skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> and half fascism.

I don't like fascism, even half of it. So I don't like Arch, mainly because of the often times toxic community. How good pacman then may be - becomes irrelevant.
The quality of experience, technical knowledge, curiosity, moderation, and general conflict-free discussion along with a style of site that intentionally dissuades a mainstream audience [1] is what I've always seen as setting HN apart. Frequently HN will be the source of many unique insights into stories, personal anecdotes from those familiar with companies mentioned, and other tidbits that often can't be found elsewhere.

Low quality posts on the other hand such as fluff replies, memes, or the odd rude post will get downvoted or simply not upvoted to demonstrate to others it's not something the community wants to see, with more thoughtful posts especially from those with experience in a topic rising to the top and sparking engaging discussions and questions.

I appreciate that all users until they reach a certain karma level don't see a downvote button. Rather than downvote something to influence the order of comments most users will upvote ones they like, which is subtly a more positive system. Over time all these things cultivate a certain culture that spreads and attracts other like minded users.

All this and the community has still managed to not become generally snarky, patronizing, or too insular itself. The life experience, focus on more technical topics, along with still retaining some humor helps.

[1] Paul Graham:

"So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there."

http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
More information
http://drop-kicker.com/?s=scribble&x=0&y=0
First we have to agree on what 0.999 is, then we can call it constructible or not.

Numbers formed by repeated 9's appended to 0.9 are certainly Turing computable. Which has the meaning that we have a terminating algorithm which, given a natural number N, will compute the N-th digit of the infinite sequence 0.999...

This is the same way that pi is computable. Given an N, we can compute the N-th digit of pi in a finite number of steps.

We don't say that 3.141... = pi! Unless, by convention, we agree that this "..." syntax has the semantics of (for instance) denoting the limiting numeric value of the non-terminating algorithm for producing the digits of pi ad infinitum. That is to say, "insert here a process for calculating the remaining digits of pi, and take this whole expression then to be the limiting value to which that converges".
I didn't quite accept that until I challenged a professor in a 300-level university math class. This came up in class, and I spoke up and was like, "no, that can't be true, because 0.3333 repeated N times will never equal 1/3."

Up to that point, I had only a fuzzy notion in my mind of what 0.33333... even was or how it was defined. But the professor helped clear this up for me: that "infinitely-repeating decimals" was actually just shorthand for a limit definition, i.e. "0.333..." is defined to be the limit as N approaches infinity of (3/10^1)+(3/10^2)+...+(3/10^N).
Mac only, too bad :(.

https://github.com/mortenjust/cleartext-mac

(since the link is a bit hidden)

Summary: "What's this? A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English."
Worked in HW design for 16 years and I've never seen a design that was done by trial and error. Usually lots and lots of simulation and calculation up front followed by a DOE (design of experiment) to provide insight in areas which are difficult or impossible to simulate well. It's most certainly not trial and error.
I'll go look, it's been many years. Regardless, it's easy to see that participation hours racks up more deaths in skydiving than other sports.

You are free to express your opinion, and free to disagree with mine. What you can't do is call me a liar for expressing my opinion, that is unreasonable.

All of the sports you listed are super dangerous.

Plus, you ignored the larger point. I wasn't making a point about skydiving, I was saying something about BASE jumping. Do you disagree that wingsuit BASE is more dangerous than skydiving?

I am a skydiver. I'm not current, but as a subscriber to USPA magazine, I'm well aware of the safety levels and risks. As are you. How you interpret the stats is up to you, but it's fair to call any significant number of deaths in any activity "super dangerous". It's equally fair to say that something with lower deaths than something else is, relatively, "super safe". All a matter of perspective.

But really, why do you care? It's not a secret that skydiving has risks. What's your point trying to call me out for saying that? Do you think people aren't participating in it because of the risks, and that my speaking it out loud is going to prevent someone from trying it?

The article the thread is about is talking about how the display of risky behavior has led to more risky behavior, not less. My local DZs are curious how every single time there's an accident and the local news talks about it, business triples for a month or so.
> "3:1 for horizontal vs vertical is quite dangerous"

I would suggest that the danger isn't the glide-ratio, but the proximity to the ground.

Could better materials improve safety? If there were improvements in the predictability and consistency of flight characteristics, that might have a more positive effect, but I can't see improvements in the glide-ratio having an impact on safety.
Why, it's doesn't take more time to set up than any other system (Windows, Mac OS, whatever), have you possibly started with Gentoo as your first distro?
The argument is that you cannot get to infinity by adding one by one.

(If the argument assumed otherwise, it would only be temporarily, for the sake of setting up a reductio ad absurdum.)
One solution I've heard proposed is taxing revenue. If a business, like Apple, Starbucks or Amazon sells something in a country, they pay a percentage of the revenue, not the profit.

It would be a very drastic change, and may items would need to have their prices adjusted, as low profit items could be a problem.

The clever bit is that tax heavens are not longer possible, because it's not important where you move your profit to.
That's one way of looking at it, but you don't just happen to have those skills. You get them from experience and practice - or doing well at the 99% that doesn't feel important.

This arguement reminds me of people who focus on a key, heroic play in sports, rather than all the good and bad that led up to it.
If the only thing stopping you from committing murder is fear of government punishment you might be a sociopath.
the purpose of teaching math is not purely to be applied in the context of daily work. It is to be able to think through complex problems of different nature and divide into multiple steps that can be tackled more easily. Technology has allowed us to easily graph and instantaneously observe math as it unfolds in daily life. Think bell curves in statistics, regression analysis and divide and conquer algorithms.

This article misses the point. The purpose of teaching math is not to memorize equations and solving methods, but to teach to approach problems in different ways.

As a developer and now a PM I've used complex math at many different times. I'm not solving in paper, but actually using it to solve real world problems.
my answer to anyone shouting "OMG I can't have my Win7 on my Skylake, die Micro$oft!" was to politely ask them to attempt to install Windows 98 on a Core i-series machine

Done that, and it works (as well as Win98 can, in any case.) Other apps from around that time will work too. Of course it can only use one core, but it's interesting to see just how ridiculously fast even a single core can be after 10 years of hardware improvement if the software hasn't "grown to fill the space".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOWzorOD-II (not me)

It's not even limited to Microsoft; you can't install Mac OS X 10.7+ on anything older than a 2nd generation Core2 Duo, and with good reason. OS X 10.6 ran like crap on the first gen Core Duo and Core2 Duo machines, despite being fully supported by Apple.

That's the opposite situation; newer software on older hardware.
You can, but that requires you to log in with your Apple ID and password. Or to download (with your Apple ID and password) a copy and create an installation thumb drive.
Okay, so it follows from completeness. Now prove that real numbers are complete (or provide a construction of the reals that uses completeness as an axiom) without using concepts foreign or confusing to someone with a middle school level exposure to math.
I'd like to suggest

- adding to the timeframes I've been here 4 years and know there are people here much longer

- breakdown of how much people read show, comments, new, etc. I do front page 2 to 3 times a day but only do show, comments about once a week. New is only when I have some extra time to burn off, so about two times a week (and mostly on the weekends).

- Breakdown on commenting. I try not to comment unless I'm going to add value to the comments. But if I have a comment when I ask a question I make more of an effort to get back to get the answer.

- Add a question about how often do you go back to old threads you were interested in.

- Add a question about how much you use search. A few times a month I search on things that interest me (Lua, Robots, Rockets, Raspberry Pi, etc) to see if there was something I missed.

Interested to see what the results are
I think we have a disagreement about epistemology. I say, you can't believe in truth if you don't believe it is knowable.

In any case, statisticians are not interested in learning the truth, either, and the goal of their enterprise is not access to it.
Vanilla Windows 7 doesn't support 4K sectors either.

I discovered this when I unthinkingly replaced my laptop's failing disk with a 4K disk. Windows 7 installed itself from the recovery DVD, but would blue screen on the first reboot.
In the UK, you aren't allowed to skydive with a camera until achieving a "C" licence - minimum 200 jumps. That's a common requirements for many overseas dropzones too.

Most BASE courses won't accept you without a minimum of 200 jumps either.
You've clearly never worked in local government if you think it's that easy.
Strongly seconded. Such ancillary features are useful for social signaling, and there's value in that, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that one of the primary reasons HN's quality of discourse tends so high is because there's really nothing here to put thought or effort into, when participating, other than what you actually say in your comments.

(On the other hand, the same is very much true of 4chan, and the quality of discourse there is hardly what anyone would seriously describe as "high", so on reflection I think I'm probably pretty far off base here.)
Ask HN: Why has HackerNews succeeded despite the rise of Reddit?
It is unusual that HackerNews is still a powerful, vibrant community despite Reddit's rise:

- Every subject you can find on HackerNews is also found on Reddit: programming, entrepreneurship, academic news, etc.

- HN celebrities don't participate that often, so I don't think that is the difference

- Reddit has more features (esp. when combined with RES)

How do you explain the success of HN despite the rise of reddit, and does this mean other reddit-style communities might succeed despite their similarity to Reddit?
Nice! Lucky the annotations aren't accurate, I wouldn't like to have 68mph plate tectonics... :)

Interesting that there seem to be the plate tectonic versions of cyclones, like off Baja California.

Also, is the absence of data at the poles due to a coordinate system limitation?
My guess is that corporates will stick to Win7 the way they sticked to WinXP. I just go upgraded last month from XP to 7...

Though the 32bit to 64bit was probably a big part of the big step between XP and 7.
Ex-Revenue Based Financier here (but speaking only for myself, not Lighter Capital). For the case you're describing, you wouldn't need it, so end of story.

A better match would be where there are J-curve and/or "stairstep" investments necessary to grow.

A real case study was a company we looked at who produced technical informational videos with 3-D animations, sold into very specific use cases in industry. The videos cost 4-5 figures to produce, but once created could be resold several times on a subscription basis. Demand was easy to project by looking at the list of topics. Production cost was recaptured about 12 months in, then pure profit on the subscription.

Now, those folks wanted to go produce, say, the next 10 videos but needed $100k to do it. No bank would lend with some obscure technical videos as collateral.

Perfect fit for RBF though. Payback on the production cost goes from 12 months to maybe 13 months and a small % of the (basically 100%) gross margin goes to the lender for another couple years, but in exchange the company grows far faster than organically possibly on recycled profits.

There are anti-patterns too, so I'm not just cheerleading. But a good match typically has high gross margins and some discernible element of J-curve wait for ROI on internal projects.
I agree wholeheartedly! It reminds me of when I was studying music. When the teacher wanted you to perform a piece for a recital or concert, you'd always play a piece that was a level or two below where you were at because you could nail it. You didn't play the piece you were currently working on because it's already hard enough to play during practice, without the added stress of doing it in front of an audience.
I'm running Windows 10 now (upgraded just before the deadline) and I quite like it. It only takes a bit of time to disable enough to make it look/act like a better version of Windows 7.
Linux lets you run new kernels on old distros, though.
There is absolutely no chance that this person will serve 40 years in prison, or anything resembling that sentence. DOJ press releases add up the maximum possible sentence for the class of offense people are charged with. It's terribly misleading.

In reality, for a non-remunerative first-time offense, even of this severity, the guidelines suggest low single-digits.
In principle a precious metal currency could inflate — if someone finds more gold and silver. There are semi-plausible proposals for asteroid mining.
Windows 10 is just as easy to crack as windows 8.1. Just install a local KMS server and you're good to go.

I wonder if the obligatory updates will eventually detect and defeat those cracks, or have the pirates thought of that too? (Or perhaps, given the aggressive push by MS to get everyone on Win10, even giving it away for free, they won't really care.)
Interesting protocol.

This chrome extension is also great: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/memento-time-trave...
A few months ago, RadioLab had a similar story, but the trees were found to communicate and cooperate across species through a network of underground fungus tubes in what scientists named the wood wide web.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/
I agree.

I used to do IT work at a company where playing chess was popular among the techs and I decided to improve my skill.

The ways to improve:

* Study tactics and strategy books
* Study grandmaster games
* Do two-to-mate or tactical chess problems
* Review your own games and look for mistakes
* Study openings (once you're more advanced)

Some of these things are straightforward, some not. If I study openings and know e5 is a good response to e4, I know my study did that. I am following an opening I memorized from a book.

If I spend months carefully studying the games of Kasparov, Fischer, Karpov etc., and my playing begins improving - how do I prove studying the greats carefully has improved my game? It might be "self-serving nonsense", as I can't draw a line between a move I do to some game I studied, like I can for an opening I memorized from a book. All I know is my general problem solving skills have somehow increased. I now see patterns I did not see before, and the correct path forward where before it was muddled, although I can't fully explain why. The only test is a sample comparison of those who do it versus a sample of those who don't.
You can eat blue tang? I didn't know that was served. I thought it was just a display fish.
Long story, but I work in infection prevention (like infectious disease, but I'm not a doctor). I was on the receiving end of care once. I was flying back home and had an large episode of vomiting in the rear bathroom. I'm pretty tall and the vomiting came on quickly so it ended up everywhere (I couldn't bend down enough to hit the toilet). It took me quite a while to clean up. I came out of the bathroom and told the flight attendants that they should close the bathroom to prevent other people from getting what I thought I had (I named off a bunch of likely viral candidates). This kind of freaked them out. They closed the bathroom and I returned to my seat. After 5 minutes the FA came back and said the pilot wanted this medical form filled out (demographics, symptoms etc). The FA left and another 10 minutes passed. They came back and said that ground medical operations wanted to ask some questions. The FA asked the questions and responded back to ground operations. After that, they decided they wanted EMS to come and meet the plane when we landed. The FAs announced this to the passengers and asked everyone to remained seated. Two EMS staff came on board and asked me what was going on. I told them and they asked if I wanted to go to the hospital to which I responded absolutely not. The whole ordeal was quite embarrassing.

Needless to say, if you are an expert, don't use technical words, just say "I puked in there, you should close it."
It's reduced a little in the past few months. I've increased my rates a little so that I can focus only on direct clients rather than training vendors who need the prices to be low so that they can take a cut.

Also, I think cheaper git trainers have shown up on the market and many people are already familiar with it both of which have reduced the number of requests I get.
For software engineers specifically -- every time you are coding formalized programmatic logic, you are using math. If you took a logics and proofs course, it would help you formalize logic better. Every time you write a "for" loop you are essentially using summations.

There is a book called Concrete Mathematics and one of the primary authors is Donald Knuth, basically it's "Programmers math" and in my opinion, would make your average developer who completes the text into an exceptional developer.
Show HN: Live Dangerously – 1-for-1 anonymous photo sharing via SMS
It's unfortunately true that you need to get them to accept a slightly stunted quality of life. But expecting him/her/them to do that without leading by example and also making sacrifices is the highest order of duchebaggery.
I think that in the pursuit of higher levels of understanding, some people miss what is even more important to know.

Is better to have strong basic skills, than high-level skills.

I was (supposedly) of the bests student of my college. However, terrible at math? Of course.

My grandmother was able to do arithmetic in his head like nothing, yet I even have trouble with sum and rest.

She only have 3 years of education after kindergarten.

---

In the first class of calculus in the University, the teacher make us do a division between a largueish number and a small number, at hand. We was something like 50 people. I don't remember anyone was able to perform it in time and give the correct result (or if somebody was able, surely was a very small number, I don't remember it well).

At that moment I know that the whole point of learn calculus will be a disaster.

-----

People not need to learn advanced math. They need to have strong, fluent understanding of the very basic (imagine if a developer can't perform without look basic list manipulations).

Like Bruce Lee say:

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
Can't we look at places where that is the case today and see? I always hear about how in places like Russia, every student learns much harder math than here in the US, and they learn it better. But I don't see other countries like Russia producing better engineered products or better science than we do here. Same with China or Japan, or whoever is supposedly the best this year.
Ask HN: What is the best way of using Linux on a laptop (currently)?
I'm planning to get a new laptop soon, and there's a problem: I really do like good hardware such as the Surface Pro, and also think that having a tablet-laptop combo is a good thing (also saves you from buying yet another device on top). However, I've so far been using Ubuntu on my Thinkpad X1 (oldest version probably, from 2012). While the Linux workflow was flawless, I wasn't happy at all with Ubuntu's hardware support for that particular model. Battery life is horrible, the fan spins up quite often, and so on. Basically I wasn't able to work on the go because the battery was dying after 2 hours. I don't want to make the same mistake again.

I'd be interested to know how you Linux-philes out there are using Linux on a laptop?

- Natively

- Through a VM

- Windows 10 Bash Shell

Would be really great to hear about your experiences with the various alternatives.

Thanks!
I'm content just to let you know I think it's rude. Sorry I don't have time to explain exactly why right now.
I think HN is great and has some of the best discussion on the web, at least for tech related stuff.

One thing I do think is broken is the ranking system. Here is my comment:

'It's too... exponential. A post seems to get either 0-5 votes, or 100 from hitting the frontpage. Implement a feature that puts 'highly' rated new stories (3-5 votes) in a slot on the frontpage for a sample of users, giving them a chance to explode.'

Posts either die or reach the frontpage, where they have a run with lots of upvotes and comments. Unless a post hits the threshold of the frontpage then it doesn't get noticed at all.

Edit:

Didn't expect to be the top comment, clearly some people agree. I've had a few frontpage submissions on HN and there is a nack to it. You find the right title and you submit at the right time, and if you don't get more than 3-4 votes you delete and re-submit again a bit later. Once it gets 5 votes unless your post isn't that good it will hit the frontpage and stay for a while. Passing that threshold is the hard bit and I think a lot of quality articles don't hit that threshold and don't get seen. Which is a shame.

I know they already do something like what I'm suggesting but there are 30 rows on the frontpage, couldn't 4-5 'new' articles be randomly interspersed rather than 1?
Hmm, maybe you mean 2x-10x expansion.

The world of 10x-100x expansion is the world of venture capital.

The specialty lending world of Lighter Capital is about attractive, not explosive, growth -- but at much lower risk of total failure for both entrepreneur and investor.