skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a fervent math addict whose enjoyment reaches into my choice of programming language (functional) and who would be delighted to be gifted a text on differential forms, I think this question deserves to be asked.

Math teaching is being carried along with a thousand year momentum and while the current curriculum made sense when many jobs involved building catapults, bridges, ships or cathedrals and jobs as a carpenter or mason were more numerous, they make little sense now.

Notice also that most of these subjects were set at a time before education was necessary so that if you went into say a gymnasium; odds were you wanted to be a teacher, academic or engineer. So topics like trigonometry, geometry, calculus and higher algebra (matrices, analytic geometry) made sense.

But these days, the vast majority of people do not need these subjects. On top of that there is a great crime. The most pertinent topics to modern living are given short thrift. Subjects like understanding basic statistics (including mean, mode, median, stdev, and variance), probability (including expected value), basic decision theory and estimation. All of these would have far more use to every day life and could be fully taught in the context of how they would help in real life (media, gamblers fallacy, money management etc).

Advanced topics would be things like distinguishing conditional and joint probabilities, counting (combinatorics), graphs and networks, exponentiation and logarithms, common plots (logistic, exponential, parabolic), rate of change, and the relationship between a circle and triangle (must be taught with animations). These things actually still have use to many people.

There is also the question of should math be taught at early years at all? A 12 year old can probably compress their previous 7 year math eduaction to 1. Maybe just numbers, (Z,+) or (Z,*)? I don't know but I think the question of if math education starts too early deserves to be looked at. The current hatred is in part due to a cycle of teachers who hated the subject having to force learn it in college and then having to teach it by force in addition to other subjects they may be stronger in.

Instead let the child's curiosity guide them. So they would arrive not by force and a bunch of unmotivated subjects but by curiosity. To augment the lack of math classes there will be game classes to teach reasoning. Not just video games but also card, dice and board games - with the caveat that the game must be PSPACE complete. Just let the kids play and compete. Maybe they will learn the same type of reasoning that will be useful to learning about chains, posets, groups, first order logic or probability. The more determined may even go read about the topics.

For video games the game must allow scripting. I think such a policy would just about eliminate thoughts of the pointlessnsess of math.

Kids are not dumb, they will do impressive things if it interests them. Adults make this mistake of underestimating kids all the time e.g. whenever they say things like "whaoh that was done by a 12 year old?!"
Ask HN: Old projects you'd sell or give away?
Google needs to sell Motorola, but doesn’t know it
Very Sneaky, Google Plus...
Carpathia blasts government for hypocrisy on Megaupload servers
Its true you should consider who your users are.

But these numbers shouldn't be used to determine what size to make a website. I'd guess most people with 1920x1080 monitors don't maximize their browser.
Wouldn't accidentally branching to null always cause problems?
"Nokia's challenges have been exacerbated by rampant competition - notably from Apple and Samsung who are extracting a disproportionate amount of margin from the industry at present,"

Disproportionately high or low ? I guess what they are saying is that smartphone profitability is falling due to lower margins.

MS/Nokia are in huge trouble, especialy after seeing that report that google makes almost no money off smartphones. It seems the only way for Nokia/MS to really compete with google is to also make no money. Sounds like Nokia is now in the wrong business.
Not at all, what's your username?
I pretty much don't know. Finance and gaming seem to be the only sectors that value systems-level performance above being a web page.
How about a cat? There is no snooze button on a cat that wants to be fed. :-)
Pandora unveils "Inside the Music" Program, opens its Music Genome Project
Listen to music while coding? It has dramatic effects
I don't necessarily call bullshit, but I can't help but question what was cut out.
Technology Review Interviews Drew Houston
Who owns what you write on the Internet?
I don't think his claim was predicated on the success of Android in China, but rather upon the general success of OEMs shipping Android phones. It has users and an ecosystem which WP7, interesting though it is, can't claim.

Many people would have lept at a Nokia smartphone running Android, given the consumer goodwill they've built up over the years. Few seem willing to do so for Nokias running WP7. Android was a proven platform with wide adoption when they announced their support for WP7; their decision to hitch their wagon to MS can only be seen as a grave mistake.

Maybe things will turn around, but it doesn't look likely at this point.
Facebook's Seventh Employee Shares Lessons Learned
It does not appear to be e-ink, and they do not claim to be e-ink... The kickstarter mentions a backlight, which makes me think it is not e-ink.

I can't say for sure, but the display appears to be this one: http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/1-26-inch-memory-lcd.html or something like it.

It's an always on display with ultra low power consumption for static displays, so I think that is what they basis of the e-paper name. Seems a little dubious to me, but the watch still is very neat.
Recommendation with Past and Present
The Future is Never What it Used to Be
Google Hangouts without the Google: Meetings.io (YC W11) goes live
Here's an implementation of FizzBuzz on Compilify: http://compilify.net/3b
How about the episode where a pair of bumbling bad guys try to kidnap Swarmy to produce their honey, which they then sell!

Not only does the gang need to rescue Swarmy, but they also need to teach Swarmy to trust humans again...
Window Cleaning in Summit County | Colorado
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You need to check your netiquette documentation, because that's not what ad hominem means. I'm not arguing with Apple users and trying to tarnish their reputations via unrelated attacks.

I'm making the specific point that their loyalty drives their opinions (frankly I don't even see why you even think this is controversial -- it happens everywhere, in every subject). And that because of their (your) preponderance in this community (again a very uncontroversial fact), it seems like (this is my conclusion drawn from above) more people are souring on Google than is really true. QED.

Now, maybe you disagree with some of those facts. But none of that argument is based on attacking anything unrelated about you guys.

(edit: I shouldn't have bitten. Go away, troll.)
Simply obliterating them kills Windows Phone for good, I cannot imagine M$ wanting such things.
I contemplate killing all world leaders every next day due to such articles.
Yet, they're still alive. Does that mean I'm going to jail?

Are we that dumb yet? I bet in a decade or so, if things keep going the way they are, it will be a reason to actually be jailed/fined.
And that's scary. Maybe I should stop contemplating ;-)
It's a bit too chunky for me, i.e. requires a high screen resolution to view content properly - similar to what they did with their webmail service, but at least with that you can switch it to a compact mode. I think Google's employees may have a skewed view of the web due their high end computers.
The most important step is to get up.

It's the best approach when sane-me wakes up first, but usually a totally different personality wakes up first. It can justify almost anything in its effort to stay in bed. Kinda creepy actually, it's what I'd imagine having a multiple personality disorder is like. It's not even a voice, I am not "me" when I wake up :-)
I said it before, and I have not changed my opinion:

In the Microsoft -Nokia agreement Microsoft wins disproportionately and Nokia loses even if it wins.

If Nokia wins e.g with tablets, other companies will use Windows, if it loses stock price goes down and Microsoft buys it(now officially) for cheap.

Elop looked and looks like a MS insider designed for the transition from Nokia to Microsoft subsidiary.

Funny how Samsumg and Apple margins are "disproportionate" when Nokia used to carry those margins with their high quality phones.
48Craft Rs 500 Discount Coupon Code
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I don't get the "don't aim for 100%" point

For me the point of that one is that test coverage isn't the goal - good code is.

I've seen folk disappearing down a rabbit hole focusing on getting that last 2% of branch coverage using some baroque mock object monkey patched into the system. Their focus was on test coverage. What people who focus on test coverage get is an evil complex test suite that's very brittle in the face of change.

Other, smarter, folk go "damn - I can't test that easily - this code sucks", factor out unrelated functionality into appropriate classes, add some code that makes some duplication between branches obvious, factor out the duplication and end up with something that's better code, with simpler tests - and better test coverage too. Their focus is on the code - not the test coverage.

[Edited for... erm... English]
> Unscramble these mixed-up words:

> cilhd

> entcered

> mraketing
By going with android Nokia would have sold phones and definitely would have seen their overall unit sales increase. As we've seen of late, google itself makes almost nothing per mobile phone sold. That means any revenue/profit made off selling android units are split between the handset manufacturer and the carrier.

Instead of having a good chunk of that massive growth to 70%, they chose WP7 which lost them marketshare, and still have to split any money made with the carrier AND MS.

I don't see how this is currently a win for them atall.
Write just enough tests at the level where it catches most of your regressions...make sure you didn't make a stupid off-by-one mistake.

One thing that I've seen in inexperienced coders (including myself in the past) is that they tend to think of every bug as a fluke one-off mistake in an otherwise mostly flawless and awesome record. New coders tend to want to just fix a bug, then pretend it didn't happen.

This is exactly the wrong attitude to take. As a discipline, we programmers should be studying our mistakes and taking steps to prevent them in the future. As a craftsperson striving to improve, each of us should be studying our own mistakes and taking steps to prevent them in the future.
Justifying 1 Billion Dollars for Instagram
I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that it cheaper to make a "15 inch" 16:9 screen than a "15 inch" 4:3 screen. The later is bigger, but your typical consumer shopping based on marketing materials won't be able to figure that out.
I set the thermostat so that it starts to become uncomfortably warm in bed right around the time I want to get up.
Tech Hub Envy, or why you should stop trying to be Silicon Valley
I don't know how many times me and friends went about how to rob a bank. Surely we should be set on fire.

More than that, Apple "contemplated" it, then decided against it, maybe because, like "oh that doesn't sound legal, we can't do that" ?
And, I don't like Apple. But that's no reason.
I put my alarm across the room next to a glass of water and a ritalin tablet.
It's a little hard to be up in arms about this alleged price fixing. Yes, it's anti-consumer and might end up costing us a few dollars, but if the DOJ is looking to make some real change, I'd argue that this isn't the best use of their time. Let's remember that we still have too-big-to-fail banks and an associated industry that the Dallas Federal Reserve says is on the brink of putting us into another bailout situation.

To make a comparison, it's like candidates arguing over birth control issues and glossing over the 3 wars and financial crisis we're in. Yes, very important, but there are some more pressing matters that are being largely ignored.
Fast HTML5 Web UIs for Every Device with Boris Smus
Amen. I started my development career with PHP, and the cacophony of intermingled responsibilities and languages in most PHP scripts is deafening. It wasn't until I learned how to apply good OO design to PHP that I enjoyed using it.
That being said, I still don't work with PHP unless I have to. I still don't like its mixed naming scheme for string/array functions or its clunky hash/array syntax.
At least the object support is reasonable.
This looks like the BK Kids Club of the 90's. "e-m@le" even looks like Kid Vid: http://www.progressiveboink.com/mike/img/bkkidsclub/kidvid.g...
Think of an old-fashioned tape computer. You feed the computer the tape, which causes the computer to do this or that in memory.

Initially, it knows nothing, but it is built to read in the tape, starting from the beginning. Then from there, what it reads on the tape controls what happens next.
Aiming for any specific ratio is missing the point. I think the only rule worth following once you're testing at all is never make it worse unless you understand why you are doing so.
On facebook page I can hardly find an empty space, but redesigned google+ has so much white space on each page...white space can be used for postit notes
I find that I have an easier time getting out of bed if I get up when I wake naturally. I almost always wake about 30 minutes before my alarm goes off. In the past I just went back to sleep, but when 30 minutes went by I felt groggy and sluggish.

Hopping out of bed right when I wake up, even if it costs me 30 - 45 minutes of extra sleep, makes it so much easier.

My fiance has been using this alarm application where she inputs the time she's going to bed and it shows best and worst times within the sleep cycle to be woken, it works well. I have a feeling this is what I'm doing on my own by getting up when I wake up.
Pyles acts as the negotiator.
Trying to port libc as we speak.
This is a highly plausible scenario for how the price could have gone from a more sensible $300M to $1B if Instagram said no to a sale and raised a round instead.
Because you can do this at runtime.
I might have a different value everytime I call the function but this means that inside the fucntion the compiler knows the value can't change
I wrote BugHub mainly as a learning experience; it is my first iOS app. I also use GitHub issues myself, so I wanted to build something I could use.

I've had similar requests for Redmine too, and if the demand is great enough it's certainly something I would consider. But honestly, I've had more people ask for BugHub on the iPhone than a Redmine or FogBugz app... and GitHub has their own iPhone app.

For the moment, this is a learning experience for me and the little extra cash on the side is just a nice added bonus.
Anyone know how to get the humungous right gutter to shrink without hiding the chat element?
If I could just set my "Friends" circle to be the default function of the Home button (something I've wanted dating back to my first 5 minutes using the service) I would probably actually use Google+.

"Home" being "EVERYTHING" is just a disaster. I want to see what the people I actually personally care about are up to first and foremost, and then I want to browse around to what the rest of the Internet is doing. Instead, everything is shoved down my throat all the time.
Mintek, Enterprise Asset Management, Hospitals, save money budget
I've always enjoyed Testivus on test coverage metrics[1]

[1] http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2010/07/code-coverage-goal...
this is the process I try to use

1) fact finding - define project scope

1a) solidify goals and deliverables.

2) pseudo code or mockup

3) implementation and iterate, many jumps back to 1a

4) alpha test - iterate to 1a

5) beta test - iterate to 1a

5a) complete internal documentation

6) release

that whole complete internal documentation is the sanity check when you compare it to the original goals, and then back to your pseudo code or mock up.

The author is 100% correct on the importance of good documentation and more than anything I think it forces you to put the time in to actually think about what you have done and compare it to what you were trying to do instead of blasting off into the next project.
Every 22 year old programmer is a guru who will lead us all to the light and tell us what people look for in hiring and tell us what's good to hire people for.
I tried just jumping out of bed and getting going, but it ended up with me failing more often than not. What works for me is to ease into waking up with a set, autopilot-type routine, something you can do without even thinking about it. Wake up, get out of bed right away, walk to the bathroom, start the shower, get in.
Good Morning, Interwebs: A daily dose of positivity.
But consumers did not choose 16:9 over 16:10, because consumers cannot tell the difference. We can thank TV panels for that switch:

LENOVO: "Again, we can thank the LCD manufacturers for this change. By cutting everything in the same aspect ratio, they have less waste per large sheet of glass. Since these manufacturers make more selling TV displays than laptop displays, the PC vendors have almost zero say in this change. We simply have to adapt."
http://blog.lenovo.com/perspectives/display-ratio-change-aga...

> Really the notion that manufacturers, except for brave Apple, unilaterally decided to force this on users is completely asinine.

In the case of the iPad, it's completely true. Apple decided that 4:3 screens were the best form factor for a hand-held tablet. So they made 4:3 happen, rather than settle for common and cheaper 16:9 or 16:10 screens. Guess what ratio Android tablets use.
I think you might be misreading what I wrote. While your points are correct, I was specifically referring to "off-by-one mistake", which is a common "silly" error (since many indices are zero-based, it's often easy to request one too many elements, or chop off the first item).

Also the way you quoted me above, "make sure you didn't make a stupid off-by-one mistake" looks like it's talking about writing just enough tests. However, in context, I'm actually referring to writing unit tests for small items where you might make a stupid off-by-one mistake.

So I was never referring to "one-off mistakes", as in mistakes that are flukes.

Your points are all good otherwise! Never rest on your laurels and always think about what you can do to catch your mistakes.
Purely functional programming? I dunno, what's the asymptotic cost of flipping a switch on a box and watching it warm up[1]?

Nobody advocates purely functional programming, at least not in the implementation of a language itself, but it can be an incredibly valuable model for a language interface. In the same way, a stack (or better yet, semi-infinite tape) can be an incredibly valuable model for a language interface at well. Functional programming is, by definition, just another way of saying that your model of computation is based on the lambda calculus instead of a Turing machine. You can just as easily ask what the asymptotic 'cost' of using a non-random access Turing machine is.

If people really want a functional language with a purely functional implementation, then you have to say 'farewell' to even things like tail-recursion, since you can make the argument that converting recursion to a loop is anti-lambda calculus.

EDIT: It seems there's some confusion over the distinction between implementing a purely functional algorithm in a language and implementing an language in a purely functional manner. My point is that, even if you implement your algorithm in a purely functional manner, if your compiler is simply converting it to a (well-optimized) imperative, destructive code behind-the-scenes and making it appear to be immutable, then this entire question is rather beside the point.
[1] (With apologies to Simon Peyton Jones).
This is a pretty easy question to answer, and calendar arithmetic is not how you do it.

If you want to do something, you don't need much math. If you want to do it WELL, you do.

The second you want to optimize something, you need math. Whether you're figuring out the analytics of an A/B test (stats!), or finding the best inputs for optimal outputs (set a derivative equal to 0 anyone?), or making an algorithm more efficient by lowering its asymptotic complexity.

You can do stuff. Math just makes it better. Like salt on bland food.

Full disclosure: I'm defending my PhD in math in 2 months! My opinions may be biased.
Wonderful. But its really the window that matters, right?
Similar in principle to Reed-Solomon coding, we have Shamir's Secret Sharing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamirs_Secret_Sharing

It lets you divide a message into (say) three parts, where any two parts are necessary
and sufficient to reconstruct the message. Or into seven parts, where you need all the
parts to reconstruct the message. Or whatever. The wikipedia page gives a very readable
basic introduction to how it works.
Isn't that because those who die in their sleep aren't discovered until the morning?
To submit a job application, please fork this repository and commit your entry in the programming challenge. Then send us a pull request [on github] with a comment that says you’re looking for a job.

Unless I misread this the challenge is only available for people who are publicly job hunting, which is a small percentage of eligible coders. I believe I've seen this before as "tweet us your resume".
The plan was to obliterate Symbian and replace it with Windows Phone. Symbian probably died faster than they planned.
"I’ve realized that it takes the product visionary to be the leader. It’s not the entrepreneur who has the business background to just plan an idea. If I had been in Mark’s shoes throughout the Facebook experience I would have made a lot of by-the-book decisions that would have been the wrong decisions for the company."
I don't think it is - Its linked at the top of http://www.groupon.com/occasions, which can be gotten to from their normal flow.

This is totally real.
Nice read.

I'm no Rails dev, so I'm curious about this one point from DHH:

> 6. Don't use Cucumber unless you live in the magic kingdom of non-programmers-writing-tests (and send me a bottle of fairy dust if you're there!)

I mostly do C#, and teams I've recently been on have found SpecFlow tests to be an excellent time saver in communicating requirements and acceptance test criteria with customers. Has Cucumber not been designed for the same purpose?

I might guess that David included the point because a product business such as 37signals has no non-programming stakeholders to communicate about requirements and acceptance criteria with.

Using BDD for having non-programmers write tests sounds far-fetched to me indeed. It's excellent to have them able to read and understand the tests, though. Any opinions? Is BDD as dead horse, or is DHH a little narrow minded here?
It's Instagram app's photo filter that made $1B.
I think the only feature that makes Instagram stand out is its after effect filters because it totally changes the look and feel of the photo. ain't it?