skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I went to college I had so many credits to start due to AP courses/exams I had taken in HS that I started effectively in mid-sophomore year. I didn't know what I wanted to major in or do for a career but I was quite good at math and I enjoyed it so I did that, and ended up with a Bachelor's with a mathematics major before I could drink alcohol legally. Later I discovered my passion for the software craft and went down that road.

Do I use any of the math I learned even in high school today? Almost never. And certainly a lot of the math I learned in college I have not used at all since then.

That said, I would still do the same thing again if I had the choice. The mental tools I acquired through having an extensive education in mathematics have served me immensely well in my career and elsewhere. So much of math is about following or evaluating the conclusions to assumptions, which is the very foundation of science and of computer science as well, but also critically important in engineering, craftsmanship, and especially in troubleshooting. So much of software development comes down to research, investigation, logic, and the scientific method, and the skills I built up in studying math have given me a very sharp edge in that regard even over folks who have CS degrees from quite good schools.
The WP7 and iOS versions are pretty similar. The only device that has specific code if the iPad, to support a different layout of the controls.

As to the gotchas, we did a talk at AltDevConf a couple of months ago that was just about that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOnUog6WeUU

The second part is about Infinite Flight and how we ported the app from WP7 to iOS using MonoGame and MonoTouch.

If you eventually get the app, let me know what you think, and don't hesitate to leave feedback on our uservoice site :)
Messages Alert Insanity
what is a farmer doing posting in HN?
What is the benefit of this vs just pressing "upload photos" button on the phone itself? Why do I have to find a computer?

I get the mobile-to-mobile bump application, but can someone illuminate me on this one.
Yes, but you don't have the right to tell the retailer what price they must sell your product at. The trouble began when they went back to Amazon and said, "You must sell at the price we agreed on with Apple and nothing less."
New APIs look great! I would love to see the ability to increment a value via the API instead of pushing the total. We have a lot of events we would love to track, but don't want to store the total locally.
I think the truthfulness of your statement varies based on the local laws, welfare state, immigration and job area.

Under the right set of conditions, I can see employers struggling to hire staff. However, potential candidates usually take advantage of this by demanding a better wage, overtime, favourable hours etc. Things that you would have no real qualms about opening negotiation on.

When the shoe is on the other foot; remember that a company's hiring policy is often set by someone who doesn't have to do the dirty work of actually asking the candidate themselves. The interviewer can brush it off as "stupid company policy" and, in the end, nobody takes responsibility for it. It becomes something that is just done.
Even the "on-paper" analyses can take some of this into account, with algorithm analysis models that take into account cache and NUMA architectures. But, people do tend to just look at the classic big-O analyses, which may not be right.

In a way that kind of dependence isn't new. If you look at old versions of Knuth's TAOCP, for many algorithms he has separate analyses for the in-RAM case and the on-tape case, using two different memory models, and in some cases which algorithm is better differs a lot between the two cases. But it may be that algorithms reference books are doing a worse job keeping up now than they used to.
But if all life on earth is descended from something resistant to radiation, why is most life on earth so vulnerable to it now?
We've been hacked
Secure your Facebook data from friends’ creepy apps in just 30 seconds
Fascinating. I assume this is self publishing (vs this article which is about the large publishers?) When you mention 35% royalties are you saying that Amazon gives you 70% of the street price you set to them? However, if your street price is more than $20 they drop that to 35% to you? Also, do any of the agreements require you, if you sell in other locations, that the price listed must match the price you told them? Ie - are they using a MFN clause like that listed in the article above?
What video codec is that? Man it looks nice.
OK Computer came out at the peak of the electronica period, so the use of text to speech and dub production wasn't really novel. Plus the album was more about urban alienation rather than just technology. I don't think they appeal specifically to geeks though, they are widely critically acclaimed.
At a hardware level a bunch of things happen on a modern motherboard. A more simplistic example would be a cell phone or any SoC (System on a Chip) or microcontroller device. What follows is still very simplified and generic though.

When power is applied there is a PMIC (Power Management IC). This is a hardware integrated circuit that provides various features, among them are are the timings needed to power on the device. A power on sequence consists of the PMIC first receiving its primary power from a regulator on the system board, this usually triggers a hardware timer that waits a bit for the voltage to stabilize. Then the PMIC triggers the power supplies to other components. A modern SoC may need 3 or 4 different power supplies and these need to be 'enabled' in a specific order with specific timings. All this is managed by the hardware in the PMIC and would be the "trigger" that tells the SoC to fire up or more realistically just what is required to fire it up properly.

Once the voltages are supplied to the SoC several other things take place before the CPU comes online. Usually there is a bit of circuitry on the SoC called a PLL (Phase Locked Loop) that locks onto the system clock to avoid fluctuation. This can take some time as the system clock stabilizes after boot but even a stable stock takes a bit of time to lock onto. The PLL sub system also generates the various clocks needed by the SoC. The master clock from the system board may only be ~25Mhz but the PLL needs to generate various clocks for different parts of the SoC, maybe 1Ghz for the CPU, 100Mhz for the I/O, etc. Some SoC processor may actually start at a much slower clock rate and setup the PLL for its desired clock rate as part of the initialization process. Still others may have a very slow clock on chip that the SoC starts from to initialize itself before switching to the external clock.

Once all that is done, the CPU comes online. Sometimes this is prefaced by some support circuitry or microcode. For example it may fetch some data from memories off the SoC. Either way the CPU just starts executing at a known location so it all just starts with a single instruction. Usually you'd have a bootloader at the startup location that initializes just enough of the SoC to bring online additional functions. A common action is to setup external flash / ram then chain to a much more complex bootloader from the external flash.

In a modern x86 system there is more that goes on and much of what I described is more distributed to various components on the motherboard. Much of the initial startup is handled by what amounts to a microcontroller that lives inside the northbridge. It handles initial startup tasks before bringing the CPU online.
How Linux was built for a non-techie
good luck !
You said it wasn't easy to buy an alternative, and you used switching away from Windows during Microsoft's dominance as your example.

It was true that moving to the competition was hard during the Windows era because there weren't good alternatives. That's a strawman because there actually are good alternatives now, and your comments indicate that you know this.

Oversight exists to prevent abuse of monopolies, not to regulate companies just because they are successful.
Basis is $199 and comes (will come) and adds (will add) a lot of value. $99+ is a little too pricey, I think. Those are two are different products, of course, but still.
I'd like to see an RSS feed that points first to the ycombinator comments, and second to the original targeted link.

From a comment thread, it is of course simple to get to the original link, but not the other way around.

With an inverse RSS feed, it will be much easier in Google Reader to share both the comment thread and the original link with Google+, or any of the services that support Google Reader Send To.
Ask HN: Is there a good place to print/bind legally purchaced PDFs?
I still like dead-tree versions of books for quite a few things. They're inconvenient when moving, but great for flipping through, etc.

There's a number of PDFs which I've legally purchased (such as Brad Feld new book), and I'd be interested in paying to have them as dried pulp with ink.

Lulu/etc seem to want me to swear an oath that I own the copyright to the book, before they'll do a Print-on-demand of it.

Can anyone recommend a place to legally get my legal PDFs printed?
I can confirm that it's live for me (in Canada).
I don't think this is news.
The fellow in the article said on Reddit that Kickstarter won't allow his project, but he's started one on an alternative site.

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/s479x/this_inter...

http://www.indiegogo.com/calyx
Math is quite fun, and exciting. But often it is taught in schools in a very poor manner which destroys any of the fun aspects of it. Read, say, Cryptonomicon or Diamond Age and tell me math isn't fun.
Last time I did the "get off coffee to show myself that I can" thing, I was able to avoid the terrible headaches by pushing the "first sip" time back a bit each day, then reducing the amount. Initially about 11AM was the headache onset time, but after I moved my first sip back each day for a week, I found that I didn't get the headache onset till about 3PM. Then I reduced down the dose over the next week, which more motivated by the annoyance of mentally tracking "when can I (do I have to) have my coffee today". The two stages separated the task of having my brain produce its own wake-up/alertness state from dealing with the other withdrawal symptoms; and it turned what was a comforting morning ritual into a chore taking up time and attention.
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> Where else in the market is this sort of behavior tolerated?

Have you ever seen a gaming console?
Have you ever seen an eInk Kindle Reader which is tied to Amazons eBook store?

Also here is a fun fact from the past: Before the iPhone mobile App developers (yes, there was stuff like J2ME applications, but it was a tiny market compared to the App store economy of today) were glad if they earned 20% on the price of their products. The providers or download portals pocketed the fat end.
I'm in the same boat as you, but I don't tend to voice my opinions on Test::Unit because there is such a strong opinion for RSpec and Cucumber. IMHO, I tend to like my tools to be tried and true, and not do any fancy magic.
This just flat out doesn't work in my browser (Chromium). I even disabled the adblocker to see if that helped. It's telling me I chose "Deny" when I was never given an option. A pop up that doesn't work?
I find this perspective so incredibly frustrating. Its as if people feel that stock investments need to have zero risk. Anyone who dumps their entire life savings into a pre-seed startup and gets wiped out, quite frankly, deserved it.

Matt Taibbi would serve the public much better if he wrote about the real world risks involved in these investments, the need for diversification, and other ways for individuals to make risk appropriate investments..
I think, with current languages, that would probably be the right way to do it. It's not beyond the realms of possibility for a language to try and do the right thing (with sane and predictable rules of course), and let the user override it with their preference.

The hardest part would be getting those sane defaults, otherwise everyone will override them anyway, and you're back to square one or worse.
Show HN: My response to "Why isn't your service free?"
At http://trackmydrive.com we have recently started charging for our service. We got our first email stating that our service should be free. Here is our response:

Dear xxxxxx,

We received your comments expressing concern about the price we have placed on our service. We have decided to charge for the service based on the following reasons:

1. There are hosting and development charges that we pay to provide the service. We had to pay to develop the program and continue to pay for the data that is stored on our website. Without this capability we would not be able to provide the reports –the most important part of our service.

2. If we did serve your needs for free we could cover our costs by flooding your phone or computer with ads. We have chosen not to use this approach as it is our goal to simplify your life and make technology an asset not a frustration.

3. With the charges that we collect we are able to continue to improve and further develop our company. We are currently making investments that will deepen the capabilities of the service to simplify other business functions.

4. By charging we ensure that we are able to provide top notch customer service. We respond to each email we receive personally and take each comment under consideration. We appreciate your input! We certainly hope you can understand and even agree with our decision points as noted. Please also keep in mind that we are conscientiously trying to avoid the "bait and switch" tactic that many other service companies use in which they attract lots of free users only to begin charging them at a later date or flooding their systems with “free” ads.

Sincerely, The TrackMyDrive team
I believe the above comment refers to regression testing. For instance, if I write a test for an invariant that is fairly unlikely to change, then the chance that my behavior will change in the next hour based on the test run is small. However, if and when the invariant is mistakenly changed, even though negative side effects might not be immediately visible, it could be immensely valuable to me to see the flaw and restore that invariant.
Anti-competitive and price-fixing are two different things in this case.

Essentially all suppliers (publishers) agreed to set a price on their goods, that's a cartel.

We like to think of books such as Harry Potter when considering publishing, but Harry Potter is a unique item because it has more or less unparalleled popularity. Other fiction books aren't really in competition with Harry Potter, people don't normally say "I am going to either purchase Harry Potter or Hunger Games". They generally purchase both if interested.

Now consider something that is much more of a commodity: Cookbooks. It's quite easy to find a couple of cookbooks from competing publishers, and if one new type of cookbook proves popular (Gluten-free Cooking!), most other publishers will come out with a competing cookbook. Great you say, sounds like competition! Except they have agreed to sell all their cookbooks at $10, so we, the consumers,
now have a plethora of books to choose from, but only at one price. That is very, very illegal.

If the different companies had independently decided to change how they charge for books, ok, but their meetings and apparent coordination not just of the agency model, but the actual price makes this a cartel.

The anti-competitive piece is more about Apple making sure Amazon could not undercut the price for competition. Apple wanted 30% profits, no matter the price, and couldn't do that with Amazon in the mix. Apple could have just signed an exclusivity deal for certain books or something, but instead it wanted all books this way, which made it get involved with the publisher's coordinating. Conspiring with the publishers to specifically target a single player (Amazon) is apparently illegal, although I don't know much about that part so much.

If you usually filled up your car at the local station and suddenly an App Station opened across the street and all gas everywhere was suddenly 30% more expensive, the anti-competitive nature would be readily apparent.
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Responsive web design allows websites to automatically change layouts according to the visitor’s screen resolution whether on a desktop, tablet or smartphone.
That's not correct. In the agency model the publishers set the price that Amazon (and others) sells it to the end user.

Apple doesn't use the agency model for music because they are dominant in that market. The agency model was meant to prevent Apple from having to compete with Amazon on price. They couldn't sell at the same price as Amazon without taking a loss.
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Okay, great, but what's the point? At the end of the day, we're not running anything on Turing machines; we're running them on computers, which are almost but not quite the same thing. Remember that the Turing machine is intended as a model for algorithms and not a model for the actual execution process/environment of those algorithms. (Again, a distinction that's irrelevant when discussing TMs in most contexts, so it's generally brushed over).

And at the end of the day, my original point stands: we're talking about writing purely functional code, but if the code is being compiled by a compiler that takes advantage of non-functional code optimization (and as far as I know, nearly all general-purpose compilers do to some degree), then it doesn't make sense to compare the functional code vs. non-functional code. Even if it appears that data structures are immutable, if the compiler is mutating them behind-the-scenes, it all depends on how well-optimized the compiler is, and that's a very different discussion than the one implied by the title.
Fixing your broken link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
Nobody is forced to purchase an Apple device.

Actually a lot of people are forced to buy Apple devices. See Apple's educational efforts as a good example of that.

Am I missing something?

Yes, you are -- Apple is big enough, and dominant enough, that even without a monopoly they can exert significant control over the rest of the market. How often do we hear on here -- strangely by people gloating on Apple's behalf -- that they have locked up complete supply chains, starving competitors? When Apple forced their book pricing model, it forced prices up at Amazon as well. When Apple limits or taxes competitors on the iOS platform, users who usually have no idea of this behavior will naturally migrate to Apple's solution because it provides just that much easier usability (geez why can't I buy that book I want in the Kindle app...oh well, here it is in the App Store). They are using their influence and control of that high-margin device that you paid for to build dominance in their other products. Not illegal or even immoral, but it eventually impacts everyone.
Also, to be honest, I'd be hard put to tell anybody how much time I spend writing tests vs. writing code.

That's a good point. Test writing versus code writing is not black and white. Spending time writing tests is also time spent thinking about what's going to be coded. Writing tests should make the coding process go quicker such that there exists a lot of overlap in test writing and coding.
I would really like to know the answer to this, as well.
Just go onto dice.com and type in 'embedded'. That's the keyword for low-level programming jobs: http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=300...
You're thinking in terms of a 2005 business model.

Even government organizations are buying lots of iPhones, even though Apple is an obnoxious vendor for those organizations to deal with.

Microsoft sells stuff these days by bundling product licensing. So unless Apple does something really dumb, you're not going to see enterprises mandating anything Microsoft mobile other than ActiveSync anytime soon.
Benchmarked: Nvidia  Tegra 3 vs. Qualcomm Snapdragon S4
Hi manveru.

Your username (email) in Ducksboard would help us track down the problem.

You can create a support ticket using the application's menu "Support" option to handle this communication and future question we may need to ask.
... And fall?

I'm not gonna hate. I'll just say that developers really need to understand the products they use and, in particular, when to use them. That said, hosted persisted storage of all sorts (s3, relational, non relational) is a huge opportunity. 10gen's partnership with RedHat is a great step forward (not to detract from other Mongo hosting solutions, of course).
Yeah, people are sharing wrong. If one person posts Vacation photos, they should post it to their Friends circle, while their Tech posts can be public posts. But, to be honest it's one more thing for people to do and is the reason why there's no fine-tuning of noise.
You can just search for 'firmware', 'device driver', or 'embedded' on any tech job site.
In the days before the consumer internet, there were online services like Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL. They did demand a cut from developers based on different features they provided.

They were driven out of business through competition from the open internet.

If the current situation is analogous, then over time we can expect open app stores to drive the closed ones out of business. No need to involve the government.
Computer/laptop monitors didn't switch directly from 4:3 -> 16:9.

They moved from 4:3 -> 16:10 -> 16:9. And the switch to 16:9 happened because of panel cutting and cost, not because of consumer demand.

From the link in my previous post, Lenovo could not keep using 4:3 screens because they had "all but disappeared from the market."

The vast majority of netbooks released in the 2007-2010 range were widescreen, so I don't know where you're getting this idea that 4:3 screens were easier for Apple to source for the iPad.

Or the claim that non-Apple tablet makers aren't simply choosing the cheaper and more common screen format. None of the mass-produced Android tablets have the same form factor as the proven hit, 60+ million units sold iPad. Why?
looks like they hired the same artist
Dear HN, I would pay for: A document conversion web service
(Thought it might be interesting to post things that I would pay for. Maybe it could turn into a business for someone on HN.)

We need to import and convert documents of all varieties. Currently we do our own conversion of things like doc, docx and pdf into fairly plain HTML. I'd like to support more formats but we don't really have the time. If there was a service that took a document and output it in a specified format I would probably pay for it. Even better if it was a heroku addon.
You said it wasn't easy to buy an alternative

I actually said "but that is seldom as simple as it at first blush may seem". Have a bunch of apps and iBooks? Ready to completely abandon them? Accustomed to any of the countless apps and services that only exist on the iPad? Ready to do without them?

Apple's actions are acts of bravado, and they only come from a position of strength. They earned that position of strength, but you can't simply say "Oh don't like it -- this policy and tax that most buyers don't even know about -- then don't buy it". It is hardly so simple.