skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a book, a real book, quite long.

It has a lot of topics on applied math.

Some of its main topics are
linear algebra,
probability theory,
and Markov processes.

Really, the book just touches on
such topics. Usually in college
each of those topics is worth
a course of a semester or more.
So, what the book has on such
topics is much less than such
a course. E.g., for linear algebra,
the book gets quickly to the
singular value decomposition
but leaves its treatment of eigenvalues
for an appendix and otherwise leaves
out about 80% of a one semester
course on linear algebra.
Similarly for probability and
Markov processes.

Some of the topics the book
has or touches on
are unusual with, likely,
few other sources in book form.
E.g., early on the book has
Gaussian distributions on
finite dimensional vector
spaces where the dimension
is larger than is common.

So, for the topics rarely
covered in book form,
the book could be a good
reference.

For topics such as from linear
algebra, a reader might get
misled without an actual
course in linear algebra
from any of the long
popular
books, e.g., Halmos,
Strang, Hoffman and Kunze,
Nering or more advanced
books by Horn, Bellman, or
others.

Usually in universities,
probability and Markov processes
quickly get into graduate material
with a prerequisite in measure
theory and, hopefully, some on
functional analysis, e.g., to
discuss some important cases of
convergence.

So, the book seems to have
some good points and some
less good ones.
A good point is that the book
is a source of a start on
some topics rarely in book
form. A less good point is
that the book gives very
brief coverage of topics
otherwise usually covered
in full courses from
popular texts.

A student with a good math
background could use the
book as a reference and
maybe at times get some value
from the coverage of some of the
topics rarely covered elsewhere.
But I would suspect that
students without courses in
linear algebra, probability, etc.
would need more background
in math to find the book very
useful.

E.g., early in my career, I
jumped into various applied
math topics using very brief
treatments. Later when
I did careful study of good
texts with relatively full
coverage, I discovered that
the brief treatments had been
misleading. E.g., no one would
try to learn heart surgery in
a weekend and then try to
apply it to a real person.
Well, for applied math, maybe
learning singular value decomposition,
etc.
in a weekend might not be
enough to make a serious
application.

It is good to see a book on
applied math try to be a little
closer to real, recent
applications than
has been traditional
in applied math texts.
I'm not sure that the
being closer is crucial
or even very useful
for making real applications,
but maybe it will help.
We were always this future-obsessed. Take electricity, for example, arguably the most significant innovation of the late 1800s. In 1883 Darmstadt University of Technology, MIT, and Cornell started teaching Electrical Engineering as a distinct field of study. In 1889 at the expo in Paris (now-famous for the Eiffel Tower which debuted at this fair), there was a large pavilion with various machines [1][2] including electrically-powered moving platforms suspended from the ceiling that shuttled visitors across from the mezzanines [3]. Two years later in 1891 there was an expo held in Frankfurt specifically on electrical technology [4], where several electrical innovations were demonstrated, and two years later at the 1893 Chicago world's fair, there was even more electric features, including motors, generators, lamps, spotlights, and the whole fair was illuminated by electricity [5].

This is, of course, the same time period featured in the xkcd titled 'The Pace of Modern Life' [6], which takes contemporary newspaper quotes lamenting that people are always in a hurry and rarely stop to greet strangers and instead spend their commutes on the trains with their noses buried in newspapers, showing that today's critiques about people lost in their smartphones are more than a century old.

So yeah, I'd say we've always been obsessed with the future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines#/media/Fi...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines#/media/Fi...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Electrotechnical...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Columbian_Exposition
[6] https://xkcd.com/1227/
That's pretty cool, now we just need to convince our university to send us over to Germany :')
What do you mean? I don't see how that can happen. Maybe a few "power moves" here and there, and companies already poach OS devs anyway. There's also licenses, CLAs.

Worst-case scenario people would just rewrite parts of the stack to move around it. There's people salivating at this very moment just thinking about rewritting core stuff in Go, Rust, or something else, and making a blog post about it. Imagine if they had an actual motive to do it.
This is why I like ZT games more than other excercises in masochism like BrainFuck. They're ultimately more about using a simple, well-understood set of tools to solve difficult problems than they are about using a deliberately obstructive set of tools. The fact that the tools are so easy to understand is what draws me to it over real asm programming: nothing's worse than trying to solve a puzzle when you have the sneaking suspicion that there's a few pieces you're missing that would make your job easier if you were to only learn them.

Let the complexity emerge naturally. Because it will.

By the way, if you like ZT games, and haven't checked out the work of Eric Wastl (The Synacor Challenge, and The Advent of Code) you should do so immediately. It's not as fun now that everyone else has done it, but it's still a blast.
I meant density not total population.
There seem to be a lot of "thin-server" type frameworks that are meant to bridge between the database and client, typically injecting basic authentication and user management.

If the goal is to create a 0-backend firebase like interface why can't this become a module of the database? Not to harp on the project, it seems cool, but I'm genuinely curious what no DBMS bother to try.
> Of course anyone who's ever gotten into a fight in middle school can see the fatal fault with this line of thinking

Yes. This line of thinking is complacent, and it is how benevolent empires fall to ruthless conquerors.
Ok, I don't dispute that, but why would the following happen:

- The campaign led by a former secretary of state decides to essentially go rogue and start accusing a foreign government of election tampering.

- The USG stays silent for a while and then rather than simply having a direct communication with Russia decides to issue an extremely vague public statement about the alleged cyber attacks.
Do you live in Ukraine now? What is the general mood in the different parts of the country? If you do live there I would like to read your opinions, there is so much spin and lies in the media (from both sides).
It's not negligible.

Wired and wireless are both "pipes" of a certain capacity. When you install the initial investment you build out a certain sized pipe. Wired has a much larger pipe for obvious technical reasons. In both cases, there is no real cost delta between a low to medium utilization.

In both cases, if the pre-built pipe experiences a high level of utilization, it results in irregularity of service (more latency, dropped packets). With wireless, the impact of high usage is significantly more severe and is more visible at a much lower percent of utilization.

The solution to this is to either reduce capacity or improve infrastructure. The latter involves capital expenditure for both pipes, albeit it is exponentially cheaper to increase wired capacity compared to wireless capacity. Cheaper, but it's not cheap. It's not just hardware - technician training, deployment costs, for larger inefficient businesses it's not easy to upgrade an edge node of 1Gbps to 10Gbps because a feeder for 100 families has a handful of hungry users.

From just a straight business perspective, usage caps make so much sense. The vast majority of customers get nowhere near them and will never notice. The small subset of "power" users that are eating your capacity you're losing money on anyway, so it's easy to sacrifice this market segment.

The sad truth is that the internet video push has turned "power user" expectations fully out of whack with what an executive room was predicting. A business that has had a built network has a hard time justifying large capital pipe expenditures for what it's internally viewing as troublesome "power" users who should switch to business accounts. So they're fighting it with these policies.

The simple truth is that the bandwidth demands are going to continue to increase across the board and this will need to be accepted and the capital spent to expand the pipe. However, a lack of competition will make this process long and painful.
> I miss those days.

Ditto. I like having a copy of a program that no one but me has access to modify, and I like that I don't have to rely on my ISP to use my computer. If I like a program, I don't want it to change until I choose to change it. I don't want to be A/B tested, marketed to, etc. I'd rather buy a license and be happy =)
failure of imagination.
It's over double the cost for my 100-down line.
You would be surprised https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democra...

And this is just one NGO.

The "West" forced Ukraine to choose between it and Russia, including the looming free trade deal with the EU being contingent on that.

There is/was also a plan to bypass the Russian controlled oil and more importantly natural gas pipelines that are keeping the lights in Europe both the conflict in the Ukraine and the previous one in Georgia are directly connected to the proposed caspian pipelines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Caspian_Gas_Pipeline

While you can make Russia look antagonistic it is just as easy to make the west look that and even worse, the west effectively violated the non-formal agreement that maintained peace after the fall of the soviet union and that is that the former states would effectively be a buffer zone.

The EU and NATO have (and it is very important to note that Russia does not distinguish between the two, and effectively nor should they) been expanding into these buffer states and worse they are expanding into the caspian region and beyond leaving Russia effectively surrounded.

Russia is a landlocked country, it always was, it always was missing a single important thing and that is a warm water port in an open sea, this is why Russia invaded Manchuria/Korea multiple times since the 19th century and this is why Russia would not tolerate any loss of it's ports in the black sea or syria.

The black sea is enclosed by the bosphorus which controlled by NATO, Kaliningrad is a tiny enclave surrounded by NATO and any ship sailing out of it would have to go through the fjords and the northern sea another NATO controlled territory, on the other side of the globe Vladivostok is not a warm water port (although global warming might help Russia with that problem soon enough), effectively Russia has to rely on the "kindness" of NATO to allow it's ships to get out into the ocean, this puts them at a huge disadvantage.

Another key aspect of Russian geopolitics is their "monopoly" on gas pipelines into Europe both from their own reserves and those coming from the caspian region and beyond, this is what keeps Russia relevant and what gives them some power over what is going on around them.

With NATO effectively being able to shut down all Russian sea travel and make Russia's only "diplomatic tool" other than it's strategic nuclear arsenal irrelevant we are not heading into a pleasant direction.
That makes sense considering the nature of QA testing and data entry. For other roles, the outlook seems bleak. Entry-level jobs are a crucial first step on the path to a professional career and most companies are cutting those jobs out in the efforts of staying "lean". Quite a problem.
This part of the passage stuck out to me also. My read on it is that what enables the subject of the story to guide his knife so well is: human attention is a finite resource and it's typically divided up among many things, and, the more attention allocated to something the more rich its representation in consciousness.

If you have some variation in success watching your breath in meditation, you'll notice an astonishing range of detail that your breath might be represented with. When you are distracted, it might barely register as the symbol, "feeling of breath"; and if you have nothing else on your mind, you can have a super rich, fully continuous experience of it moving in and out, with all the gradations of temperature at different points etc.

Seems not very useful with breath watching, but if you carry this over to a sport or other skill, it's amazing how much more time it seems you have to act, and how many subtleties about the playing field that are otherwise totally filtered out.

I can imagine the butcher feeling every little difference in density of the meat as his knife moves along, anticipating where it will give or catch and always remaining on a smooth track.
Show HN: Find similar blocks of CSS(/LESS/SCSS) using this simple Node.js script
Well, of course. But it feels like there's less of a puzzle there. And it's soo much less cool than automating minecraft, especially using more primitive systems.

If you're wondering about modded minecraft, definitely check out SethBling's (unfortunately brief) let's play of FTB (feed the beast - long story) modded Minecraft. It's not terribly representative of the modern mod scene (it's evolved quite a bit since 1.2.5!) but it captures the appeal quite well.
Ah, so necessities can't be too expensive? I guess we need to arrest the owners of restaurants that sell food for too much now.
I feel like I'm reading a guide on how to be the perfect human, not how to be a tech lead.
> There is a vast difference between the parties' budget plans and vision of government

Yet no matter which party holds the presidency and controls the legislature, we end up with the same status quo year after year.

This would simply not be possible unless both parties were heavily invested in maintaining the status quo.

On the other hand, the best rhetoric to use when fundraising is about things that will not happen (overturning Roe vs Wade, for example) because then there is no accountability when the status quo continues. Not coincidentally, both parties use this particular issue as a major fundraising plank.
> That is simply impossible.

Right. And in that vein, "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible".
> “[Teachers] are woefully unprepared [for] engaging in inquiry driven lessons. [...] instructional changes entailed by NGSS are too big to internalize in isolated chunks of professional development.

I think this is currently the main obstacle with the CCSSM and NGSS. The structure and logic of the news standards are good, but they're new so it will take some time for teachers to adjust. We need better course plans, better textbooks for teachers, better textbooks for students, and better exercise frameworks.

We can't look to mainstream publishers to provide this, because they're large, slow, and extractive organizations. Therefore, this seismic shift in the structure and material taught represents a tremendous opportunity for OER to come in and eat the big publishers lunch, e.g. [1].

Our company (Minireference Co.) is currently focussed on university-level textbooks so we can't "attack" the high-school market, but we're happy to share technology and insights with anyone out there who is working on OER for primary/middle/high school.

[1] State-sponsored content push to create common-core-aligned textbooks for high schools: http://k12oercollaborative.org/
Then just fine them, why does this have to be a criminal issue? It should only be a criminal issue when they did this knowingly and maliciously instead of checking the wrong box somewhere.
[video] First impressions of DevOps
Thanks for the feedback (down-vote). Would appreciate an accompanying comment. Then I could reconsider my position and perhaps alter it.
Conversations.im
Check out SethBling's let's play of FTB (feed the beast) modded minecraft. If you know who Seth is, you'll know that he's great, and this is him playing with a grab bag of minecraft mods. It's outdated, but it shows the appeal.

Mind, I haven't gotten my hands on factorio yet, so I'm judging by what I can see, but thus far, it seems strictly inferior in capability and capacity for mayhem and interesting mechanisms to minecraft modded.
I recently had about a dozen old posts silently downvoted without comment because I linked to a wikipedia article about marginal utility which apparently deeply annoyed an ideologe.

So the de facto workings of the site make me wear downvotes with pride.
I'm in the process of rewriting our external api using GraphQL, It's kind of amazing, I do find my self tripping on "best practices" e.g. pertaining to a User view model

query {user {name}}
query {users(someQualifier: $qualifier){name}}
mutation {createUser(name: $name) {name}}
mutation {updateUser(id: $id, name: $name){name}}
mutation {destroyUser(id: $id) {name}}

It ends up looking like CRUD. But so much easier to reason about :)
Thanks for replying. I don't disagree with any of your conclusions but I'll reply in that thread with a brief comment in a moment.
Yeah but why would Musk want to discover that he isn't really a billionaire, but in fact an unconscious hairless dude living in a pod of goo and wired into a giant computer?

Anyways he better be careful or he'll be flushed into the vast waste pit for knowing too much.

Hey, maybe Musk think he's "The One!"
What the church believed is neither here nor there.

Failure to observe stellar parallax is not scientific evidence for geocentricity, as there is an explanation, obvious to anyone who understands parallax (and, as it happens, correct), for the non-observation. Consequently, Occam's razor (which is a methodological assumption, not an axiom of either logic or the scientific method) does not apply.

Kepler had fixed the prediction issue.

I do not believe the center-of-gravity issue was considered at that time, and if not, could not be a reason for preferring geocentricity at that time (and by the time it was recognized, geocentricity was already scientifically untenable.)
"Why haven't the Republicans been hacked?"

Assumes the conclusion. Possibly they have been hacked, but the hacker sees no value in releasing that information. The publicly available data at hand may not be enough to reach a conclusion here.
If it's getting leaked eventually anyhow, better that it's before the sale is final.
If the announcement came from, say, Major General Mark W. Westergren, USAF, Deputy Chief NSA/CSS, it would be more credible. He's not a political appointee, and should know in detail what's going on in this area.
...That depends on whether you think interpretation is a wart: if you don't need the perf, a lot of us don't.

And you have no evidence that that was Lutz's intent.
Ok, that sounds like the Chrome extension that adds "orange lines next to new comments since your last visit", mentioned in this comment (on this same page): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664187

A button to scroll down to the next unread comment thread sounds interesting.
@GFischer, it's going to be available outside and with Office 365
Yes, it is the "already admitted to and apologized for personal server" that this would distract from; certainly not the ongoing email leaks or content of those already released.

The server was a simple 'mistake' anyone could 'accidentally' make; I honestly think people don't understand how easy it is to accidentally configure a mailserver, happened to me just this morning.

>Doesn't that sound just a tad wild even for a conspiracy theory?

Sadly, it doesn't sound wild at all.
I would recommend getting rid of downvoting altogether.

Downvoting is overwhelmingly used as a means to express disagreement and enact censorship (by reducing visibility), with no regards to the substance and quality of the actual post. I think this is a poisonous feature, that will eventually turn HN into yet another echo chamber if left unchecked.

Either flag a post for being off-topic, inappropriate or adding nothing of substance to the discussion, or reply with a counter argument to express disagreement to well-written posts that deserve it (AFAIK, with flagging, unlike with downvoting, users are held to some level of accountability and are liable to losing their flagging rights if they flag posts indiscriminately). The ability to silence opinions different to your own with minimal effort and no accountability can only hurt the quality of discussion here, in my opinion.
'freethink/freethought/freethinker' is a politically-loaded term

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought
> how is one supposed to make a career decision

By finishing the process? I had other offers, and they waited the <one week it took to finish team matching with Google.

When would that take a long time? It was a quick chat with a few managers and then I picked.
Could you elaborate on what "Money at the End of the Rainbow" business model is? Thanks!
When I downloaded and unzipped this, I got a folder with what looked like a web site. I figured I would need to run it under a web server, but double-clicked the ‘index.html’ file anyways.

That opened a simple page with 3 links to example files, and clicking either opened a working document editor, where ‘working’ seems to include the saving of changes (somewhere in browser history; edits survive closing the web page, but get lost on clearing history). (Tested on Safari, Chrome, and FireFox on Mac OS X Sierra)

I guess that means this aims to be a powerful document editor with rich and highly developed cross-platform support.

It’s not as flexible as LaTeX or markdown, but that is on purpose.
This is not controversial at all, this is a well-known and empirically confirmed trend since the mid of last century.
Me too! If my comment is up-voted then down-voted then up-voted then down-voted, I know that I've said something that people have different thoughts on, and I know I hit on something. Other times I get down-vote, down-vote, down-vote, just like I thought I would, and am totally happy to take that hit. I put out such comments sometimes knowing they go against the HN grain, and consider the karma-cost as my way of giving back to the community, keeping it honest.
Wasn't contradicting you, just adding a bit of info.
Does firefox actually supports X25519 now? I haven't seen it in the builds (it's also not on the reference list i use).
I know Edge is going to support it by the end of the year, no clue on Safari yet.

But anyhow if you want to have a full list of software that supports Curve25519/X25519(DH) as well as other open crypto standards IANIX has an upto date list https://ianix.com/index.html
If you're in the UK, you are exactly describing Andrews&Arnold's business:

http://aaisp.net/

Full, unrestricted, unmonitored, uncensored, IPv6-compatible compatibility sold by the gigabyte.

They are honestly fantastic (I'm even using them as my mobile provider - and I don't live in the UK anymore). However, if you use them you'll understand why this model can't go mainstream: It gets expensive pretty fast, especially if you aren't paying attention.

However I will straight up recommend AAISP to the UK HN crowd. If you don't know them, please look into them!