skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why not just create another stack exchange just for facebook?

If Facebook wanted to, it is not like they can't write a question-answer site or use one of the open source alternatives. This is an endorsement of Stackoverflow from facebook. Nothing more.
I had to go back to T9 whilst travelling in the US (no pay as you go for smartphones) and even after 3 months I still struggle. My muscle memory is never going to be as good for T9 as it is for a keyboard, writing symbols is a pain in the ass, the dictionary is much smaller (I always have to add proper nouns like Reno) and I can't switch languages/alphabets.
i think i found the solution
http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/59526/symmetry-with-...
> How would you explain to a 10-year old why 3^0 = 1 beyond "it's necessary to make the algebra of powers work out".

Actually, that's exactly the reason 3^0=1: it was the definition that preserved the most identities. Agreed that this explanation doesn't really help intuition.
One bank to rule them all?
I agree with your second point, but your first point goes against established precedent at Stackexchange.

I mean, if it was about getting more eyeballs then I think the best way to go would have been to use tagging, so that questions would be posted to 'stackexchange' and would then be tagged with 'programming', 'codereview', 'superuser' etc and as they were tagged they would show up on the programming.stackexchange.com (and other) sites. IIUC the current way is that if I post a programming question to stackoverflow, it will get 'migrated' to programming.stackexchange. That works, but it detracts from the total number of eyes because it is removed from stackoverflow.

That design decision is something that has always kind of confused me about the Stackexchange sites.
"13+ years of programming experience"? For a theater company website?
Eidos could quite possibly have a case for tortious interference; consumers could for deceptive trade practices:

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2011/08/gamestop-onlive/
I'm a life-long Portlander, and absolutely love the place. I'm glad that you and your wife have been having a good time thus far- it can indeed be a great place to live and work. It sounds like you guys have been getting to experience a lot of my favorite things about the region, which is great to hear- many newcomers don't get out as much as you guys are. That said, however, Pakourama raises some valid points, and I think it's incorrect to dismiss them out of hand.

Portland does indeed have an extremely high homeless population, and there are real structural issue with how the city deals with that problem. Depending on where and how you live, it's possible to ignore that problem, or to not fully appreciate how bad it is, but believe me: it's real. It's also gotten a lot worse in recent years due to the economy as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our local VAs have brought on extra social workers to try and deal specifically with homeless vets, and the various homeless services agencies have been expanding, as well.

We also have inflated unemployment, mostly because the city's such a nice place to live that lots of people move here without a job, or, when they lose their job, don't leave. If you've got technical skills, it's a great time and place to find a job- but if you don't, there are way fewer options than it might seem, and it is can be an extremely competitive job scene. It's like that everywhere, I know, but for whatever reason it's especially bad in Portland. I am (honestly, no sarcasm) thrilled for your wife that she had such an easy time finding a job; not knowing anything about her, I can say that if she's not a techie than hers is the first such story I've heard from a new arrival in Portland over the last few years. Far, far, far more common is the "well, I picked up a few hours here, and a few hours there, but I can't find anything full-time, and I've been looking for six months, etc. etc."

Regarding the weather- winters in Portland affect everybody differently. SAD is indeed endemic; my GP blames it on wide-spread vitamin D deficiency, but who knows. At least in the 1990s, Portland did have an above-normal level of teen suicide. I don't think the rain here is any worse than Seattle, and from what I've heard the SAD issue is about the same up there as it is down here. But it's a real thing... you'll know what I'm talking about when we get a freak-occurrence sunny day in Feburary (typically, it will have been raining or at least completely overcast for three or four months by that point) and suddenly everybody around you seems ten times happier.

Anyway, welcome to Portland, and like I said, I'm glad you're enjoying it. I love it, myself, and feel like the positives vastly outweigh the negatives. But it's important to have a complete and balanced view of one's city, and Portland definitely has room for improvement.
What they "need to do"? Why did Apple need to sue Samsung? Apple doesn't need the cash, Samsung's tablets aren't hurting iPad sales very much, and Samsung didn't show any inclination to pre-emptively sue Apple.
Apologies, I totally missed the phrase "login screen" in your post.
A yammer competitor just showed up, and its pretty darned good
Reminds me of a quote from Yossi Kreinin:

CMM has 5 levels. CMM level 1 is where you operate right now: it denotes the ability to ship something. CMM level 5, the one mentioned in the interview from Kent Beck's book, denotes complete paralysis. To do anything, you have to write or update so many documents, have so many meetings with "relevant stakeholders", and to perform so many pointless measurements of the defects/LOC kind, that it's much more productive to just go postal and at least remove a CMM auditor or two from the face of the Earth in the process.

Levels 2 to 4 indicate various intermediate stages where paralysis is spreading, but you can still ship. For example, level 2 is called "Managed Process". "Managed Process is distinguished by the degree to which the process is Managed". I'm not making this up. There's a book called Capability Maturity Model Integration, and this book, heavy enough to kill a human, is full of this sort of stuff. Reading it is impossible.

http://www.yosefk.com/blog/extreme-programming-explained.htm...
That has merit. Personally I usually find myself doing something more like this:

if (argc != 3) {
printf ("Wrong number of arguments");
// throw an exception or return NULL or something
}

if (!fname) {
printf ("File name cannot be null");
// throw an exception or return NULL or something
}

/* Do stuff */

The important thing, to my mind, is the absence of an else block.
This is completely off-topic, but did you mean to call it l'hospital as opposed to L'Hôpital? I remember even my calculus book had similar errors, and I always wondered if it was just because the two looked so similar (or if there was any more reasoning behind it). didn't mean to nitpick, your comment just triggered a repressed train of thought :)
>I like competition as much as the next guy but it's hard to see how most of Apple's competition is not riding on their coattails with Android.

You don't see movie producers suing eachother for incorporating eachother's plot devices... it's ridiculous. If someone is incorporating design elements with intent to confuse the consumer, or incorporating complex design elements, then I am prepared to entertain the validity of legal action.
JPMorgan Chase Bank of America Merrill Lynch will rule us all
It's not that weird; these meetings are the most fundamental part of the "scrum" methodology, and lots of companies do them.

There are whole books on the subject of "scrum", though you needn't read them to hold the meetings and find them useful. ;)
I've not met a gamer who is a raving fan of GameStop. they seem to either hate them, or not hate them yet.

They do have a lot of names and numbers, but you rarely see anything remotely like the "i <3 steam" or "i quit pirating games because steam does it right" abject love that valve gets.

I have serious doubts GameStop's corporate culture can accept gamers as anything other than something to extract dollars from, much less accept lower revenue and lower expenses.
Did Kubrick invent the iPad?
AFAIK, Android apps can store data in either the private data store where it can be accessed via intents published by the app or on the public data store, which is usually the SD card.
What is true in mathematics is whatever leads to no logical contradictions.
I lived in Portland for four years and loved it there. The city is wonderful for so many reasons, especially if you like good food and great beer.

However, I hate to let you down, but if you've only been there a couple months, you have not yet lived through a Portland winter. It's certainly not unbearable, but the weather does take a drastic turn for the depressing.

In any case, I'd like to move back there eventually. From the cities I've been in, Minneapolis and Portland are about tied for the nicest.
wait.. you mean math is simply made up? It's not the language of the universe?

well that's just depressing.
> They're usually reflexive Platonists, believing that math is out there, and we merely discover it. This is a result of the teaching of undergrad math as essentially a series of completed works, with little history attached to it.

It's not entirely clear what you mean by this, but in the most obvious interpretation this idea is correct.

Here's what I mean by that: math deals with pure logic. All logical deductions (derivations from axioms to conclusions in formal systems) are in a sense "out there", waiting to be discovered. Certainly they have always been true, before people knew about them, and there are deductions that are true even though no one knows about them yet.

The other interpretation, which you probably meant, was the question of mathematical style and interest: which axioms do we study, and why do we care about them, and why are some theorems important and others not important? Certainly the definition that 1/x^2 = x^(-2) was made for consistency, which is an aspect of style. You could make some other definition and do formal reasoning just as well (although you'd have to change some other things - maybe the definition of exponentiation, maybe your interpretation of symbols on paper).

But either way, I think you are wrong that high school teachers don't think critically about why 1/x^2 = x^(-2). Some may be bad teachers, but I have known a lot of incredibly good high school math teachers, and I suspect they have thought about this. In fact, when I talk to mathematicians about high school education, they usually agree that people doing research know more parts of mathematics than high school teachers, but good high school teachers have a much deeper understanding of elementary math than people doing research, because they have had to approach it from many different angles in order to teach different students.
Anyone know where I can find an ungated version of "An experimental evaluation of the assumption of independence in multiversion programming"?
Bad Ideas: Booktrack Adds Sound Effects And Music to Books
I'm not sure what they meant by "more paperwork," but in most locations, working an arrest will result in a whole lot more paperwork than simply calling it in the field. All interventions (intubation, IV access, medications, defibrillation attempts, etc) have to be documented (who did it, when they did it, etc).

That's a whole lot more paperwork than "Confirmed asystole in 3 leads, see attached strip"
His original name was actually Guillaume de l'Hospital; French spelling reforms later did away with a number of cases of silent 's' (which had been silent for a long time already), replacing it with a circumflex over the preceding vowel.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_the_circumflex_in_French...

and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_de_l%27H%C3%B4pital#c...
Screw You, GameStop.
sounds like you had a pretty awesome attic growing up! all I had was my sister's old REO Speedwagon LPs
Downvoting me doesn't change the fact that I've seen offers for top CS Stanford grads for $120k for undergrad and $130k for master's, and that was a few years ago.
I find it remarkable that google insist on blogging about a service (google+) that is only available to the limited few.

It leaves a sour taste in ones mouth.

'Look at this cool thing' - (that you can't use).
Possible, but having gone from 8.6->Linux->10.4 myself, I think it's worth noting that 10.6, their previous release, was without question one of the most solid, stable, usable desktop OSes ever released by anyone. 10.7's instability and rough edges seem extraordinarily out of place by comparison.
It's about the topic of the site. FB API questions are on-topic with SO, others aren't. The Code Review is debatable since it's arguably a subset of SO, but other SE sites (like Programmers) don't really intersect that much.
Interesting. I thought the most compelling part of the talk was his interpretation of the purpose for doing math and how we've failed to educate toward that purpose.

I assume you're referring to his assertion that deep understanding of by-hand calculation is not necessary (the driving a car vs servicing a car analogy). I would agree that this may be a false analogy, and that a basic understanding of mathematical concepts (presently drilled into place through hand calculation) may be a fundamentally important step to being able to do math. Especially for those who continue to any advanced math study, fundamental understanding is almost certainly necessary.

But this talk is more about the common student who doesn't go on to college or post-grad math. Overall the broader point of the talk still rings true to me: because of an overemphasis on calculation, the majority of students are receiving insufficient math education to successfully make life decisions and contribute to their own fields of work/study. In my mind, Wolfram presents a viable solution in recommending refocusing math education towards logical thinking and correctly structuring problems, and in utilizing computers for calculation.
I recommend The Incompleteness Phenomenon over GEB[1]. It thoroughly presents Gödel's Completeness and Incompleteness theories at a level appropriate to the collegiate Math or Computer Science student.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Incompleteness-Phenomenon-Martin-Golds...
apparently it equals:

Error establishing a database connection

that is kind of funny... sorta
Eat dumplings and learn Chinese next weekend in SF
There was an excellent cs theory stack exchange question on this:

http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-papers... [pdf]

The top two are nearly tied for:
"A mathematical theory of communication" by Claude Shannon

http://guohanwei.51.net/code/A%20Mathematical%20Theory%20of%...

"On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" by Alan Turing

http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~ctg/classes/lib/canon/turing-com... [pdf]

I would add that

'The Annotated Turing' by Charles Petzold

http://www.theannotatedturing.com/

is an excellent treatment of Turings paper, including much of the relevant additional math and computing history both before and after.
Try these for size ( actual interview questions )

PITA interviewer > What's bigger, e^pi or pi^e ?

If you get past that one,

PITA interviewer > What's i^1 ?

Clever student> Its just 1 unit on the imaginary axis.

PITA interviewer >Good! So then, whats i^i ?

Clever student > Probably a few more units on the imaginary axis!

PITA interviewer >Then why does google say 0.207 ( http://www.google.com/search?q=i^i )

Clever student> hmmm...ohhh...aaahhh....WTF...I hate math I don't want this stupid stupid job lemme go back to coding monads in Haskell for my ubercool startup.

PITA interviewer >Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
Enterprise Social Networking Company Jive Software Files S-1 For IPO
I'm not surprised that this doesn't surprise anyone. So many fall victim to unethical practices from Gamestop, the worst I think being selling used re-shrink-wrapped games as New.

In other news, digital distribution to me makes sense i.e. Steam, and full downloads direct to console HD and the like, but it just isn't a large enough market share yet IMO. These games are humongous it's kind of pain to keep running out of disk space, at least as things stand currently.
Are startups better as single-gender affairs?
It's not an error. The french changed their spelling to replace a silent 's' after some letters with a circumflex over those letters. Using the silent s instead of a circumflex is considered correct when transcribing into English.
>>Would you tell someone that unsafe sex is ok, and that one should learn its danger by doing the mistake, catching a STD, and then not doing it again?

Your example is a little bit over the top. I might have generalized too much but I think that in the context of the discussion you get the point I was trying to convey. There are always exceptions to every rule, of course. I believe my comment still stands, most of the time.
That'll be ideal. But realistically most people are paid based on market/political factor.
There is a feedback aspect that this article does not seem to get.

> After all, the material hasn't changed (much), so if the calculators were good enough for us 10 or 15 years ago, they are still good enough to solve the math problems.

Technology changes the material: it changes what you think you need or want. You could almost say dialup internet was fine for viewing text web-pages -- why does it need to be faster? Broadband enabled web video -- which in turn spurred the need for broadband.

The calculator example looks a bit like a phone. If you took a phone from 2000 and one from 2007, they would look pretty similar. It is still a phone, is it not? We do not need something more, do we? And then the iPhone appeared.

> Here's the thing. Some technologies don't change all that quickly because we don't need them to. . . . Look at cars or power plants

Crikey! If you wanted to hit on two of the things we do most need to change, and have for decades, it might well be just those.

The whole article disturbs me a bit, actually, because it seems dangerously full of the anti/un-creative mindset. You will never invent anything if you just look at what you have and think of justifications for why everything is pretty much fine. You create by finding faults and imagining what you do not have. Look at those two calculator pics, and think of them as representing some part of the web now and in 2021. Scary? Well that is what it will be unless you get irritated and make some weird unexpected new stuff!
Yeah I wouldn't call that 20% time at all, it's just a quarterly hack day, which I think is also a cool way to get employees excited about working on cool things and ideas.
This looks interesting. I'd like to try it out but the link to the iOS SDK on their site doesn't work.
I just tried the link and YouTube has a notice saying it was a fake account.
This scares me, because if the U.S. ends up in a situation where the entire country is relying on even fewer financial institutions than it is now, then the government will definitely consider them "too big to fail." Not that the situation isn't bad already, but I can only see this making it worse.
Look at Gumstix.com for their Overo products, which basically do what you want, for under $200.
No. What would you apply it to in 0^0? The best you could do is come up with two functions, f(x) and g(x), with f(x) and g(x) going to 0 as x goes to 0, and try to use it to evaluate f(x)^g(x), but the result is going to depend on exactly what your choices are for f(x) and g(x).
This is the same company that will buy used games for $2 and sell them for MSRP minus $3 or so, then try to sell "scratch insurance" as an attachment.

I don't play a lot of games, but every time I do pick one up (since GameStop is virtually the only remaining B&M game store in many places), it hasn't been a consumer-friendly experience.
Very accurate. Facebook makes it clear that they don't give two shits about developers because they're top dog and they don't have to. This just solidifies that impression.

They should improve the clarity of their the documentation and add more examples, in addition to keeping them updated... or pay a couple people to answer questions. God knows they have the money.
Do you think they'll try to do an AT&T and break them up into hundreds of little pieces?
Facebook Surpasses 1 Trillion Pageviews Per Month
Beard nominees are expensive. All up scale restaurants are "real restaurants". But beneath them (while still well above fast food) are mid level restaurants. In Portland this market niche seems almost entirely dedicated to "gastro" pubs. The very fact that they are called "gastro pubs" suggest people are aware there is something lacking in mid and low end (but not fast food) restaurants.
After having spent a lot of time researching autism related topics on the web, I have become very sceptical of anything that is marketed through Google Ads.

For several years, if not still, the anti-vaccine group Generation Rescue have had Google Ads proclaiming that “autism is treatable.” Jenny McCarthy, a TV entertainer who has been involved with Generetion Rescue, reportedly heard of the movement through Google Ads.
I think GMail had a similar very long-lived invite-only sign-up mechanism. I'm sure part of it is you don't want to join a social network thing with zero social connections.

If anyone needs to get in, plenty of invites left here: http://goo.gl/WTu3Y
Ah, didn't implement that yet. I'll get to work on that :)
Although my mathematician friends would probably yell at me if they heard this, as far as I see things it's hardly any different from physics. Just a model we create to describe observed phenomenon.
Previous discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727
Hibernate Cache Is Fundamentally Broken
Copyright Law Explained
Simply putting the title into Google gave this as its second hit:

http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/nver-tse.pdf
Einstein refrigerator
I miss my old Ti-89. it really was the best graphics calculator I ever used.
Watch the Uber-Emo Trailer for PostSecret’s New Smartphone App [video]
Yeah -- that may have been the original motivation, but repeating it as an "explanation" reinforces the notion that math is a bunch of rules (vs. models you can construct and manipulate in your head).

0 probably started as a placeholder symbol for "naught", i.e. nothing to write, and the first scribes were taught "Just write a circle when you have nothing to report".

But, with greater understanding of numbers 0 evolved into its own entity and we saw numbers on a "line", a powerful mental model (why not 2d numbers? N-dimensional numbers? etc.)

Re-teaching that 3^0 = 1 "because the math is convenient" doesn't help us build a mental model of what exponents could be (I know you don't agree with this, just stating it again because the lack of intuitive explanations for math is a major pet peeve of mine).
This will definitely not happen. There is no way it would win the support of BAC's shareholders and board.
Tony Hoare's ACM Turing Award lecture "The Emperor's
Old Clothes":

http://awards.acm.org/images/awards/140/articles/4622167.pdf
Check out the BeagleBoard or Bug Labs, they do basically those things and cost >$100 each.
Thank you. I read the entire transcript and not once did the police mention race.
Crowdmug Launches the First Real Time Places App