skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are iAds popular? In 3+ years of owning an iPhone I'm not sure I have ever seen one in the wild. I've used a fair number of free apps that have ads but not a single one of them used iAds.
Up-vote if you spend waaaaay too much time playing chess.

Sometimes I get into this "mental trench" and can spend several hours a day playing against people all over the world. In a strange way it sometimes helps me solve programming problems. Not sure how that works as it seems that I am thinking about the problem while playing fairly intense games. Maybe it simply helps get you into a flow state?
You are right, I was wrong saying no standard exists. It does exist, but is not followed unfortunately.
This has one major implication: killing ad networks. Or, more specifically, killing ad targeting and CPA.

Advertising is not going away. Let's face it, people are just not willing to pay when it comes to the type of games that are popular on the iPhone. That's in large part a result of the race-to-the-bottom environment Apple created with App Store. Advertising is what makes this economy work.

Whether it's ultimately a good thing or not to kill advertising is a debate I'm not going into (tho, I'd personally err on the side of it being a good thing long term). But, good ad targeting and CPA has the effect of improving the ad experience for everybody: making more money, and seeing more relevant ads.

Admittedly, I'm biased since I'm part of a mobile advertising startup, but I think Apple fucked up here. Having a way to uniquely identify a device across apps is very important. I'd suggest creating a unique identifier on device installation, and formatting the device would reset a new identifier. I know for a fact that if we were to play by Apple's rules, and this goes through, we're going to be very hurt by this change.
First of all, service providers have to give me a choice. Even if they offer a paid subscription it doesn't automatically mean they don't store personal information about me. These things would have to be part of the contract and I haven't seen many such contracts.

Right now, I don't feel I have any other choice but to block the trackers as aggressively as possible. I hope there will be better solutions in the future, because I really want to pay for services I like.
I dunno. That book is really dense and terse. It's a good reference book, but not something you'd read cover to cover.
As far as I can tell, this actually uses express.
You can run queries against XBMC sqlite database or use http://trakt.tv/ to keep all your XBMC in sync.
Anonymous fingerprinting sounds like a more sensible solution than something that allows advertisers to build a profile about the user of a phone over time like UDID.
Wasn't me, I actually think it's a good question, really made me think. In this instance I don't believe an "all or nothing" attitude about all IP is healthy. The same way an all or nothing attitude about taxes, war, death penalty, and freedom of speech is healthy. Too much protection and we get patent trolling, not enough protection and we get IP theft leading to less innovation and unfair treatment of the inventors. Naturally, our instinct is to share something with friends when we discover it. Which is why music and movies are pirated so much. Stealing IP, that's also a human instinct passed down from our lovely evolutionary primate relatives. To an extent it's beneficial (creative commons, github forking, open source projects) and too much stealing/borrowing is destructive to its inventors while really beneficial to the stealing party (Like the way China's been "borrowing" high speed rail and maglev technology from Siemens, Transrapid, and other companies and re-patenting everything with slight changes so they can avoid licensing costs and can resell the technology as "Chinese Innovation"). At that level it's really unacceptable, pirating music and movies here and there, that's entertainment, it's not right but it's not seriously destructive to society.
I don't think you understood -- I'm not suggesting we pass specific legislation detailing the cause of each accident after it happens. I suggest that we put in place generally applicable statutes for criminal negligence, manslaughter, etc. that would apply in case of malfunctioning industrial instruments. The law wouldn't change, but the market would automatically adapt and keep safe practices autonomously because the deterrent from the punishment was not worth the risk of cutting a few corners.
Thanks for the suggestion! Just deployed a new version that links to their page.
PostgreSQL also uses longjmp to implement TRY/CATCH macros:

https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/include...
Very well, apparently.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/571
But computers can only work with recursively ennumerable axiom systems. Humans do not have this limitation. The Incompleteness result shows that the natural numbers as defined by the second order Peano Axioms is different than the natural numbers defined by any first order system. Doesn't this have to with thought and rationality?
Wow thanks for the link to the csv. I just pushed a new version that uses that list!
And yet Deepwater Horizon still happened. If the regulations that all rigs must use equipment bit x, y, and z, certified by industry conglomerate w, weren't in place, then maybe new, much safer technology would have been developed that would have made the spill not happen. If the market needs permission from bureaucrats, who may or may not be corrupt, or needs a new law passed, to adapt or develop better solutions to its problems, then it's no wonder we are stuck on obsolete tech that is 50+ years old and that the revenue in regulated markets is entirely dominated by a small oligopoly that holds everyone by the balls (see also phone companies).
Strang's hand-wavy teaching style in my opinion kinda falls apart towards the later part of the course. I feel like the whole second half is kinda half baked. I didn't come away really having a good intuitive understanding of what the SVD was or why I should care about eigenvalues. I definitely think it's a good place to start though, but if you want something a little more organized I'd really recommend.

"Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra"

http://www.amazon.com/Matrix-Analysis-Applied-Algebra-Soluti...

It's very clearly written and all the proofs are not too long nor too short. It pretty quickly goes through all the stuff Strang covers and moves on to more difficult things.
Flint Township towing
IIRC there was some evidence of this found in research -- cited in "59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot". IIRC the study was focused on characteristics of 'successful' people where 'success' was defined in terms of societal achievements (e.g. monetary success, status). Ultimately, the gist was that, among other personality characteristics, people who identified as 'introvert' were more 'successful'. This may have absolutely nothing to do with intelligence, per se, but in my humble opinion; it probably does (not saying this because I identify as 'introvert').
If you have some C++ code linked, and use RAII (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initial...) then you won't have the destructors of the objects in the stack getting called. For example if you had a profiling kind of marker, that relies on C++ (instead of begin() end() kind of thing).
One annoying thing is that some programs want you to separate different email addresses with semicolons and some with commas. It's another hassle to translate between those two conventions.
One of the best I've read, too, and I've read hundreds. I also highly recommend '59 seconds' by experimental psychologist Richard Wiseman.
Cool, finally has what the big players have had for over 5 years (10 for some of the new features).
"Nobody embodies your userbase better than your mom"

That is not a universal truth.

Is your mother computer literate? How does she use web applications and her computer? How does she connect to the product? What niche does the application fill in her life, and is it truly a superior alternative to another product in her life?

What the article is getting at is that friends and family often show extreme positive bias. If you really have to use your friends or family as a feedback group, you'd be best off not telling them you built the application at all. If you're like "hey, check out this thing I found, it might be useful for you," you can get rid of some of the "My child/sibling/cousin/friend built this!" bias and instead only have to deal with the lesser bias of "My child/sibling/cousin/friend referred me to this product."
I think you are spot-on in suggesting that characteristics other than the quality of the schools are responsible for students' performance and learning at this point.

Seems to me that at some point we need to start focusing on parents and families instead of the schools themselves.

Clearly the educational system works reasonably well if the students have certain characteristics (wealthy, well-educated parents for one). So maybe we should be asking how can we "fake" those attributes for the students who don't have them?

It's not an easy problem to solve either way, of course. But after you've retooled the school system over and over for decades, trying a different approach seems only logical...
Heh, it was a jab at my co-founders.
'Usually' but definitely not always. Account ID is also usually at the application level, while Message-ID originates lower, at the mailserver level. When the app posts something off to the mailserver, how is it supposed to get the Message-ID back?

At least with the cruft, bounces are just handed back to the app to deal with.
While slightly off-topic, do read more of lesswrong.com if you are new to the site. I personally find the site to be a solid repository of useful/thoughtful content.
I think the requirement of the ETRY macro solidifies this as a neat trick, and not something you actually want to use in a project.

Forget ETRY once and you can kiss your afternoon goodbye while you debug.
It's easy to make any kind of mistake in any language. Singling PHP out for it because some people are shitty programmers is BS, IMHO. Not all of us are asshats who have no idea what we're doing.
Before everyone starts posting their Amazon affiliate links, look at the requirements that makes the LessWrong thread so valuable:

2. You must have read at least two other textbooks on
that same subject.
3. You must briefly name the other books you've read on
the subject and explain why you think your chosen
textbook is superior to them.

Rules #2 and #3 are to protect against recommending a bad
book that only seems impressive because it's the only
book you've read on the subject.
Idiorm&Paris: object-relational mapper and fluent query builder for PHP5
> I still believe the Halting problem can be solved in some sense of the word solve. But perhaps I'm being too pragmatic.

While its true there are some forms of functions that can be found to either halt or not, some can't. For example, ask the user for a boolean, and do a while loop based on this value. You can't say whether this will halt or not, but it does contain unspecified variables.

Then consider the Collatz Conjecture. We can't prove any other number then 1 actually reaches 1 without simulating the process. Since we don't even know if the next step will reach the destination, we can't make any decision about when it will halt. If we can't even decide it for such a simple function, then I don't think we can 'solve' it, even for a general 'solve'.
Ensuring that scores are reported correctly won't even start to fix our educational system. We don't need to cut down on cheating; rather, we need to realize that more data is not better data, that teachers know a lot more about teaching than we do, that the teachers were doing a hell of a lot better before we started measuring them, and that we should just let them do their jobs.
Perhaps he does, but I don't think he does so in the proofs of his incompleteness theorems.
Are porn site video players really better than youtube? From Reddit.
> The best teachers don't teach much really. Rather they inspire. The worst teachers may teach a lot, but they make you despise the material.

Going to my 11th grade Biology class every day, I used to joke with a couple friends "Do you think we'll be learning today?", "Ha ha, Probably not." The class was fun, not very serious, with the bulk of the period spent listening to our teacher tell stories. All that and the homework was always easy.

But at the end of the year, while studying for the final, we realized that we had learned a huge amount of biology. Our teacher had spent the classes telling us stories that related to the material, and the homework was easy because she inspired us to be interested in the questions being asked. I didn't remember toiling over the Krebs[1] and Calvin[2] cycles, but I certainly knew them. More importantly though, I found them interesting.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_cycle
I Don't know what hospitals you guys have been in, but my primary health care for the last 12 years has been Sutter in California. The hand-offs have been electronic (custom software, not word docs) for that entire time. The Doctors now carry around a tablet as well to update info about a patient. Before the tablets, every room had a PC for updating info. Maybe Sutter is just a special case, I was surprised at the article and some of the comments here.
This has one major implication: killing ad networks. Or, more specifically, killing ad targeting and CPA.

I for one won't be shedding any tears - as a woman that spends a lot of time on tech (and hence nominally male) websites, I am decidedly over getting ads for dating sites telling me how I'll be able to hook up with young women with no complexes...

Another classic - I hang out on some atheist sites, so of course I'm vitally interested in some Christian alpha course or what not - after all, I spend time on sites talking about religion, don't I?

The model is flawed. I find that so called targeted ads are almost entirely out of phase with my interests, almost comically so. That being the case, I'd rather not be giving unknown people the ability to more easily monitor my online behaviour.
We also seem to get along fine in space, under water, in low oxygen environments, in irradiated environments, in freezing environments...

The point of this is: who cares if the data center is warm/hot? It's as hot as that inside a mascot suit at a theme park, so they build cooling mechanisms into them. Tools exist for a reason, and it is somewhat ironic that we prematurely assume that our creations require the same environment for "comfortable" survival that we do. The animistic tendencies we have may not just be cultural.
Apple updates iTunes Movie Trailers app to work with the Retina Display
Thanks :) I also order the results based on frequency and I just pushed an update to the site that uses the official word list of "Draw Something".
I'm talking about Apple, not about developers. If Apple had returned SHA1(KeychainID + UDID) instead of just UDID when the SDK was released, then apps would never have seen the "real" UDID, and we wouldn't have this issue now. However, since Apple did not do that and they can't change the UDID now (for a variety of reasons, including various abuses of it by developers), it's too late for them to fix it now with such a simple change.
I agree about more data is not better data. I get the impression that its not just that they are doing standardized tests. I mean I remember doing quite a few California tests when I was growing up (I was born in 1977 so this was before No Child Left Behind).

But from what I hear, they have gone completely overboard with the standardized tests so that it takes up all of the time.

I don't see anything wrong with having a few simple standard tests to cover some important things. I think it is actually important to have some kind of holistic measurement and analysis and guidelines.

But clearly there are too many tests, too comprehensive, and the attempt to mandate actions based on the tests is repressive and even destructive rather than helpful.
This amuses me. In my experience I haven't seen any porn site player being faster or better than youtube; or may be I have too little experience to make a judgment on this. I find the fast-forwarding on youtube most efficient when compared to other video playing sites on web. The switching between full screen and half screen acts cranky at times, but other than that youtube videos run just fine. Also, many players don't even allow fast forwarding.
Top Free Apps for Android and iPhone : Feb 2012
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Comparing reading a dictionary definition to an encyclopedia entry, and complaining that the encyclopedia had more detail? Perhaps it'd be a fairer comparison if you compared reading the first paragraph of the wikipedia article to the dictionary definition
I wouldn't go so far as to call that "practical." It's a cute trick, but it becomes really annoying when trying to write libpng bindings for any environment other than plain C.
DIE BART, DIE
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But you still need the uuid for push messages, so how are they handling that?
The weak typing of PHP doesn't make life easier for the programmer in this instance.

For example, this specific problem is harder to create in stronger-typed languages, since you would need to explicitly cast from an integer to a string.
Who in the world are the 'mathematical police'?
This seems to me to be something that should have been issued as an OS-level patch.

Apple could prevent a lot of these issues by using an application-specific UDID generated by the device. Hash the UDID with a random salt generated from entropy on the device, and use it only for that app install. Developers then couldn't track you from install to install, or across their application ecosystems. Privacy issue averted.

Any existing calls that hundreds of thousands of applications make to currently get the UDID just return this application-specific one instead.
>>Even Python
Why "even"? Python is the most portable language today. It's portability between OSes superb and it "almost portable" between VMs (IronPython, Jython, PyPy).
Seattle's mad-scientist scene is booming
How to Backup Your Smartphone’s Data
These days, it is likely you use your smartphone for just about everything from surfing the web to reminding you of your appointments.
This is a really brave thing you're doing, I'm glad it seems to be working out for you.

A nitpick on spelling/word usage (sorry): I think instead of "in times of desparity" you want "in times of desperation". "In times of disparity" would be applied to something like a country.
As my colleague once said: "Java is the only modern language in which it possible to write millions lines of code".

I agreed with him.

Minute later he understood what he said <grin/>
Push notifications do not use UDID, they use a different device token.
I will end this too.

But I am not able to understand what problem young entrepreneurs actually have.

I know for sure that as a nation we are honest people. We pay for stuff as we always have been.

The problem is simple, India is a different nation and you need to build stuff that solves peoples problem and they will buy those solutions from you.

For a moment I can't imagine why anybody would blame the whole nation just because one start up failed. Or a certain part of the nation pirated something, which by the way happens around the globe. Most of such people are basically wannabe westerners and for whatever reason they just want to run from here. May be they think its honey and milk outside. Or may be they just want to go and settle down abroad.

All that is understandable and we Indians have no problems with that, but don't defame a whole nation to justify your actions. Writing books, blog posts and publicly ridiculing a whole nation just so that you can get your moments of glory outside.

My advice to any person starting a start up in India would be simple and straight. Understand what problems people have and solve them, give them a good pricing and people will buy it.

This is what big successes of India have been doing. This is what Tata's and Ambani's did, This is what NRN's and Premji's or the modern era did. They gave value to people at affordable prices. They built industries and sectors that has fueled India's growth for a decades now.

None of them wanted hit and run success with a tiny 3 web page MVC website and then expected the entire nation to make them millionaires regardless of whether the product they sold was useful to them. They faced numerous failure but they did go on and blame the whole nation for that. They looked internally and solved their problems.

Focus and build stuff that matters. Give a good pricing. The market here is huge. People will buy.
yeah, but giving rides from SFO is time consuming and costly. Gas could easily cost you $10, not to mention an hour of time. There's easier ways to do it, and as a startup, you need to be as resourceful as possible.
Fixed. Thanks. Not the best writer in the world.
As long as you stay busy, that's the key. I left high school after one year to do my own thing and since then have had some pretty extraordinary experiences. I recently left the institution where I had a full scholarship and will instead be getting my second degree (first bachelor's) within a year somewhere else– because the other things paused. I wish you the best of luck, but make sure that you don't let anything that happens close your mind. To stay on top of your game you have to be able to see when the game changes. If work ever dries up and you find yourself idling, don't be afraid to go back and do some of the things you didn't need before.

This message has been brought to you by Clonazepam and too much late-night circuit analysis... (I'll save the regret for not waiting to write later until the morning)
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Hey man, great job. Wonderful blog post, the only thing that bothered me about it was this part "I chose not to have much of a social life. That's because I want to go somewhere." As if to say that people with a social life aren't successful. Aside from that, great blog post, and good luck on the journey.

Can you explain the open government intern a bit more in detail? How was it that you were able to acquire it...I too would like to do something similar and I have felt an inclination to abandon post-secondary education.
They certainly could still add a new API which does something along the lines of what you describe while still deprecating the UDID API. The only real catch is that they'd had have to do it in such a way as to make it difficult to figure out the un-hashed UDID from the value they give you. It's certainly possible to do that, though. For example, instead of hashing the UDID along with the keychain identifier, they could hash it along some other app-specific or vendor-specific info which only Apple knows and is not shared with developers.
No worries. I'm excited for you to continue blogging about your progress, and you'll get better at writing along the way. Just don't want people missing the importance of what you've accomplished because of a few typos.
You can just keep typing while you're in the first text box :)
I definitely think that's a key point in all of this. And really I'm just 18. That's the really, really cool part. If I totally :facepalm: fail in two years, I can say, "Ok, college might not be a bad idea."
Joe Davis: The mad scientist of MIT?
Color anyone?