skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look up the essay "Lockhart's Lament" for a real mathematician's perspective.

I have read the Lockhart's Lament essay already years ago.

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

I like his point, "The saddest part of all this 'reform' are the attempts to 'make math interesting' and 'relevant to kids’ lives.' You don’t need to make math interesting--it’s already more interesting than we can handle! And the glory of it is its complete irrelevance to our lives. That’s why it’s so fun!"

But there are various kinds of real mathematicians, and various kinds of activities that real mathematicians find fun, or at least strictly necessary for doing the fun things.

"Paul is a mathematics teacher at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York."

http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html

So I regard Mr. Lockhart's opinion, but I also consider the opinion of Fields medalist William P. Thurston.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/0503/0503081v1.pdf

"Addition of fractions is a very boring topic to someone who already knows it, but it is an essential skill for algebra, which in turn is essential for calculus. It is not so hard, when talking with students individually, to find out what parts of the structure need shoring up and to deal with those parts individually."

And I consider the opinion of professor of homotopy theory W. Stephen Wilson

http://www.math.jhu.edu/~wsw/guide/node19.html

"We memorize in order to facilitate learning, so we can function with the demands of the field. Memorization is not an end in itself, and it does not constitute learning. But when you use this information, you won't forget it. Every field requires memorization, and most fields -- biology, history, physics, political science, languages -- require far more. We are only able to solve problems if we are familiar with the necessary terms and laws. To improve your memory, don't trust your recognition memory when it comes to a test. Practice writing out the definitions and theorems, and make outlines of the major points of the theory. Check back to your text for accuracy. It is easy to think we know something until we attempt to put it in writing. By practicing studying continuously in this way, rather than cramming at the last minute, you will find memorization will feel more naturally like part of the learning process."

Anyway, can't learning the content of the preliminary course mentioned in the submitted article be fun for someone who recognizes beautiful consistent patterns for the first time?
Well... you actually can try out functional approaches in C++, and even gain something out of it. It's just that doing so requires a sophisticated understanding of C++.
Rapid Hiring & Firing to Build the Best Teams
The iPhone platform isn't the same as the Mac platform. And Sturgeon's law will most likely always apply.
Hotpatching A Java 6 Application
Unless I'm greatly mistaken (completely possible) symbian is a more traditional multi-tasking system. The UI and everything else was more or less kept in memory with the only caveat being that you had to learn to graciously deal with being shutdown as memory ran low.

I also think that the Apple system varies pretty significantly from Android. Android has the concept of 'bundles' and 'servers'. Bundles work similarly to what Apple is doing, but having servers (which multi-task in a more traditional model) enables more consistent background processing.

For instance, an alarm clock on Android is often implemented with the GUI 'bundle' on the front-end and a server on the back-end that manages the actual 'when should I sound the alarm?' part of the task.'

That's one thing that just isn't possible in the iPhone model.
Easy enough to make it better, if you want to.

It would be cool to see what can be done with CSS transitions upon open and close.
It turns out that Embarcadero Technologies, the company I work for, is now developing an IDE that targets the Mac. It will be useful for testing that, at least.
I'm surprised there isn't a Google API or existing service somewhere for this. Google aggregates their news links already.

I would start with just informing the link submitter of the similarity measure to other URLs, and give them the responsibility of deciding what to do.
Nice one. How about adding support for :focus alongside :hover?
Ask HN: Is there a startup that caters to conference speakers?
How do you keep track of your favorite speakers' next keynote or presentation?
Ah, sorry if this was posted previously.
Twitter + Tweetie = Tweetrouble
"This is about whether Apple is insane or within their rights to do what they did."
GPU vs CPU Supercomputing Security Shootout
Ummm... who exactly are these "unsavory developers"? This is starting to feel like a bad political ad.
Ask HN: What to cover in a MongoDB case study talk
I'm going to be presenting at the upcoming MongoSF conference on MongoDB with a title "Humongous Data at Server Density: Approaching 1 Billion Documents in MongoDB".

If you were attending this, what would you like to hear talked about?

Database: http://www.mongodb.org
Conference: http://mongosf.eventbrite.com/
Reference articles:

"Choosing a non-relational database; why we migrated from MySQL to MongoDB"
http://blog.boxedice.com/2009/07/25/choosing-a-non-relational-database-why-we-migrated-from-mysql-to-mongodb/

"Notes from a production MongoDB deployment"
http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/02/28/notes-from-a-production-mongodb-deployment/
You know I never used the focus property in my apps before. Maybe I should start using it. Thanks for reminding me.
Why Twitter Buying Tweetie is Great News
congrats to Loren! i love his app. a true craftsman.
Twitter Previews Redesign That Will Make You "Not Want To Use A Desktop Client"
It's a psychological depressant as well.
I remember we had problems with Norwegian fonts in the early 1990s - printing, copying between computers and email would invariably mess up the æ, ø and å. Even the computer science department of the university I attended in the mid-90s didn't get it right. I think it took close to ten years before the majority of printouts and emails were correct.

But compared to Azerbaijan, I understand we were lucky - at least we didn't have to mess around with creating our own fonts :)

Good point on how tools put constraints on expression, BTW. I guess ASCII art is another example, and the ASCII smiley :-) is still with us.

Even today mixing text and freehand drawing or images is troublesome enough that we rarely bother. In a sense it is somewhat curious that 60 years of computer science has not been enough to replicate the convenience of a handwritten note...
Sincere contrats to those of you who are consistently getting this rate.
I would prefer "notes from a production deployment" -- I don't think anyone needs to hear the SQL vs. NoSQL arguments yet another time.
The first thing any of these platform-dependent app companies should be doing is looking for a way to exist outside of the platform. To sit idly by and wait for the master to claim manifest destiny is just dumb. Unfortunately for the Twitter apps, it may be too late.
I've reread my message, and it was bit harsh. Sorry about that!
Google is saying my site takes 7 seconds to load... Well, it doesn't.

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1 is one of the slowest pages... according to them.

Browse it and see for yourself. It's super fast.

TribalFusion and PubMatic take some time, as do the user tracking JS, but (a) not 7 seconds and (b) do not affect the actual content.
AppleApologists.com would be a better name for that site.
Very cool presentation and demo! I was at the conference and the audience was in awe!

great watch. Gets my thumbs up!
Linus Torvalds famously said the same exact thing whilst bashing C++ (instead of Ruby as Zed does here).

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot
of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much
easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if
the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out,
that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643...
Introduction to Monads
Change Dead Battery of Laptops
nstead of buying a new 120$ Laptop Battery, here is a tip using which you can save upto 75% of the original cost, get a better backup battery and also do the whole job at Home.
Exactly. I don't know why more haven't been doing this. Ev must have been very persuasive about the ecosystem that everybody was building. Funny, the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man" just came to mind.
this exam tests concentration skills more than anything else. While these skills are important, I'm not sure this is what teaching math is about
Google Chrome Market Share
Blackra1n & Cydia Spotted on Apple iPad
Blackra1n & Cydia Spotted on Apple iPad
Like "note pad"?
A GC and framework designed around this serialization could be made to work, though, greatly reducing the burden on the programmer.

Of course since Apple has outlawed innovation in those areas targeting the iPhone, they may never find that out...
That's cool. I think the most surprising part, upon reading the CSS, is that the only special fixes are for Opera and IE8. So IE7 and IE6 just work.
If I were a betting man, I'd be looking to Twitpic next.
If you really think about it, Apple has always been like this. They want to control every aspect of their hardware and software. The pride you felt was the result of marketing.
At least Apple doesn't pre-approve App Store descriptions! I commend them for their openness! :)
Except that during a March 12, 2009 meeting, they discussed it and decided not to buy it, according to the Twitter notes leaked to Techcrunch.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-...

I always felt a little bad for the Twitpic guy for that.

Also, that conversation from the notes spelled out pretty clearly that Twitter would eventually start pulling things like this.
Assume a constant rate of swapping of 128KB/sec evenly distributed across 16GB of storage space. How long before the whole system collapses, as a function of n write cycles?

16 * 1024 * 1024 / 128 * n = 131,072n seconds
~= 1.52n days
~= 0.0042n years

So constantly swapping (which is a very pessimistic scenario for a phone, which spends most of its life idle in your pocket) may expect a lifetime between 4.2 and 42 years, presuming between 1,000 and 10,000 write cycles. I would say it's acceptable.
I'm more or less a novice with FP, yet to learn a language more functional then Python, but this, and the article, are along the lines of something I was thinking of. Why exactly is it that I/O is stateful? A program, after all, is something that takes in input and spits out output, right? Why can't it be:

[Byte] -> [Byte]

main [data:rest] = ...

(sorry if I'm making up syntax or types, haven't properly learned Haskell yet). Well, my friends tell me, the problem is that often times you have to deal with timing, exceptions, etc. Well, fine:

[(Byte, Integer, Error)] -> [Byte]

main [(data, time, err):rest] = ...

As you said, no reason actual evaluation has to correspond to the logical order of evaluation.
Push Twitter to open source Tweetie for Mac: http://act.ly/1w1
The move to buy Tweetie surely ratcheted up the pressure for the likes of Twitpic to sell. As the uncertainty begins to spread in the minds of these developers, the price will likely drop, and make a sale more palatable to Twitter.
Twitter has been eating their own dogfood with http://mobile.twitter.com
If Twitpic was well implemented I could see it but it has no design and little innovation.
Not really. Native third party apps were originally a concession to demands from users/developers by all accounts I've heard. Regardless, the original strategy was to encourage web-based apps.
Not too many writers can "set up and tweak their caching strategy."
thanks for the amazing link (I'm 100% with the 'dinosaurs' on that one), it is worthy of a separate post
"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"

How far we've come.
G-d forbid iFart be written in Ruby. Such important work should be left to C if you can't get all the way to assembler.
It usually seems pretty fast to me, but maybe that's because I mostly browse outside of US peak hours.
Textaurant Wants to Change the Way We Wait in Restaurants
That page took several seconds to fully load for me (no more spinning thing) the first time, though the main content came up quicker.
> Adobe has never gone after these open source swf player projects.

They went after rtmpdump, a tool developed by the gnash devs after clean-room reverse engineering to eventually bring RTMP support (client video streaming) to gnash and other free players:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Messaging_Protocol#RT...

> rtmpdump is an open-source command-line tool that is designed to dump the full RTMP stream. It implements the RTMPE protocol, which Adobe believes to be an encryption and copyright protection scheme: however analysis of RTMPE shows that RTMPE is nothing of the kind. rtmpdump was removed from its original SourceForge page due to Adobe issuing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice, which Sourceforge did not have the resources to contest, and could not place any other sourceforge projects at risk. flvstreamer is a fork of rtmpdump which removes all the code that Adobe believed was in violation of the DMCA (due to the belief by Adobe that RTMPE is an encryption mechanism). flvstreamer still allows users to download a stream of audio or video content from all RTMP servers, as long as RTMPE is not enabled on the server. rtmpdump development was restarted in October 2009 and is hosted at the MPlayer site[5]. It has much improved functionality and has been rewritten in C (was C++).
Sounds like a business opportunity to me. If only there were a site where...
FWIW, I just visited your link and with a cold cache it took ~5 seconds the status bar to report every asset was downloaded. Definitely not a scientific measurement by any means, but I thought you might like to know.

I also ran the site through http://www.webpageanalyzer.com/ (one of many such services), and it said on a T1 it would take approximately 6.5 seconds to load. It also provides a number of improvements to cut down the page size, and improve rendering speed.
And probably a sophisticated understanding FP as well, if you want to apply it in such a hostile environment.

Not really a good idea when you are starting out, I guess.
Don't forget the free peanuts. They're different enough to serve as a hook to make sure people remember the business.
So in other words, you can't and don't intend to address the topic at hand. bye bye...
It would also be very easy for you to uninstall the app. This is possible on my droid but I haven't really run in to it. If I were worried, I probably wouldn't install the app.
Much praise for the multitasking UI on iPhone OS4, but I still think that the cards metaphor of webOS is much better.
I am 46 and had something similar happen twice in my life and it usually preceded a huge change, for the better.

tricky waters to negotiate they are (yoda)
Another decent use, embodying synaptic weights in neuromorphic engineering. A decent description: http://www.scidacreview.org/0804/html/hardware.html

I think eventually, if we want software that performs like a human mind, we'll want hardware that performs like a brain. That's probably the easiest way to get to a machine that can match us while consuming 30 Watts.
Why would they do that though? They could do a better job by building it into the site itself, and it would probably work out to be cheaper for such a simple feature.
Pile of gold, eh? I guess this is why Tweetie for the Mac is still so extremely minimal. The developer got lazy because of his pile of gold. Bye bye motivation. Money makes people lazy.
Nope, sorry. This has very little if anything to do with the user.

Apple wanted to buy Admob, but Google got them instead. This change will prevent Admob ads from being well targeted on iPhone, and will prop up their (assumed to be upcoming) rebranded Quattro mobile ads.

This smacks of anti-competitive practices. (That is, assuming Quattro ads are allowed to use location aware targeting.)
It would be interesting to know how coarse the data exposed to mobile ad providers is -- does anyone have any experience here?

Were I implementing mobile ads, the precise location would stay on the device, and the information sent to the ad server would be city or at least zip level.
A machine learning theory dream team
Exactly. Now it's more expensive to show up in search.
There's a new twitter petition asking for it to be open sourced. http://act.ly/1w1
Pool Pumping - Keeping the Water Uncontaminated
Everybody desires to own a pool in their back yard therefore that in the hot summer season they can relax in their pool.
Could be faster in my experience. Not great.
S/he has a point. I spent four years in college in DC eating at various Five Guys in the DMV area and they were all great. (And it had nothing to do with price--I'd spend $8-10 every time I went there which was fairly often.) Then, I started venturing out after graduation to other places like NC and suddenly, you could tell the difference between Five Guys closer to their home vs. newer franchises that folks have open and begun to run like more familiarly crappy fast food chains. I sometimes think (and of course, I could be wrong) franchising seems to be the death of a good thing and it's funny how the founder says he was against it because of the very thing I'm finding has slipped--quality. (When people are involved and so crucial to a process, does quality always scale?)

I haven't had a decent Five Guys experience outside of the NoVA/MD area yet. It's always the worst things--the fries are often cold (I remember having to wait for them to be cooked fresh in NoVA), they'll mess your order up some other kind of way such as leaving something off your burger or forgetting a part of your order entirely (more common if you order lots of food at once), etc. The experience just isn't the same. No one I've taken there in my local area has been impressed unless they'd already eaten there in DC and just dealt with it--like I've stopped doing.
And now, we can up the problem even further:

Build a tetris clone which forces the player to "win" with 13 lines scored.
While not considered a true 'multitouch' device, the Nintendo DS had a software system to sense multiple contact points at once. This is used for a puzzle solution in the first Hotel Dusk game.
It seems like the cursor would jump between the 2 points at some resolution.
I assume many touch screen systems use something similar to filter inadvertent noise such as smudges on capacitive systems.
I already commented on another one of these link bait articles here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1253870, but I'm reposting my comment here. Just because I felt let down after having clicked through to get the details on some 'juicy' new Java flaw. Only to find the reality to be less serious than advertised. I don't like feeling duped.

BTW - The last article was called 'Javocalypse'. Now with a name like that, when I test the exploit, it better deliver the goods.

I don't know.

That's just how I feel.

Anyway, here is the comment I left on that one:

----

I love all these 'embarrassingly trivially exploitable issues' that require me to set up my machine in just the right way to make them work. And for all that effort, you can't even own the machine using the exploit.

What has it been? 15 years? and this is the best they can come up with for java security holes?

You know, I don't like java, but the more stuff like this I read, the more I have to admit that it is smart for enterprises to use it so heavily.

An interesting comparison might be to look at the number of java security holes vs activex vs windowsxp vs apache vs iis vs php vs ruby vs (you get the picture). Maybe group by client side and server side. That would give a real 'data based' look at software security quality.

Though I suspect that the jvm would be at the top of the 'security quality' heap in both groupings. (ie-least number of holes). I think it would be interesting to see nonetheless.
And it validates!
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Oh, I also don't want to question that it may be a good strategy.
"Any developer would not in good conscience be able to support this."

Oh? Raganwald seems to be ok with this, especially since he does his iPhone development on the web platform and doesn't need Apple's permission.

"Any real developer would not in good conscience be able to support this."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
MapReduce SVM – A Python Example
Google Search Rankings Now Consider Site Speed
Watch Complete How I Met Your Mother Online Season 1 to Episode 22
This is exactly why I stopped posting here. I've sent an email to YDN. I'm sure they don't want this kind of representation out on the open internet.
Also relevant: "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets"

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
Anti-competitive tactics are entirely legal unless they have a good chance of resulting into, or furthering a monopoly.
Naturally. If you remove half of a product while keeping the same price, it's bound to be overpriced. Software isn't free (unless it is free...).
Node.js explained by Ryan Dahl
Who'd have known I'd cause so much trouble.
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وريال مدريد
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وريال مدريد
Matt Blaze on Applied Cryptography, 15 years later
I think this roughly corresponds to the original I/O system in Haskell, based on lazy streams. They were, by all accounts, an absolute bitch to program with. Continuation based I/O was slightly better, but monads were still greeted as liberators when they arrived on the scene.
All of those people writing those things advertise Twitter. As we all know Twitter has a huge drop off rate where people post a few tweets and then go away... forever.

So Twitter is always in the need of new users. Let's say they do an Apple and kick out all of the various different add-ons that they make (while allowing ones that they don't make until they make one themselves).

Eventually Twitter will just be another memory because the critical mass, people advertising twitter, will fall away.
"to the benefit of nobody"

Apple is benefitting. Apple is right to look out for their own interests - they should behave in ways that are good for them, long-term. If you think Apple's actions aren't good for it, fine, but remember that you don't have all the information they do.

If customers don't like Apple's policies, they are free to competitor's product.
If developers don't like Apple's policies, they are free to develop for another platform.

I love Apple's products, and I'm going to continue using and buying them.
مشاهدة مباراة ريال مدريد وبرشلونه
مشاهدة مباراة ريال مدريد وبرشلونه
The Magnetar Trade: How One Hedge Fund Helped Keep the Bubble Going
I have never seen "anti-competitive" being used in a positive light. A quick search shows it has mainly been used by prosecutors and plaintiffs to describe their adversary.

You don't need to believe me though, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices (We can /all/ trust wikipedia, right?) "Barriers to entry" is relevant.
Definitely took > 5 seconds for me (measured by guesstimate, until last asset loaded).