skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a mathematician, I would like to point out that there are a lot of different areas of math, and higher math isn't just learning more calculus. Graph Theory and Stats, for example.

I have no idea what he's talking about with including Stats in up to 8th grade math. I've taken a few university classes on it, and I still don't feel like I have enough to be confident solving all but the simplest statistical problems.

There's a lot you learn in High School. Functions is a big one that comes to mind. The idea that f(x) = x^2 + 2 or something, and you can compare it to another function g(x) is pretty important, but not really covered till the end of High School. Sure, if you have studied programming too, then you know what functions are, but that's not quite a good assumption to make for the general population.
> I mean I wonder how many people even understand that 0.999... = 1?

To be honest, I think it's unreasonable to expect anybody - even with a Ph.D in a field other than mathematics - to be able to even define the real numbers: My definition is probably very different from yours(I tend to say there's countably many real numbers).
$20 copay
... and then Ashton Kutcher makes absolutely sure you can see the Muscle Milk logo every episode of The Ranch.
If you read “everything broken for non-expert users that can't compile their own kernel modules”, how long has it been since you used Linux?

Your example is spot on. I once spent over an hour with a friend who wanted to test a multimedia application [1] on OS X and tried to help her installing it. In the end it turned out that installing the needed C compiler and SDL dependencies – a task that is only an “apt-get install” away on Debian – was a lot harder on OS X than we both had expected.

[1] IBNIZ: http://pelulamu.net/ibniz/
Wow, that path looks like it avoids any kind of land on purpose. Might make sense for legal issues, but I'd be much more comfortable if it went partly over South America or Africa (or close to the shore) in case of trouble with the plane.
> I'm sure a significant number of engineers and STEM professionals feel (as I do) that they're deliberately eschewing those subjects not for a lack of interest, but rather as a response to market demand

That's the point -- the "math myth" is specifically in relation to math (and science) skills as being of particular importance as a comparative advantage over other countries (Russia, Germany, Japan, India, China) where these fields are perceived to be prioritised higher in education.

If there's low market demand for the skills, it's unlikely that countries with a higher supply of those skills can leverage them to surge ahead in comparative advantages.

That said, I don't think I agree with the conclusion. Most people who are good at something don't particularly know they are, and few can explain why they are, so just asking them is useless. Sure, math and science are probably of limited value in their distilled, pure forms, but my impression is that most successful people in computers and software do subconsciously draw on a fairly solid math/science basis on a daily basis, even if they never consciously sit down to apply science to a problem.

I took particular issue with the Accenture anecdote - we can all laugh at useless consultants all day long, but I've met more than a few who can pick inconsistencies (not validate hard math, but "why is that number so low when that is so high, and is revenue in X really only a third of Y" style things) out of a wall of numbers in what seems like an instant. You don't do that without a solid math foundation, even if you don't think you use it.
The point is not whether you can tinker or not, the point is how much you can. And Linux allows you to tinker with stuff with which neither Windows nor OSX would ever let you play.
Let's replace some of Math with dance!

https://youtu.be/iG9CE55wbtY?t=8m40s
Cesium does have a flat earth projection built in as well (there's a wireframe globe in top right of main page demo, and clicking it allows you to switch between 3D and 2D).
Tax heavens like law breakers may have critical roles in a stable system allowing it to adapt. But one can not let them run the show as a whole.

International trade is not a new problem. Car manufacturing has been internationally for a while. Rules for transfer pricing have been established. The challenge is with this construct of intellectual property where arbitrary valuations disconnected from any underlying real trade are easier to get away with.

It used to matter less. It matters more now and tax innovations are getting more scrutinized.
He was not equating total military expenses, he was equating ordinary soldier's pay.

That should be fairly apples-to-apples. The top charioteer, over his career, earned enough to cover all ordinary soldier's pay for 1/5th a year. Using the figure above of 600,000 ordinary soldiers in Rome's army, that equates to 120,000 soldier-years of pay. It's reasonable to treat that number as somewhat of a constant over the last 2000 years.

Now, I am a little skeptical that a US soldier makes $125,000 / year. The pay rates I can find online range from $25,000 / year for a newly enlisted soldier to $90,000 / year for an E-9 soldier with 40 years experience. That produces a lifetime earnings for our charioteer of $3-11 billion, depending on what the average pay for a soldier actually comes out to.
I think the author is mostly attacking a straw man.

The argument that mathematics skills in the US (or many other Western countries) are inadequate usually isn't a complaint that there aren't enough graduates familiar with advanced pure mathematical theorems. It's usually a complaint that after years of compulsory education the masses struggle to do basic arithmetic and understand basic statistics, and plenty of people whose jobs do entail working with figures or making calculations from time to time lack the "eighth grade level" numeracy to spot the figures in the Excel output table are out by two orders of magnitude because someone screwed up inputting the formula.
What would you study instead to remain valuable in the next two decades? I've gotten pretty deep into engineering: worked on games, mobile, web, FP, legacy code revival, a half dozen popular languages, automated testing, and people management. I'm looking for something new to study to add flexibility and "luck surface area" to my career. I was thinking ML would be another area of valuable study. Do you have any alterative suggestions?
Well, that's if they accept that an infinitely repeating number is actually EQUAL to the fraction. Some people just accept that a non-infinite number will never equal the fraction, but don't understand the concept of infinite repetition as an actual number (point on the number scale), not an estimate.
Relevant Carmack tweet: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/767911253763170304
Thanks for the feedback! I wasn't sure if hacker news would be interested at all and was unsure what best to share. I'll write a blog with challenges and lessons learned.
Depends on what effect size or power you are looking for and/or other factors like variance in the data (standard deviation), etc. There are some different ways to calculate sample sizes here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size_determination

or google: sample size calculator
> We are in 2016. We should be past this by now.

I have read arguments of the form “It is [the current year]. We should be past this by now.” a lot lately, but I do not understand how referring to time provides a useful starting point for an argument about morality. Can anyone tell me?
Yes! This! I am 30+ years post Ph.D. and work in microscopy and image analysis. I have repeatedly needed to go into areas that I never anticipated and learn what I needed to solve the problem at hand. Happily, my graduate advisor taught our group to expect this to happen and to become self-directed learners and to embrace the process.

I will also note that I found this works best when surrounded by a few like-minded individuals with complementary skills to serve one another as "a second pair of eyes" and a sounding board for hypotheses and conclusions.
That path is a great circle path, it's simply the shortest path across the face of the earth. It's not a flight plan or anything (but, being the shortest path, it's pretty close to what any given flight would follow).

http://www.gcmap.com/faq/intro#definegc

Also, because it's so far from land, there are special procedures that need to be in place, see eg. ETOPS.
Speaking of BASIC, I took a high school course in BASIC, in 1981, and it changed my life. For one thing, it changed my approach to math.

I think that computation should be part of elementary math, not to produce the next generation of career programmers, but because computation is actually how a lot of math is done. And it might change the curriculum -- having students think about more complex problems that they have the tools to solve, rather than learning algorithms by rote.

I speculate that people might have a better grasp of statistics if they could just play around with artificial distributions generated by a computer -- even just in a spreadsheet.
sounds like communism and free masonry to me.
free masons should be kiled to make some justice and people will be liberated. they should be punished for their sins just like others and that's equality
The deep sea diver who saved Winchester cathedral
Good point. Some other research papers that use tablets and e-ink readers found no significant learning benefit as compared to paper:

http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA289721760&si...

http://search.proquest.com/openview/f98bc7b7d8194ba66b948d94...

(Found after a quick Google Scholar search, there's probably a lot more material out there.)

Although I still think eReaders are more limited than physical books as far as sensory input is concerned, it appears that the difference is small enough not to make a serious dent on learning.
No game engine was used. I render directly to canvas. Using CoffeeScript for our custom engine. Electron is super thin layer to put it on Steam.

I'll prepare a blog post and will share more info there. Sorry for jumping the gun here. I should have been better prepared.
Try again on /r/nottheonion.
Some good resources to learn about IBM Watson
Around $5000. Most of that went into having a small booth at Gamescom.
Release Planning Answers the Other Questions, Too
Yes I have not used altavista but I have read about it, and I've read the book and I know search was stuck back then, my question was why the above comment says search is stuck at the moment, because I don't see search stuck at the moment.
Process Calculus
That latter assumption, save with the stress of the situation rather than "something else", is pretty much encapsulated in the physician's choice of "decompensated" to describe her. That's an interesting word! I'm glad I had cause to look it up.
Apparently it's not limited to fish industry. A lot of ingredients are substituted behind the scenes and recipes altered when crossing geographic boundaries.
[1] https://nypost.com/2016/07/10/the-truth-behind-how-were-scam...
A lot of people work non-stop and don't get paid much - Especially outside of the US.

A lot of software developers learn new tools outside of work to keep their skills up to date or they have side projects. Many developers (myself included) work 80 hours per week. The pay is typically good but not that good if you count it on an hourly basis.
Yes, sorry about that. I see this post was already (rightly) flagged, so I'll do a proper blog post and will repost when it is done.
Torrent hunters
That kind of makes sense. Why would they issue licenses for hardware that they know won't work?
Its is written in CoffeeScript. I started about 4 years ago working on it. At this point I would probably just use JS. No specific frameworks or module architecture was used.
Functional Error Handling in Scala
> there's no way this is cheaper than hiring an actual person.

They've got to try something. Staff has been noticably cut in both local Lowe's in my area over the past few years. It's still far better than Home Depot, but takes time to find help when you actually need it.
I was using the word "Congress" as I intended, which was to refer to Congress as a whole.
It's not that they're necessarily inferior, it's that I don't have 3-5 years spare to get really good at those languages
Yes, sorry I wasn't sure what the right amount of information is for this platform. I see I jumped the gun a bit. I'll make a proper blog post with detailed information.
small nitpick: the 2020/2023 dates are for extended support, where they only provide security patches. But you're right in that windows 8.1 at least is still in mainstream support, so they will accept feature requests (until 2018).
Don't give 'em ideas...
Will you integrate with React Native?
Jared Friedman, YC Partner, post from 3 days ago, on raising money online and the differences between the various crowdfunding services, Angellist syndicates and YC:

http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/08/raising-money-onlin...
I wondered at that statement too, but for a different reason. For me, a book is an investment for life, so I don't mind spending some money on it if it's worthing buying. (If I only want to read it once, I can usually get it through some library.) I would only consider second-hand books for something like a really expensive text book that I'm going to need repeatedly, but only for a limited period of time (e.g. for a thesis).
If the difference between samples is VERY large, you don't need a very large sample size.

In other words, we're trying to find the chance that the result we got was due to chance. Let's say you have numbers like these:

A: 11, 11, 12, 12, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 14, 15
B: 90, 92, 93, 94, 94, 95, 95, 96, 97, 99, 99, 101, 101

What is the chance that those two samples come from the same distribution?

On the other hand, if A averaged something like 12.5 and B averaged something like 12.4 it would require a huge sample size to prove that those two samples come from two different distributions.
Steam's market power is huge and extremely important for having any visibility at all.
"Hackers penetrate and ravage delicate public and privately owned computer systems, infecting them with viruses, and stealing materials for their own ends. These people, they are terrorists."
>Finally, there's the "pirates" - hundreds of millions of people who run older versions of Windows, which are easier to crack because they're not as 'cloud-enabled' as Windows X.

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 don't buy the sports analogy with which he argues that it is "self-serving nonsense" if people state that mathematics education trains your general problem solving skills. His argument that soccer players should only play soccer seems not to be anchored in reality: Of course professional soccer players spend a lot of time in the weights room or go running to enhance their general strength and stamina [1]! They do not only train their bodies by playing soccer...

I do think that learning math does help you to think more clearly and to analyze problems in a more systematic matter.

Now, he does not define well what he means by "higher mathematics": I agree that (as with almost all learning) there is diminishing marginal utility in mathematics education. While I would argue that learning how to work with percentages and also basic calculus (to get a feeling for the difference between a change in position and a change in velocity, for example) increase your general problem solving skills by a lot, if you have been through all this then learning about Ricci flow will probably not do that much to your general problem solving anymore.

[1]: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/train-like-a-german...
Hardly. We use this reduction because it's essential from a mathematical and axiomatic perspective and because limits are a fundamental construct. But more philosophically, a natural and nonterminating simulation of 0.999... (were it possible) would never strictly equal 1. You would wait an infinite amount of time for it to do so. This comes down to how you view the problem. I would never argue with this through the lens of abstract higher mathematics. I think about it from a computability perspective, which is one way in which you can discount the observation.
The difference is that with a house and a car, you pay for the physical object. With a book, you pay for the ideas contained therein - a subtle but (IMO) important difference.

Which isn't to say used-book sales should be illegal, but that if you can afford it, why not support the person behind the ideas you're profiting from?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument
Perhaps the arc of my career is different but I've seen the opposite. I've been in Finance jobs where people who don't understand more advanced probability can't figure out how to price things. And even people with advanced knowledge make mistakes.

I've also been in analytics jobs where college educated people mistake correlation for causality. (It seemed so profound when I learned the concept only in how often it's abused)

I've seen people in customer support management make enormous judgment errors because they think don't comprehend the difference between a 500K account and a 1K account.

Requiring calculus of everyone may not solve this, but requiring a couple years of hard (beyond 8th grade) stats could help.

As for the CS/engineering/Math requirement for jobs - I think that's just a reaction to the weak rigor (on average) of so many other majors.
South Korea gives big tax breaks to its chaebol (form of conglomerate). So effectively they don't need to funnel anything to Ireland/wherever because their home country works just fine.
My gut agrees with yours. What's the benefit? Was he working for someone, or is this part of a plan to become Dr. Evil? Seems to be beyond a prankster act.
I'm not worried about the past 20 years at all (those were good times). I'm worried about the next 20 years.

Before, when people thought about 'monopolies' they thought about Microsoft (there wasn't that many)... Now practically every company is a monopoly.

And taken together, they form a sort of oligopoly. Companies today are more cooperative than they are competitive (and this helps them maintain their positions).
That's true, ereaders don't broadcast your "intellectual worth" and interests as much as bookshelves do. It's also not a conversation starter ("a biography of John Major, really?").

I wonder if it's something that could be solved with some sort of integration with those "smart frames" that show your family pictures.

This said, I don't agree with ereaders making people "look like dorks" -- pretty much everyone in a coffee shop these days is glued to a screen; be it a laptop, phone, tablet or reader, the look is exactly the same (well, unless you're rocking some huge "portable 386" from 1995, in which case you look either nuts or "oh so retro").
Searching for Amazon Austria brings up Amazon Germany's website, that site also serves the Dutch it seems.
If there are enough users, they can outbid a minority bad actor. I think that's the idea. Decentralized democracy where you vote with capital. I'm not sure if there are better ways to do this? Although I think this could be combined with trust system somehow (so all capital wouldn't be equal). I.e. known bad actors (also selected via bidding) could have less valued capital. So the value of the users capital would be based on their trust. Not sure if that makes sense.
It is upon the shoulders on these giants where I stand. Dijkstra, Floyd, Hoare, Knuth, Curry, Church, and Turing, among others.

The science exists. The trick now is bringing it all together in a way that is useful enough to others that they actually start using it. :-)
That doesn't square with research on social mobility. E.g.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/america-...

It's easy to cherry pick a fact like "85% of millionaires are self-made" and ignore the background of those millionaires.

How many come from secure middle class homes, or grew up in families in areas which happened to benefit from a property boom?

It's a meaningless statistic unless you look at the bigger picture - which is where you find a persistent pattern of research proving that the one single most significant factor determining the wealth of an individual is the wealth of his/her parents.

Worse, the US does far worse on objective social mobility than most other Western countries.

The fact that a few individuals can still work their way up against all the odds doesn't alter the fact it's an unreachable goal for most of the population.
Yes and those arguments, that open source is a good or even the best way to tinker is to a large extent based on the ideology of open source. Someone who isn't convinced about the greatness of open source and/or might prefer other things like a large application ecosystem or other forms of tooling won't agree that this aspect of Linux is important.
Lost Hiker's Remains Found 5 Years Later in Utah Wilderness
Forced obsolescence is kind of a big deal.
Living in Austria right now, I know two Austrians out of the like five I know well that have amazon prime.

I only know about it from those people because they order so much on amazon.

They may be using amazon.de, but so are most central euro countries.

In Denmark, people generally either buy from .de or .co.uk.

Certainly people order less from amazon than in the states, but the presence is still pretty huge.
I fully agree. Rather cheap as well.
Curious as to why you think Hacker News is successful.
> Better would have been like I've already used it: "Intel's and AMD's chips won't work with Windows 7/8"

A much more appropriate description would be that Microsoft won't support Intel's and AMD's newer chips in the company's earlier OSs.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/avoid.html
this should be pretty easily solved with a forward/downward facing depth sensor (to identify and avoid the debris). The fact that they didn't do this says to me that debris may not have been a major problem in testing.
I just wish they would teach the common curtesy of putting (page#/totalPages) on each slide of their power point presentation so I can decide whether I can make it through the deck or cut my wrists now.
My anecdata is that paper and eink are pretty similar, and definitely superior to screens and tablets. Then again, I grew up studying on paper; it might well be different for my kids.
It's not a reduction. If you try to find where to put 0.999... on the number line, it has to go exactly where 1 is.

For one thing, 1 - 0.999... = 0.000... because you never get to have any remainder since 0.999... is infinite.

Or here's another proof:

x = 0.999...

10x = 9.999...

10x - x = 9.999... - 0.999...

9x = 9.000... = 9

9x = 9

x = 1
This. I always find myself a bit frustrated when shopping that I can't just open an app and see a map of the location of the item I want. A robot for this seems like overkill. I suppose it is probably just as much for marketing.
You are discarding an essential part of the representation. You are moving the goal post to make yourself right. Just because people don't always understand infinitesimals doesn't make them right. It's the reason they are wrong. There just plain don't know what they are talking about.

You can't represent 0.2 exactly using IEEE floats, either, but that doesn't mean the representation 0.2 is not exactly equal to 1/5th.
As someone who was born in the crappy part of communist Yugoslavia, I can confirm: slowly starving to death in a dark, abandoned nuclear bunker is an apt metaphor.
Yes, and that was with massive asset inflation from 0% rates. Moreover, there were a few once-in-a-lifetime growth events in there including globalization, China, smart phones, Google, social media. Doubling that from this point in the next 10-years is going to be tough. Expect sideways growth in the public markets over the next 10-years.