skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The discussion that has begun in this thread suggests that the Wikibooks chapter submitted here could use some more work. (Its last revision was a 9 October 2011‎ reversion of I.P. edits to restore a version from 22 May 2011.) Evidently, not every reader of Hacker News is convinced that infinity is not a number, despite several websites by mathematically learned people who say exactly that,

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/10/infinity_is_not_a_n...

http://nrich.maths.org/2756

so equally evidently, some readers here are not convinced that there is a rationale for drawing a distinction between infinity and numbers. Does it help to take a look at a discussion of "not a number" concepts

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/12/nullity_the_nonsens...

as they are implemented in computer science? What I see here, from my view as an educator in primary mathematics (in a program in which I can define "primary" to include topics like Hilbert's Hotel), is that some readers here have had educational experiences in which they "remember" seeing infinity treated as a number. The classic case, which prompts the Wikibooks chapter, is taking the limit of a rational quantity as the denominator approaches zero. This appears (based on previous HN discussion

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=728026

from more than two years ago) to suggest that physical quantities can be divided by zero with a quotient that becomes infinity. Perhaps this is an example of how an engineering calculus course isn't always interpreted by learners quite the way it was presented by teachers. (I presume all but the tiniest number of teachers of engineering calculus would agree that infinity is not a number, and that no one can divide any number by zero.)

What would be a good way to clarify the point so that people are communicating with one another well as they speak about infinity and about what numbers are?

AFTER EDIT: impendia's kind top-level comment here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3592101

has sent me looking at a Wikipedia article, the talk page of which leads to a WolframMathWorld article,

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/AffinelyExtendedRealNumbers.htm...

and there is a discussion of the affinely extended real numbers. Does the limit example in the submitted Wikibooks chapter fit the characteristics of that number system fully?
Grab Some Popcorn. You are Now Watching the Real Tech Bloggers of Silicon Valley
What an enormous data mine.
What plan did you get for Titanium?

How was Appcelerator's geo features, is it comparable to SimpleGEO?

Top 3 drawback vs going native pls.

Thanks for taking the time!
DNS has nothing to do with ping response times.

Not true, the feature is called GeoDNS and gives you different IP addresses for the same domain based on your DNS server. See Locke1689's reply.
If you are ok with Union City then I can connect you with someone who offers very cheap office space. Its a commercial building which houses insurance agents and stuff.
Somewhat relevant, a guy designed the ultimate city, Magnasanti, in Simcity 4. Here's his video [1] and an interview [2]. Choice quote from the interview:

Vice: I think most people’s natural inclination after watching your video would be awe, followed by fear.

Vincent: I am in agreement. That was part of the intent of the video, for those that know, play, and love the game.

Introversion, an indie game company in the UK who created hacker favorites like Uplink has unfortunately shelved their game project played in a fully procedurally generated city, from the major neighbourhoods down to the individual floors of the buildings. You could get a demo of the city generator from the recent Humble Bundle. There are still some fascinating videos to find on their blog [3] or on youtube [4]

[1] http://youtu.be/NTJQTc-TqpU
[2] http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-...
[3] http://www.introversion.co.uk/subversion/
[4] http://youtu.be/J30i0gABfS8

[edit]: better link for the Subversion video
Most Americans have no taste-buds. They don't eat lamb, and prefer grain-fed beef (which tastes like slightly gamey chicken) to grass-fed beef (which has a much more ... beefy ... flavor). And don't even think of offering them kangaroo.

On the other hand, I'm sure there's some Minnesotan here, who'll tell me I'm a wimp for not eating gopher. Regional US food rocks, but generic "US food" is just bland.
Web developers unleash code in hopes that students will take on bookstores
If you want quiet try caving 100m down and it's like another world.
> Ok, an irrational number of dollars is pushing it a bit, but you don't need to go that far to see that infinity doesn't work when trying to count things consistently.

Well, if your definition doesn't work for irrational numbers, then your argument isn't good enough: you exclude infinity on criteria that also exclude "good" numbers. In the context of the article, π is a number. And you cannot count things with an irrational number,　by definition.
The app looks great, thanks for sharing. Did you guys come across any issues with Titanium's memory management? I'd imagine debugging could be a nightmare.
What I Learned at Summify Before Twitter Swooped Down and Snatched Up My Team
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Online surveillance bill will be ‘a gold mine’ for hackers
> The argument "Addition breaks" proves just as well that zero "isn't a number", since it breaks division rather badly.

Mathematically, numbers (be it natural, rational, real, or complex) are defined as a field. Fields (or, more accurately, rings, which all fields are) are defined by addition and multiplication, not both. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(mathematics)
Huh, I did my back of the envelope wrong when I first decided that wasn't plausible.

Here is a better back of the envelope.

Suppose that we're using a random number generator that has 4 billion possible internal states. (We're using a C integer under the hood.) Suppose that we're having it generate random 256 bit integers, which we then test for primality. The probability of these integers being prime is about 1/log(2256), or about 1/177. So we have around 2.4 million possible prime numbers we can generate from this generator.

A key has 2 of these primes, therefore 2 random keys have 4 possible combinations of their primes that could match, for about 1 chance in 600k of matching. Given n keys, there are roughly n*n/2 possible pairs of keys which might match. It turns out that if you have about 570,000 keys in your overall pool which was made by the same bad algorithm, you'd expect to have roughly 27,000 possible matches.

This is scary. What is even more scary is that if you can identify the bad algorithm in common in this pool of poor choices, it is quite doable to enumerate all possible primes that could be a key. And then rather than just being able to compromise 0.2% of the published keys, you can relatively easily compromise about 4% of them instead.

If they haven't already done so, I would expect interested parties to identify the bad algorithms in widespread use, and enumerate likely to be used primes. The NSA is obvious, but criminal parties with access to a botnet can also perform this operation.
Maybe a blog post on the pros and cons of using Titanium is in order.
Whoa, didn't know Titanium compiles javascript into native code. Cool! But Phonegap has a pretty rich set of plugins and its relatively painless to extend Phonegap's functionality with a plugin. Did you have to hack in your geofencing capability? There's no plugin framework?
For every real number between 1 and 2...

1) I can find that number also in the set between 1 and 4.

2) But I can't find that number in the set between 2 and 4.

To myself numbers are always relative to one another, don't exist outside the mind, and the set between 2 and 4 is twice the set between 1 and 2.

But like I said, it's a personal spin on it.
Which parts are biased? Things like whether or not the government allowed the domain owner to contest the extensions should be pretty easy to verify. I'm sure that the lawyer probably has some record of a number of the communications he/she had with the government.

I realize that there's a bit of hand-waving with respect to 'holding people responsible,' but most of the things in that article that are verifiable are pretty damning of the government if they are true.
This article is dajaz1 writing about a different hip-hop site in the UK which was recently seized by the UK authorities, not the seizure of dajaz1 in 2010-2011.
The fundamental premise that this is starting out with is flawed which is that cities can be successfully designed upfront. This is what we painfully learned with our grand experiment with the modernist architecture movement.

The argument is roughly the same as the one against waterfall development in software engineering which is that it's impossible to know until actual implementation & use what is successful or not.

Instead, successful cities are evolved and mixed use, with a mix of new and old buildings, strong social fabric and buildings built to be adaptable to changing needs.

See: How Buildings Learn, The Death and Life of Great American Cities and A Pattern Language for more context on this.
Apparently they just ask the registrar. Here is a blog post about it.
http://blog.dominicsayers.com/2011/02/11/uk-police-can-turn-...
With cooperation from Rackspace.

Domain servers in listed order:
NS.RACKSPACE.COM
NS2.RACKSPACE.COM

The domain resolves to 83.138.166.114 which hosts a takedown page within Rackspace's UK datacenter.
tldr; Google should get MM to make Nexus phones.

This would come back to bite Google. Android's success is by and large because of Android licensees. Google demonstrating a clear interest/preference in a specific one would not make the other OEM's too pleased.
Dear AppSumo: Please Stop Running Ads Like This
Nixie clocks... now :)
To be honest I've only built games and in that sense appMobi has an edge with their DirectCanvas technlogy which speeds up the canvas rendering on mobile devices by 500% (according to them). I guess you don't use any canvas though so not really relevant in your case.

Thanks for the reply anyway. I will definitely have a closer look at Titanium.
Firefox Adds Option to Import Browsing Data from Chrome
Well, you can read what the RIAA thinks about it, along with an informationless non-statement from ICE: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111209/03385017020/ice-ad...

Or you can read the almost-totally-redacted FOIA document dump: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111214/03264917079/freedo...

The court case is under seal, so I can't point you to any relevant court documents. Heck, even Senator Wyden raised a fuss about it: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/wyden-domain-seizur...

I don't have much reason to doubt the accounting of events described in the TechDirt article -- although it does contain a fair amount of editorializing.

If the government would remove the seal and speak up instead of remaining mum, we'd have another side to the story, and maybe we could eliminate this perceived "bias".
The placeholder page looks fake to me. Any confirmation from SOCA?
I think there's some confusion here. dajaz1.com was seized back in 2010 by the US government, but the title is about a different site/domain that has recently be seized by the UK government. Not only seized, but the admins have been arrested, something that did not happen in the case of dajaz1.com.
We're on the Community (free) plan.

I haven't used SimpleGEO so I couldn't really say. Appcelerator Titanium just provides API functions to access native geo features like GPS. It also provides reverse and forward geocode functions but I found those buggy so I implemented my own using Google. I know Appcelerator recently acquired Cocoafish, which I imagine will provide much more comprehensive geo features for future Appcelerator devs.

Top drawbacks:

- Bugs/memory leaks. Since Titanium does memory management for you, you will occasionally run into memory leaks or bugs that don't make any sense, and there's not much you can do about it. Appcelerator isn't the fastest at releasing fixes either.

- Using third-party SDKs is generally annoying. Want to integrate Tapjoy? Chances are you'll need to write a custom Titanium module. Same goes for just about every single SDK out there. You have to manually create the JS->Obj C interface (aka module). There is a Titanium marketplace where you can buy existing modules for relatively cheap, but it's only a handful of very popular SDKs, like TestFlight, Flurry, or Urban Airship.

- Need to manually integrate new iOS features. Like geofencing, for example, I had to manually hack into the framework, so you're always a step behind in terms of the latest iOS features. That's OK for most people but when you do need a feature that hasn't made it into the framework, it can be annoying.
I won't disagree with you either. Nor will I reply with my academic credentials. There are exceptions to every norm.

I have hired CS undergrads, graduates, TA's and instructors as employees.

I do believe, based on what I've seen, that not enough institutions teach problem solving in general enough of a way to be applicable to building applications.

Understanding how all the pieces of algorithms, propositional logic, technologies come together in a solution that means something to the end user is something that our CS education fails in many ways on in too many programs.

Instead of strategic, spatial thinking, we are taught to focus on the same algorithms over and over in a dozen or two languages. That teaches us coding, not programming, let alone software development. Too many just learn to recognize the design patterns, let their eyes glaze over and get it done.

I'm not knocking education, I had some of my greatest memories and years and experiences in Academia. It just didn't prepare me for the real working world of finding the dots, and connecting them in the way that doesn't douse or kill the business. I didn't learn to communicate with different business units in CS. I didn't learn to help people communicate what they need in a clearer enough way. I wasn't taught to market or sell my ideas to the other stakeholders in my workplace, and instead consider just having fits of rage relating to Dilbert or XSCD (?) cartoons. This is all the responsibility of my formal education; to help prepare me for the real world, and it didn't. I was given a limited set of tools to interact and interface with the real working world. But man, I sure know what an O(n) function looks like.

Understanding how those details work, fit, and come together to amplify an organizations' competitive advantage, instead of dousing it in cold water is something we know far too many programmers, CS grads included, really, truly, suck at. CS grads have to go and learn that in the real world.

I wasn't taught when to use agile (when the outcome is unknown) and when to let waterfall in a little (when you're doing something very familiar, standard and predictable to reach your goal).

A system is really the data. No software system has any meaning, purpose, value, or impact without the data it works on. Teaching a data-centric and an experience centric approach to software development, in addition to what is already taught is critical, and I'm afraid it's simply not happening enough from the false positives from the people I've tried to hire in my business.
The dates seem to suggest otherwise: the TOI article is from February 2007, the blog post from April 2007.
My father gave a "stone age ax" to Mark Wilden; the coder of Leisure Suit Larry.

(http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.diabetes/msg/7c00...)

> Someone mentioned IDDT’s Bruce Beale a while ago. He’s a great guy, and I’ve enjoyed his hospitality several times on trips to England. He gave me a Stone Age axe given him by the Prince of Denmark (and there are pictures to prove it).
> Apple has an established track record of not getting what people want from a TV. Ala carte TV shows and a crippled set-top box is not very inspiring.

Disagree. TV is not a TV set. You may as well argue that the Macintosh TV from 1994 is indicative that Apple doesn't "get" television.

Apple TV is a hardware extension of iTunes. It is not a profound re-imagining of the TV, which is what we are expecting the Apple TV to be.

And I'd suggest that TV has been pretty popular.

"Apple sold more than 3 million units of the device last year, marking seemingly strong demand among customers for the small box that plugs into high-definition TVs to stream music, movies and photos from computers, mobile devices and various websites."

"Cook didn't say what that "something" was, but did add that "for those people that have TV right now, the customer 'sat' (satisfaction rating) is off the chart…""

> Palm wasn't exactly a superstar before the iPhone's launch.

Palm's marketshare in Q1 2005 was 17.9%. Back then when there were several goliaths (Nokia, RIM, Sony-Ericsson) that's a huge fucking deal.

Samsung's marketshare of the TV business in 2010 (only data I could find)? 17.2%

Believe me. This is a very apposite comparison. I'm bookmarking this thread to revisit in 5 years.
Except, a single McDonalds can serve ~5 orders a minute. Yet, a car dealership that can sell 2 cars a day is doing Ok. Let's assume 2 cars a day over 5 years = 3,650people before you get repeat customers. (Average salesman sells 7 cars a month * 8 sales guys.)

Edit: http://www.bluemaumau.org/6057/ten_largest_restaurant_franch... 2 million / store per year / 52 weeks / 6$ a meal = 6,410 people averaging 1 vist a week per McDonalds.
Minicourse on Technical Writing by Knuth (et al.) [pdf]
I'd argue that 20 minutes isn't either, but fair enough :)
The {Unspoken} Rules of Open Source Hardware
It is worth it to point out that Vitamin D has been shown to prevent colds...but the "recommended" dose unfortunately still leaves people deficient.

A nutritionist recommended I take at least 5000IU a day (with regular blood tests to confirm I wasn't going over the limit.) My blood test level started out at 18 (extremely low, despite the fact that I lived in San Diego at the time) and is now a more respectable mid-50s.

Most Americans are chronically Vitamin D-deficient (sources: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-d... and http://planetgreen.discovery.com/food-health/vitamin-d-defic...) and at this point, it's pretty much safe to assume that you're not getting enough of it and to consider taking a 2000-5000IU daily supplement.

Anecdotally, I can say it's made such a huge difference in me getting less sick on a regular basis (and is SO cheap) that I've been recommending it to pretty much everyone I know.

I've also become a huge fan of NOT wearing sunscreen, especially if you're going to be out in the sun for less than an hour. With proper Vitamin D levels, you actually burn less. Try it for yourself and see--it's been a massive difference in my life.

Vitamin D I use (Only $8 for 4 month's worth! Disclaimer--Amazon affiliate link, but it is actually what I use) http://amzn.to/zJYS1X
Oh yeah, nothing particularily hard about building strawbale houses to code.

My point was about this particular style of amateur building not being amenable to things that require standards.
I love this one:

The remaining connected
component is the most intriguing - or suspicious - as it is a complete graph on nine vertices
(K9): nine primes, each of whose
9C2 = 36 pairwise products occurs as n-value.

There's an RSA key generator out there which randomly picks two primes from a set of 9.
There is a module framework, but since the Titanium framework already created a CLLocationManagerDelegate in their GeolocationModule, I didn't see a clean way of adding geofencing in a separate module. So I hacked it right into the existing GeolocationModule. Again, the performance difference between native code and rendering HTML5 is huge, and that's why we decided against PhoneGap. Personally, if HTML5 wrappers were the only option, I probably would've just sucked it up and went native Obj C. Like someone else mentioned, there are a lot of challenges to making an HTML5 app perform like a native one.
Personal Surveillance Drone by Francis Fukuyama
The ISS orbits between 330km and 410km above the earth. Really just a hair's breadth off the planet, skimming the outside of the atmosphere.

While distance is one measure of loneliness, travel time would be another.

I'd suspect among the most isolated humans were early Antarctic explorers. Robert Scott, when he died on the return leg of his failed South Pole expedition, was some 400 miles (670 km) from his intended destination. Very few McDonalds' in the neighborhood, I'd wager.
Fair enough, is it common to describe this task as brainstorming when it's done solo?

I only really hear it used when it's a done as a group activity.
Maybe you should delete ones that have fewer points :)
The landing page is fantastic. Super simple initially, more info if I want it. I wish the features section was more visual.
Regarding coroutines. The very reason Node.js is awesome is because it forces you to do evented programming and makes it apparent what is blocking and what isn't. That's the beauty of Node. The event loop is not a bug, it's a feature. Why program in JavaScript if you don't want to do evented programming? Why use Node.js if you don't want to see the difference between blocking and non-blocking code?

On the flip-side: This looks like a solid implementation of what lots of people have been waiting for (fibers in node).
I think it's not just a matter of "exceptions to every norm." There are significant differences in the teaching philosophies of different countries, and this article argues that India's priorities are even worse than those in the US with regards to encouraging creativity and the like.

I moved to the US at a fairly young age, but talking to many friends and family members in India, I'd tend to agree.
Valentine Minute Gram
I just watched the entire video, and it's really interesting.

I especially recommend the part about how reflection is implemented in Scala 2.10. It explains the Cake pattern and how Scala self types enable dependency injection.

Good stuff
Where 1 <= x <= 4:

f(x) = (x-1)/9 + 1, maps bijectively from [1,4] to [1,4/3]

g(x) = (x-1)/9 + 4/3, maps bijectively from [1,4] to [4/3,5/3]

h(x) = (x-1)/9 + 5/3 maps bijectively from [1,4] to [5/3,2]

Therefore, [1,2] must contain three times as many numbers as [1,4], right?

It doesn't work like that.