skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry, but every part of your response betrays a severe lack of understanding of the history.

People understood the solution to Zeno's paradox centuries before we had a rigorous definition of limit. And limiting processes were understood both before, and after, without necessarily referring to limits. (In fact in computer science people prefer the more flexible Big-O/little-o notation for that purpose. Knuth has in fact suggested replacing limits in introductory Calculus with that notation and I'd be quite interested to see how well that would work.)

The idea of infinitesmals were thought up well before limits. In fact the idea of a limit came out of Cauchy's work. Cauchy tried to define an infinitesmal as a function that went to 0. (His idea of an infinitesmal became what we now call a Cauchy sequence.) When limits came they did not explain infinitesmals - they replaced them. It was not until Abraham Robinson came up with non-standard analysis in the 1950s that anyone came up with a sound explanation of infinitesmals and properly explained the connection with limits.

And finally I was trying to explain what things are like from the perspective of the student.)
More info:

"Our site is currently unreachable. Working on fixing it asap. Thank you for your patience. Monitoring continues regardless, though." [1]

"Hardware failure at our main datacenter so our site is unreachable. We're working on it. Monitoring continues, so no data will be lost." [2]

"If your site was down anytime the last few hours, you will get delayed alerts now. Some timestamps may be incorrect though. :( Very sorry." [3]

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/pingdom/status/83169267490623489

[2] https://twitter.com/#!/pingdom/status/83191625874018306

[3] https://twitter.com/#!/pingdom/status/83253096096088064
I wish someone would post an account of a nightmarish experience with a failed startup.
How To Make Your Own Sugru Substitute
Most of this just not true. Read almost any journal of repute, from Nature to Science to JAMA to Algorithmica -- they're all peer reviewed.

And most scientific papers actually don't make outlandish claims. If anything they make rather mundane claims. For example, a new algorithm for Q-SAT that reduces the complexity in the presence of a K-Oracle from O(3.5^mn) to O(pi^m(3.5/pi)n).
> Where is it that you live that is so resource constrained, in both bandwidth and electricity?

My home, in the UK.

We actually have a pretty good deal on bandwidth compared to most people here, but wasting several gigs just to download patches every few days is absurd.

The electricity isn't really the issue (though bills for that have risen far above inflation in recent months) but the heat generated by running that machine and all its accompanying peripherals full time is relevant at this time of year.

Besides, why kill the planet pointlessly? A staggering amount of precious resources are wasted because people leave equipment in power-draining stand-by modes all the time these days.

> Also it's fair to say that whatever you've saved in electricity has now been decidedly outweighed by the two hours of developer-time you spent updating it.

Presumably I would have had to spend at least the same amount of time spread out over those two weeks if I'd applied each patch as it became available, probably more because much of the software uses rolled up patch releases so I probably avoided a few intermediate steps.

I think my general point, that the amount and size of downloaded patches in modern software has become absurd, stands.
Avi Bar-Zeev says that the solution to WebGL security will be to ask the user to explicitly enable it per site (so it runs only on trusted sites), to sign shaders in the same way drivers and plugins are signed now, and maybe to maintain a whitelist of sites allowed to use shaders (or any WebGL at all). OK, that will work, but I don't feel that there is much chance of that happening. I still remember when JavaScript was a new-fangled untested technology, and IT departments would disable it by default on untrusted sites. Some people still surf only with scripts disabled. But really, there was immense pressure to give web apps a lot of the features of native apps, and everyone pressed ahead despite the security concerns, which ended up being very serious and costly. I suspect that the same thing will happen with WebGL - it will end up being on by default. The Khronos white paper on WebGL security is a very short and superficial dismissal of extremely complex issues, and Avi Bar-Zeev is being unrealistic about browser vendors being able to work around it all.
Simple, you just don't have any deductions. Or narrow it down to a handful of deductions. The loopholes are not sending in false information to the IRS about how much you made. The loopholes are all the deductions that some know to take and others don't.

For example, I know I make the same amount as another guy at work. We both rent (no mortgage deduction), neither of us have student loans, neither of us are married, and neither of us have kids. We both spend about the same on living expenses, loans, etc. We both file the same way and work for the same employer in the same job. But he used TurboTax and I hired a professional tax accountant. I got almost $2,000 more back on my refund last year than he got.

Roughly the only difference between us was who prepared our taxes. Obviously my tax accountant leveraged more deductions for me than TurboTax did for him.

If there were no deductions, it would be quite simple. Take a certain percent of your income and deduct it to the government and that's it. The deductions cause all the problems.

Now what are the other options?

The flat tax/high sales tax sounds good in theory, but it sucks in practice. We need roughly 20% of GDP for taxes. So 20%+ sales tax on everything? If I'm buying a yacht, or a vacation house, or an airplane why would I buy it in America? Simply put, nobody would. But if you have to buy dinner, buy clothes, put gas in your car, you have to buy that locally. So that kind of tax kills people on the necessity and doesn't impact people on the luxuries. Of course the answer is to give a 'necessities' refund, which would force the actual rate to be raised even higher. Do you think anyone is buying a luxury item in the US when the sales tax is 35%?

You can strike out the idea of a luxury tax, we've tried it and it failed spectaculary.

High property taxes would put a permanent end to any kind of housing market recovery.

Corporate taxes are even less workable than income taxes.

And it has been shown that spending is far more flexible than income. I.e. we often hear the argument that people move to low tax states (which mostly they don't, but let's say conservatives are right and they do), which is easier, taking your vacation to a non-US destination or getting your company to move out of the country? Income is fundamentally less flexible than spending.

Any of the other plans come out really regressive. The best way to capture tax revenue fairly is through income tax, if you eliminate the loopholes it should capture nearly everyone equally.
QR Bookmarklet
Naggum was one of the net's all-time greatest cranks. He almost singlehandedly turned comp.lang.lisp into a minefield.
If hosted, but still want to own your content, don't go with Tumblr?
make me the worst HN user and go blog about it :)
So, why didn't you write a parser to convert your C code to Go?
It seems civilian causalities will always exist.
Thanks, one question though... I've just been making some more bookmarks... is your backup server database now your master? So when you get your main databases back (or a replacement), will my bookmarks remain when you switch back?
Good talk, but lots of big generalities. You have to pick and choose what to really take to heart, IMO. Good counterpoint that you may have already seen: http://www.humbledmba.com/dont-give-bullshit-advice
I've thought before about Knuth's proposal (see http://micromath.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/donald-knuth-calcu... for his description) that Calculus be introduced using Big-O, little-o notation. I once drew up a curriculum based on it, and it seems to avoid the issue that you describe.

In particular the idea of approximation seems inherently useful. All approximations take the form something = approximation + error, so the idea of having a useful language for the error seems useful. Once you have that language, the tangent line is just a particularly useful example. Only after working with tangent lines for a while would you get to the definition of the derivative.

The nicest thing about the approach is that all of the derivative rules are easy to remember for tangent lines. Product rule? Multiply the tangent line approximations, throw away the high order term. The chain rule? Plug one function into the other. And so on.

The only thing that I found did not flow naturally was L'Hopital's Rule. However that rule is a source of confusion for students who don't understand the importance of the precondition that the limits be of the form 0/0 or infinity/infinity. And furthermore all standard cases where it is useful are obvious upon inspection for anyone who knows Big-O/little-o notation. (Don't believe me? Crack open a textbook and look at the problems that you're supposed to use the rule for. They are all obvious.)
Awesome project, I've been thinking a lot about how to open up research and get more researchers to collaborate. I wanted to drop you a note to talk some more, but not sure how as HN doesn't have a PM system (right?).

Take a look at this project which is similar to yours (not mine btw): http://annotatr.appspot.com/
The sad truth of your comment is that in many cases the scientific community by its very nature, is forced to ratify and review everything so that it can withstand the critical eye.

Many discoveries in the past come from failed experiments. The failing to achive a desired result can have as much merit for future discovery as a successful enterprise.

The scientific community balks at learning from others mistakes and has a tendancy to ostracise those that failed.

I personally enjoy the insights into the mindsets and thoughs behind an avenue of research, successful or failed. I find it helps give me a glimps at what others feel is possible.

O.
I love how Pinboard deals with this issue: site remains online (albeit with limited abilities), all data is secured and backed up, users are encouraged to use the export tool if they feel the need and there are status updates on Twitter.

Keep it up Pinboard!
The brave new world of overzealous law enforcement data warehouse searches just continues to wreak havoc on "cloud" services and content. It's akin to digging up the neighborhood to search somebody's house. What can the Feds/providers do differently to prevent this from happening so often?
That is a surprising aspect of San Francisco. Went there for the first time in October and wandered into basically a ghetto downtown. I'm not sure if US cities are the best comparison. That said, there are a lot of other good cities with strong business communities in the world that are quite safe. It seems a bit disingenuous to suggest the trade-off is between authoritarian government and safety.
That only works when the tiered plans are cheaper than the unlimited plans. In Verizon's case, at least, they are not. If I wasn't being grandfathered in, I'd be going from Unlimited to 2GB and paying exactly the same price.

I'd be perfectly fine with tiered if the prices were reasonable and, as you suggest, cheaper if you use less data. That doesn't seem to be the case in reality.
Qt’s future for Nokia: Bringing apps to the next billion
The point is to learn the language...I don't see writing an automatic converter in a non-go language a good way to learn go.
The thrust of what you are saying is true, but it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be.

Last summer my girlfriend was between jobs. She had a non-life threatening but potentially dangerous condition. She went to the hospital and was treated. During the period of time between jobs she had purchased a temporary health insurance policy. That policy declined to pay for the treatment. The hospital presented us with a couple of options, renegotiate the bill, accept some charity, etc. We chose to fight the insurance company and ultimately had them pay it (because it was a valid claim). But one of our options always hovering around was bankruptcy. Do you want to do that? Of course not. We would have rather cleaned out our savings and maxed out the credit cards before doing that, but it was an option.

So there is an obvious path here, get a temporary policy and use the card to get into the hospital. You will probably get denied by the insurance company for a pre-existing condition, but you can then declare bankruptcy.

Now, that is a pretty terrible way to go about it and speaks of how screwed our system is. But I would say bankruptcy is preferable to prison. And since there is that path available, I would think that this guy is mostly an activist. I think he is making a good point (about how prisoners have a right to healthcare, but not the rest of us), but the problem is that it is too easy to punch a hole in his story. Critics will focus on him instead of the underlying message.
Banking site stores passwords in plaintext. Coworkers think it's no big deal.
At my company, we develop and maintain a home banking website, that deals with millions of dollars, and the passwords are stored in plain-text. I can't convince management it's a bomb waiting to explode, because the "most senior" programmer doesn't think it's a problem, since "nobody will have access to the database." What should I do?

And it gets better, because everyone on the development team has access to the production database. If anyone hacks any computer of the devs, they can obtain the database and steal millions.

The entire security of hundreds of clients is based on the fact that our network can't be hacked, that an evil employee does not exist, and that the website is invulnerable.
The No-Reply Guy (aka, Here’s My Card, Don’t Contact Me)
In some ways, Chrome has reset the bar for updates. Google has shown that you can have silent background updates containing meaningful features that don't (in general) break add-on compatibility.

People may have felt deterred by this in the past, but I would argue that it has worked impressively well for Chrome so far, and makes older mechanisms seem clumsy and antiquated.
The "shadow markets" in this article reminded me of the "shadow systems" we often run into in the business intelligence space. Except instead of rouge, hidden, and prone to error	spreadsheets it's rouge markets. Because the logic is effecively hidden dishonest individuals can use their shadow spreadsheets to massage their numbers into an up and to the right shape. The same potential for abuse and accident exists in shadow markets but with the global economy on the line. Terrifying thought!
Quantum money
MoreMagic: How mobile commerce and banking can lift entire economies
Thanks! That looks good
I'm saying that the meaning of the text - be it prose, poetry or code - is all that is important. Text editors are tools, like paintbrushes and screwdrivers. They only important or valuable to the extent that they enable us to create stuff of actual value.

You can go down the route of text editing as art, like that Vi Golf concept that was floating around. And a well-made tool is indeed valuable and beautiful to behold. Nevertheless, I maintain that a text editor is strictly as important as the text it is used to create.
They closed my bug as "fixed" but didn't give any details. I'll have a look at it again when the next beta / final build of silverlight 5 comes out. In the WebGL WG we are very confident that this can't be fixed without working with GPU vendors on new robustness features in the drivers.
How many lines would the equivalent python program take?
Tesla Roadster reaches the end of the line
Zero-based indices also behave nicely with the modulus operation. That is, if I have an N-sized array that is indexed from 0 to N-1, then I can take any arbitrary positive integer i and get a valid index through the operation i % N.

Of course, if it was indexed from 1 to N, then (i % N) + 1 would do the trick, but that's more cumbersome and uglier for what can be a frequent operation.
In a delicious piece of irony[1], the paper that this post refers to appears to be behind a paywall, illustrating one of the causes of the problem. (Edit: since the post is erroring out, the link to the abstract is: http://pus.sagepub.com/content/19/1/115)

My field (computer science) and a few others at least don't have the problem of paywalls. Authors always make their works available; a few publishers have relaxed their copyright policies and others have an implicit promise not to sue. It's not ideal, but it's not too bad.

Public communication, however, remains quite bad. It is very unfortunate that in the current system, researchers have no incentive to communicate with the public or do anything except rack up publications and citations.

I write a blog about my research (http://33bits.org) and I've been pleasantly surprised by the level of public interest. In my ideal world, research grants would come with some strings attached to get scientists to fulfill some of their social responsibility.

In related news, if you're in the Bay Area there's an Open Science event next week with Michael Nielsen that I'm really excited about. http://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2011/06/15/%E2%80%9Cwhy-the-n...

[1] Is it irony? The word is so overused I can't even tell anymore.
I vehemently agree with Dijkstra on this matter: indices should start at 0 and run up to N (but not including N itself).

Any language which does not facilitate this, should be cast from The Bridge of Death into the Gorge of Eternal Peril.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV0tCphFMr8
The researchers created a scanner that is supposed to check for these vulnerabilities:

https://code.google.com/p/amid/

Its readme contains some links that appear worth reading, if you're deploying AMIs securely.

The researchers' own page on this story:

http://trust.cased.de/AMID
Domainer gives up JeffBezos.com, gets Amazon gift certificate
Jeff Bezos owns JeffBezos.com. And he has Bob Olea to thank for that. Olea is one of those domainers who buys and sells internet domain names. Olea recently bought the domain name JeffBezos.com at an aftermarket domain auction. But he has decided to give it to the Amazon.com CEO.
If you were to start a blog where you provide links to your papers (when allowable) along with synopses for those of us with only an engineering-level math background, you might be pleasantly surprised at how much interest your work attracts--particularly on places like HN. Please let us know if you decide to do so, and I'll be sure to bookmark you.
I think once you understand the proof of 5 color theorem and believe the fact that the proof of 4 color theorem is more or less the same, but more hardcore, then it is as much insight as you can get.

Looking for insight is what many people do in mathematics, but nonetheless believing that every true fact is true for a reason is naive, just as naive as believing that every problem has to have a solution. So far, most of the time we succeed in explaining why true things are true, but it may be the case that some facts are true merely by combinatorics, and not for human-imaginable reason.

Sure, I would like to believe that there is a crucial observation we haven't made yet that makes 4 color theorem easy, just as it is for 6 color theorem. Nevertheless, I accept the fact that there may be no such thing and 4 color theorem holds just because the constraints force it to be.
Staples resold laptops with customer data, Canadian Privacy audit finds
Somebody made a TrueType font which resembles Edsger's handwriting, see an example at http://fonts.goldenweb.it/pan_file/l/en/font2/Dijkstra.ttf/d...

Direct download of TrueType font at http://fonts.goldenweb.it/download2.php?d2=Freeware_fonts...
This is why I love Pinboard. They seem like they always do it right by the customer.

Not to mention it's dead-simple to use.
I just wish they had other options, other than the LG Optimus phone. I'd even pay full price for it (given the savings). Maybe in 2 years when my contract with AT&T is up...
It's a master-master setup with only one accepting writes at any time. So it should catch up first, and then I'll be able to switch back over to the original DB without data loss.
There's been speculation about Qt's future on HN. Now there's an official statement from Nokia, but it's typically opaque. Here is the ElopNokia decoder ring that may be helpful in understanding their announcements:

"Future disruption" == "We want to keep developing MeeGo as a plan B, but don't tell Microsoft."

"The next billion users" == "You know, we sell a lot of featurephones. These have become smarter mostly by accident, while everybody was occupied with our real smartphones... Now we've noticed that these simpler phones aren't really so bad compared to the mess we made with Symbian. So we'll try to make these things even smarter while still keeping the prices suitable for Africa. Qt somehow plays into all that, but we haven't really figured that out yet."
LulzSec punishes wanted "snitches" with leaking their info to the FBI
>What can the Feds/providers do differently to prevent this from happening so often?

The feds could do plenty, but won't. The legal system is slow to react, and the feds likely fear that just taking virtual disks would lead to evidentiary issues at trial.

Hosting providers might be able to provision in a way that the servers hosting evil.site could be taken by the feds but backups existed of the other sites, but it would be an extremely hard -- if not impossible -- task.

In the end, cloud computing doesn't change the rules of safely deploying your site to the world -- if you care about uptime & your data, your site must be running on at least two different hosts.
> What can the Feds/providers do differently to prevent this from happening so often?

In the United States we might start considering computer equipment as private spaces, not unlike our residents and vehicles. With so much of our lives increasingly digital in nature, it's not that screwy of an idea that law enforcement should require a search warrant for computer equipment and storage media.
Slovakia has a 19% flat tax.
Show HN: easy way to submit a Weekend Hacker project
Are Web Apps An Insult To Users?
Probably won't be trying it, I've been using FF4, and then Nightly, but the memory leakage is so hideous on FF since 3.x that i finally gave up -- after 6 hours use, FF4 and nightly would use 1GB ram, even after closing all but one simple tab. Forced browser restarts.

Chrome is where I've ended up. If FF ever get the memory leaks straightened out, I may switch back.
News Aggregators Score A Big Win
Google search with logos
It supports Linux poorly, and supports nothing else at all.

(WebDAV isn't "support," when you look at the Dropbox/SpiderOak feature set.)
It seems ridiculous that this is affecting so many customers - pinboard, Curbed, one Instapaper eval/test server, bunch of individuals - when there was one FBI warrant.

Apparently the FBI took three racks. If those are whole racks, it seems excessive. https://twitter.com/#!/Pinboard/status/83256217174147072

But another issue is that Digital One told Pinboard this was due to bad router firmware -- how do you confuse a software issue and an FBI raid? https://twitter.com/#!/Pinboard/status/83257679023325186
One thing that does work is our export page, and if you're feeling nervous about your data I encourage you to use it. We have fresh backups (from one day ago) safely stored on S3, but in these matters you can't be too careful.

+1 Maciej. I am glad I paid for an account.