skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, depends on your definition of »mathematician« – I'd probably go for a question about the very basics of algebra. Something like: How many elements does the symmetric group S_3 have? (Optionally: Write down its Cayley table.) Is it abelian?

Not exactly relevant to practice, and utterly trivial, but I suppose nobody comfortable with formal math should any problem solving it on the spot.
In the case of the ADB, it's public domain (published in the late 19th century), so could be used directly, like the 1911 Britannica is. Except it's in German, so some translation is necessary. :) I sometimes translate fairly directly, but I usually look for whether there are any more recent sources to expand on the bio, or correct any info that might now be obsolete.

With copyrighted encyclopedias, my preference is to use at least 2-3 sources for a bio. For example, with a physicist, I'd use a biographical dictionary / encyclopedia as a reference for basic biographical facts (dates, locations, awards, etc.), and then flesh out information about scientific importance from something like a textbook or survey paper commenting on his/her work.

If the main source is a non-encyclopedia, it's usually less of a problem, because the original text doesn't really read like an encyclopedia article anyway. For example, when writing articles on Greek archaeological sites, my source material is usually a discussion in a monograph or history book, which is sometimes scattered (it may be mentioned for a few pages in Chapter 2, then again in Ch. 8, sometimes as a main topic, other times in passing when discussing an event or person, that kind of thing). So it's a matter of going through, noting down salient facts and page numbers they came from, and then assembling the results into an article.
I'm not hoping that at all (I do measure my data actually! I'm even a data-freak, so to speak).

Deploying a demo requires a certain amount of effort.

We're bootstrapping so I'm careful with our efforts.

I'm only asking around to figure out if for most people that did it, the effort was worth it.
Wow, I actually edited my comment without reading yours and came up with the same problem.
> Isn't HN proving the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory wrong?

HN employs anonymous, unaccountable, unnecessary, possibly automated and most definitely counter-productive hell bans.

And with that any level of decency becomes quite irrelevant. I implore you to turn on "show dead" and gaze upon our "shadow people", check their comment history and notice about half of them got hell banned for some rather petty reason, and are currently being made to waste hours of their time writing comments before realizing nobody reads them. The other half might have actually deserved some sort of disciplinary action, but a hellban is actually less effective than a regular one except in some quite rare situations[1].

If [the unseen mods of] HN believe that's what it takes, I'll gladly deal with some more Fuckwads. (though the more probable reason is that none of them seems to want, or is able to bugfix the modding code)

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...
In that case, it is harder to provide. As far as I know, most SSL certificates just validate the domain name, while code signing certificates validate the developer/company identity.
Guess you should write your own blog post. :-)
Except that not every mathematician will actually have done Taylor Series. Algebraists, logicians, topologists and graph theorists, for example, may very well not have done analysis to that level.
Gotta love HN :)
I think his point is that Github is about actual work artifacts, while all other business networks are basically talk about a more or less specific topic - more flexible, but also less focused.

Github is much closer to the topic at hand. There is almost no way around attaching comments to a piece of code.
It's a pretty easy proof. I'm on mobile so I can't elaborate a lot, but just look how do you construct the fraction corresponding to a periodic number. In this case, it's 9 divided by 9. That's 1.

Another proof (requires more knowledge) is based on the structure of the real numbers. Let a and b be real numbers where a ≠ b. Then, there are infinite numbers between them. It's a pretty obvious statement.

Now, try to find any number between 0.99... and 1. You can't. So, if there isn't any number between 0.99 and 1, they are equal.
If the idea sounds interesting to me. I would anyway try it. The demo button infact reduces the chances of actual signup as after trying out i may or maynot signup.
Screencast - Sleek animations with requestAnimationFrame
I don't see what issue you are addressing - or seeking to get support to address.

So what if there are a few feature requests mooted and (possible) bugs identified - would dealing with those issues get more and better items posted? Would the standard of debate improve? Would the community up and move to somewhere else if those little things that are niggling you were solved there?
"This issue is that studies show us vim's rules are wrong:"

If using vim is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Honestly, I can believe such studies, and I still would use vim.

One, my shoulder gets tired and sometimes hurts if I move back and forth between keyboard and mouse too much.

Two, by the time I move to the mouse and back, I could have done the equivalent twice on the keyboard and moved on.

Three, there is nothing sweeter than "How did you do that?" :)
Holy Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. I ordered 8 GB of RAM for my HP laptop last night and spent well over two hours reading about this exact subject to see if I needed to install Windows 64-bit when it arrives. I think I even stumbled upon this same page.

That being said, I still don't fully understand; Once I install the new RAM, will I only receive the benefits if I perform a new 64-bit install of Windows 7, or will upgrading just amplify the benefits? (I currently have 3 GB in 1 GB + 2 GB as the default factory configuration.)

Sorry if this question is dense of me, but my field is economics and the more technical aspects of HN are often lost on me
productivity != quality and utility
I am constantly forgetting my phone at home, leaving it in the car, etc. I attribute it to an unconscious hatred of the thing. Of course I am from the generation that grew up without these annoyances, and look back with nostalgia at the days when you could leave the house/work and you were just "out" until you got back. And you were more likely to a) complete the errand or purpose of your trip without distraction and b) get back sooner because you didn't get diverted to handle three other requests on the way.
>It's a platitude, sometimes it's even the wrong mindset to have, tools do matter.

They help, but they don't matter one iota in most cases. Whatever one is doing in Rails could be done in Django or PHP or whatever. A better tool can help, but not as much as using what you already know, using things that have programmers to hire in your area, using what has community support, etc.
I'd love to reduce sign-ups that could end up in cancellations straight away! It would only make more support.
Add a biography of some female scientists and writers and see what happens. Then watch the pages.
He uses a metric for importance other than just size.

That said, his points that there were 600000 software developers in the US 10 years ago and more than a million GitHub members now, SO there must be significant developer mindshare seems nonsensical unless maybe if you assume GitHub is completely dominated by Americans, which anecdotally doesn't seem the case to me (I spent a few minutes looking for a breakdown of users by country, but didn't see any).

Also, confirmation bias.
From what I've read, egg cookery is fizzbuzz for cooks all across the restaurant industry --- although an omelette might be a more typical problem.
Isn't it easier to work with the tool that you know thoroughly, which may not be "cool", rather than pick up a new tool in a different ecosystem?
> Because HN is still an exclusive secret garden?

No, because HN commenter's favourite pastime, Reddit-bashing, is too scary if not done behind their backs and from a safe distance.
The Original Logos of Tech Companies Were All Terrible
>> I'm assuming this is 1000 vs 1024 issue

It'll likely be your graphics card uses a portion of your main RAM for its memory. This is common.
Antarctica is Burning
The point isn't whether there are 5% or 15% Mac users -- it's that you're ignoring 85%+ of non-Mac users.
Please submit it if you ever do, I'd love to read it.
I don't really see this as being any less trivial than proving inverses are unique. Both require writing down the statements, and a couple applications of the group axioms.
Jesus.

I really, really, really want to know an example of that.

(Philosophical logicians do not score as examples of this).
Hm. The site links to a very interesting Question 31, which is missing...
Even logicians took freshman calculus.

This is actually more reasonable than expecting an analyst to produce basic group theory proofs.
OK, modulo taking up extra space on already-cramped CD distros, taking more time to download updates, taking up more space on production hard disks, and having to download a new version of the software if your dataset grows over 4GB, it sounds good. :)
That seems too easy.

(ab)^2 = aabb
a^2 b^2 = abab

ab = ba iff G is commutative, so for an Abelian group we can substitute for the middle bit

aabb = a(ab)b = a(ba)b = abab

Which won't hold if G is not commutative.

QED

I recognize that FizzBuzz is supposed to be easy, but it's supposed to recognize programmers with basic competence; I am not a mathematician. (But maybe I underestimate myself or overestimate some of those with advanced degrees in mathematics?)
Show HN: Entrepreneurs Anonymous - Share Stories, Not Advice
For sure about the confirmation bias, but I would propose that the post is meant to encourage scholars to come up with their own falsifiables and prove it one way or another.

The 600,000 vs 1,000,000 means: A lot of Americans, and the excess are people who are not from the USA or have multiple accounts. But the main point is that in gross numbers many of those 600,000 have accounts.
Excellent post, thanks for the link.
And the government granted Kevin Rose the monopoly to vote on things.
The problem is not outsourcing, it's thinking that you can outsource (or delegate) and important task and not pay attention to it's execution.

Good management breaks outsourced projects down into replaceable, manageable chunks. This is important for oversight and for competition. If you size an outsourced chunk of work correctly, then you should be able to increase competition for that contract. If you structure the contract correctly, your oversight should be able to identify and replace problemed contractors.

These guys are all smart enough to know that. It's just that they are also all smart to know that it is easier to avoid political responsibility for failures when it can be blamed on an outside contractor.
That's actually something I do do! One of my on-again, off-again projects, which now that you mentioned it I should return to, is going through the book American Women Historians, 1700s–1900s: A Biographical Dictionary, and adding articles on the ones that're missing (which is a lot of them), especially those where I can find 2-3 additional sources to use for an article (which is still a lot of them). So far nobody's tried to delete my contributions.

There are also some more organized projects. There are a few dozen people at WikiProject Women's History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women%27s..., and Wikimedia hired a paid Community Fellow to focus on gender-gap issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SarahStierch
Thinking About Fuduntu
Who said anything about coolness? Seriously, why do people think that just because all languages are Turing complete, any further discussion is just a popularity contest?
> And this argument has been repeated endlessly.

And that is why we need to broaden software patent laws to also include Internet arguments: patent trolling to counter actual trolling.

(BRB, patenting this idea)
I think I'm at least as competent at math as one would need to be at programming to solve fizzbuzz and I have no clue how to prove either of those things.

Fizzbuzz isn't trying to separate the professional programmers from the pretenders, its' trying to identify people who have no capacity for programming whatsoever. Fizzbuzz only requires basic knowledge of the syntax of any programming language and basic problem solving skills. I think a better equivalent would be something like "integrate x*e^x". Or maybe even some college-level algebra.
At least here in Europe, a course in basic real analysis is mandatory _in the first semester_ for just about every program which includes some math. I'd even be surprised to see somebody with a math degree who hasn't at least done a little bit of complex analysis at some point…
Being able to mark an email in a to-do system as "Waiting for reply" with an expiration date would be useful. This way, such to-do system could alert you when an email has not been answered to and prompt the next action.

Emails could be cross-linkable and have tags (among the tags, there could be the ID of the project they belong to).
Saving the auth info is then the problem. It's not so bad on iOS, because you have the Keychain that persists across uninstalls and get backed up. Android is a bit trickier -- there's no comprehensive way to preserve information across uninstalls (except BackupManager, which requires a Google login).

Still, you could give the user the option to defer creating user/pass until later with the understanding that their account is temporary until then.
In fairness, if you handed this in for homework in a sophomore algebra course, you likely wouldn't get credit (you've definitely proven the "only if"; the "if" is a bit murky). However, it's not too much of a stretch to clean it up into a proper proof.
If you were a designer, you would claim Dribbble instead of Github.

Either way, you would be delusional. Social is just a useful paradigm on the web. More and more products would use it as default. Just like every site now has a search box. Github also has a search box. It is not the most important search engine.
The top answer seems wrong to me.

>> a process can have more memory than address space

How does that work? The best I can come up with is the author is referring to mmap? In which case the address space is still limited to 4Gb although I concede that with the OS pagefile it would be possible to have more than 4Gb in core at a time via judicious use of mmap.
Purpose-Driven User Experience: Apple & Instagram's Secret Sauce
> relevant to the world at large

That is not a good encyclopedic. Encyclopedia's are to document and archive for current and future generations. They are a store of knowledge for knowledge's sake. You include stuff that may not be relevant today because it may be relevant tomorrow.
I remember Stripe used to be like this, but not anymore. I wonder what reversed their decision.
Yea - I wasn't entirely sure what you meant by the "FizzBuzz" for math point. You were looking for something with more of an abstract focus?

You can have the person then turn it into a general case. What is the sum of 1...N given that the numbers divisible by x1...xk. Even that's pretty simple though.
That's why it would be interesting to see it as a language on it's own.
I'm not going to prognosticate about whether or not this service will take off. I really hope it does - the raison d'être seems genuine, or at the very least, passionately backed.

But that seems to be the very problem with it. In trying not to bury his lead, I believe Dalton Caldwell has let it take over the pitch. 95% "why" and 5% "what". 10 minutes in, I was still scratching my head wondering what the service will look like. And the name App.net certainly doesn't do the cause any favours. The first decent explanation finds itself relegated to question 2 of the FAQs.

This is an audacious attempt, and I laud that. But the pitch, in my opinion, needs an overhaul. Diaspora was also about the "why", but they addressed the "what" really early in their Kickstarter pitch.
Wikipedia has three possible definitions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_number

All integers, integers >= 0, integers > 0
Yea, although there appear ways around it though hackery, for all intents and purposes, you need a 64bit OS to take advantage of the extra memory.
You need to install 64-bit Windows to use anything beyond ~3.5GB of RAM.
Firefox 16 now supports HTML5 getUserMedia
I like this one. It can be brute-forced easily enough, but there are also a couple much more elegant approaches that I would expect a good mathematician to produce.
I don't really agree with the claim, but I'd love to see Github enter other areas of science like Physics, Maths, Chemistry, etc. Not just programming and computer science. That would be great, Github could work as a center of science all around the world.
Ask HN: Who is building a new kind of search engine?
In PG's Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas essay he talks at length about building a new kind of search engine. I was curious, who is working on this angle and makes your search engine innovative?
Another very basic question, maybe analogous to FizzBuzz in that regard, could involve some real analysis, e.g.: Let f: [0,1]->[0,1] be a continuous function. Prove that there exists some x in [0,1] such that f(x) = x.
According to the Isaacson book:

“I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.” - Steve Jobs in 2010.

And to Eric Schmidt regarding patent licensing: ”I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.”
The idea behind the problem seems to be to separate the mathematicians from the engineers, which the problems seem to do reasonably well.

However, since both problems are fairly trivial proof-by-contradictions, I would like every computer scientist to be able to solve them as well.

That said, my masters degree is in programming languages, so I may be exposed to a bit more math than the average software developer. I do not consider myself competent enough to be a mathematician, though.
Err, yeah. Except at the end of the day, the goal and outcome of the relationship is the programming (or, well, the technical side in general).

The business relationship is supposed to be just a construction between us, in order to be able to agree on the tech work. If there is no need on the other party, they have no reason to do business with me. People don't just hire me because I'm a cool guy and I say funny jokes and blabber insightful-sounding things. They hire me because they believe I can, one way or another, provide them some value. Telling jokes, or writing link-bait-ish blog posts, (or doing mostly shiny and maybe useful software), or whatever you want to put under "developing your personal brand 101" is just a way to make them believe that in order to put myself in a position where they would allow me to provide value to them. It doesn't, in itself, provide value to anyone.

Or, at least, it provides less value than the time I spend doing the real, and boring, and lonely, and hard to justify research groundwork that could (or not) lead me to developing something valuable. And I mean research in the broad sense, be it evaluating new or old software, trying to talk to people and to discern if they have problems that I could solve, or just chasing after a sneaky bug in an obscure backend thing that I happen to maintain.
Stuxnet leak prompts US House to consider prosecution of journalists
"The Most Important Social Network: Real Life"
Mainstream is lowest common denominator aka crap.
Local Camp Trains Future Female Entrepreneurs
It could work as a center of collaboration all around the world. Until [Gobbler](http://gobbler.com) came out, I was using Git as a means of version-controlling my music projects (even going so far as to branch and merge the project, my DAW allows me to do this without touching audio files since all changes are saved to a new file). GitHub has shown us that you can create an extremely powerful collaboration tool around Git, all you have to do is design a user interface that's simple, elegant and familiar to those involved. I can't wait to see what other companies do with Git.
French law hitting on Google Suggest
Dermotological or neurological problem
My skin is physically throbbing. It happens in 'spasms' that last for about 5 minutes then stop. A couple of days, or weeks in between. My forehead, forearm, hand etc. I'm not overly concerned, so I'm wondering what the clever mass thinks instead of a physical opinion. My eyelids twitch every couple of weeks for minutes on end, for days. It may just be lack of sleep, but the twitching everywhere else is rather odd.
I like my phrasing a little bit more because it at least requires knowledge of the definition of a group hom. Fizzbuzz also requires little more than an understanding of for loops and if statements, so I'd say they're kind of similar.
Yea, they can, but some of the names are overly verbose.
I read that as a response to the parent - "If you are proud of your work, sign it" - pointing out that "pride" could reasonably cut either way, so it's a spurious argument in the first place.
I don’t write because I can, I write because I can’t not write. Alas, looking at my Github projects, it seems that I underscore the problem described in the OP. I have done a lot of writing, but how good is my code, really? If I published the exact same Github projects under a pseudonym, would anyone who hasn’t read my writing care?
One of my favorite things about this is its presentation. You've placed your app in something that people lust after (a macbookair) and then something 'cool' inside of that (x-men).

Probably more compelling than a screen shot of a spreadsheet or a table, I bet it triggered an "I WANT THIS" reflex that I wasn't consciously aware of.
> You can't remove the battery and take them apart to clean them (proprietary screws)

Huh. I've never really looked at a MacBook Air that closely, but why does it need proprietary screws?
Rap News 14: Higgs Boson (with Prof. Scott Ridley)
Nah, Github is a step in the right direction. They make publishing online easier which gets more people to do it. It's like how twitter grew the blogging world by making it easy to do. Sure, not everyone does it yet, but it's better than before
Google has a social network, and it isn't mentioned in the piece. But I'd bet there's little doubt Google is the most important search engine.

You're right about Dribbble, but I'd argue GitHub is for collaboration and Dribbble is for showing off. Certainly people collaborate on Dribbble and people show off on GitHub, but by virtue of how people actually use the platforms I think GitHub is more collaborative and more important (at least in the way the OP posits). Go to http://dribbble.com/, click the first thumbnail, and count the compliments in the comments.
On the other hand, I know a couple extremely good analysts who would stare blankly at you until you reminded them of the definition of a homomorphism =)

To be clear, however: I think these are pretty good analogues of FizzBuzz.
An Engineers Mind
It could be a very important special search engine, like Google Scholar. Sadly, search on Github is also a topic to rant about.