skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if there is really any specific relationship between Radiohead and mathematics more than any other musician or composer, and I agree with you-- mathematics doesn't play into my feelings towards radiohead, they're a great band. But you point out "music theory isn't much rooted in math." I think the sentiment is true, music theory is generally taught and practiced without much thought to mathematics.

However, the fundamental concepts music theory are based on are all analogous to mathematical statements. You can see what I'm talking about here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_and_mathematics#Frequency...

You'll notice that a fundamental frequency is picked, and we give names to several related frequencies (octave, third, fifth etc). All of these labels are analogous to various multiplications of the fundamental frequency. We learn to recognize some of the simpler relationships, as they are easily identifiable (different chords are an example of this).

Any one who can count can recognize a number on the number line and compare it to another number and tell if it's smaller or larger. Those who have begin to understand arithmetic can identify the difference between those numbers, and if they are multiples of each other. Advanced mathematicians can tell us about more complicated relationships.

In music we have tones that can be ordered, and musicians learn through experience to make these same judgments about tones without even knowing it. Any amateur musician can hear a pair of tones side by side and recognize which is higher or lower in pitch. The more advanced ear can identify notes that are the same or they can tell you a harmonic relationship between them. This is a different way of experiencing mathematical relationships within an ordered set.

At it's core, I think music theory is absolutely the study of finding which combinations of tones create the numerical relationships we find most appealing in sound.
Wow, the NSA trademark everything.

> Crypto Cat®, Decipher Dog®, Rosetta Stone®, Slate®, Joules™, T.Top®, CyberTwins™ Cy and Cyndi, and, of course, our leader CSS Sam®.
For me the night-time is the only quiet time to get work done (full-time job, family), but I still need to get up about 5:40 AM. I aim to get to sleep by 10:30 but usually work up until that point. I know I sometimes suffer when trying to fall to sleep, but I guess it's a trade-off I'm willing to make.
C++ at Facebook
The Latest in Nationwide Internet User Identification - Part 2
True, and countries that are empty except for random river squiggles can save a good bit of storage (at the highest zooms so those river squiggles are isolated), but, again, if you have to start with the lowest level first, the described approach isn't saving a whole lot in processing time, even with big empty space.

One thing I forgot to say in my top post, though, is the presentation mentions compositing layers together on the fly, and that is one of the key tools they use, but the presentation drops that thread. I'm curious if originally it had more on that front and what they do with that.
Re: Blackboard.

I also think it's quite interesting in this regard, although the largest obstacle is obviously privacy/security. If Facebook were to spin off some of its .edu ventures (encroachments?) with terms more amenable to university and student interests it could do quite well. Being forced to use Blackboard is an inconvenience, but being forced to register for a facebook account feels downright threatening. Not that you're suggesting this, but it has to be crossing a few minds in academia.
Andrei Alexandrescu: Generic Programming Galore Using D
Google+ redesigned into Facebook
Thanks!

FYI, we have an update coming next week which will add a CRJ-200, a Space Shuttle, Missions, map enhancements, better runways, bug fixes for sound and accelerometer issues...
Re: "The simplest way to estimate the future is to guess that it will be similar to the past."

When we say that the future will be similar to the past, for code, we really mean that the probability of certain events occurring in the future will be similar to their prior probability of occurring in the past.

In my hypothetical example of testing an invariant that is unlikely to fail but damaging if it does, it might be valuable to keep that test around for five years even if it never fails. Imagine that the expected frequency of failure was initially <once per ten years>, and that the test hasn't failed after five years. If the expected frequency of failure, cost of failure, and gain from fixing a failure remain the same, we should keep the test even if it's never failed: the expected benefit is constant.

Not to say that we should test for every possible bug, but if something is important enough in the first place to test for it, and that doesn't change (as calculated by expected benefit minus expected cost of maintenance), we should keep the test whether or not it changes our behavior.

Thus, if we could estimate probabilities correctly, we really would know when it's OK to nuke a test.
Really interesting! Does that work for international users? I'm from Brazil and the form don't accept my phone number.
For Haskell you can do even better than random testing: There's Lazy SmallCheck for exhaustive testing. (For some values of `better' and `exhaustive'.)
> If you teach them programming to solve their physics homework and make it a game using math, they won't ask.

True. That's actually how I ended up as a programmer - math in school was boring, trying to make a video game was not. I finally learned trigonometry only when I was trying to figure out how to rotate an object in 2D space for my game. Also, there was a point in time when I used a "formula for distance/vector length in 2D space", but I had absolutely no idea what that "Pythagoras' theorem" is useful for.
Absolutely. But many of those hypothetical compiler transformations would only work if the code isn't really taking advantage some of the most important advantages of purely functional data structures. Persistence, for example.

That, and in a sense it's side-stepping the theoretical issue more than anything else. A compiler that's smart enough to find spots where a performance improvement can safely be gained by replacing a pure structure with a mutable one in the background doesn't really counter the idea that impure structures can be faster so much as acknowledge it.
The Best Thing You Could Do Right Now to Succeed as an Entrepreneur
Knuth has written (and talked) about interesting mathematical/algorithmic takes on music.
What they need is are "show more like this"/"show fewer like this" buttons. Then they can use a Bayes filter (like the Spam flag in Gmail) to hide posts. So if you don't want to see that programming-language researcher's vacation photos, click "show fewer like this".
Best soft launch ever on Hacker News!

This one had everything:

- Build something you want.
- Build something other people would want.
- Turn your passion into a business.
- If you need it, build it. (Love the S-hook idea!)
- Offer street level appeal.
- Tiered pricing. (Love the fun pass!)
- Instant rewards. (Tickets through slot.)
- Organic growth: more games.
- Secure technology (calculators).
- Turn customers into raving evangelists.
- Leverage others' technology (Facebook, Reddit).
- Company t-shirt.
- Bootstrapped with friends & family.
- Have a customer write a song about you!
I used 0 as the example because the 8bit chip I was thinking of (the Z80) used that. But the exact address isn't too relevant, the basic idea is that the CPU has a default state for the instruction pointer, and can get things going from there.

http://lateblt.tripod.com/z80proj1.htm

"What's Happening?

The computer begins with the CPU. When the CPU starts running (which basically happens as soon as it receives power and is reset with the RESET pin), it begins to pull instructions from memory and execute them. Where it starts in memory depends on the individual CPU, but in the case of the Z80, it simply begins at memory address 0, instead of using a reset vector like many other CPUs do. This means that any computer using the Z80 must have a ROM chip at memory address 0 which gives the initial start-up instructions to the Z80."

Also - the memory map during boot time is broadly unrelated to the per-process memory map during OS runtime. Also, if you branch to unexpected memory addresses, you deserve all you get. Also, on a processor with privilege isolation, your ring3 user process can't just cause a reboot.
Should Microsoft give up?
That's a really great idea! It would be a solid step in the right direction.
Sorry, but that's exactly what Big-O analysis is intended to do. If you have an binary search tree that can be imbalanced, then the lookup time is O(n). It's not "can be," it is. Worst-case analysis is across all inputs. Not "for most," but all.

The only binary search trees that people use in practice are balanced. That is, the algorithms that control insertion and deletion in the tree guarantee that the tree is always balanced, and they themselves run in O(log n) time. In my experience, most trees used in practice are in fact red-black trees, but a much easier to understand balanced binary tree is an AVL tree. So when we say that a red-black tree has O(log n) lookup, that is a guarantee across all inputs. There is no input to a red-black tree that will yield a linear lookup time.
C is enormously more consistent, better defined and specified, and well-documented than PHP.

Yes, this is a trite and negligible truth of PHP. A developer suffering any significant loss of productivity due to problems like mismatched needle/haystack parameters just isn't very competent. It's a non-issue if the developer is being paid a real salary. I'm not saying these issues aren't important enough to warrant attention, but the debate between maintaining backwards compatibility and squashing bad practices certainly isn't exclusive to PHP.

and not even remotely competing with PHP.

I already addressed this in my previous post. I'm not suggesting that PHP is in competition with C, that should be pretty obvious. I'm asserting that C, like PHP, is ridden with dangerous pitfalls for developers who don't know what they're doing. PHP is just easier to work with for a novice programmer.

The one thing PHP has going for it is inertia

And did that inertia spontaneously emerge from a vacuum? In the spirit of PHP's namesake you've devised a recursive argument to explain the only conceivable upside to using PHP.
I agree with that but that does not excuse those comments. If the original poster would have explained or at least made it clear that other people publish the polls automatically and that they are not individually vetted and that there is a complaint mechanism, that would have sounded better. But again blaming people for being upset is the wrong thing to say here and fully deserves being called an idiot.
Note that, at least in python (which I assume is pretty similar to Ruby in ecosystem), you can get a lot of mileage for #1 by doing static analysis, for example Pylint.
I don't like radiohead hardly at all. I think, besides a few songs, they are boring. Same with My Bloody Valentine.

I do love math rock though.
LFT's FPGA-based 16-bit hw/sw a/v demo
It's not as if you're LOSING pixels or screen size watching video on a 4:3 tablet.

What? Of course you are. Have you never used Netflix on an iPad? Gigantic black bars above and below. I suppose you could grossly distort the image and vertically expand it, but no thanks.

Actually, 4:3 presents a BETTER viewing experience

Absolutely preposterous. So preposterous it merits no direct response.
They don't have zero distribution costs, they have (close to) zero shipping costs. Distribution is not just shipping.
Patch editor-in-chief quits
In english that would be "it's so bad, it's good"
Intuit Acquires Mobile Payments Company AisleBuyer
Sorry but the OP stated valid points, which I fully agree with, yet did not take time to post because they were not very constructive and would not add to the discussion. I guess there are more than 2 of us.

The charging part is the #1 problem for me. I would buy a device which could be extracted from the wristband (ala ipod mini) and would not require cables (ie with a charging mat). I would even pay a premium for a device which would not have me remove it from my wrist for charging (don't know how it can be done, but it should!)

Having to care about battery life is just adding complexity for minor advantages compared to a standard dumb watch, therefore I'm not buying it, but please do not discard such arguments just because of some "negativity at work" theory.
The difference is that at each stage, Python's designers have exercised more global reasoning than PHP's.

The PHP bar for inclusion, for most of its life, seems to have been "it compiles".

I don't think it's possible to directly compare PHP and Python and not draw the conclusion that PHP was basically slapped together out of any old thing that came to hand without any degree of planning or foresight.
> when was the last time I used the quadratic equation

Actually, quadratic equation might be one of the most important things in high school maths - lots of practical problems, especially involving optimization, tend to be reduced to (or approximated by) quadratic equation.
Which in my case backfired. While the story itself may be inspiring, the film making style was cloying and cliched. I couldn't actually watch the whole thing.
Yes. And instead of comparing purely functional vs imperative languages, we could sidestep those issues by comparing persistent vs ephemeral data structures, regardless of language.

(For an example of the distinction--straight out of Okasaki's book: the standard purely-functional queue implementation as two linked lists has O(1) amortized runtime in adding and removing only if used `single-threaded' / ephemeral. As a persistent data structure you get a worst case of O(n).)
This story was really touching and inspiring (and my first exposure to it since I don't read reddit) and I hope one day to create an environment where my own child can build as prolifically as this kid has.

Some highlights to take away if you're focused on the entrepreneurial lessons from this kid:

- Ability to see the core value proposition: that S-hook with string is the fun part of the claw game, you don't need the complex mechanical arm and flashing lights to make it fun

- Scrappiness: use what you got, he only had his toys so made those the giveaways in his arcade.

- User testing: soccer game wasn't hard enough so put up army guys

- Lean startup: don't build a ticket dispensing machine while you're still testing development, just sit in the box and dispense tickets while you watch the balls fall through

- Pricing: make the upgrade plan really easy to justify to yourself (4 plays for a dollar, 500!!! plays for $2)

- Marketing: he even had the cool web startup t-shirt going!

I'm sitting here with practically unlimited web technology in front of me and all that kid had was cardboard... and I think if the flash mob came to my creation they'd have a lot less fun :)
If Barbara Corcoran Can Turn Off Her Phone At 6:30, So Can You--Here's How
Why Instagram & YouTube are so alike
It's amazing that I can't find any information on their site about what this does. Why would I need an app to hit my spacebar? I just use my thumbs for that, and it's working fine so far...

I say this as someone who did follow the link from HN, and I still can't figure it out.
that website looks familiar, yep that's it, zachholman.com
Dojo now uses AMD - initial load 3.8k
Dojo now can load its modules asynchronously - plus also other 3rd party modules & libs (e.g. jQuery)
TV engineers used to call wide screen "fewer lines".
Except for the administratively front-paged YC ads.
there is no a prior reason to not assume that a freshly allocated tree occupies a contiguous region of memory

But I'm sure you'll also agree that a freshly allocated tree probably hasn't been alive for long and hasn't seen much activity. :)
Http://t.co/M5fAZhxR
Wow, it was at 80 a few hours ago.
Google Chrome 20.0.1096.1 Dev Offline Installer on Downloads App
Oh - but I do also want to say that you did a great job on 99% of the article. You hit on pretty much all the major considerations, biases and issues one could run into when testing.
Possibly with anamorphic lenses though, like wide film.
O(log n) is clearly worse than O(1) if you just considered an O(log n) array-replacement data structure or hash table-replacement data structure and considered what its performance would be. I mean, how is this even a question?

Why yes, it is worse in some theoretical manner. But if you think it is necessarily worse as a practical manner, you have failed to understand the math fully.

Suppose that n is 1000 in some toy problem. Then you scale it up to a huge data set, a billion items! The log(n) factor only got worse by a factor of 3. Maybe we didn't go high enough. Perhaps we can take a large data set. Let's see, how about all of the data that is produced at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in a year? That's 15 petabytes. Now the log(n) factor is a whopping 5.39.

In other words while log(n) represents unbounded possible growth, it gets worse in practice by at most a fairly small constant factor.

How about O(1)? O(1) does not mean fast. It just means constant relative to the data size. It can be a bad constant, but as long as it is a constant it qualifies as O(1).

Let's take a practical example. Wavelets are cool in lots of ways, but one of the properties people noticed quickly is that doing a basic wavelet transform on a data set with n elements takes time O(n). Doing a FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) on the same data set takes time O(n log(n)). Yay, we're faster!

But hold on a minute. The interesting wavelets that we like to use are O(n) with a worse constant than the FFT. So the FFT tends to be faster on practical data sets. (There are lots of reasons why one would prefer wavelets over the FFT, but speed of calculation is not generally one of them.)
That doesn't work if you're going to do a minor/major change, though, and it also doesn't work if any of your chords have open strings in them. Not all chords are "moveable" chords.
Long article pimping a get-rich scheme, full of affiliate links. Avoid. No value whatsoever.

And FFS don't click the links. If you try to exit it refuses to let you go until you click one of those mystery meat dialogs. I tried this so you don't have to.
Dojo now can load its modules asynchronously - plus also other 3rd party modules & libs (e.g. jQuery)
"The trouble is, it makes it harder to find a saw like my grandfather's when you decide that its what you want."

There is plenty of high end gear available. Items that are used by professionals. As only one product category (video) contains consumer, pro-sumer and professional equipment.

On this page you can buy a circular saw made by Makita which costs $879 or buy a re manufactured Makita for $69

http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/category_power-tools+...?
These things are irrelevant to the definition of a monopoly.
Cassandra ftw :)
Hopefully all those calculators do the same sqrt calculation or else you're going to be terribly upset when Cane rejects your funpass for fraudulent use.
I would have been more impressed if the father made the video and it went viral. The slickness was actually what prompted me to make my comments (which as I would expect have been downvoted)
The issue wouldn't be implementation, that usually happens pretty quickly nowadays. The wait for older versions of browsers to become irrelevant, however, will probably be a long one.
X86 HW, software defined network services, and performance guarantees.
I was shocked when I saw the client-side DB access in the video. It seems like absolute insanity to me.

Even when I knew very little about web development, the principle of not accessing the database on the client side seemed obvious and very important.
I guess this doesn't faze me since I use a Garmin GPS watch for running, and it obviously needs to be charged regularly.

Complex electronic devices need energy, most cheaply obtained from your wall. Radios specifically use a lot of energy, making regular watch batteries a poor value proposition.

I guess I've accepted that Kickstarter projects aren't going to change the fundamental laws of physics or invent something like a battery-size nuclear reactor for their project, so I don't get upset when an electronic gadget needs to be powered. That's all.
Hey Jonathan ;)

This is the danger of having a 'test org' separate from the 'dev org'. When writing tests is tied to writing production code, your progress in one is tied to progress in the other. If it's easy to write tests for a particular feature, then the developer stops writing tests and writes the feature once they're done with the easy tests. It's much easier to understand your coverage when you're actually working with and writing the code being covered, rather than working in some separate "test org" - you don't need to run a coverage tool, you just see what breaks if you comment out a chunk of code. If the answer is "nothing" then it wasn't covered!

At the end of the day, an automated test suite is a product for developers on your project in the same way that a car is a product for drivers. You will have a hard time making a car if nobody on your car-making team can drive, and you will have a hard time writing a test suite as a tool to develop Project Foo if nobody on your test-writing team develops Project Foo.

I now write a project where I handle both the code and the tests. In the same way that my production code is improved by writing tests, my tests are improved by writing production code. I know what is included in the test coverage in the same way that I know what I had for lunch today - because I was there and I remember what happened. Tools for checking coverage are an aid to my understanding; in a company with a separate test org, you don't know anything about coverage until you've run the tool.
This isn't much different from what I'm saying, I think -- you mention frequencies, which don't come up much in most study of music theory beyond more or less what you have in your comment.

Beyond that, well, I suppose you could say it's "math", but that's a bit like saying price comparing at the grocery store (calculate the per-kilo price!) is math -- it won't have math geeks drooling.

I can recognize intervals by ear, but it's just practice. You start out by "cheating" (twinkle twinkle starts with a leap of a perfect fifth, the NBC call sign with a major sixth, etc.), then you just learn it. I'll bet you could get the gist of it using the reference melodies pretty quickly.

You can refer to the relations using basic math terminology, or just the music theory technology, but regardless it doesn't feel like anything beyond elementary math -- it goes much quicker into psychology territory.
Heh. You should read the Q&A I did on DailyKos that Monday evening.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/09/28/787366/-Facts-from-...

If you're ever in San Francisco, look me up. I'll buy you a drink and you can call me an idiot as much as you'd like. ;)

jesse@20bits.com
It's what I did before, the problem was that the point of the app is sleep-tracking and waking you up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle. This requires the phone being somewhere on the bed so it can register your movement. The negative side-effect of this is of course being able to turn off the alarm with your eyes more or less closed by blindly grabbing at the phone conveniently placed at arm's reach.
The browser-makers seem to have grown tired of the approval-process. Implementation happens before that.
Show HN: Geo Twits
This math doesn't work - you're gonna wake up early to have more productive hours, but you'll waste the gain by exercising.
For real. This is the same philosophy we share for our iOS apps. I gladly pay for great software/services (i.e. Basecamp, Vimeo Pro.) Youtube, while ubiquitous, is a a visual pain, compared to paid Vimeo accounts.