skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Roman numerals are now dead, nobody would be taken seriously if he extended the roman numeral system in order to prove that the roman numerals could have a zero (or negatives). Right?

But when cultural systems were alive, they routinely changed, adapted, imported concepts. Sometimes they were replaced, but not simply because they lacked something that could be added

One could simply add "N" as nulla and invent something for negative numbers or spell it as a full word.

The key point in the arabic/hindi zero is not the 'zero' value of the symbol, but the positional feature of the numbering system. The zero just turns out to be useful to express a lot of numbers in a positional system.

Zero by himself is probably less useful and as a concept can be expressed as a full word "nulla" if needed.

Indeed I just found out that medieval extension of the roman numeral system included 'nulla': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Zero

If only Romans had to calculate complicated feast dates like Easter, perhaps they'd found the need to include a zero as the medieval computists did.

(honestly I have no idea of either the Ancient Rome festivities nor exactly what they used the numbers for, just guessing)
I'll believe it only if they bundle Jumpman
the picture looks like an amiga. The screenshot is like AmigaOS >3.x, the keyboard is very similar to my amiga 500 keyboard.
WEB SITE TEMPLATES: Watch Online The Belgian Grand Prix - Live streaming
"Smart" hex conversion routine
OK, to recap. You want to decompose this:

[ 3x-1 ] / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ]

into fractions. In other words, you want to find A and B such that:

A/(x+2) + B/(1-x+x^2) = [ 3x-1 ] / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ]

Apart from getting the brackets wrong, you said (correctly) that the left hand side is equal to this:

[ A(1-x+x^2) + B(x+2) ] / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ]

So now you need to solve:

[ A(1-x+x^2)+B(x+2) ] / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ] = (3x-1) / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ]

The denominators are equal, so you just need to make the numerators equal.

So tell me - what equation do you have to solve?
"Medicine and Law has more prestige."

And, thanks to economic protectionism, a largely guaranteed source of white collar income. Programming is much riskier.
I'm not sure how much of that is the result of "Western monoculture". Girls throughout the world reliably prefer dolls to robots.
Maybe it's because it's a terrible choice of long-term career.

Do you mean a terrible choice for everyone, or just women?
I'm not really sure of this history here, but I will say: I love the icon: http://giveabrief.com/.
Is this available on Linux? I tried the flag on my chromium-dev build, but it didn't do anything. Updating the source now... (turns out yaourt is nice).
Tethering
There's evidence that toy preferences of girls and boys are in part hardwired (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18452921). It's analogous to career choices. It's what we all know intuitively, but political correctness pressures us to invent alternate explanations. Even esr succumbed: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2118#more-2118.
Not if you give the process administrator privileges.
try clyde
I love screen.

I use it on a daily basis for ~10 years.

What still bothers me mightily is that, up to this day, nobody has bothered to get the history scrolling right (neither in tmux, btw). You still have to press an awkward key combination to switch to "copy mode", the normal mechanisms (PGUP, mousewheel, scrollbar) only result in garbage.

I've tried various partial fixes ("altscreen off") but none works properly across sessions or with multiple windows. Years back I even tried to patch screen myself but had to surrender over the (for me) crufty code-base.

And that despite the solution being fairly obvious: Just redraw the entire window while scrolling, just like irssi and plenty other console apps do it. And just like screen itself does it in copy-mode.

I wish someone would finally take on this issue...
Comedian pitching the Ice Cream Glove to venture capitalists
About friggin time. That has been the major obstacle for me to start using chrome. Horizontal tabs just don't scale.
Even writing e.g. "frimaerke" is not unintelligible, though. One could also imagine that ø and æ were replaced by the more common ö and ä in the future.

I think the "there are so few letters and they are relatively simple" is the point here.
Room Dividers
furnitureinfashion.net Offers room dividers, decorate, your bedroom with these fantastic screen dividers. Decorative, portable screens & discount furniture.
Any books & articles you'd particularly recommend? I've read some popular neurology stuff (books by Oliver Sacks, Jonah Lehrer's blog), but that's it, and would love to go deeper.

Edit: I see a few suggestions from you in other parts of this thread. Any others?
Try CurdBee(http://curdbee.com), if you want simple, but not a toy invoicing solution ;)
This reminds me of the story of Abbi Hoffman with his book "Steal This Book". The people who wanted it just did as title told them and stole it from the bookshelves. Bookstores didn't want to carry it if it's stolen half the time.
hmm two things come to mind:

1) finally something that would make me switch for a 'wide-screen' lcd.
2) if you can resize the bar then all of the webdesigners' estimates about "this much should always fit the screen without scrolling" are off (if they still make them).
German here. Tried to film the police arresting some guy near where I live, they immediately came over and asked me to delete the videos or else they would take my camera (cell phone)
Worth waiting to build a product full of killer features like Gran Turismo 5?
Smart? or Greedy?
It's funny, I crossed the profitability line a while back after several failed attempts, but I don't really feel much different. When I finally did make a "successful" company, it was a little like when you've been practicing a song on an instrument for a while and you look at one bit that has always felt a bit not right, and you tweak it a bit and you realize that you just corrected a mistake that you had been unknowingly repeating. Or when you're speaking a foreign language and your ears can suddenly hear a place where you've always been speaking with a slight accent but which you didn't know about before.

My point is, from the beginning, I've made many such realizations and corrections and at some point I guess I just made enough to be able to create a profitable company.

The flip-side is, I feel like I'm still playing my instrument badly, just slightly less badly than before. Every day I wake up anxious about sales and think about my latest expansion plans - just trying to add stones to the wall that stands between me and starvation, which is what I've been doing all along.

I'd be interested to hear if others have had a similar experience as I.
i get A(1-x+x^2) + B(x+2) = 3x-1
In response to that other thread about females in tech, this was designed by a very successful female entrepreneur.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth
I flagged that, because the title is basically useless, and the glaring result is that no one reads about this important case.
This reminds me of Jeff Bezos's framework: optimize your life for minimal regret. Very inspiring.

http://www.youngentrepreneur.com/blog/uncategorized-blog/liv...
I noticed the same thing when I was a math undergrad. While working on proofs for Abstract Algebra and Real Analysis, I couldn't go more than a couple of hours.
I think there are certainly the more 'honest' homeless people. But I do guess where you live. In some areas/countries being 'dishonest/dodgy' is the 'norm' and so it attracts the majority of homeless people to do the dishonest things they do.
> I want to be able to say and do things on those sites that I wouldn't do on FB.

This. I don't use any forums that expect my True Name, because I would self-censor all controversial opinions, making participation a waste of time. This is also why I only post fluff on FB itself.

Venues like this are where I can be honest (without first developing a close and trusting relationship with literally every member).
Yeah, it seems like the long way around, but it really adds up over the years!

You'll probably want to get Quinniec's _Lisp in Small Pieces_, if you don't have it already. It covers several aspects of implementing Lisp interpreters and compilers, the lambda calculus, a bit on semantics, etc. (It mostly focuses on Scheme.)
I read this article a while back: http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/4018083-beggar-ear...

$50,000 (AUD) a year! no tax as well.

What do you guys think about a beggar earning more money as the average Australian who actually works and earns money(I'm simply giving Australia as an example because I live there)?
A good portion of the problem of homelessness could be addressed by a sane approach to substance abuse. One innovation is a special 'drug court'. If a person charged with an offense has a drug problem, they have the option of entering a rigorous rehabilitation program with intensive support and somewhat intrusive monitoring. The upfront costs are a little higher (than standard courts) but data indicates that it really pays off in the long run.

And related to that, it would be really helpful if drugs were treated as a mental and social health issue and not as a law enforcement problem.
I have to have two passports for this reason - one for entering Israel and one for everywhere else. A surprising number of countries get a bit steamy about having an Israel Visa stamp.

Israeli border guards will also stamp a piece of paper stapled to your passport if you ask them (so it can be removed when you leave)
Why is Prophylaxis Important For Hemophiliacs?
The Fatman and Circuit Girl
I was :)

... but it is easy to see it that way considering all the jokes that the speaker throws to great response from the audience.

Scientific process is often used to disqualify religious nonsense

All I'm saying is that scientific process is also used to disqualify "scientific nonsense" as well, such as turning lead into gold. So religious nonsense isn't any different.

Just as you'd credit alchemists for contributing in other ways, "religions" ought to get credit for contributing to psychology, for instance, if not for creation theories.
This is very, very true. Ministers of most all religions are among the loneliest of the lot. Because confidence is crucial to their social function and because people breed politics (i.e., backstabbing), many feel they cannot have friends in their congregations/parishes/communities/whatever. Too often they are right.
Homebrew silicon fab
Very cool. One quote hit me : " A conventional statement of this principle is that a program should never declare that a given object is a SmallInteger or a LargeInteger, but only that it responds to integer protocol. Such generic description is crucial to models of the real world."

I've been thinking about an OO language where there is no subclassing. However, you do have protocols (interfaces) and super-protocols. This might even allow for full type inference.
Puma Speed Cat Big Shoes White
Neighborly Borrowing, Over the Online Fence
fwiw, i wasn't approached - i'd simply answered an ad on craigslist.
I always tear up a little when I hear Amiga name. Hardware isn't enough though, it would need an AmigaOS at least. But, AmigaOS has it's own share of drama which will make it highly unlikely.
It wasn't that she had a lack of access to the information (IE a non-golfer randomly acquiring the balls), he husband was an avid golfer and she said her son was semi-pro. She simply didn't care to get the information before selling a product, which is another lesson entirely.
A very large part of compiler operations involve analyzing and transforming tree/graph data structures (once you've parsed to an AST), so you want a language with good native support for those structures. Pattern matching and garbage collection help immensely, as do ML's inferred static types. Working with complex data structures is really where ML shines.

It's not just ML, though - using a language where you can work directly with native tree structures (ML and Haskell's type constructors, Lisp sexps, Prolog functors, Lua tables, or even JSON) means that you can postpone learning syntax/parsing and start with the language's semantics. You can save the syntax details for when you have the language design worked out. Compiler books based on C (such as the dragon book) spend such a long time on parsing upfront because they don't have much choice.

Also, Andrew Appel works on SML/NJ, and the C and Java books are translated from the ML version. I've looked at the C version (which uses lex and yacc instead of ml-lex and ml-yacc, mallocs but doesn't free until later in the book, etc.), and while it's still a good compiler overview book, I'd strongly suggest getting the ML version instead. The ML version uses Standard ML (SML), but I've only used OCaml and didn't have trouble following it and making the minor adaptations along the way. (I haven't looked at the Java version. Whatever.)
I do agree that the OS "should" not allow access but it has to because otherwise you would not be able to modify it.
I think the right solution would be to publicise and shame the culprit applications.
Secrets of Successful Data Scientists
Die Welt der Klick-Arbeiter (in German)
Ground Zero Mosque vs Baghdad Christian Church?
Soshin: the Beginner's Mind
It is not so easy if you also need to earn money somehow for living.
Even if you are writing a production compiler, you will likely not be using a tool, nor writing a tool, to generate the parser. Most production commercial compilers in practice use hand-written recursive descent with a hand-written lexer, which itself potentially uses feedback from the parser (very handy for parsing C or C++). Recursive descent usually gives context for error recovery that matches the way most programmers think about language syntax; and with it being written by hand, the recovery can be tweaked to be as smart as necessary.

Also, IDE / editor support like intellisense can greatly benefit from integration with a recursive descent parser. If you encode the cursor's position as a special token, the parser can handle that token and do a deep return (throw an exception, longjmp, whatever) with relevant context, active scopes, etc.
I would like a mobile stylesheet (also for iPad) that has larger buttons. Especially the upvote button and meta-links.
Sounds like it's time to write a Windows driver that redirects all writes like this to a regular file. That way, apps keep working transparently, and their clever DRM scheme fails miserably.

Oh proprietary software vendors. Won't you ever learn that you can't stop "unauthorized use" on general-purpose hardware?
The classic case of the solution in search for a problem? ^_^
Real reason is ridiculously simple as most of the men don't care about if the color of their great hat matches with their nice boots, most of the women are not geek.
> All I'm saying is that scientific process is also used to disqualify "scientific nonsense" as well, such as turning lead into gold. So religious nonsense isn't any different.

Yes. Science is self-correcting. Its common knowledge. Religion is not self-correcting. You might have different interpretation (over the years) of religious allegory, but nonsense is nonsense; regardless of your interpretations.

I don't really see the connection.
SarBox is considered to be the last nail in the coffin, not the sole cause of seems to be the effective end of the US IPO. The numbers speak for themselves, although of course a return of more than a couple of handfuls or so of IPOs per year would change that (less than that when you just count tech firms).

I've heard it costs something more like $2.6 million, but it's going to be company specific and the cost might have come down as people and accounting firms got experience. However the pure $$$ cost is only a portion of its total expense, it's also a time and attention sink and it significantly increases the liability (including as I recall criminal) exposure of some of the company's officers. Plus it costs a LOT of time (a year or more), money and attention upfront to get your company SarBox compliant for an IPO, and too much of it is insane stuff that does nothing to improve your real business.

If you remember your chemistry, look at it as raising the activation energy needed for a reaction.

Agreed this should be "the best of times", but you're still talking about fairly small scale and limited domain areas. As I keep harping on, where's the next FPGA like thing going to come from? The only really big "new thing" hardware based startups I know about are Tesla and Space X and they were funded by a single angel. Who got his money from co-founding PayPal, which was a perfect fit for eBay to acquire, which is a prior to SarBox public company.

I don't really know about Twitter (but it's tiny in terms of people and revenue, all out of whack with its impact), but Facebook has clearly made a decision to stay private for whatever reasons. It could go public, investigating why they've decided not to might be worthwhile.

The cash on the sidelines is a good and big question. Some say it's not so much at net, i.e. companies are keeping it to make sure they can service their debt (unfortunately debt is massively tax advantaged compared to stock based capital), others say (and this is clearly related to the first point) that it's being held in reserve for the Dark Times To Come. Or at least fear of such.

There have been too damn many 2,500 page pieces of unread monster legislation passed with no end necessarily in sight (let's say that confidence in what the Republicans might try to accomplish when they get one or both houses of the Congress back is not exactly high) ... in times of colossal uncertainty keeping reserves can mean the difference between your company's survival and death.

E.g. will the insane file a 1099 for any corporate recipient of $600 or more per year insanity be repealed? If you're a small business (< 500 employees, half the economy), well, you best keep some reserves in case you have to do that (it will cost a lot of money and friction, and will likely cost a lot of companies business as everyone decreases the number of companies they do business with).

Etc.

At the furthest extreme, compare to 1937 when "capital went on strike"....
"Except for a necessary parts to make it useful. From someone close to the source (the last paragraph pretty much wraps it up)"

I am not sure what you are referring to. I'll try to reply to a few of the points raised in the article (but I have only skimmed it, so if I missed your point feel free to point it out).

Darwin is still being updated. Back in 2006 Apple didn't release the x86 code straight away, but I think they did so after a while.

DarwinBuild still exists and (apparently from their webpage) it is still being updated. This is a project supported by Apple whose only purpose is to build Darwin

As for Apple not including some of the drivers code in Darwin I can't say I am surprised. By looking at the fights between kernel people and drivers developers on Linux it seems a lot of companies (e.g NVidia) simply would not accept their secret sauce to be open sourced for fear it will reveal secrets of their architecture. Though correct me if I am wrong.

Finally the article you linked to asks why should people contribute to Darwin if Apple is less than helpful. Here I agree with you. Apple could do much more to help and encourage Darwin. But I don't see how this would be any different if the code were GPL.

And incidentally Android uses the same technique (keep development closed and open source the final version once it's being used) but everybody praises Android for being open source. (which is true, since they did open source _everything_ and Apple keeps things like Aqua closed source, but my point is that you don't hear quite the complains about Android's development model, as you do for Darwin's).

As for your second point, I think X-instance replied better than I could.
What advice would you have given your 17 year old self? (I am 16)
What I don't understand is why was ahoyhere's comment killed?

She made a pretty important point about "progressive, enlightened males who are egalitarian by default"; people are not always who they appear to be. Anyone will tell you to look at what they do vs. what they say. What you need to understand is that there is a fine line between genuine behavior and "fake" behavior. It is only when you are at the receiving end do you notice. This is a very important point to make. True, no one wants the sexist tag, but are they actually creating a level playing field?

I don't know the answer to the question, but someday I hope that I will figure it out.

Anyway, here is her comment;

>>>I can tell you from experience that lots of those "progressive, enlightened males" are a different type of boor. Being treated "special" - in a "nice" way - is almost as unbearable as being mistreated.

I recall a certain world-famous engineer who actually argued with me about the experience of "women in tech." Fact: I'm a woman, he was a man, and there weren't even any female devs at his very famous employer and neither were his close family or friends female devs.

He was "progressive, enlightened" -- on the surface. I've heard lots of people call him "nice." But he was actually insulting and condescending to me, trying to play a More Feminist Than Thou game in order to shore up his ego.
I'm sure that people like that are everywhere, and that certainly didn't turn me off tech. But it's irritating to think that you'd probably consider him a poster boy for "the good guys."<<<
No one on their death bed ever said "I wish I'd spent more time alone with my computer." - D. Bunten (creator of M.U.L.E.)
A better approach would be destroying capitalism.

Edit: Sorry, I do more or less agree with you that what you are describing is pretty much the right way to handle drug problems, but I think it's important to point out that poverty and homelessness are symptoms of capitalism, which is the real problem.
I agree that anecdotal evidence is worthless.

However, there have been a number of studies on this and they've found that toy preference is pretty innate. And even present in other primates.

See this paper: http://www.scribd.com/full/36579212?access_key=key-1ztjrngs9...
How about the idea of role models? There simply isn't many female role models that motivate young women to go into tech.

Being involved with young athletes in high school - I know 18 year old boys who aspire to be the next Michael Jordan or next Michael Phelps. I know 18 year old girls who aspire to be the next Cathy Freeman.

Outside of sports there are also many industries where potential female AND male role models are rife.

Film, dance, journalism just to name a few. Even the 'normal' fields which have been thrown around - doctors, lawyers, business, teaching etc. Many young people are may aspire to be like that 'aunty who is a lawyer' or that 'family friend who is a doctor' etc.

But tech? .... Because the industry is so skewed towards males and because of that there is no... female version of steve jobs, or bill gates, mark zuckerberg to aspire to.

Just a thought.. what do you guys reckon?
Das U-Boot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_U-Boot was created by experienced engineers (I don't know about Magnus Damm, but Dan Malek is still in the engineering world - Sr. Scientist at Mentor Graphics). Wolfgang Denk took over the original U-Boot code and has been driving it forward for over 10 years now.

http://www.denx.de/wiki/view/U-Bootdoc/History

I've met Wolfgang and would estimate he is a few years older than me, which would put him in his 50s. He still is much sharper than the youngsters on the email list. :-P

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model I, bought in 1980 or '81. My first program was written in Basic on a timeshare system (dialup modem with a DEC terminal) in 1978 or '79.