skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And that's where something like Bitcoin could enter the picture. It establish value in the other direction. It has value to the apple eater because it can be used to buy an apple

Right...but this can be said about any commodity. If I own a new iPhone, or a bar of gold, or what have you, it won't take me long to sell those and buy apples. But iPhones, gold etc. have inherent value and use, Bitcoin has no use value.

> fixed supply
most commodities

> highly divisible, cheap to store
some commodities have these properties...like precious metals

> securely transferable
fortunes are wired from bank to bank around the world every day

Gold is a useful commodity. For wiring, for filling teeth, for other purposes. It is also durable, divisible, uniform, portable, and all those things which make a commodity useful as a currency. Bitcoins are not a useful commodity, they are a hash number ultimately. When the game of musical chairs ends, people flock to commodities that have had value for thousands of years, like gold. They have inherent usefulness and value. Bitcoins don't.
"∗John Conway collaborated on the research reported here, and has been listed as an author of this work since it was first distributed in 1994. But he has never approved of this exposition, which he regards as full of ‘fluff’"

That's weird; I thought Conway was a big fan of fluff (and while the reader is enjoying the fluff, he sneakily introduces the highly non-trivial.)

Edit: well the paper is fairly chatty, I guess that turns some people off (it can obscure the argument.)
Right now, software (GPU based) implementations of neural networks are acceptable because the models are constantly changing. Whatever you build in hardware today will be obsolete in a year (unless your hw is flexible enough, but then it loses a lot of its efficiency, and GPUs will probably catch up with you soon).

However, as we discover more algorithms for general intelligence, we will reach a point where the model can learn on its own - just like a human baby does. That will be the point where we will need size, speed, and power efficiency, rather than flexibility. That will be a good moment to offer a hardware solution, and that's when an analog chip will suddenly become more attractive than a digital one.
SoftICE was the tool that really got me into programming. Before that I was coding in Visual Basic, and tried and failed several times to teach myself C++. The books that I got where all talking about things like inheritance, polymorphism and Microsoft's MFC and none of that made sense to me. Then I found SoftICE and learned how to crack sharewares and eventually found an amazing tutorial on how to write Windows apps in assembly using MASM and calling the Win32 API directly. I used SoftICE as a debugger and it was amazing to see my code being run by the processor, instruction by instruction. I had a feeling of having a complete understanding of the computer. From there, I was able to work my way up the abstraction chain.
Access isn't free, but anyone can write to it without permission. That makes it public.

Individuals couldn't compete with SWIFT because they had no way to coordinate their actions. Public databases change that. The first phase will be financial institutions using blockchains to lower their costs. The second phase will be financial institutions pursuing new business models around blockchains anyone can access every time they use Apple Pay.

The genie is out of the bottle. Middlemen are no longer necessary for anything.
Google's Eric Schmidt on Future of Intelligent Machines
>To given an example it can easily take me a whole day to set up something as simple as an authentication system for a web application

If you are writing your own, it should take more than a day. You can't just slap it together and expect it to be right. That's why there are companies like Stormpath.

What you probably need to do is work on building some reusable library of personal code so that you can get shit running faster. Base it off one of the major frameworks and just make some boilerplate projects that you can check out and get up and running fast. Try to reuse code. You don't have to write reusable modules to reuse your code. Just have a skeleton project that makes things faster.
why this instead of TypeScript?
I should've looked at FAQ first:

How does JS Zero differ from TypeScript?

TypeScript aims to be a superset of JavaScript, while JS Zero aims to be a subset. This means TypeScript extends the JS language, while JS Zero refines the language by removing features that are hard to check for correctness.

How does JS Zero differ from Flowtype?

Flowtype and JS Zero are indeed very similar. However, Flowtype aims to type check the entire JavaScript language. Unfortunately, JavaScript as a whole is too dynamic for Flowtype to achieve full type safety. JS Zero aims to specify a subset of JavaScript that can be type checked soundly.
I'm not following, how does a piece being somewhat unique each time it's performed lead to a) harder to record in a studio setting and b) live performances provide authentic experiences? Are you saying that the audience of a live performance adds feedback that the artist can't replicate in isolation, or that the audiences own audio affects the performance, or both, or something else?
I can't think of a better language to complement Clojure than OCaml. It hits all of Clojure's weak points dead-on, and its own weak points are covered really well by Clojure.

In terms of "general purpose", I think of Clojure as being a better choice for long-running server processes and OCaml as being a better fit for code you run on your own machine or programs that don't stay running forever, due to the varying memory/performance/concurrency characteristics of their respective runtimes.

I wrote in more detail about my experiences coming from Clojure to OCaml here: http://technomancy.us/170 I found it very easy to pick up with some FP background. Not having to think about nil in particular was a huge breath of air after Clojure. I also had good luck accepting contributions from others with a Clojure background who wanted to make some changes to my code and learned OCaml just for that.
I think this was completely lost on all my math teachers growing up. It wasn't until I started teaching myself programming and exploring the patterns of the universe and reading philosophy and science and even too from being a musician and teacher did I start to FEEL and KNOW math and experience it's concepts directly. Not just memorize steps. I almost feel like math and philosophy should be combined in school into a hybrid course that is very experimental (verbal hypotheses, mathematic proofs) and should focus simply on investigating the world of ideas around you. Get them into a mode of thought where your creative and skeptical insights can get you into mental conundrum, and your mathematical skills can help you get out of it. How wonderful would it be to get students to "rediscover" fundamental insights about the world? THEN you crack the book open and teach them who discovered it first 2000 years ago.
I would take that classical programs class in a heartbeat. That seems like something that could be organized online somewhere.
I'd never heard of that interview; now I'll have to see if I can find a copy. Thanks!
Diabetes will also affect mental clarity and vision.
What do you want improved about her?
Very true Pallav and incentives are coming in the for of carrot (save money when you shop) and stick (High deductibles). I think we agree that before the consumer gets involved, nothing will happen to improve the system. One difficulty with these incentives is that it calls for new behavior and a minimum of understanding of how Healthcare work. I believe that the stick will finally win to get consumers to move.
> Blockchains give us publicly writable databases. Such a thing never existed before

Not true. We had Microsoft SQL Server[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer
>They don't make a pill for slowness

They do make a pill for slowness. Several, in fact. In subjective order of strength, modafinil, methylphenidate (Ritalin), and amphetamines (e.g. Adderall aka speed). Not that I'm suggesting these, but it's not called speed for no reason, yeah? It is not just for ADD people; the benefits to everyone else are immense (well except potential heart problems and psychosis.)

You should definitely follow the other suggestions, like verifying that you're truly operating slowly (it's difficult to accurately judge oneself). And making sure you're healthy, etc.

The stuff you are describing though, it sounds more like unfamiliarity. If it took you three hours to debug something, why was that? Are you following a scientific approach in debugging? Analyze and get feedback on how you're missing things. I spent hours debugging an app that I wrote and it all came down to a one-line fix. I was just unlucky.

Edit: You can check erowid out. From developer friends, I've seen them: 1. Read hundreds of pages of material in a single setting, at a fast pace, far beyond normal ability. 2. Ability to do math/calculations increases several fold. 3. Output soars once focused on a problem. 4. Grand-scale ideas (sometimes even workable.)

The big downside and why not all devs should be on it all the time is the tendency to lose sight of the big picture. Like spending all day optimizing for TLB-hits... in PHP.
Again you think that those blockchains will be publicly accessible which is incorrect, they'll have their own blockchains for their own settlement, maybe they'll have some sub-chains in the long run for end-users but still you can bet your house on that they'll find a way to ensure that users can't simply join the blockchain "fully" (e.g. find a way to separate wallets from mining, like BC does with mining pools for example but for another reason) like they can currently with Bitcoin.

And having a non-free access make it non-public by definition sorry.
Bitcoin is moderated by the amount of effort needed to perform certain operation, some take very little like generating your key and address tomorrow they can change that to a point where only the large bitcoin farms could do it would you still call it a public system?
If so so is SWIFTNet sure you just need a couple of billion and to open a bank but hey any one can join....

BTW you see a similar thing today, BC is "complicated" this is why things like coinbase become more and more popular, people don't keep their bitcoins in their own wallets anymore they use a 3rd party mostly in the form of various bitcoin exchanges.
If a "public" based system has already degraded into pretty much a hierarchy what do you think a system designed by the financial sector will turn out like?
> The intrinsic value of bitcoin (if this matters) is immutable storage. You see this utilized with projects such as counterparty.

I have heard people talk about the storage aspect of Bitcoin as having value before, and it's probably the best argument for Bitcoin having any inherent value whatsoever. You're making a more intelligent observation than most of the people in this thread.

That said, Bitcoin has a $3.4 billion market cap. Litecoin has a $119 million market cap, and even the joke crypto-currency Dogecoin has a $12 million market cap - and they can be used as storage mediums as well. As a storage medium, Bitcoin would be way overpriced. It's price is due to the other points I mentioned, mainly the hype.
Ever spent time in Alaska in the summer? Getting to sleep at a decent hour can be a real trick unless you're sleeping in a cave. Hell, an entire movie was made with this very problem being a major plot point. http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0278504/
Lessons from Sam Walton
I'm actually the D-9000 computer Walter was working on. I replaced him when I computed he was jeopardizing the mission with his human error.
Earlier posters have mentioned getting enough sleep. If you are affected by sleep apnea, you may be getting enough hours of sleep but it won't matter due to the affects of sleep apnea.

All the reputable medical websites have good articles about sleep apnea -- certainly enough for you to have an informed conversation with your doctor.

Most insurance plans will require a doctor to refer you to a sleep disorder specialist, followed by a home sleep monitor test, then a overnight sleep lab study.

If you ask around, you'll probably be surprised about how many people have been diagnosed with sleep apnea and are probably using a CPAP machine at night to address the problem.
TypeScript and JSX
Lowering the financial barrier of online education to basically zero
I would get assessed by a psychologist if you really think your slow. You might get surprised and just find out your actually not. Or your smart and meticulous (more accurate, but slower), something pretty common in software engineers. Software requires high preciseness, being loose and sloppy quickly gets filtered out.

The example you cite sounds like a lack of experience with the library set. The reason it's a 10s fix is because he's seen that shit before, not because he's smarter. The engineer is applying a heuristic, the heuristic was correct and thus they solved it quickly. You start to notice general error patterns in computers from experience, and certain error patterns in certain libraries or programming languages.

For example, I notice a stutter in a UI application. My guess when I see that is something is probably being processed on the main thread that takes too long, because I've seen that before in my own programs. I've just reduced my search space significantly. My heuristic might be incorrect, and my search time becomes larger.
This also makes for a somewhat spooky dystopian science fiction. Society engineers a gigantic sunshade. Something goes wrong and they lose contact with the shade unable to adjust it. Leading to crop failures, ecosystem collapse, and a global ice age. Frantically, the world governments race to launch a mission to repair or destroy the shade before life on earth is plunged into a permanent ice age from which a collapsed technological civilization could never hope to avert.

That is, this thing should have a dead man's switch on it, and if it isn't renewed every few years, it will self destruct, alter course, stop station keeping, etc Of course, this is probably an implausible scenario but it would make for a great TV movie.
This is not far off from what much traditional chemotherapy actually does. The approach is to literally poison yourself, and hope that as a whole you can take more of it than the cancerous cells can.
This is not as big a problem as:

1. Enrolling enough people in a trial to prove you can cure with a combination therapy

2. Evolved resistance with an entirely new set of mutations
Unfortunately the comic missed the reason why such research continues: people will pay most of their money for a cure for (or even a temporary reprieve from) _their_ cancer. This becomes "all of their money" rather than "most..." if their child has cancer.

Cancer centers are enormous money-generating systems. Most of their research is useless but the doctors running them get rich, the corporations who own them get rich, all of their patients die and in the end nobody cares so the process continues.
interesting article. Never heard of Somailand before but after reading few articles at http://www.somalilandfoundation.com. This breakaway region deserves to be heard and recognised by world powers.
While I don't mean to snub anyone, it's sorta like C++ - most would not use it if there was a better option (C compat, little runtime/overhead).

Go cannot (AFAIK) be used when you need C compat (i.e., I can't write a C-compatible plugin in it, whereas with Rust I can).

I'd contend that "GC or not GC" is _probably_ a rather large requirement. Rust is nice enough that some may use it when they don't really need it.

But fair enough, if my comment came off snubbish, my fault.
I think the shared ledger analogy is meant as a simplification for the general public. I did the same thing in my explanatory article two years ago: http://zen.lk/2013/11/28/how-i-finally-understood-bitcoin/
The world economy absolutely was designed, just not by a single designer. It certainly isn't there by mistake.

Economic theory dating back to the late 1700's arguably were the first major attempts at retroactive design of the global economy. There've been other pockets of this happening, but not globally, more likely the monetary and debt systems of various epochs and empires.

But after retroactively observing market exchange, most classical economic theory became pretty prescriptive, i.e. it wasn't a reflection of "human nature" so much as that was an easy way to promote free market ideals.

For example, the "profit motive" has been basically disproven as something that never actually existed historically or anthropologically as a universal human driver. It was invented by economists as useful way to explain away certain aspects of their system design. This is not to say some people were not and are not motivated by profit.. sure they are. It's just not universal, like hunger, or breathing.

Markets also weren't omnipresent throughout human history until proto-economists noticed them, wrote about them, and businessmen began convincing governments to apply them by force to various communities in the 1800s. (see Karl Polanyi, the Great Transformation).

One could argue that economics is really "software design for the world economy", except you need to test and debug in production. Religious wars about better designs and features abound (fiat currency vs. gold standard; Keynesians vs. Rational Expectations / Real Business Cycles; Austrians vs. Science; etc.)
Managing Xcode
The industrial value of gold is far below its trade value.

And the value in jewelry is largely due to its perceived cost - otherwise any number of alloys that look the same would have just as astronomical cost. Just look at diamonds where nearly the whole retail value is based on de Beers marketing and industrial diamonds are in a different class.
> being a subject of historians' research

I might be narcissistic but that seems like a good thing to me. Imagine being able to tell future people what the present was really like.
Here you go:

$ python
>>> 10e50 * 10e90
1e+142

Waaaay bigger than the number of atoms in the universe. Consider yourself the "greatest programming mind" now. You're welcome ;-)
Uber Founder Interview Late Show Colbert
I'm a lot like OP myself. I take a lot longer than others to get something off the ground, but when I do, it's very well executed, and I understand all the moving parts inside. But then again, I'm obsessive about every small thing.
American graduate mathematics student here at a US university, speaking from my perspective. This is perhaps not useful with respect to high school or first/second year undergraduate mathematics, but I choose to include this for sake of another perspective many may not be aware of.

Whenever anyone says something is "trivial" -- I understand that to mean simply "it is obvious to me." I try to NEVER explain things in such ways -- to say things are trivial because it is very clear to me that is NOT trivial to many other people. And there has to be some respect given to this idea. I abhor when professors use this sort of language -- instead of stating it is trivial, explain using an extra sentence or two why it is so. If it takes more than that, it is likely not trivial.

The best way for me to learn new concepts (in my graduate classes, for example) is as follows. And it is the method all of my professors currently use whether they know it or not.

First, they begin with the definition of something. For example (one of my classes last week expressed this idea in particular): in metric spaces they say "A function is upper semi-continuous at x_0 if for all x approaching x_0 the limit supremum of f(x) is smaller or equal to f(x_0)." But what does this mean? You can use the "epigraph" as a way to explain this idea in a different way, explaining what it means to be a u.s.c. and/or a l.s.c. function in a more understandable way. From here, then, after understanding this, I was able to go through the strict mathematical notation of these concepts and follow it more clearly.

Instead of starting from the mathematically "rigorous" notation, I am able to jump to a more familiar idea and proceed to link it back to the notation and rigor described in the definitions and associated theorems. This is a much more "efficient" way, in my opinion, than staring at the notation and trying to decipher it for hours. Having examples makes it easier to understand the context of the symbols and rigor involved: by having a specific example of a general form.

Is there a lack of rigor in American math education? In general I would say yes -- especially in high school/undergraduate mathematics. But how do people most easily learn? Through examples tying back to definitions. This is more of the American way of teaching in my experience.

Furthermore, you state "American textbooks on mathematics" are "softcore." I think this is true for a lot of the lower-level material, but if you pick up Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis I do not think you will feel the same way.
I had the same question. Is taking a whole day to set up an authentication system for a web application unreasonable? That's a pretty critical component and not necessarily simple. At my, erm, last company, it took multiple developers three months to set one up and we're still tweaking it.

I'm with @funkysquid. A few extra hours to properly implement and test code that is going to see months if not year of critical frontline service seems like a bargain to me.

Now if your managers are of a different opinion, or you're taking an extra long time to produce code in the end that still has a lot of issues, that's another matter.
Yeah the weirdness. It's funny because I'm generally sympathetic to the thrust of the article, but then there are these random sentences that just read like a Markov chain.
3. Cancer cells can be hard to get to with drug therapy. Even if we have a drug that kills the cell in question we can't always get therapeutic concentrations into the core of solid tumors, and we can't get many drugs past the blood brain barrier.

4. Cancer cells can be highly unstable, genetically, depending on what part of the DNA got mangled. Unstable cells that mutate rapidly follow the same Darwinian logic you see in microbes. A single tumor can contain thousands of different mutations of the original cell type, and if your therapy kills 99% of them the 1% that come roaring back will be highly resistant to whatever strategy you used the first time around.
I teach a class that is about 80% Chinese students who have come to the US. Many have much better technical skills but I do see gaps in these concepts like graphs as the locus of points satisfying a logical claim, the equivalence of various approaches to integration (numerical/limit of Riemann sum/fundamental theorem of calculus), etc.

You're right that American textbooks on math are often very soft. We try to make things so understandable that they are impossible to understand. There's nothing to hold on to. I am occasionally guilty of this in my teaching, although it can be very effective with people who do understand the technical basics.
Just saw it last week! It was good - sort of. Very interesting to see Al Pacino as the good guy - mostly. And Robin Williams as a really, really creepy bad guy. I'd never seen him so convincing before.
I am exactly like you. I have been doing this thing from about couple of years, and I also think I am not getting anywhere. I have lost most of the interest that I once had for programming, and I just sleep and take meds for my ADHD now. I don't program a lot these days. So, thanks for asking.
It might be true... but ask an American 17-year-old with collegiate aspirations what he or she will take in college. "Calculus!" What else? Blank stare. What other math exists? This number theory you speak of... as far as an average high schooler is concerned, you're making stuff up.