if you violated it a certain way.
How A Teenage Entrepreneur Built A Profitable Lyrics Site
Startup Meetups
Are there any startup events in the Charlotte NC area?
If you are interested in this topic and you haven't already done so, check out "The Mathematical Experience"

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Experience-Phillip-J-Davi...
I cringed on this line of CSS from the video:

margin-left: -920px;

However the class="popup" at the end is a nice idea.