skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. He's completely car crazy and we discussed him creating a little database of cars that he's interested in, complete with photos. Probably a bit advanced for what we need to do initially (otherwise he'll get bored if he can't see progress). I'm wanting to see for myself if I can teach him without friction as I am looking into alternative methods of schooling at the moment.
Patches, bug reports are welcome :)
When I'm afraid of getting a STD by shaking a coder's hand, then it will be rock and roll.
Reminds me of...

Goldman Sachs says Ireland will be ok

http://www.politics.ie/economy/143357-goldman-sachs-says-ire...

How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,676634,00....

How Goldman Sachs Made Tens of Billions of Dollars from the Economic Collapse of America

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16...

Oh, Goldman Sachs. Are there no depravity which you are absent from?
This would be a good opportunity for Adafruit to start pre-selling an 8x8x8 programmable kit.
Should you do performance reviews in a small startup?
Even if you're right and some companies do count this as a plus, I wouldn't touch that company with a ten foot pole. Why would anyone subject themselves to such extremist oligarchy in which you are forbidden from doing mostly anything that doesn't fit within some random business rules?
I agree that it is just divide and conquer, presented in detail, with some specifics thrown in on techniques that are useful in mathematical proofs.

However I think that this is useful, even for students with decent problem solving skills.

The biggest issue that I was trying to solve is clearing up misconceptions about what a proof actually is. A beginning student knows that proofs have to be utterly convincing. They know that even many basic and obvious things require proof. So they are uncertain what techniques are OK to use. Worse yet, all of their liberal arts education pushes them towards believing that the way to make something convincing is to add verbiage, examples, supporting references, and so on. All of which is the exact opposite of what you actually want to do in a mathematical proof.

A second issue that I was trying to address is the art of reading problems and figuring out what it actually says. This is why I included specific advice on how some common phrases actually cover two separate claims.

A third issue is that students arrive at a first course where they have to do proofs having seen (and usually ignored) lots of examples of worked proofs, but never having done one. Even if you use divide and conquer elsewhere, there can be a barrier to realizing that this is the technique you need to use here.

And that assumes that the students are competent at divide and conquer. But there are many paths through academia where you can arrive at the first course where you have to do mathematical proofs without having explicitly learning to divide and conquer. You can complain about that situation, or do something about it. I chose to do something about it.
Depending on where you live, there have been a number of similar projects that the author dreams of.

Some organizations doing this:

http://SunlightFoundation.com/ (USA), http://mysociety.org/ (UK), http://cee.mysociety.org/ (Central and Eastern Europe).
I sure hope not. Most responses seemed to disagree and even technomancy wasn't happy with the characterization of his part. If you take every criticism personally instead of looking at the whole, it's a recipe for being miserable.
I'd never heard of it, but I've just signed up for one via iTunes U. These look awesome. It will be interesting to see where the world of education goes in the next decade. Personally I'm looking for resources for younger children (5-15) for my own children
You have exactly captured my intent.
Microsoft to take on Apple TV with Windows-based set top box
On Twitter, Glimpses of a Slain Pakistani Governor's War on Religious 'Fanatics'
Yes, let me just add all 50 of these to my RSS reader. Obviously each and every one is worth it.
Also, it is possible that superior cooperation ends up moving non-trivial chunks of intelligence into a group mind, which need only "exist" to the extent that a group of hominids cooperating can outcompete a non-cooperating group (so as to avoid the ultimately-not-even-wrong question of "where it is" or "what it looks like"). See also in AI how frequently and how robustly it turns out that a hordes of less intelligent agents + cooperation can outperform a theoretically smarter single agent on its own.
Top tech investing trends for 2011
Brain affects New Year’s Resolutions; How Brain Works
"Bigger Fool Theory" has officially been added to my vocabulary for explaining the current spate of ultra high valuations for companies like Facebook and Twitter.

* Greater fool theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
Has anyone actually read the article on the Flynn Effect? Near the bottom it states that studies show that the progression has peaked and in some cases regressed.
2010 Qt DevDays Technical Video Sessions with Qt Engineers
They're in need of charity regardless; allowing compensation doesn't change that, and would likely make the required charity less expensive by increasing the supply.
For me the first question is usually enough, with the power of statistics I know that if I have this problem somebody else should have too and be aware of that fact.

The trick here is make the rest of the market that isn't aware of the problem, aware of it.
Don't do it, Microsoft.
I have a lot of ideas, for instance an RSS feed filter to remove duplicates. Same idea could also be used to filter twitter feeds, although I understand the code would be different.

Do you think it would be better to work on my own projects and jump in the deep end or should I start with cookbook code and learn from that first? Part of the problem maybe is not understanding where to go once I learn the basics.
> The government makes lives easier for every industry; health insurance companies, the airlines, the automakers, the utilities, the postal service, Hollywood... everyone.

except for the part where govt says "nice little industry you've got there, be a shame if something happened to it". That is, the "make lives easier" often comes after "make lives harder" and/or consists of not following through on a threat to "make lives harder".
Agreed. But it is still does not make it appropriate or right to question one intention, publicly, on a site that is set up for s specific purpose, with out finding out info about them, and to flame them if they think their intention are other than what the site is here for, and to pile on by down voting all of ones post, even from days ago.
>Tipping low-wage customer service workers for unadvertised services and favours is now some sort of evil "class" issue that indicates greed and corruption?

It is absolutely corruption. There is no question about it.

Sure, the corruption is from a less powerful position, but the morals and outcomes are largely the same: Someone is selling privileges they have no right to sell, and the same mentality is the mentality that allows corruption in public office.

"Do you get mad when other diners at your favourite restaurant tip better than you and get friendlier service for their trouble?"

What a terrible example. Tipping occurs at the end of the transaction, and is intended as a reward for good service. If you had to pay the server before getting served, and it decided the level of care and concern you would get, I am quite confident that it would be forcefully abolished by every restaurant immediately.
7 Tech Predictions for 2011
I'm fairly certain that the examples he's found are of private roads, driveways, or subdivision roads. If you flip in to streetview for one of the areas he highlights, the thin line a dirt road with a mailbox next to it (http://goo.gl/maps/GSX8).

This may coincide with the recently released TIGER 2010 shapefiles which, from my perusal, seem to have digitized these longer private driveways a lot more than previous years.
People Fucking Need Clean Water
Fair enough... guess I need to start using it!
What do you think this says about the US? Be honest.

(I don't have any political motivations here. I love my country. But I'm curious as to your perspective.)
I like Gilbert Strang's math courses, and Robert Gallager's Digital communications.

On the other coast, I like Stephen Boyd's Linear Dynamical Systems and Convext Optimization courses quite well. I wish Stanford would do more like these.
As a product manager in a social gaming company, I definitely kept an eye on those metrics.

However, I'd like to caution that these metrics are relevant in all phases of the product lifecycle, but the focus on feature development follows the order you mentioned.

For example, keeping an eye on Rev/DAU and conversion rates at the beginning of the product tells you about user engagement, while paying attention to reach metrics (virality and new customer acquisition) in the mid to end will give you an idea of longevity or potency of your user base. Specifically, pay attention to social/user metrics as they will tell you how active a user is in interacting socially as well as inviting new users to use your product/game.
So You Just Bought Sex.com For $13 Million – Now What?
Automating Heroku PG Backups
Kahn Academy, also available on I-Tunes U, has some great material for younger learners.
Predictions for the Nigerian Tech Scene in 2011.
It's going to be a very, very small subset of websites running PHP that could be hung...

- Must be one of the PHP 5.3.3 versions with the bug, where very very few web hosts are running such a recent version (5.0, 5.1 and 5.2 branches are much more common)

- Must be a 32-bit version, no bug in 64-bit

- The PHP program must try to use the input as a number
2011: The Year Philanthropy Starts to Become a “Long-Term Solution”
Functional Programming: Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes and Barbed Wire (1991) [pdf]
How many of you guys analyze your data daily? Ok 70 hands went up,now how many of you guys analysis it live and work on back end execution of the data analysis several times a day as it's happening toward specific goals 2 of you? Yeah I'm that guy...that's how you go from $1 a day with adsense to $100 a day. Stop worrying about getting more hardware & database resource sucking irrelevant traffic. Understand what you have now and tweak,analise,rinse and repeat.
There was a minor controversy on campus when OpenCourseWare was being rolled out. Some students thought opening up the courses was unfair since they worked hard to get in and paid $30k+ per year to attend MIT.

I'm glad these folks didn't win that debate ;)

I'm currently working on a startup to push what MIT has done even further. If you're willing to provide some feedback, then drop me an email for a preview.
THIS.

I occasionally torrent movies and TV shows, but I have a Blockbuster account and I always check them out once they're legally available months later and return them unwatched, since I've already seen them. That way I figure the content producers still get a paper trail of paid demand or ratings or something.

If they were available on demand, DRM-free NOW so that I could watch them when and where I want, I would happily just pay for them and not go through all this bullshit.
While I really enjoy reading Quora and think that it has enormous potential, this type of comment shows me why I don't think it can reach the mainstream. Simply, the community is not meant for everyone. While Twitter also has a small portion of people tweeting, Quora goes even further- towards generally discouraging people outside of a small group of technically inclined giants in the startup world. I don't know how they are going to spread that into other fields in a way that continues to interest people when so much interaction with the site is frowned upon.
I never could get the "restricted driver" to work for me (I have on past laptops, but not this one). It's possible that this has changed with more recent restricted driver releases.
From Axel Boldt's idea diary,

1/24/2007 10:13 PM
Defeat any copy protection on video/audio: play the content on a
certified software player in a virtual machine, copy material from the
virtual screen/loudspeaker.

http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/Diary.txt
This is one of the only things that really annoys me about these courses, is that they are often only available via iTunes U. I don't have, nor do I want, iTunes. I shouldn't have to fire up a VM to access "open" content. I deal with it but it bugs the crap out of me.
The Empty Restaurants of New York
Some numbers, albeit a couple years old:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/b...

Social security and medicare combined are 35% of the Federal budget. Income security is another 10%. National defense is 19%. Interest payments (essentially a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to T-bill holders, i.e. poor Americans to rich foreigners) are another 9%.

It's also not true, in strict monetary terms, that the vehicle of these transfers is monetary expansion. Total federal spending is about $3T. The total expansion in the monetary base since 2008, even with the massive explosion due to quantitative easing, is only $1.2T. Tax receipts still form the bulk of the budget.

I hate government waste as much as anyone, but get your facts straight before arguing.
Between programs like OCW and Khan Academy, how long can education costs continue to increase at their current rates?

I can't imagine students in the future accepting paying $50k? $60k? more? per year when the opportunity exists for inexpensive and high quality programs online. Maybe a lower cost hybrid program would work (to allow for better peer and faculty interaction) or at least the acceptance of an online degree. Probably not immediate future - but I imagine that changes to our higher education system will come.

http://www.collegescholarships.org/research/student-loans/
“Why We Shoot” (How Smart Phones Are Changing Our Concept Of A “Photo”)
This is the nature of floating point numbers: they're not exactually "exact" at all. Converting a fixed fraction decimal number into a floating point means turning an exact number into its best approximation. In order to get the approximation as close as possible to the original number, a floating point conversion algorithm will perform several runs until the error between the original number and the floating point representation is smaller than some very small value. This leads to problems when either the error can't get smaller than the required precision, or when the error doesn't decrease per iteration. In both cases an algorithm that doesn't have error detection will be stuck in an infinite loop.
Its a tricky thing to do as the potential for link-spam is very high. All one needs to do to rank his/her site high is to link to some authoritative/reputed site. Edit: One apparent fix is to assign smaller scores to outlinks as compared to inlinks. Even this is easy to game by setting up numerous pages to harvest outlink score, and then direct it to a page as an inlink.

Edit: Erm anything wrong with my comment ? This got voted down to -1.

As a graduate student I look into algorithms like these for ranking web pages.

This was with reference to dead-end websites and awarding a Pagerank like scores based on what my site points to (in addition to those who point to me)
I also own tiwyr.com might be re-branding it as such (for viral purposes...easy to pass along to friends than the insanely long url) not sure.
> Japan has one of the highest-rated healthcare systems in the world

Japan also has one of the least diverse populations in the world.

As always, I wonder how Japan compares to Japanese-Americans.
Mental note: don't buy Intel chip's with DRM
For me, most of the reason behind that is my super-customized fvwm that perfectly fits my workflow. Because I've made it for me, no other desktop environment comes close to what I need.

And fvwm gives me the freedom to do it.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. There's no terms at all in the donation-based giving, and yet people think they have influence. Contracts get renegotiated all the time. What would prevent Company XYZ from exerting pressure along the lines of "we want you to do [abc] or we're not renewing?"

All I was originally saying was that I just feel he'll end up in the same situation. I'm not suggesting he can't say no. :)
Why the SEC will force Facebook to go public
I'll be honest, I don't get what your site is about. I refreshed the page a few times and got some sentences that barely made any sense, were not specifically funny or insightful. I think I understand the idea (like a Chuck Norris jokes site but for "why I rock"), but I couldn't link what I read to it.

Also, you're talking about GUI, but I feel like I'm missing something: I could see "design", but "GUI" puzzles me a bit since there isn't much to interact with.
These students in all likelihood had never, ever, been asked to produce a mathematical proof. They were being told that they were about to write one as a group, after having a general description of how to do it, without seeing any worked out examples first. It is quite possibly the first time that they had ever been expected to do anything for a first time in a math class without seeing a worked example first.

Furthermore they were staring at a theorem that was complicated and abstract enough that none of them had any idea why it was true. They had just been given a method of attack, but had no particular reason to have any confidence in it.

I expected and wanted this surprise. I wanted them to take this handout seriously. I thought that the experience of seeing how easy an apparently impossible problem really was would make them pay attention.
Or, ya know, emacs, which is nearly a zillion times more customizable and Free both as in beer and freedom.
Thanks...adding other social network buttons would negatively affect the ctr of my facebook like this button and my users love facebook more than twitter like 93% of them! I listen to the data.

Also I only use Google text ads and the 1200 wasn't likes to go directly to the site it was pointing to another link for testing its virality.
How long is the list of games that zsnes doesn't have 100% accuracy? It had reasonable performance in the Pentium 3 era. We're talking about emulating a 4MHz processor.
Linux is a way of life, like healthy eating or meditation, and it is not for everyone.

When a new version of something open-source unfolds it is not because Christmas is around the corner or some other marketing bullshit; someone has poured their love into their work to make it a little bit faster, safer and shinier, and they want to share it with the world in the name of progress

We are playing the long game, like physics and maths before us, open-source will still be here in 1,000 years long after the name of Microsoft has faded.

Join us, or not, as you will
Indeed he would
Why not accept donations with the explicit disclaimer that under no circumstances will Rich's development efforts be swayed?
You've got it all wrong I run over 15 other websites and using the same data on any of them isn't going to give me admirable results. Just as each human is complex so is each online iniative, sorry their is no magic pil so dig a data hole and keep digging.
More Schools Embrace the iPad as a Learning Tool
But there are also cultures that say that someone who doesn't demand a bribe is selfishly turning down money he could use to support his relatives out of fear of punishment for bribe taking.
I bought a Mac earlier this year and I don't find it suitable for use as my everyday OS for a variety of reasons.
So, as usual, opinions vary.

I've been using one or the other Linux distro every day as my main OS for over 10 years. There's no question that the Linux desktop is polished enough for use by many people as their every day desktop.
Not to pale upon one of my favorite PBS series' hosts (Carl Sagan), and here are two of my favorites. One serious, one brillig.

Act 5 Scene 5: Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow (Spoken by Macbeth)

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Jabberwocky

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Using information theory to improve communication prosthetics
Would this make it politically OK for Netflix to release a Linux streaming client? I read somewhere that the lack of a standard DRM lib was the blocking issue on an Android client.
Redcar looks to be GPL2, which meets both of those freedom standards.
>How long is the list of games that zsnes doesn't have 100% accuracy

Plenty of popular games. http://board.zsnes.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=16

Notably, Yoshi's Island glitches out to the point of unplayable-ness in around half a dozen levels under ZSNES, the first one being 'Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy'. This is the most high profile example.

bsnes is the only emulator that lets you play yoshi's island properly, which happens to be many people's favourite game on the platform.

The problem is down to some games exploiting timing tricks in the graphics subsystem to achieve transparency-like effects and so on. All the emulators apart from bsnes compute the graphics line-by-line, which breaks these tricks. bsnes draws it's output pixel-by-pixel, like a real snes, which is much more computationally intensive.

"The reason is because while a scanline renderer runs at a mere ~15.75khz, a clock-based renderer would run at ~10.75mhz. That may not seem like a lot, but when you are writing an emulator that claims absolutely flawless interprocess communication, that means synchronizing two separate processors over ten million times a second."[1]

All that context-switching makes your processor mad.

The main reason for bsnes is homebrew snes developers' need of a bit-for-bit accurate snes emulator. These people need an emulator that will help them test code they are planning to flash to a cart and run on a real snes. ZSNES and other emulators designed to simply run commercially produced games on their PCs are riddled with hacks and shortcuts, this is what allows them to run fast on low spec machines. However this means that they allow many, many things that a real snes won't, and are useless for development targeted at real hardware.

For more details, see byuu's many rants on the subject, the first of which is here: [1] http://byuu.org/articles/emulation-2/ (Bear in mind it was written ~3 years ago, a lot of the problems he mentions he has since overcome, the aforementioned per-pixel video rendering for example. He discusses this in later essays.)