skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've not read this paper, but studied the technique described here.

A good example of the sort of thing this lets you do is the fold fusion, which (under the conditions which you need to derive the equality) lets you collapse multiple calls to fold (reduce) in to a single call, with a combined function:

foldr f e (foldr g e' xs) = foldr h i xs

When the first foldr is something like tails, which produces a list of lists of length ~|xs| this can turn an N^2 operation into a linear one, mechanically!
My experience so far as a first-time founder is similar. We invested thousands of hours of our spare time into building a strong foundation and a working product running on top of it, but lack traction mainly because we had day jobs and truly pushing and marketing our product was impossible.

The incubators and investors we've talked to seem undeterred by our presence of a product without traction, but the equity they're seeking puts us more on par with a couple guys with an idea. It makes sense, but the low valuation means we're now looking at consulting options and other means to build out enough infrastructure to attract paying customers.

I don't regret the route we've taken (yet) and I'm excited to see how creative we can get, but it is interesting to see our experience eloquently presented by someone else and some reasons why. It's obvious now, but like most obvious thing it wasn't obvious until it was.
Ah, now we arrive at the real nut of anti-Libertarianism: paternalism. The notion that somehow adults are not capable of making their own decisions. This is our fundamental disagreement.
To me, impoverished, indigent people struggling to make ends meet are fully capable of making their own decisions. People fondly recall stories of their immigrant ancestors working hard and struggling in order to provide a better life for their children. Why do we want to curtail the ability of today's poor from making the same decisions?
You're deciding for them that it's better to stay poor than whatever alternative they might choose for themselves (in an effort to climb out of poverty) because you know better than them.

I will admit, there are roles for government regulation in the marketplace. I simply do not know enough about the chicken I buy at the grocery to make an informed choice. I appreciate the health inspectors, organic labels, and other regulations that facilitate a free, fair, and efficient marketplace in which I do not need to know the farmer to be confident my chicken will not poison me.

However, I do not think lack of open (and understandable) information is the issue in this particular case.

Regarding your last point, I agree with you. The more interesting aspect here is not the implementation details, but rather the questions you're raising of free enterprise, the freedom to work, and the freedom to engage in free & fair commerce of your choosing.
I grew up learning math from calculators. I still today am terrible at mental math, but having immediate, accurate graphing capabilities from precalc onward was an incredible boon.

Even before that, mechanical skills such as polynomial factorization or algebraic reorganization ("fiddly symbol manipulation") were actually, in my opinion, aided by having a calculator which could perform them for me. By releasing the burden of actually performing the computations, I was focused on larger patterns which made the computation meaningful and possible.

There are two camps here, of course. As an engineer or mathematician, doing mental arithmetic is a dead skill---all the effort comes from modeling and understanding the structure of math. However, "practical" math such as computing tips or adding up grocery bills---and this was the kind of math application stressed in my public school education---probably benefits much more from rapid mental sums.

So, ironically, I'd support the heavy involvement of calculators (even ones as powerful as Mathematica itself) in education if it's to be aimed to produce engineers, scientists, or mathematicians. Otherwise, they're probably damaging.
the algorithm needed to execute quickly. image analysis takes too long.
Sorry, but that's just wrong. Most other computer or consumer electronics companies have high-end lines with prices comparable to Apples products. Companies like RIM and Nokia had pretty nice margins on their high-end phones.

The main problem was simply that they had no incentive to innovate in that direction until competition showed up in the form of the iPhone. (And I'm not saying Apple is special here, I think they would probably have been in the same position if they had continued selling the Newton and tried making an iNewtonPhone out of it).

AFAIK, Apple claims various touch-related inventions through their patents (some of which are quite stupid, which is another story). I've never heard them saying "we invented touchscreen phones".

Apple never claimed to have invented subnotebooks either. But you would be right if you looked at many of the new "ultrabooks" and claimed that they have borrowed many design details from the Air (as opposed to, say, copying the form factor of the X-series or netbooks).
I believe you are right. Also he is writting his own book: http://getsomere.st/ (linked from the part 2)
Modern medicine, or wealth?
Still waiting for your answer.
* [Gmail]

* [in Chrome/Chromium]
Asynchronous IF implementation using JQuery Deferred Objects
BOA in Centreville,VA will register your company for free
WebSockets versus REST?
Tim Gowers replies to Elsevier's open letter
Most likely that getting WakeMate manufactured was a painful experience and he wants to avoid physical products now.
wow.. I just realized that calling some people "sheep" is just insulting to sheep
What do they do now? You make it sound like there's a better alternative currently available!

The reason they would consider selling a FUTURE interest in their organs is because it would be the best option on the table. Since it's not currently available as an option, they must be choosing considerably worse option now (which is the best currently available option).

How is your alternative more just, more fair, better?

----------------
EDIT
----------------

Imagine YOUR loved one received a liver/heart/kidney in this manner, thereby saving his/her life. And in so doing it DID improve the welfare of someone loved by the donor allowing him/her to get a better education, get better housing, or something else worthwhile.

What is so horrible about that? Your insurance company would cover it and it would make the world a BETTER PLACE for everyone. By the way, the surgeon gets paid a lot of money for a complex procedure like organ transplant; what's wrong with a donor getting a tiny fraction of that for his/her contribution providing the amazing, wonderful gift of life?
I'm not familiar with the author and his expertise, but he might benefit from this: http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/11/how-to-read-haskell/

And maybe also this: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/How_to_read_Haskell

I consider myself a newb in Haskell (and functional programming in general), and didn't see anything too mystifying in the code, other than it takes a declarative approach (well, Control.Arrow.first is maybe the only 'exotic' thing, but it otherwise looks rather straightforward).
New professional backup tool: review
Thanks for the comment!

Parse.com looks interesting, but I'm a bit worried about trusting someone else with the whole server side backend. And since I already implemented a backend using Django it's not really needed for now.

I'll definitely do a website where you can see more details about your progress. There a leaderboard seems like a good idea. For example showing the user with best progress this week etc could be fun.

A children's version sounds very interesting. For now it's really focused on adult or young students studying Japanese as a foreign language. I'm not sure how big the market is for children learning Japanese as a foreign language, maybe it's bigger than I think?

I know there are some kanji apps for native Japanese speakers as well, though I'm not sure if they're any good. Some things would need to be changed to sell this app in that market. For example, what should the questions be? Maybe from words written in hiragana only, with an example sentence for ambiguous words, to writing the word with kanji? There are some things to think about there.

In-app purchases is something I've thought about as well. There are IAP for Android as well, though I'm not so familiar with them. Personally, it seems a little shady to use IAP, especially marketed towards children. But on the other hand, since it's an educational app maybe parents would consider it ok?
The presentation is explicitly about REST, not about pragmatic dead simple solutions.

It even quotes Roy saying "Many of the constraints are directly opposed to short-term efficiency" and that most developers don't care about goals of rest.

I think points you're making are fine, but they're acknowledged in the presentation, so your rant is unnecessary.

I think the author did a good job presenting actual (you can say academic) REST, rather than a more popular and simpler to create "JSON-over-HTTP database" pattern (which is fine, but shouldn't technically be called "RESTful").
Would love to start playing with Redis but have limited time to do so. To save me some time, has anyone found some good tutorials?
Climate Change-Induced Drought Caused the Mayan Collapse
Why do we need more maths textbooks in the first place?

I agree with the comment by HN participant droithomme above that it would be perfectly possible for school systems in the United States simply to adopt the Primary Mathematics textbook series from Singapore (which already exists in two editions adapted to the United States in general and adapted to California curriculum standards in particular)

http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_US_Ed_s/39....

http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/1...

and thereby do much better than most United States schools do with any of the other existing textbook series.

Based on international textbook content analyses and other evidence, gathered and digested with the help of professional mathematicians aware of international K-12 teaching practice, the great majority of states in the United States have voluntarily adopted the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics

http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards/mathematics

and the next iteration of textbooks in the United States will CLAIM (with truthfulness of that claim yet to be verified) to follow that set of standards. I like what I have seen of those standards. I have yet to see any new textbook series that fully embody the best practice in mathematics teaching in other countries. The best elementary mathematics textbooks I have seen are in the Chinese language, published either in Taiwan or in China. Among English-language textbooks, the Singapore Primary Mathematics Series has been plainly superior for at least the last twenty years.

I can't imagine there's new branches of maths that we need to teach school kids about. (and same goes for a lot of other subjects)

I can more readily imagine new developments since my childhood in physics than in mathematics that would have to be reflected in elementary textbooks, to be sure. But textbooks would have to be updated in any country that does not yet have the best available textbooks, even if the subject of mathematics has not changed. There has been a growth in understanding during my lifetime about how to teach mathematics to elementary-age pupils. Content analysis of different textbooks used in differing countries has helped develop that growth in pedagogical understanding.

Moreover, at least two aspects of mathematics as encountered by most members of the public have changed in my lifetime:

1) today anyone in a developed country can buy an inexpensive calculating machine that is more generally useful than a dedicated office business machine of a generation ago, and

2) discrete mathematics plays a much bigger role in business and in industry than it did when the march to calculus was the main path in mathematics education for technical careers. Both of those changes would have to be reflected somehow in curriculum design for K-12 mathematics instruction.
>> Varying your content based on mobile User-Agent (or any User-Agent actually) renders public caches almost impossible to get right.

Interesting. What would you recommend doing instead, supposing, for example, that you are meant to be returning a different set of items depending on a device identifier, and that you have to support 100s of devices? Should this be considered a different resource instead of a different representation?

Also, can you point me to a nice resource about public caches?

Thanks!
> Some of the problems in this book are HARD, but they are generally well posed problems of actual research interest to mathematicians

Could you share a few examples? I've looked through the books from Gelfand's correspondence course (which are indeed excellent) but don't remember any problems that fit your description. Some of them would certainly be challenging for young children--I'm more interested in the second half of your statement.

I'll volunteer one potential example. There was a sequence of problems that dealt with the solvability by radicals of palindromic polynomials. That certainly motivates some ideas of Galois theory in no small way, but it's very basic and of no interest to research mathematicians.

Addendum: Now that I have looked it up in the book, I see it was a single problem, Problem 270, not a sequence of problems. That sequence of problems was from a mathematics competition for young children.
A casual inspection of Firebug shows that the only way JSONLint communicates with outside world when you click Validate is to report usage to Google Analytics. It certainly doesn't appear to be sending the actual JSON anywhere.
How exactly do you expect build any automated tooling around your ecosystem of raw socket applications?

For example: indexing

You're going to need something that solves the problems HATEOAS solves when it comes to multi-service coordination.
So, having used the software for a couple of hours, I've found at least three problems/bugs. Now we're going to see whether the price is justified and whether we indeed pay for support :-)
I've got one of these: http://www.avalontest.com/e-store/media/prod_full/hp_6236b.j...

It's terribly useful.

What you do is read the voltage you want from the device, turn the knob to the voltage you want and plug it in!

It was made in 1977. It works like the day it was bought i.e perfectly. I don't imagine a cheapy switch mode supply making it to 35 years old.

With regards to the "sweet DC juice" - it'll be full of noise if it's a switch mode supply. They're horrible devices that cause all sorts of local RF interference, noise and transients on the mains. Sometimes more than chucking an inductive load like a hoover on the line.

The only positive things is that they are small and cheap. They are definitely not good.

Also a switch mode supply does have a transformer! Just a small one.
I love my collection of Kinesis contoured keyboards. I have one huge grip with them, though: the function keys are spongy and too closely spaced. I regularly hit F1 when I meant to hit Escape. Do you (or others) find this irritating as well? It would be a flawless programmer's keyboard if only it used regular, evenly-spaced, mechanical function and escape keys.
Your example of the Prada disproves your point. The Prada sold unlocked for roughly $775. Hardly a cheap phone. The Sony/Ericsson P990 also sold for $700. So the iPhone was not sold at a significantly higher price than its competition.

So, Apple is doomed when faced by your criticism. Either they sell the stuff with new technology at a high price because of their cult following, or they're really not introducing something new. That's a pretty effective attack, since you can basically switch both tactics interchangeably regardless of any actual validity.
I wouldn't call the interview process at Google broken. While some of my coworkers are better than others, I've yet to encounter any that truly aren't at the top of our field. Whatever we're doing, however we may fail in other areas, the primary goal of interviewing--to find and hire highly qualified people--is something we're achieving.

Yes, we may be rejecting highly qualified people who would do well at Google, but interview poorly. As has been noted in the comments here and elsewhere[0] it's far better to reject a qualified candidate than accept an unqualified candidate. Though we'd all be happier with a higher true positive rate, we're not willing to accept a higher false positive rate to achieve that.

What we're not good at, and what we get lampooned for so frequently (e.g., this story) is that in our pursuit of minimizing our false positive rate, we come off as arrogant, sometimes condescending, and a number of procedural and legal problems exacerbate that appearance. I've interviewed people that were right on the threshold between "hire" and "no hire", and like Joel advises, I wrote down "no hire". I'd love to tell these people what would have swung my opinion and ask them apply again in a year, but I just can't: it's too dangerous.

As far as interactions with recruiters goes, I can't really speak to those issues, since my experience in the hiring process was atypical (though not at all distinct in the ways we've discussed here so far, e.g. being hired for a company and finding a position after an offer has been extended).

Now, to answer your question, I have never interviewed anyone for a specific position. Every single person I've interviewed has been for engineering as a whole. People get interviewed for specific job ladders (e.g. SWE, SRE, SET, etc.) but the specific teams/projects a person will work on is decided after they've accepted an offer, as I understand it (and experience it myself).

[0] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html
At the very least, watch the videos with Rich Hickey. Trust me, it is well worth your time.
Sounds like a high-maintenance angel investor.

"A related red flag is asking me a question or mentioning something that I've obviously addressed in a blog post."

This is a red flag for me from the other side. It comes off as out-of-touch to assume that because I want investment from you I will read through your entire blog. I'm sure there's quality information there but reading every post is not a high-value thing to do with my time as an entrepreneur.
Hubble Reveals a New Class of Extrasolar Planet
Another JSON tool that is less well known but also extremely useful is the JSON schema validator tool at:

http://json-schema-tester.herokuapp.com/
Did Bell Labs have a policy of researchers owning their inventions?

No, Bell retained the ownership (and revenue stream.)
different iterations of an software platform are not "fragmentation". Fragmentation means that the platform is divided into multiple incompatible versions.

That is not the case here: The Android team does a pretty good job in keeping Android forward-compatible. That means that right now, more than 93% of all Android devices can be targeted by the same API (Android Eclair).

What the author is actually analysing here is the penetration and legacy of new versions of the cross platform technology Android. How fast are manufacturers creating and updating operating systems that are based on a new version of Android? But that's not fragmentation.
What's the bottleneck? Bandwidth for downloading images? Understanding of an algorithm that would do the job?
That's a good question. The law is pretty complex and I don't pretend to understand it all, but the basic answer as I understand it is that piece work rates have to be calculated in such a way that you'll get the "prevailing wage rate" -- http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/14c/18e.htm

There are also exceptions for people with disabilities, special minimum wages (you can actually pay the disabled less than minimum... sometimes), etc.

So, I think the basic answer is that you still have to respect minimum wage, but how you do that is pretty complex.
Images in web sites? That hasn't been novel since .. well .. before html
[Photo] اجمل صور حيوانات مضحكة - كوميدية وبالضمان
Maybe I should have written that they ripped off Apples _implementation_ of the idea. Or maybe they were just "inspired".

The right question to ask is this: Would multiple capacitive multitouch phones similar to the iPhone have been introduced in 2007 / 2008 if the iPhone had never launched? Some people seem to think so, but I see no evidence that other companies were working on similar technology / user interfaces at the time, and plenty of evidence that they were caught off guard.
Is there a way to use OpenDNS from any location and permanently opt out of their NXDOMAIN hijacking? I know you can configure it from their website but you can only control your own domains so it doesn't work when you access a wifi hub. You also have to run that daemon all the time which seems like a slightly bigger privacy concern.

> We don’t persist logs for our users without accounts and configured networks, I’m not sure Google makes the same statement.

Does that mean that both my DNS requests AND my HTTP requests to whatever webserver is intercepting my requests to test.invalid (http://guide.a.id.opendns.com/?url=test.invalid) are not being logged? Does that mean my requests on wifi hubs that are configured with OpenDNS are being logged?

What does it mean to discourage automated DNS lookups? What else do I use it for? dig?

Couldn't one argue that it is a good idea to keep the number of companies that have access to your information low? From that perspective wouldn't it be prudent to use Google for everything?
I don't have time to read it either but its about: Bird-Meertens Formalism which you can find out about via google.
It would help if you told us what country you live/work in. If it's USA/Canada or most countries in the EU, then as others have said, you could go be a janitor for more money. If you're living in China, Russia or a 'developing' country, then that's probably pretty good.
WolframAlpha is a good visual tool also, and I often use it when I tutor math.
I'll probably lose a bunch of karma over this, but here goes.

This is my takeaway from the article:

The pragmatic approach means that the company (media companies) should accommodate the folks who:

1) Are so emotionally damaged that they can't perform the simple act of opening a door without making a mess (pay a couple of bucks for content that they like.)
2) Are so ill-mannered that they have no respect for the people they share a space with (take content without the creator's permission.)
3) Are so poorly socialized that any attempt to correct their behavior causes them to act out like a 5 year old by making a bigger mess (downloading even more stuff that they don't even really want.)
4) Are so lazy that they can't be bothered to take the simple action of taking the towel back to their desk and putting it in their own trash can (using the distribution channels the creator asks them to use.)

I find his argument unconvincing.