skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spot on. All I know is the situation at Berkeley, but I imagine it's similar at other universities. The lower-division math curriculum (particularly intro calculus and linear algebra) is under pressure from a bazillion different departments to cover such a wide range of topics that 90% of the material is useless to 90% of the students.

For example, a friend of mine was a forestry major, and the only reason she needed calculus was for population modeling. She knows exponentials and logistics better than I do! But she had a hell of a time passing calculus because she had trouble with the other 90% of the course. Keep in mind that this is a discipline that until maybe a decade ago required zero math.

Maybe at least at the lower-division level, applied math needs to be a bit more targeted...? But that would require us letting go of the notion that math is intrinsically edifying, and that people "ought to", "must", or "should" know it.
Aparently not. Read some technical explanation on it, but can't remember the details.
Well, it's not an example of Betteridge's law ;-)

The political science professor in question might consider the fact that while many college students struggle with basic math, they struggle just as much with basic literacy (most undergraduates can't write grammatical sentences, use punctuation, don't know how to write an essay, and have a hazy grasp of the idea of citation). Extending his argument we might consider removing History and English from the curriculum.
Math became ludicrously easy for me as soon as I realized how to think about it. It wasn't the same method that they were suggesting in school, and I don't know that my method would work for everyone.
I think real names do make difference. It makes you effectively self censor, because every comment is a statement with your name with it. Do you often troll you boss or clients / customers?
Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem
A single newspaper using patents to make sure their expression and opinions are the only one we get to hea?

Thats not creepy at all.

And this one message travels the world. For our standards, here in Holland, the app store policy representa fundamentalistic christian values. If they keep this up,we might actually see legislation concerning allowing side-loading.
I would say that the basic college level math courses have helped me tremendously in non-obvious ways. Companies run on spreadsheets and formulas, and to better predict and analyze situations, it is easier if all parties involved have a common understanding.

Our economies are huge, number driven in almost every aspect. To ignore that or turn out graduates are less well rounded would not be more productive as a whole.
So the Google ecosystem was a bad idea after all. I knew it. First they lure you in with a slick web mail client and a couple of gigabytes of storage. Then they buy up a bunch of companies, including YouTube. Then they link your Google and YouTube accounts together. And now your Google identity is suddenly your YouTube identity which is linked to your real name. I didn't ask or sign up for the vast majority of this!
One Cool Trick to deal with "Content Not Available in your Area"
I once tried searching for my friend John Smith on Facebook, and there he was, right at the top. Good thing westerners have such distinctive names.
As someone who still haven't found a way to think about it I would be curious what you ended up with.
I started with Shaw and then switched to Novus in my building.
Pro Tips from social hackers
Many Confuse Sense Of Urgency With Sense Of Emergency
I think the problem itself comes from Math departments. Typical undergrad math curricula involves throwing a mix of math at students in the hope of training them to get mathematical literacy. From personal experience, I suspect it works because of the pressure and the massive amounts of math you are exposed to over a short period of time. This clearly is not true for people in other disciplines which is why you have these haphazard courses like Linear Algebra and Calculus thrown at them in the hope that they "get math" and also "learn something useful". It is an ugly situation where a lot of people just end up hating math (which considering that their sample size is small is clearly a bad thing to do but then again, they are probably never going to learn statistics to figure that out :).
I don't know if that's necessarily related to not performing well in algebra as much as it's related to not understanding some relatively complicated technical details. Which is inexcusable if these people are claiming to be professionals, but I wouldn't expect most people to get it right away.
"(For an elaboration on this idea, see http://duckduckgo.com/?q=lockharts+lament)."

For the lazy: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
> SevOne's careers page says that a Bachelor's degree is a requirement

Don't let this stop you. Every. If you honestly think you have the skills for the job after reading the description, seek it out. Let them determine if you are right for the position.

Don't be the no in your life.
Yo dawg, I heard you like discussing HN posts.

So I made a HN post to discuss 4chan's post discussing HN posts.
Why is it impractical? (It's the way we do it in South Korea.)
You should probably send yourself more email
people say they want science and math skills but do they really?

when i was a 10 yr old kid in 1982 i wanted to create email and newsgroup type systems and my computer science teacher was like that's a big waste of time like video games, get thinking about data structures and algorithms instead

10 years later I'm in college and the guy who runs the computer center got a source code license for SunOS and fubar-ed our whole system because he wanted to block our access to the internet, which would stop our academic pursuits.

hell we were just trying to be matt zuckerberg a decade before his time.

or there's this guy who was the one bright kid who remembered what he learned in organic chemistry class. all the other muggles sold their textbooks and forgot about it, but he applied what he learned to invent a way to make a new drug with stuff you can buy at the grocery store.

this grad school dropout got his work cited in the "journal of emergency medicine" because some kid made a batch of this vile brew and chucked all over his bed and the doc in the ER is like "what the f'uh?", "i mean you read this on the f'en internet and really did it?"

And all this time this guy and his crew are worried they're going to get called to testify about this in Congress and they were just so happy when the statue of limitations came up.

If students studied science and engineering and got both the ability and the will to confront technological society, we'd have a revolution.
The reason I wrote r³ is because I was a little overwhelmed by how complex disco is to administer and scale.

r³ was designed from the ground up to adhere to HTTP. That means it's pretty easy to scale using our old and well-proven techniques: caching and load-balancing.
I'm hoping Google Fiber will force their hand, or put them out of business entirely.
I think algebra is necessary, and calculus, and geometry, and trigonometry, and everything else I don't understand in the realm of mathematics.

But they're important in the context of real life.

So, yes, we should keep these classes, keep having kids go through algebra and calculus and geometry...

...But you shouldn't be bound by arbitrary rules. Algebra is important, but if you find "x" by doing something other than some arbitrary thing where you subtract both sides, etc., you shouldn't get an F in the class.

Same with calculus, geometry, everything. The importance is the thinking and the logic, and what real-life application you can take from your knowledge. Making hard rules for these math courses, for example, definitely hurts this and does some of the things this article claims.

But true, honest exploration in math and thinking about it is very important, and if it's free and done in an honest way there is no question about whether it's necessary or not.

Richard Feynman covered this better than I ever could: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZED4gITL28
Oh, I am not disagreeing with the importance of Calculus for engineering. However, calculus as a core tool for say biology majors? While, I know that there are a ton of biological models (say in population dynamics) that require knowledge of calculus, I feel like for most people, this becomes one of those hate it and get through it classes and we really need to rethink its importance.
The license is in the README now. It's MIT licensed.
How the heck is linear algebra important for CS majors? Where in CS is linear algebra useful where calculus isn't?
TotalFinder - Finder On Steroids
A little coherence goes a long way.
We do horizontally scale redis as a farm. I'll try to get more details on how we do it as I'm not the one responsible.

We thought of parallel reducers and it does make a lot of sense. The reason they are sequential is to get a first release out so we can juggle ideas with people. If you care to contribute we'd love it. Even if you just create an issue.
And Apple doesn't aim to please everyone. Note the discontinuation of optical drives, of floppy drives, of hypercard etc.

Most of the reviews I've read (particularly John Siracusa's) point out that the RSS functionality is gone. Now maybe we've gotten to a point where people are treating OSX upgrades in a cavalier fashion, but I think that's a mistake. I always wait a few days if not a week or so to let the early adopters experience the pain.
I will be very much interested in learning what method did you use.After dropping from regular education 12 years ago, I have tried to learn mathematics multiple times with moderate success only.

Please try to share your methods via a blog post/elaborate comment if you can spare some time.
I sense, a lot of posts are going to be grayed out in this discussion :D
Sending people away from your website in order to access your website is bad UX.
Yes and No.

We use tornado for the stream (the task processor). That means that only one user gets to run a task simultaneously.

That said, the stream is just an http application.

This means that you can scale it as easily as you would any web app.
(They do put it on the front page, I already pointed that out)

So, assuming you don't consider HN scum (you're here, after all), can you please explain to me how is this different from YCombinator using HN to publicize their own companies? There's nothing in the front or signup pages explaining that.

Frankly, I don't see why is that a problem. They're offering a free service in exchange for having words manually OCRed. If you have a problem with it I think you should take it to the site that's using reCaptcha, not with Google.

(By the way, I'm not affiliated with Google and I'm not even an heavy user of their services anymore)
I think we should commission such a study. Those of us with English degrees will be perfectly suited to conducting this survey and delivering the results in epic poem format.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco
I agree, but one of the next features we'll implement is for you to be able to write stream processors, mappers and reducers in any language you want. Stay tuned!
> Why would anyone want to have an executable txt file?

A shell script.
No disagreement there, and especially the way it's normally taught now, which can feel more like a course on special-case methods for performing symbolic integration. There is some understanding you gain by knowing how to work symbolic integrals (the chain rule, integration by parts, etc., etc.), but I wouldn't put it near the top of the list of things all students must know. The actual integration can be done fine by Mathematica or Maple; what's important is what you do with that.
Wait till you learn about the term "Growth Hacker" ...
They didn't remove her data. They removed the app. The data is still in the original location. The fact that she was able to "recover" it is unimpressive.
Passwordless authentication done right is a subject in here, try to break the auth and let me know...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4291856
Why procrastination is good for you
...and James Joyce showed you can get lit profs to take what you write seriously without any coherence
You seem to imply that actual mathematical content is rather less important. Then why stick with algebra and calculus?

Frankly, I agree with Hacker: quadratic equations are boring. Teaching number theory will do better job of teaching pattern recognition and deduction. More Fermat's little theorem, more Chinese remainder theorem, less quadratic equations. I found undergraduate number theory to be far easier and more fun than calculus, and you need no calculus to start on number theory.
Did you have a low-karma account when you made that useless comment before? If so, I don't see a problem with the algorithm. Lots of downvotes on a low-karma account is indicative of a spammer, a troll, or someone who hasn't taken the time to figure out the communication style of the site (it's not that hard) and probably won't ever. Hellbanning itself is a great idea; have you moderated a forum before and dealt with abusive trolls who keep coming back?
Yeah, and the music industry wants us to pay for plastic discs.

Things have changed and people who want to force down some old model of social interaction on the internet are dinosaurs who couldn't differentiate a paradigm shift from a potato - just like said music labels with their shiny plastic discs.
>> Calculus is certainly not important for CS majors. Compared to, say, linear algebra.

I dunno. I am trying hard to refrain from saying X is not important for C.S. because the nature of this site is that you are going to find a ton of C.S. people who point out that they would be crippled with the lack of X :-)

Having said that, I read Steve's article many many years ago and upon reflection, I have realized that Steve is way better in Math than he lets on. Some of the techniques there are designed not for you to "get" Math but to get some sort of cultural awareness of Math (which of course is a fun pursuit on its own). The reason why casual foraging of a ton of math has never worked for me when I started learning math is because one of the reasons Math is incredibly hard is that it is inherently a personal journey. Getting math sometimes requires working at it patiently for weeks before you finally understand how to wrap your brain (which really means making connections with how you think about something that you previously learned and this new math) around it. This requires hard work mostly in the form of rather mind numbing problems which at first glance can be boring and feel like you are being told to "wash on wash off" (to use a Karate Kid reference). However, the subconscious is a powerful tool and helps by developing weird connections. As I got more and more trained in math, I realized these connections became much much easier. I suspect this is why math researchers are able to look at paper and quickly grasp the intuition behind it.
Machine learning, for example.
"Nobody ever brags about not knowing how to read, but people brag all the time about not knowing how to do math."

This is not just math, it's virtually every subject you learned in school. Imagine the following at a cocktail party:

"I had to read Joyce, Whitman, and Hawthorne, but I never got the point of any of them."

"I took a lot of history, it was a bunch of dates which I could never remember."

"I took three years of Spanish, but I don't remember a word."

Et cetera.
I don't understand why you (or anyone) would give up so quickly. Would you try to run a marathon on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and then conclude it's too painful and give up?
I think there has been an effective shift in what that word means to anyone born after a certain point say 1970-1975?

I nearly said "that's a good hack" about something the other day, but edited my speech in mid thought - I am sure the audience would have taken "hack" to mean "wtfpwn", which wasn't at all what I meant...
Yep this is the way to go the same in here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4291856
Britain is a good place for entrepreneurs, says Adfonic chief Victor Malachard
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You can sign up to be kept up to date on the site: http://comehackwithus.com
You will probably have (b) even without real names. Pseudonymity is hard enough that as we get better at interpreting this data I suspect most will be connected back to offline identities. Relying on the identity separation we have now to persist is asking for trouble.
Not sure what a result CTR is - can you explain (click through rate?)
If that's the case, then HN has had a problem since nearly the beginning! You can find posts from its very first year (2007) worrying about whether it's overlapping too much with reddit, how to avoid redditization, etc. (Example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60767)
Please, somebody figure out that when you embed asymmetric keys in things, when people lose those things they'll get really angry

or

Please, somebody figure out that when you embed asymmetric keys in people's bodies, we'll end up with a lot of geeks with their hands hacked off with machetes.
Yeah, if we go down that avenue, we'll be extremely careful about it. Definitely no gameshow-elements involved.
To the extent that algebra courses consist of solving # + x = # over and over again, I agree that they are mostly useless. In life, algebraic questions don't come at you in symbols and numbers, they come in words. And I would argue that these questions surround us! It's just a matter of people recognizing that they are there. Therefore, in my opinion, a good algebra course (which is essential!) focuses on problem solving. Necessarily, the course would involve some mindless equation solving to learn the framework of algebra.
Another word: lxde.

On Ubuntu that's lubuntu.

xfce is cool, but it's gotten too visible for me. lxde/lubuntu is just windows and a panel.

Personal preference, personal choice. Glad you like xfce.
Nicely put. I have increasingly come to the view that computer science really is a branch of applied mathematics. My most intellectually rewarding recent work has been on (programming) projects where I get a chance to use some computational geometry and linear algebra.

It goes without saying that almost every non-trivial project requires serious thinking about time and memory complexity costs, and I've been surprised to find theory of computation useful when working even on simple parsers (nothing fancy from compilers classes, just straightforward reading of proprietary formats).
Lolgrid
Automatic compilation of funny cat pictures, so you don't have to check each site manually.
Will/Should never happen. Human != device, and it's the human we want to identify to personnalize the service.
Kontagent uses both.
Apple Hates Web Developers
/g/ is an atrocious community, going there for just 15 minutes makes me ill.
Interesting option for sure, we'll look into it. 3G internet is not super though, 12 people will easily saturate that when working..
> You seem to imply that actual mathematical content is rather less important

No. The point was that it is much more than what you call the content.
You're right, but he's claiming this at a lower level. I imagine it's more embarrassing to have to ask, "What does this say?" than to have to ask, "How much change should I receive?"
The site was a 30 minute hackjob, forgive us ;)
thanks, I tried to double check that the url would work for everyone but did not think about the automatic redirect to local the local google
Interesting! This same problem occurs in calculus as well. Leibniz's notation is pretty offensive, for example: in basic calculus, d/dx is an operator. In differential equations, you suddenly begin treating dx as a separable algebraic term — and way too many teachers suck at explaining why this is suddenly permissible.
Somebody has noticed that we are nothing more than enterprise wannabes and Apple fanbois, with less to no hacking in sight.
The problem with "solutions" like these is that they start with faulty premise that "passwords are broken". This particular idea sounds like death by a million cuts.
Perhaps your poor experience here is because of the tone of your posts? From your own description, your posts seem to involve (a willful?) mental blind spot around the whole concept of politeness. The implication of your comment is that cleverness trumps all, and that insightful snark is entitled to some sort of social leeway. That's not how things work around here.

In short, your HN comment is a bit clueless.
Illustrates the danger of passing all PR functions to, well, PR people. They have obviously taken on trust the rational provided to them by their IT contact. We all know this tweet is ridiculous - who are they to know different?
Serious question - how do you stop the trolls from running that extension too?
About the autocompletion: big privacy breach, would immediately quit and probably tell some authority about such stuff.
Ways to Save Gadgets from Rain | Science feature
Wow, I want to work at Foursquare!

These are such great ideas. I get jealous when I see articles like this as I have never had the privilege of working in such an environment. Of course as the company gets bigger it is going to be tough stopping fiefdoms and silos but they are surely on the right track.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the heavy usage of Bootstrap that's been going on lately.

Bootstrap not only makes it simple to visualize the construction of a page, but their documentation is really easy to understand (while HTML's documentation can be difficult to go through).

It's great how flexible HTML/CSS is -- it comes pre-built with an existing paradigm (semantic HTML), and tools to create your own (read: <div>s & classes/IDs). Personally, I prefer using the standards already set than creating something new and/or using something different.
...only in Finnegans Wake. And let's be fair to English professors, many of them don't take that book too seriously. :)
They do get put into redis.

Maybe we should have a different storage strategy if the data is too big? File storage? I just meant for it to be simple.

If you are going to use redis for storage then you'll need to fine tune it to the processing you are doing (we have).
This happens for basic calculation really, for which Google spits out an answer. And since it's a feature of Google Suggest, it also works in Firefox.
When a horse dies, it doesn't stay in a constant preserved state forever, it slowly decays :)
The site should have the capability to detect login attempt for multiple attempts - Show captcha
Same account login attempt from multiple IPs - show captcha
With the above: a simple time wait for next attempt could solve the issue for most legit attempts right?
Tada!

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

Guess what? Even worse usability.
Your Smartphone Is a Spy for the Government
Also graphics.

That said, it's absurd to make a dichotomy between the two. Both are essential. Maybe not at first glance at a simple CRUD app, but both get surprisingly handy once you want a bit more out of it.