skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Someone on Reddit wrote a nice bookmarklet to use MathJax on pages where the site doesn't support it. You can get the bookmarklet here: http://web.mit.edu/jcalz/Public/Reddit/mathbookmarklet.html

Here was the Reddit discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/o6a2u/math_bookmarklet...

It supports both MathJax and TeX the World, which is what /r/math uses. However, that is no longer being developed, so for sites other than /r/math I think people should stick to MathJax.

The great thing about the bookmarklet approach is that it also works great on mobile devices. The previous solution for adding math to sites where the site owner won't support it was to use a greasemonkey plug-in or something similar, which generally left out mobile.

Here's some math if anyone wants something to try out with the bookmarklet.

The solutions of \(a x^2+ b x + c = 0\) are: $$x = {{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}\over{2a}}$$

Another example. Consider the continued fraction expansion of an arbitrary real number \(\alpha\):$$\alpha=a_0+{1\over{a_1+{1\over{a_2+{1\over{a_3+...}}}}}}$$.

Let \(\left\{p_n\over{q_n}\right\}\) be the sequence of convergents for this continued fraction.

For almost all real \(\alpha\), the limit as \(n\to\infty\) of \(q_n^{1/n}\)exists and $$\lim_{n\to\infty}{q_n^{1/n}}=e^{\pi^2\over{12 \log 2}}$$

For the curious, more information on that interesting limit can be found here: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Khinchin-LevyConstant.html
Absolutely the best material on Konrad Zuse's inventions can be found in archive.org captures. It's written by his son Prof. Horst Zuse:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040213064006/http://www.epemag....
Work is a Card Game
The Media are a group (or several large groups) and as such as subject to group-think like any other group. I believe a lot of conspiracy related accusations could be attributable to the natural tendency toward group-think.
He is also pretty well known in Germany. That (I guess you could call it local fame) seems about appropriate for what he did. He is no Turing, after all.

The new computer science and automation building of my university in Germany (now the second largest building on the campus) was named after Zuse. I would say that’s quite the honor and recognition, especially considering the other buildings are named after Humboldt, Newton (mechanical engineering), Kirchhoff (electrical engineering), Helmholtz, Leibniz (library), Röntgen, Curie and Faraday.
HN has a love/hate relationship with bitcoin? :-/
I don't think his starting point is arbitrary - the article referred to BAC at around 5 in December. Since the beginning of December when it closed at 5.53 BAC has beaten the Vanguard financials ETF by over 59 points (and SPX by over 67).
Right so we're discussing the reality of the situation, which is that web apps would have no choice but to force update (as they would be run server-side and hence the client wouldn't have a choice) and that native apps could be possibly, but aren't.
Because these are low power devices working at low frequencies, and it's about minimizing risk not eliminating it.
One of the more fascinating things about the history of computing is vacuum tubes where first commercially available in 1920 and several computing devices where so quickly built from them. When you look at how unstable early vacuum tubes actually where the gap where a computer was possible and when the first one was built was fairly small.
Hitting It Big In The Enterprise
It really doesn't matter what "computers" demand; it matters what you can live with.

Case in point: I recently discovered a bug in code I wrote back in 1999. The bug would only cause a problem early in the machinery startup sequence and only when a particular, buggy version of hardware was installed. Even then, it was fairly benign and showed an appropriate error message and would almost always work properly when the operator restarted the machine.

The point is that the majority of bugs that make it out the door are not showstoppers. The same complexity that causes bugs to be introduced can mitigate their impact: need a very specific, often rare, sequence of operations to invoke the buggy code. As a result, it's frequently the case that no-one cares about it.
> small credit unions can't offer all the fancy featurs of a multinational (like automatic online bill pay or whatever).

I've only banked with 2 credit unions, but both offered this feature. Maybe I was just lucky, but online bill pay seems like a solved space at this point.

If not, surely that's a solid start-up idea?
Am I the only one who finds this article unenlightening? I don’t disagree with its broad opinions, but it mostly seems a recounting of lawsuits in the public record.

Are there any factual breakthroughs, or is it mostly a rant? It seems very short on new information, and long on name-calling.

Again, it doesn’t mean it’s “wrong”, but rather it doesn’t rise to the level of being informative or corroborable. Trust me, I am inclined to agree with the tone but I don’t feel smarter for having read it.
Roughly, keymaster.js is focused on being small, while shortcut.js has been through a few iterations and is focused on being feature-rich. But they are both fairly small and they have many of the same features.
ABS: your wish is my command:

On Speaking vs. Writing: http://t.co/SYOqGZfm
I totally agree with you.

One of the most amazing things you see when people is bad at something is how they make excuses so they don't have to do the work. I have cached myself so many times making excuses. We tend to distort our world with fantasies.

This is like the people that are bad at meeting women, instead of admitting it and do something about it, they create excuses like "women love bad boy bastards, so because I want to be a good boy I don't want to meet women",in reality is more like "I don't want to accept that maybe just maybe they do something better than me I can learn from".

In Paul case it is "I don't want to learn to do better speeches so I invent the excuse: Doing better speeches will mean I will be a worse writer so I don't want to do it"

When you admit it is a temporal issue, when you are in denial it is permanent.

Could you tell me those speeches are devoid of content?:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V57lotnKGF8
It depends what you are showing. Seriously some stuff just has too much detail and. Less detailed version works better - was doing this for a logo the other day and there were three versions for different scales; all worked well but the larger ones were closer to the full logo.

Oddly the .ico format allows different versions for different resolutions, unlike most ther formats.
oh paul, what a mental block have created for yourself! the first sentence of your essay is "i'm not very good at __". well of course you're not going to be a good speaker if you tell yourself that.

you speak to high-IQ crowds and you discuss complex ideas. you don't have to be a JFK public speaker, but having a "beginner's attitude" and spending a few hours with a public speaking coach could probably work wonders for you and your audiences.
I followed the steps mentioned at http://dustwell.com/macbook-pro-sharp-edge.html

I basically just gauged it by eye. Light, slow, take your time.
A speaker's success is defined on how well they can connect with their audience and deliver their message in a way that the audience will understand. People usually enjoy speakers when they are speaking on a topic on which the people are interested compared to people not being interested when they are forced to listen to a speaker.
The same goes for written communication, you must connect with your audience and deliver a clear message. The difference becomes that a writer has the option to edit and change their communication before communicating with their audience.
Either way, successful written or verbal communication is determined by what our outcomes are for our communication. If you can communicate your point and influence the audience then you are a successful.
I'm working with my local Pirate Party to outlaw domain name seizures for the reason that it's asinine since domain names act as typically an address to content and can't violate any laws although the server hosting the content can still be. I also have further reasoning.

Unfortunately, it's for Australian domain names (.au). I think .au domain names are under USA jurisdiction due to AuDA's sponsorship contract with ICANN where ICANN is hosting Australian domain names on a nameserver. The sponsorship deal cost seems to be ~7% of domain names.

The Pirate Party is pretty great for entrepreneurs as they have many closely aligned motives. Did you know a Pirate Party in Czech is trying to make a constitutional amendment of an Internet Access right?
New catalyst for safe, reversible hydrogen storage
You could try USAA. They have all the bells and whistles (auto bill pay, check cashing app) and have great customer service and conservative lending practices.

EDIT: They have a unique organizational structure more like a co-op (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAA#Legal_structure)
When I was in undergrad my university offered an unusual course: "The History of Computing". The prof wrote the text for the course, but it was actually a pretty good book, unlike many prof written texts.

http://www.amazon.com/History-Computing-Technology-2nd-Editi...

Zuse was given his due in this book (and the course).

A recommended read if you're interested in the foundations of computing. It's oriented much more towards early computation devices than the PC era. If you want the story of Jobs, look elsewhere.
"Do yourself a favor and drop the stealth approach."

This advice isn't necessarily correct. Look at Zynga as an example: they regularly steal ideas from other companies because they have huge resources. If you announce exactly what you are doing before you even have any customers/beta testers, it will give a much larger company (with larger resources) to beat you to the punch.
Leaving your credit card sitting out unattended on a park bench is negligent. Buying things with a credit card is not negligence.
Why Speakers Earn 30k An Hour
Why so you need to configure someone else's IDE? Just produce a style checker ruleset (like Checkstyle) and tell team members they can use a non-standard editor if they want, but that any output that doesn't match the style checker will be rejected.

It seems to me that if you never allow anyone to use a different editor than you close your team off to the possibility of finding improved toolsets or workflows.
That wouldn't account for destructive interference.
1) Have an offering which is extraordinarily difficult to hire for at the moment which...

2) ... accelerates growth of the startup in ...

3) ... a demonstrable manner as evidenced by...

4) ... past successes which are identifiably associated with your name in...

5) ... the minds of people who have authority to cut checks.

That's really the most helpful answer I can give you. "Learn SEO, A/B testing, AdWords, viral acquisition, etc etc." is also as true as the last 47 times I said it but less complete as an answer. There exist few reliable ways to hire for these at the moment and they are, at least potentially, all worth $$$$$$. However, putting out your shingle doesn't get you $x0,000 on your first week.
Don’t Think Big. There, I Said It.
If one could write a fit function that returns a value correlated to the meaning of such random image, some genetic algorithm could be used. Also, this would be a perfect project to finally nuke copyright on images. Could also work with random texts, code, etc. Even better, a random piece of code could be evaluated on a simple "does it compile" basis. Hmm, I better get to work.
Right, exactly.

With careful precautions, Bitcoin can, I'm sure, be used anonymously. (Mine the coins yourself, connect to the network using TOR, never use your computer for anything else, be paranoid, never pay for a transaction that could be linked to you, etc).

By this argument, credit cards can be used anonymously too. But everyone isn't going around saying that credit cards are anonymous.

If, sometime in future, Bitcoin happened to be commonly used for online commerce, by casual, semi technical users, then, with the system as its currently implemented in clients, most of most peoples transactions are going to be very obviously linked to other transactions that are linked to their real identities.

If, as the implementation currently stands, casual users were doing their Amazon.com shopping using Bitcoin, Bitcoin probably wouldn't look very anonymous to Amazon at all.

I can only guess how anonymous it looks to Mt Gox.
Out of your three examples, only the last one is an argument for cash over cards. Is that the reason why you prefer cash? Or is it the privacy thing?
Redefining Pragmatic Programming
Culturomics: Words have life cycles
A must read. Christopher Shea writes: "The authors even identified a universal "tipping point" in the life cycle of new words: Roughly 30 to 50 years after their birth, they either enter the long-term lexicon or tumble off a cliff into disuse."
This seems to miss the distinction between a good speaker and a good speech. Just as there are good writers and good posts. Speakers and writers require practice, discipline to improve their craft. Speeches and blog posts should have purpose, entertain and inform.

The best way to measure a successful speech is to see what the audience walks away with. Usually, the audience walks away with a few lessons, not verbatim recall of the words spoken or written. Steve Jobs and J.K. Rowling's commencement speeches are two of my favorites. Stories provide entertainment but the lessons they learned are what the audience walks away with: life is short, chase your dreams.
Fred Wilson Crosses the Line
there will be no factual breakthroughs until someone in the know actually discusses what happened in a case.

for example, if a GS employee spoke out about what really happened with el paso and kinder morgan (they were advising el paso in a buyout while owning stake in KM), then we'd really see AGs and others go after the banks
It happens with poets too. Some poets used to read their poetry to an audience, and if it wasn't shallow enough to be understood by the average person, they were booed. Great ideas need time to be understood and absorbed, and a listener simply doesn't have the time.
Sometimes nothing bad will happen, for certain values of "bad."

Have you ever had to do Risk Analysis? I have to do it on my (an others') code pretty frequently. One thing to consider is what is the "bad" thing that can happen. If the worst impact of the bug is that a line of text has an extra period at the end, that's generally not a big deal. If the database is corrupted because an extra period causes a parse error; that's High risk.

The entire planet is imperfect, yet we stumble through life somehow.
"As you decrease the intelligence of the audience, being a good speaker is increasingly a matter of being a good bullshitter."

I don't think intelligence has as much to do with it as whether or not you've convinced the audience to care about the topic. If the audience doesn't care, they will be looking for other ways to pass the time, such as laughing at jokes.

Now, it may have to do with intelligence or it may not. But I believe my perspective is more useful when writing or speaking because it leads to a more obvious solution. Rather than going around looking for smart audiences, you can instead look for audiences that have a reason to care about the topic, and then find the most concise way possible to tell them that reason at the beginning of the essay/talk.

It's also a lot less condescending, quite frankly.
As the Winter Ends, the De-Dollarization Begins
You haven't made any technical points. You just waffled nonsense about scalability. I see you're bowing out of the argument because you have no case. Once you have interrupts on a platform, you have polling. If you're stuck with polling you can't recover interrupts. Which is why we have websockets decades late. The truth is there is not tension between interrupts and polling. Interrupts are plainly superior, since you can opt out of them trivially. But the platform should not opt out ahead of the developer. This turns out to be inadequate, so we get polling implemented inside interrupts and then a separate mechanism for interrupts. And the interrupt driven stuff has stupid reload buttons and so forth on the GUI. It's dumb engineering because increases complexity and leads to bad results for the user. You have no case. Polling is dumb. And if you think software engineers ever needed "good reasons" to add a bunch of pointless complexity to things, then you simply have no clue on the history of software development.
There is very little useful content in this essay, and the arrogance with which is presented has clearly rubbed some the wrong way. Let's address the same topic with reminders of what most of us know but might like to have a handy cheat sheet for.

Speaking:

Lets the audience see your face and body.

Lets the audience connect with your emotional state.

Lets you use humor based on timing, intonation, homonyms, slapstick, etc.

Lets you gesture for emphasis and explanation.

Lets you use rhythm and volume.

Lets you interact with a crowd rather than an individual.

Lets you control the speed and continuity of information transfer.

Gives the opportunity to match words with other dynamic visuals.

And this is with only one person talking on a stage. The superset of oral communication, of which the speech is a tiny subset, is huge.

Writing:

Can contain far more information in a longer form.

Can contain far denser information assuming that a reader can re-read and grok at their own pace.

Is much easier to compress, store, transfer and search.

Allows for footnotes, citations, links etc which encompass a freedom of consumptive flow. (Do I read the footnote now or come back to it?)

Also a bit less clearly, writing:

Is considered more serious. 'put it in writing' vs. 'just hot air.'

Often takes considerably more time to produce, lending it implied value.

May be assumed to be the end result of a great deal of careful thought.

----

It takes a lot of time to add the skills of persuasion and performance to the skills of thinking clearly, generating good ideas, and writing them down. It also means you get to convey fewer ideas in the same amount of time.

Perhaps PG isn't willing to make this tradeoff, but there is a lesser and necessary tradeoff to be made.

A speech does not have to be an entertaining performance, it can be terse, information packed, and extremely useful. The annoying thing though is that for any public speech to work it has a set of things it needs to avoid. Pauses, twitches, perspiration, clothing faux pas. Stupid things that distract an audience.

While PG is correct that you can have a beautiful content free performance, that really isn't his concern. What does he care how other people speak? Instead he should focus on perfecting the basics of public speaking technique so his audience forgets about the medium and can concentrate on his ideas.
I understand and agree with you, so I will take back that statement and simply say that that was my impression and not what was actually meant.
From the article:

As disclaimers go, Glass' is weak, something he acknowledges.

"It seemed best for the story if this were kept a little vague," writes Glass. "I thought it would be lousy and undermining and killjoyish if—at the end of a story—a radio host came on and said 'that wasn't true.' Seemed nicer and more artful to simply raise the possibility that it might or might not be true. I figured: the audience is smart. A little goes a long way."

Edit: the money quote from Gladwell is good too:

"My story was true in spirit," he e-mails. "The details were happily and gleefully and deliberately exaggerated and embellished and made up by me—and I am quite sure that not a single person in the audience the night I told it thought otherwise. Anyone who would fact check a tall tale like that either has no sense of humor or is on crack."
Interesting. I was under the impression that in order to get the good stuff through them, you had to be in the military.
I don't claim any expertise or insider knowledge, but I do recall during the crisis getting the distinct impression from publications like FT, WSJ, and NYT that BofA was strong-armed by The Fed and/or Treasury to acquire Countrywide and ML.
The counter-example is Kathy Sierra. I don't know if she still gives talks, but her presentations at SXSW several years ago totally change the way I think about app development. She also had an excellent blog, but her presentations were even better because she used the slides to both show examples and also heighten emotional momentum (which in itself the theme of her work - making your apps loveable).
Which requires that people use Chrome, running a web-browser to run native code that gets JITed from bitcode... at that point, why not just pull the blocks from the Jenga tower and run native code on your processor through an executable file loaded by an operating system?
I think you have a point that "I don't want to be a good speaker" implies something negative about being a good speaker. In context it can be understood as being a good speaker is in opposition to the goal of having better ideas. Perhaps a less controversial phrasing would be "I don't want to put forth the effort towards becoming a good speaker".

However, a more in depth reading is that being a good speaker is in opposition to the process of improving one's ideas. His example of being captivated by a good speaker, but on further reflection realizing how little content was conveyed, is a case-in-point. You lose the important signal of audience engagement with your ideas if you dazzle them through charisma. Without charisma to charm your audience, all you have left is whether your audience was engaged through the quality of your ideas. So in this sense being a good speaker is in fact in opposition to developing good ideas--you're losing meaningful signal regarding their quality.
I don't know any drug dealers who take that.
Author of the article here.

If you read the closing paragraphs of the article, you will see that I do talk about the physical size of the final representation of the pixel-based icon. However, just because you can use more pixels on higher-resolution displays, it does not mean that you can just take a highly detailed vector artwork and display it.

Being able to display very intricate details for each icon is not necessarily the end goal. The end goal is to preserve the clarity, which is why smaller icons (physically, not pixelwise) should have smaller amount of detail compared to larger ones.

In your example, a 128x128px icon that occupies the same physical size on an extra-high DPI screen as a 16x16px icon on a lower-end screen can (mathematically) have 8 times as much detail along each axis. Just because this is possible to do without losing the signal quality on the level of individual pixels, does not mean that it is desirable from the UX / UI perspective.
There is also the risk that they steal small amounts from you and you don't realize it. This won't happen if you check your statements but I don't always and there are enough small charges for me not to notice if I was charged a small amount extra every month.
So in a few years, the govt. will get a report at the end of the year showing that model Swede citizen has bought more than the recommended amount of meat or alcohol or, heavens forbid, has bought tobacco products. And not enough fruit/veggies. So the friendly Swede govt. will "recommend" that model Swede citizen fork over an insane amount of money and "optionally" attend re-education classes in healthy living. Can you spell Big, Big, Big Brother?