skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a Math and CS student and still wonder how was it even possible that I did not start to hate math in high school. Things done there are dull and boring, exercises are repetitive and do not teach anything substantial other than applying another algorithm shown by a teacher. I found out that almost everyone did not really understand not only the problems that were told to solve, but also the solutions they gave -- and it was hard to blame them, for it was mainly teacher's and education system's fault not to give them thorough understanding of what is math really about.

My idea? Dump all that algorithmic crap and teach real problem solving. Do not punish for bad performance, because it is really hard to actually come up with a solution to a problem, and this skill is not something that can be learned by doing the same thing over and over again. Problem solving also require less concepts to be introduced and internalized, so more time can be spent on actual thinking and discussing, and less on preparations.

This kind of math course may seem not to prepare to good to "university level" math, but in fact it is quite opposite -- universities have to start almost from scratch anyway, and it is easier to teach new concepts a person who has a good understanding what math really is, than a person who only know tens of algorithms, used in high school to grind all kind of "problems" given there.
Here is an interesting article by the man who created the term "meritocracy" as part of satirical work:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

An interesting quote, which I'm sure I've heard a few times in relation to the recent banking crisis:

"If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get"

[Edit: As far as I can this concern really applies to organizations like those in the UK public sector where huge salaries are often justified based on rather dubious "merit" - not because of any measure of the value delivered or risks taken]
Domain names are pretty much a set-and-forget thing.

You can get into a cheap registrar and pay for 10 years in advance.

I'm paying $7.75 elsewhere and perfectly satisfied.

Oh and by the way, NameCheap is essentially an enom reseller,

remember the registerfly/enom fiasco a few years ago?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RegisterFly
Paravirtualization With Xen 4.0 On Debian Squeeze (AMD64)
Can you please explain in wihich respect ACPI and EFI is worse than BIOS ?
This article is ridiculous and pointless JavaScript hate article.

JavaScript is not different from HTML and CSS, all of these are generated by a sometimes proprietary service and executed in the browser.

This article is completely stupid because it not only misses the point of JavaScript, it even contradicts itself:

- if the UI is plain HTML/CSS and is generated server side and then fed to your browser, you will never even have a clue how it works

- if the UI is done with JavaScript on the client you can always de-obfuscate it

> Further, we've recently seen companies such as Research In Motion (makers of the Blackberry) advising customers to entirely disable JavaScript in the WebKit browser on its devices because of a security problem that was discovered.

It seems the FSF wants to build a reputation by taking things out of context and leaving out important bits. The security was probably found in the browser and not in JavaScript, this is the same as advising someone to unplug the computer because of a computer virus.

I am really disappointed by this short sighted article, the FSF should be better than this.
Why are you writing about "soft real time" when you don't seem to have done any work in RTOS/embedded?

Your listed project is transloadit, which is a file uploader that does some sort of magic I don't care about. (I'm provincial.)

You also appear to be available as a node.js consultant. That's a first for me. I figured the only "node.js consultants" were ryah and anybody you could catch awake on Freenode.

A burgeoning ecosystem is good. It's not good when virtually every proponent of Node.js I run into makes wild claims.

Checked your submissions, I see in this order from chronological proceeding towards the final entropic state of the universe:

1. jQuery >? *

2. Git

3. Node.js

4. Node.js

5. Node.js

6. Transloadit file jobber thingie (written in JS, on Node.js)

7. Javascript (This is what Node.js is written in, FYI)

8. TDD @ Transloadit (written in JS, on Node.js, Church of the GoF)

9. Realtime encoding - over 150x faster

As easily as I could outright crucify you for butchering the word "realtime" here, I'll simply spare you the trouble and do a text-replace that'll fix your solipsism simulator article (blog)

s/realtime/buffered/g

'Fraid that won't work for your video though. You'll have to fix that yourself. Also, please provide full transcripts (linked, in-line, doesn't matter) in future. Not all of us are hearing.

And to cap it:

http://debuggable.com/posts/hacking-a-commercial-airport-wla...

Illustrious real-time hacking, that.

This is why we programmers don't deserve to be called engineers, not yet.

Code is art, wondrously so, but we're lacking a rigor and consistency of competence that could be there.
Vi Harts youtube is pretty entertaining, Here's a video that shows pretty well what her videos are like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhlv5Aeuo_k

The whole topic vaguely reminds me of Khan Academy, both seem to recognize that the way math is taught in schools at the moment is fundamentally broken, and doesn't engage students the way it should.
Rock Paper Scissors Takes to the Cloud
For OO you can use domain driven design. Cucumber is used for behavior driven development.

It's just up to you to use the right tool for the job.

To succeed in a project is to involve the client. So I would concentrate on that over enforcing a tool he's not comfortable with. It's great if he thinks about the story and the done criteria's. The tool you used to register/followup doesn't really matter.
You have a very broad definition of "free". If Google really tried to use the leverage it has with Android to get Verizon to drop Bing as the default search engine, I can definitely see a problem there. Their intentions might be good (for the consumer, at least), but their methods just got pretty strong handed. Oh, and Honeycomb won't be open sourced any time soon, so there's that, too.
Spotlight On Steroids
Funny, Google just launched Google Guru.

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-talk-guru-2011-3
If taught properly, and with the proper illustrative exercises, calculus is recreational. Period.
Apologies for going meta, but it's refreshing to see that I'm not the only one who uses capital 1's from time to time.
Free markets don't always decide for the best product, and there's plenty of history to prove that.
Great, thanks!

For anyone else, he's a picture of Matabei:

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/image.php?...

And a more detailed one from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Matabei_crater.png
Verisign charges registrars $7.34 for .com and $4.65 for .net

(if that's what you mean)

(why the hell ICANN gave Verisign the contract again is the most dumbfounding politics I've seen)

So Namecheap loses $2 on the transfer and then hopes to make it up on the renewal.
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Samsung blames security software false positive for StarLogger issue.
Isn't this just a cheap shot? The video won't play on my computer, but I'm fine with putting down animals that are attacking humans or human civilization.[1]

Sure, sending Westerners over to do it is nonsensical, but presumably profitable. GoDaddy has lots of real issues (e.g. Google "godaddy fyodor"), but I don't think this private "sport" from their CEO is very relevant.

[1] You're allowed to disagree, but please keep a sense of perspective. Eating a couple hundred domesticated animals a year and telling a vegetarian not to kill one genuinely dangerous specimen is just silly.
You'd think anyone with merit would see the flaw in the logic: p implies q, q, therefore p. Maybe the don't have as much as they think.
Clicking around the site I see no mention of physical location, I'm based in Perth, and as far as I've seen there isn't much of a community here. Anyone know if any of these mentors (Or anyone interested in startup culture) call Perth/Western Aus their home?
>If anything, it may open our eyes, that Google may be a corporation like all others and will aggressively use its leverage to hurt competitors and partners.

I hate the fact that some people don't get this, but anything that makes more people aware is a good thing.
SoundTracking iPhone app adds new social layer to Apple iTunes Store
IPhone Application Development Boosts Business
If they combine it with the favorite star in Chrome then users have an incentive to upmark the material they like.
Checked everywhere on the website and no TOS anywhere, the only mention regarding Intelectual property is:

"2009 © All right reserved" ;-)

Anyway, i'll consult a lawyer and pay 200$ maybe before launching any ad campaign.

You've been all so helpfull.

Thanks.
Normally you would be right but I think since we're talking about kernel code golf here, it's only fair to consider the bootloader (if there's any) as part of the kernel.
Assuming that this vaccine "works", can it be of any use to people that already contracted AIDS ?
iOS and all the apps are build for a specific _physical_ size. A larger screen would mean apps would need to scale (or run in an awkward smaller size) which would look terrible and be awkward to use (very large buttons). The alternative would be to ask developers to make another, slightly larger version of their apps. Not going to happen ;)
> Developers with a curiosity about their craft grow into better developers. This takes time away from the immediate work of pounding out code (point 1), but makes one more effective over the long run.

This is something I wholeheartedly agree with. On the surface it seems to be an opposite of a `The Duct Tape Programmer' (whow gets the job done quickly when it matters most) -- but probably that's matter of self-discipline and having the goals set straight.

Now the question is, how do I pick such programmers in an interview? The ones that are curious about our craft, yet self-disciplined?
How To Develop Ideas That Will Disrupt Your Industry
I don't think you can say that these 50M guys simply won't get married.

Have you thought about what would happen if china lowered the marriage age for women? 50 million+ new women in the marriage market. Problem delayed.

There's already age disparity in chinese marriages. The idea that millions of young men simply won't get married is absurd. They'll just wait longer, or expand the group of women they're willing to marry.

And I assume you're joking about chinese men marrying african women.
FWIW, while less known in the West, Taobao.com is one of the world's most highest-trafficked websites. It's the eBay equivalent in China and has many more use cases, such as buying plane tickets or new clothes.
Virgin Galactic: Inside the spaceship
Last time I looked into 'git notes' it wouldn't preserve the notes attached to a commit when you amend / rebase / cherry-pick the commit. It seems that git now supports this! From the git-notes manpage:

notes.rewrite.<command>
When rewriting commits with <command> (currently amend or rebase),
if this variable is false, git will not copy notes from the original
to the rewritten commit. Defaults to true.
To wrap all your responses up: in non-trivial production systems, having separate /var is a good, practical idea without serious downsides -- and my original critique was unfounded for anything but simplest use cases.

Thanks for all your responses :-)
The only reason Calculus seems so dry is that the ones teaching it are not very competent and don't understand the subject quite well.

During my school I'd ask teachers all about limits and why we need it and their attitude was - Don't get too involved - here are the formulas, go learn them and solve the exercises.

I later discovered that there were some amazing applications of limits (calculus) but wasn't taught the way they were meant to. This is the reason why I never found Calculus to be interesting.
No, it seems to be Sydney only so far, which is a little disappointing (I'm in Melbourne). However, they do seem to be keen to expand their reach: http://twitter.com/#!/pushstartau/status/53295477621399553
Management advice: Dealing with difficult people
This gets said a lot, by many people, but: by checking their open-source / publically available work.

If someone's managed to complete a significant task, and the code looks readable and reasonable, they're probably fair decent programmers. Even better if they've got code Out There in multiple languages; that shows a broad base of both knowledge and experience, in my opinion.
Lockhart's Lament: www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory....

Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music ... are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.
Great point ! The "recreational" part can be applied to any subject imho.
That _can_ happen if the newer OS doesn't have the correct drivers available. I'm a "wiper" but I have spent many an hour trying to get simple functionality working again on a fresh install.
The real question to ask is this: By reading this article, how much time have I wasted?

Sure, it took a few seconds to jump through my RSS reader, yep, it took a bit of time to read it because it's an interesting article, and obviously, I am now here, writing this comment and thinking whether I should inflict the link on my twitter followers, perhaps even on facebook.

And then the coup de grâce at the end of the article itself

> There are other factors relating to flow which can be optimized. For example one can block off chunks of time

Well oops?

In general, the internet sucks for productivity, but at the same time it's really really hard to code without it.
I think they see the logic as:

p iff q. q. therefore p.

which is a valid inference.
Now Networkworld and Mr. Hassan should answer why they made such a baseless allegations?

Someone working in Security firm (NetSec Consulting) should have idea of they are saying.
The incentives should be around changes in performance, +ve or -ve, especially if it was as a result of the kid's own actions.
Every school should replace calculus with spreadsheets and a basic programming course. Or maybe with statistics. Each is more practical than calculus.

(I don't mean to put down calculus; it's spiritually rewarding and, when paired with a few other subjects, yields crazy awesome higher math.)
I know people here (the top 0.1% of the high school class) love to bash math education in particular. I'd like to ask how you would apply your views on teaching a topic such as History for instance.

Sure, rather than learning the dates of middle-age battles, it would be more fun to interpret a play, in costume, or rebuild a battlefield with legos.

But can you spend your entire school year this way, or could this "recreational" teaching need to be combined with more traditional teaching?
I have started automating a lot of the smaller, repetetive tasks. It doesn't save a huge amount of time, just removes small annoyances and friction. One example is that I'm new to OSX, so I was playing with Automator and have used it to create a command which brings up my entire development environment. This saves only 1.5 to 2 minutes each time, but it removes that friction when I get home from work I can just put my laptop on the sofa and have the dev environment load while I make a drink.

At work we have to create performance reports monthly for a particular client. The procedure has always been to do it manually, which takes around 4 to 5 hours. Writing the code to automate this in C# took less than 4 hours and now the reports take 2 to 3 minutes each month. Time well spent, money definitely saved.
Isn't that kind of how forum software like vBulletin or phpBB works? Every comments bumps it back up and the most active threads of the moment tend to hover at the top.
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That's half the answer, I'm afraid. Anybody with a bunch of time on their hands can churn out quality code. The other half -- self discipline to ``duct-tape your way through'' when in crunch mode -- is not covered by reading sources.

Now that I think of it, another angle comes to my mind: once you're done with the crunch mode, you need to get back to the duct-taped mess and mop it up. If working in an organization, it's mostly communication problem -- you need to explain to your boss why you absolutely must rewrite what works now. Not only taking time, but also risking introducing new bugs.
I think A5 (and the Cortex-A9 it implements) implies dual core. Saying they'll surpass the competition with the A5 is debatable, I'm assuming based on them having a better GPU (and NEON) than Tegra2 phones, but HTC/Qualcomm are coming even later to the dual-core party with a rumoured 1.2GHz and an Adreno 220 GPU.

Also, Apple added HDMI out to the current iPhone 4 via a dongle they announced as part of the iPad 2 launch.
Use primary sources.

Have individuals or teams look at an original primary source, interpret it, then discuss with the class, who all interpret something from a related source. Students put their heads together, discuss/debate and post some interesting original research to the Net.
Make sure your software knows what platform it’s for.
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If you aren't familiar with Vi Hart, let me suggest some of the more awesome videos that seriously tickled my geeky innards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK5Z709J2eo (infinite series through doodling)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heKK95DAKms (graph theory awesomeness, through doodling)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4MSN6IImpI (some lovely properties of binary trees ... through doodling)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx5D09s5X6U (snakes)

Especially that last one, it poses a question as to whether you can use a grammar to show that a snake lives (doesn't bite itself). Unfortunately she doesn't provide a solution to the problem, but me and a few mates went ahead and proved that it is impossible to prove whether the problem is solvable without simulating the snake.
My favourite: fs_usage
yes. I realised and hurried the submission here. I dare say, Google Guru cannot yet do some of the things that WebtoIM can
That's pretty standard for Servlet containers.
"Ability to type quickly and accurately maximizes the effectiveness of time spent in the flow of programming. Hunting and pecking means you only capture a fraction of what could have been done."

I submit that typing speed matters, but only as a component of what I'll be unoriginal and call actions per minute (significant APM, to be precise). More important components of SAPM would be pushing blobs of text around (editor knowledge) and manipulating/filtering blobs of text efficiently (Unix toolchain).

A 60wpm developer who uses rectangle commands and pipes a portion of buffer to shell to transform it may have higher SAPM than a 150wpm developer ignorant of the various shortcuts available.

To further flog the RTS analogy: typing speed and keyboard shortcuts that operate on one line are micro. Regex replace, sed/awk-fu, multiple buffer usage, etc are macro. To be an efficient dev both are necessary but not sufficient -- all the micro and macro in the world can't save you from brain-dead decisions.
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And the other question is: how do you sustain and nourish this curiosity and gaining of knowledge in regular project work cycles in typical IT departments under already more-than-pressing deadlines?

Often there are very real issues, however sad and true, why there are so many hacks and "duct type programming" and more often than not, programmers and immediate superiors do not have the luxury of being able to deal with them and instead have to "suck it up".

Once you are in "crunch mode" in a death march project curiosity, elegance and sanity are the first casualties right after all of your free time.

And apart from that, we as humans are not exactly outstandingly great at betting on the "later benefit" instead of immediate gratification.
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Have you seen the Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm, Victorian Pharmacy or WW2 British House shows?

That's how history should be taught.
When people start thinking about math education - as I have at considerable length - they always come up with the idea that since "real math" is about problem solving (which it is) and not about rote algorithms and manipulations (which it isn't) then what we should do is come up with problems to solve, not formulas to manipulate. We should encourage creative thinking, novel solutions, and ways of approaching problems.

This is, actually, all true. Students should indulge in problem solving, analysis, investigation, early proof, ideas of proof, argument, explanation, and all the things that math is really about, and which make math useful.

After all, who except for science and engineering students ever differentiate a polynomial? Knowning qualitatively and intuitively what rate-of-change really means is useful. Differentiating x.sin(x) isn't.

But here's the problem.

To within 20% or so life expectency in the UK is about 70, and there are about 70 million people, so roughly at every age point (up to about 50) there are about a million people.

How do you assess and grade the mathematical standard (whatever that means) of about a million children?

How do you persuade a government full of lawyers and classics graduates that what you're doing is better?

How do you assess the teaching, and the school, if not by the grades they and their students achieve.

It's all about assessment.

So that's the first stumbling block.

The second is the question of getting teachers who are up to the task of teaching in an open and interactive manner, rather than trying to teach rote algorithms and manipulations.

But you don't need to worry about that - schools will never teach proper mathematics. They'll continue to teach arithmetic and manipluation.
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Does anyone think "You +1'd this publicly" sounds quite ominous ?!
The internet itself is neutral, only gives high leverage to your actions. Feeling like procrastinating? It'll get multiplied 100-fold. Searching for something useful? It'll get multiplied as well.