skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What it really all boils down to from my point of view is that the question is "Can we really teach mathematics (qua mathematics, as opposed to raw computation) without at some point creating a firm intellectual foundation?"... and there are some people arguing yes, which just boggles the mind.

Yes, you may never in life have to subtract 1/4 from 3/4, but even so, in the grand scheme of mathematics manipulating fractions is the easy part, and still useful if only as a really good place to practice and pick up useful manipulations on relatively concrete items, before you move on to more abstract versions of the same operations, which are used everywhere in mathematics.

(I'd also point out I phrased it as "at some point", not "at the beginning"; in general we can't solve the chicken-and-egg problem and just start Kindergartners on pure set and number theory. But at some point you need a decent foundation laid down or you will never build a strong structure.)
Hewlett-Packard’s Look-East Strategy
AppFog (formerly PHP Fog) uses Cloud Foundry For Multi-Language Support
I can see Parse being acquired by Amazon, Salesforce or the like - maybe even Google for Android.

But, a billion-dollar valuation? Not so sure.
WAYS TO CHOOSE A CAR SHIPPING COMPANY
I've published a Dropbox client for webOS written in Mojo, the previous webOS framework, and have started an Enyo rewrite for the Touchpad. I have an opinion from both a consumer side and the developer side.

1. Somebody should wake up and take RIM's lunch, not Apple's. Build a thin candy bar webOS device with an excellent keyboard and a decently sized screen. Palm went all in on the Pre form factor instead of Pixi, which I maintain was their biggest mistake to date.

2. Deliver on the webOS promise to developers. Mojo wasn't it. Surprisingly, Enyo is! My hat is off to the Enyo guys.

"Just use jQuery" is the new "just use RegEx." I loooove jQuery, but it doesn't really help you in managing a huge application. There is a reason why people use backbone.js, knockout.js, javascriptmvc, and the like, in addition to jQuery.

Enyo lets you assemble your apps from components. I'd be the first to say that my bs meter went live when I heard that. 99% of the time, "its modular" is an empty promise. However, for version one, Enyo is bang on. I'll be honest though, the thought "another fucking framework..." _has_ crossed my mind in frustration.

Yet, I am staring at my webOS mobile app running in Chrome right now -- inspector working and all -- and it's like staring into the future. _This_ is the way mobile apps are meant to be built. _This_ was the promise.

This brings me back to the article re: packaging. I package this enyo app in a second's time and it's up running the same code on the device or emulator, and it all feels native to the OS. As long as the code is the same, I don't care if you package it in a cup cake.

Enyo is actually a very good idea. All they have to do is give it an appropriate, free to use without restriction, license.
Clojure, Abstraction and ZeroMQ
Giving Control Of Consumer Experience Back To Marketers
My experience is similar but in addition I also noticed that I would come across many of the topics a day or two before they were actually posted on /. so it started to get less and less relevant. Now I don't visit at all.
It has been a fun ride!

I started using Linux in 1994 when I was twelve with Slackware Linux. I remember having long fights with my younger brother about how to divide a 40MB hard disk between Linux and MS-DOS (for games).

It is important to remember how Linux and the BSDs made it possible for a whole generation of tech enthusiasts to educate themselves. At that age, I could not afford to buy a compiler or books as means of getting sample source code. Linux and BSD gave us free compilers, source code from the masters' hands to study, and generally a fun system to tinker with. I can not image being where I am now without that ecosystem.

I hope that future generations will be as fortunate to have these possibilities.
"Steve built a company and culture that is unlike any other in the world and we are going to stay true to that—it is in our DNA."

Let's hope.
Sad news ... Rob Malda, dead at 54

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Nerd/Ponies website proprietor Rob Malda was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Hacker News community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
(Stephen Fry on) Steve Jobs quits as Apple chief
Note that this article is mostly about the linux kernel, while your link is about distributions.

Yes, distributions are fractionalized to some degree, but most of them use a pretty standard kernel, and if not, their kernel patches are also open sources, so other distributions can still use them.
People's revealed preference is that they value watching TV more than they do saving money on food by trading the time it requires to do so. In other words, the 'cost ceiling' (I just made up that term :) ) of watching TV is higher than that of the potential savings of cooking at home.

Yes. The point I was trying to make was exactly that - actual monetary cost is not why people choose to eat fast food. I'm not claiming that's a bad thing, either. All I'm saying is that it's irrational to argue that the monetary cost of cooking is higher.

Additionally, I think your argument is flawed in that you don't account for other costs of cooking at home. For one, you need a kitchen, utensils, some basic skills and access to transportation to get goods from the shop to your home. All of which are not readily available to many low-income families.

Real data doesn't support that claim. Based on U.S. Department of Energy data (1), 99.6% of poor households in America have a refrigerator and 97.7% have a stove and oven. The necessary utensils and cookware can be had for the cost of a couple of fast food meals at Walmart. I'm not sure what sort of transportation you are envisioning that can take someone to McDonald's but not the grocery store, but assuming that is a problem every county I've lived in has transportation programs for the poor.

1. http://explore.data.gov/Energy-and-Utilities/Residential-Ene...
People are born with a sense of numbers. Psychologists have confirmed this. Arithmetic is therefore our gateway into mathematics, in the sense that we build on the intuition we're born with and obtain greater intuition.

This is why it wouldn't surprise me if mental (or at least pencil-and-paper) arithmetic is correlated with understanding complicated mathematics. For one thing: to get to the complicated mathematics, you need algebra. A major part of algebra is arithmetic on polynomials. If I didn't understand arithmetic on integers, what hope have I on a more complicated entity?

Okay, forget polynomials. Maybe they're not important. How about logarithms? A good intuition of logarithms is that the log of a number tells you how many digits it has. Paired with a good intuition of multiplication (multiplying a 3-digit by a 2-digit results in at least a 4-digit) makes it feel obvious that log (MN) = log (M) + log (N).

Finally, how on earth can you understand calculus at all without realizing that division by a big number gives you a small number?

Using calculators certainly is one way to be "good at arithmetic" in the sense of always getting the correct answer without too much thought, but it does not enable arithmetic to be used as a building block for gaining intuition about more complicated things. And arithmetic is one of the best building blocks we have precisely because we're born with the beginnings of it.
Talk Dirty to Me, Paul Krugman Talk Dirty to Me, Paul Krugman August 24, 2011
So, Steve Jobs has left his role as Apple’s CEO. Like, for good this time.
To me slashdot was critical in galvanizing the geek community and bringing free software to the mainstream in the late 90's. The comments added incredible value and created a community that I had not come across anywhere else.

I think the high point of that period was the announcement of the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base. Nowadays, itt is hard to imagine the need for all the stories on how to convince your boss to use this software some dude in Finland wrote.

Slashdot also championed everything2.com, kind of a proto-wiki.

The low point was all the trolling in the article about death of W. Richard Stevens, which lead to much of the moderation code that needed to be put in place.

Rob's run at slashdot was pioneering and hugely influential. I look forward to his next project.
Many of my friends doing phds in math are terrible at mental arithmetic. Higher level Mathematics does not have much to do with how fast you can calculate tip in your head.
Title Was Changed. Can't Edit. Getting Moderated?
I just posted an article about writing headlines, and the title of my submission was changed. This defeats the whole purpose. Additionally, I am not able to edit the post or see the discussion thread.

Did I get moderated, is this is a fluke, or a known bug? Any help would be much appreciated.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2925024
This is pretty awesome! Love the design, the docs in particular. We've been building something similar at slidereach - http://slidereach.com but the focus is on import from ppt/keynote/pdf rather than a markup-based presentation. Is this a more preferred route?
The other way to look at it is these people continued working as long as humanly possible. They quit not because they wanted to move on, but because they couldn't continue.
A Discussion On Marketing Dissertation Topics
Marketing dissertation topics play a very important role in understanding growth in business. Marketers develop various strategies and plans to start, promote, grow, and establish their business. You will need to acquire knowledge on several different topics before you successfully gain marketing expertise and take a big step towards a management degree.
Just tried it out -- exactly what I was looking for. In less than a minute I was practicing Spanish with a nice fellow from Mexico. Superb idea.
Why I don't like Steve Jobs
One thing that doesn't appear obvious to me is the level of proficiency required (if any) to get started. I suppose that could be an expectation to be set by the community, but is it feasible for someone to make Verbling their first stop on the way to learning a new language?
"A Junior-to-Mid Level Developer" ... Which is it? Pick one.

Also, "I've been out of work and on the job hunt for a year." This may be true but is not a selling point. Say instead, "I'm available for work, contract or full time, right now. Hire me."
The first human-like astronaut robot awakens and tweets
Yeah, but a good portion of Mac users would never use it if it weren't UNIX under the covers and if it didn't enable them to work they way they like (from command line and vi). Without these people advocating the platform, it would be a lot less successful.
Indeed, I entered college for CS in 1998 and Slashdot was my main source of tech news for many years. (userid #132!) The comments would actually have more info on the story, or even someone related to the story itself posting (e.g. Carmack) I still have /. in my RSS reader but don't really read the comments anymore... however one of the main reasons I come to HN is for the comments, just like /. years ago.
You're spot on. Rob is not good at being Idle.
Grothendieck "died" in the sense meant by Paul Erdos (stopped doing new mathematical research) at a surprisingly young age, while Israel Gelfand kept going into his nineties, not "dying" (ceasing to be a mathematician) until he "left" (died in the usual sense of the term).

http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion62.html

Gelfand was a mathematician who also cared deeply about mathematics pedagogy, and his textbooks are delightful.

http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Israel-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773

http://www.amazon.com/Functions-Graphs-Dover-Books-Mathemati...

http://www.amazon.com/Method-Coordinates-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817...

http://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817639144...

Gelfand poses delightful problems that give students a workout in arithmetic (and CAN'T be done with a calculator) and that build conceptual understanding and interest in higher mathematics.
Ask HN: Is there a tool that will be a controlled hacker?
I am launching a web app and want to make sure that my sign in and sign up forms are at least relatively hacker safe. Is there a program out there that will try most of the basic traditional hacker methods and tell you if it can get through?
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What We Know For Sure on Linux's 20th Anniversary
$76 billion dollars can buy a lot of R&D time.
Do you have a reference for this? I'd like to send it out to a few people, but "I read it on HN" doesn't seem to have the same cache' (yet.. ;) ).
4chan Is Already Trying to Dox the Author of the New 4chan Book "Epic Win"
The full story behind Steve Jobs' 1985 resignation from Apple
There is another site where you can do this. They actually take you teach you the language. http://www.livemocha.com/
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I may be old school, but I believe that technology can only very mildly help with mathematical understanding. Math is build of bricks, one on top of the others. And to understand advanced concepts, you need a deep and solid understanding of the lower layers. I think you only get this understanding by thinking hard, looking at examples and building your own.

Calculators are fine if you are dealing with numbers, but if you work in a quantitative field you often don’t deal with numbers directly: you deal with expressions involving variables. You manipulate the expressions, and at the very end you plug in numbers. A calculator is of no help, and I hope you did not use one when you learned how to deal with numbers. You better be able to manipulate fractions, and know the distributive & associative laws, and know when to complete the square, and the exp(ln(x)) trick, etc… What, you say I could use Mathematica? Of course, and I do -- when I know exactly what to compute. But generally I do not: I have these relations and I try to make sense of them. Moreover, when the final result is nice, concise and elegant, it means that I do not fully understand the problem. Examining the computation will help me understand what is happening: what part of the equations cancel with what other part, and do I understand why? Good luck doing that with Mathematica.

Another example: continuity. Nothing is simpler: you plot a few graphs, and the functions are discontinuous where there are jumps. Who need this epsilon/delta gibberish?

- Functions that are discontinuous everywhere? Ok, I can wrap my head around that. Still no need for epsilon deltas.

- A function that is discontinuous on the rationales and continuous on the irrationals [1]? Good luck understanding that with your graphic calculator.

- And the topological definition of continuity [2]? This is a beautiful definitions, that unifies all the definitions of continuity you have seen for all these functions of THIS space into THAT space. Well, thinking and well chosen examples are going to help you understand the definition, not technology.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomae%27s_function

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_function#Continuous_...
That email seemed a waste of bandwidth to me. I mean, talk about stating the obvious. But I suppose he had to chime in with something.
Are you sure about that? Windows on mobile is less than a rounding error.
If you haven't already, would you mind reading about HN's approach to comments? http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Great question -- here's a shot of the revenue forecast: http://cl.ly/9c99

And here's customer growth: http://cl.ly/9bLI

We just built this so we're still working out how to show some polished examples.
You could try http://www.binpress.com/
> 'helped keep Linux together and defy the trend for forking and fractionalization'

He's talking about the kernel, and to my knowledge there are no significant forks of that.

> 'which one should I pick?'

Ubuntu or Fedora. (Really, it doesn't matter too much).
Forget about "Recent research", look in the history books!

"However, this switching from counting rods to abacus to gain speed in calculation was at a high cost, causing the stagnation and decline of Chinese mathematics....In Ming dynasty, mathematicians were fascinated with perfecting algorithms for abacus, many mathematical works devoted to abacus mathematics appeared in this period, at the expense of new ideas creation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_mathematics

Weee, its repeating!
Having read a lot about Jobs, I take a more cynical view of this anecdote.

I picture it going down like this: Steve doesn't like the yellow color in the icon. Steve asks an Apple employee to get it done. Apple employee says he can't get anyone at Google to pick up the phone or bother with a little detail like this. Steve calls a Google executive to nuke the logjam.

Steve may have a meticulous eye for detail, but I also don't see him wasting time calling high-level executives at other companies (and wasting their time) unless there was no other alternative.
Limited granularity, too. K5 improved on that, while HN's factoring in of time since posting seems to help to my mind as well.

Yet, for all its failings, it was an impressive starting point that led the way for a lot of others, and was massively influential in a way no single site seems to have become since.
What do top CIOs make?
I disagree. While he doesn't seem to mind the credit and attention that he's getting, he didn't "invent" that concept.

Look at what he said in his 60 Minutes interview: “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s negative tendencies in check. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person; they are done by a team of people.” He has always given credit to his team. I think it's the media that invented that myth.
I don't get it either. At first I thought this, and the other 'Steve Jobs' stories in my reader were some kind of concerted joke.
MIT/Princeton Researchers Develop Mobile System To Help Boost Fuel Efficiency
"he couldn't care less about the future of his company" is quite an overstatement. He is still the chairman of the board after all. Also, that company is what allows him to fund his charitable endeavors, so you bet he cares about it's future.
I think the span between the Columbine shooting and 9/11 was probably their peak. So many of my memories of /. involve national disasters.
I think the reference had unintended implications: the phrase "so it goes" is only used when something dies.
The article states overtly that patent infringement is near unavoidable in smartphone manufacturing, but then proceeds to paint a picture of unilateral patent infringement on Google's part vs. Apple. I know the author intended to focus on one patent disagreement, but it's disingenuous to focus on Google as an infringer and Apple as a victim whilst ignoring that the opposite is at least possible.
Hadn't heard about that one yet! Thanks, will check it out. :)
blogspam, go to http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-ll-003-build-a-small-radar-... instead. relevant links are in the sidebar on that page.
I've been testing this fix today on Apache 2.0.53 and observed that when running the attack script against a server patched with option 1 (minus the optional logging) there was still a significant hike in CPU usage, perhaps because there is a cost in processing the header analysis.

Option 2 produced no such hike, and protected the server from attack.
Will you be getting your next job through networking?
I'd try a search for 'automated penetration testing' on your favorite search engine. There seem to be quite a few result.

But beware, these things could easily lure you into a false sense of security by not finding a big gaping hole in your security.

Note that sign in and sign up isn't the only possible vulnerability. For example do you check that a signed-in user can only change his own information, and not other people's data by simply changing a user ID in an URL or in some hidden form data?
I was just wondering what will happen if tomorrow everyone owning Dollars dumps them back in America?
No, their five word pitch should not be "chat roulette for language learning". That would imply lots of cocks speaking different languages.

I hate when a company is the something for something else. Be unique. How about Video Chat For Language Learning. Why bring chat roulette into it? Break free and then Chatroulette can become the Verbly for wanting to speak your native language to another penis.

It just seems with all of the abuse that chatroulette gets it would be smart to try and separate yourself from them.
One of my favorite memories from /. was refreshing to see a new version of the kernel was available. You'd spend a few hours downloading it, compiling, and reboot. Usually there were no new features you wanted, no bugs fixed, just the idea of being on the bleeding edge was "cool" enough.
I'm fairly certain it was mentioned by a character in an issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. It's had reverberations across the geek ethos.
I think that learning to do mental computations vs. relying on technology is a trade-off. As hermannj314 pointed out [1], there's an issue whether memorizing multiplication tables/trigonometric tables is a matter of fundamentals, or it's just how we used to live before calculators to be able to compute anything. Well, I think it's both in some sense.

Human brain is good at some things (pattern matching, quick look-up, aka. intuition), and terribly bad at others (computation, explicitly running algorithms). I do believe that we should augment our mental skill whenever possible - we're already thinking using our environment [2], so unless one rejects pen and paper, or even looking at things around him/her, one is using his environment to increase his mental powers. So why stop at handwriting? Why not use slide rules, calculators and Google?

There's the other side of the trade-off though. Learning tables with numbers, or multiplication tricks, or doing lots of exercises with plotting functions by hand is the way we leverage the power of our brains. Our minds seem to be good at caching stuff and quickly looking things up, so the more such mental tools we incorporate, the more power we can get of our thought process.

In a very simplifying way:

Our cognitive powers = internal 'skills' in thinking * external tools we have.

The best strategy is to properly invest on both sides of the multiplication. Boosting only one side is suboptimal.

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2924937

[2] - http://consc.net/papers/extended.html
Heh. Annnnd you just blew mine. I always thought it was "Kooroshin"
It's a nice story, although not particularly deep, but please can you change the title to something that gives some hint of what this is about?

Thanks.
He's right -- the vast majority of web users are not mobile users.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers