skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There got to be far more to mathematics than simply learning how to follow steps.

Nope, that's really all there is. Just like computer programming is nothing but learning to string arcane commands together in anal retentive ways. It's just a lot of making variable names and putting data in them and using little symbols like "argc" and "foldl" and "fopen" that have excruciatingly dry definitions that are completely disconnected from the real world. You memorize rules of syntax and look up function definitions and follow all of the rules exactly correctly, and even after you've done what feels like a ton of that you're still just writing a dumb program that you would never use anyway. What's the point?

But I bet you didn't feel that way about programming when you were first learning, right? Things like foldl and dlopen seemed kind of neat, if not mind-blowing. People who become good at programming get there because they take delight in the simple things that make up the basics. Is there anything intrinsically beautiful about loops? There is the first time you encounter one. Oh, man, the possibilities! The feeling passes quickly, but I can't imagine how anyone who never enjoyed loops could endure the boredom long enough to become skilled at programming.

It's the same thing with math. Like programming, it really is just symbol manipulation and nothing more. The pleasure and beauty is in your perception of it, the concepts you develop to give intuitive substance to the abstract rules. Your appreciation gets deeper the more you learn. But to get there you have to enjoy the basics, the simple things. How many times did you have to write

for (i = 0; i < m; ++i)

before it became second nature? You must have derived some satisfaction from your initial fumbling with loops and functions or your interest would have died before you learned to write more complex programs. (The kids who don't enjoy the basics quit programming as soon as they realize they won't be making a state-of-the-art video game in a weekend.) Learning math is the same process; you start by enjoying where you are, even if you're starting at the mathematical equivalent of

for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) {
System.out.println("I love cake " + i + " times!");
}

That may not sound very attractive to an educated person with many sophisticated things to think about. It's entirely possible that there are some people who are not simple-minded enough to enjoy math. However, I think those people do not enjoy programming, either ;-)
ironic that the linked site is _not_ responsive :)
> Find energy-draining devices, including faulty appliances.

How do this work?
Can we stop calling these things “frameworks” if they are so lightweight?
More Google Webfonts that don't suck
Browser bookmarks are a way unrated feature. A descriptive title and you're good to go. Who cares what the name is when your bookmark title has "t.js A tiny javascript templating framework".

I already can't remember the name of half the libraries I see even when they are clever and appropriate.
Good news: Groupon made money

Bad news: Investors want it to make more money

Verdict: Should have stayed private
Since this was on the front page, I took the time to figure out what IronWorker was all about. It looks to be cron, and memcached as a service, which to me are not real pain points.

Twilio on the other hand is Asterisk, TTS, telephony gateways, and a bunch of other telephony stuff as a service, which is a real pain point.

If I were to implement this app with neither iron.io nor twilio, it would be easy, however using twilio would save me about 2 hours, and cost the same money as a regular SMS gateway. Iron.io would require an additional several hours, and cost additional money. In short, I see iron.io as a negative value add.
You might not even need to implement all of emacs, just emacsclient and have the emacs daemon running on the server.

But why does everything need to run in the browser? You have a perfectly good OS and you can run Emacs natively and use tramp to open remote files over ssh. I do it every day, it's awesome because I'm using my local emacs configured the way I like it and I can edit files on any server that has sshd running. Problem solved.
That looks pretty cool. It looks like you nailed the precise zoom feature, which is key for your use-case.
In quantum physics, a particle can be found at energy level 0 or energy level 1, but cannot be found at any level in between. (for example, this is a result of the infinite 1D quantum well). That is the impossible that I was talking about.

It's a very tiny jump in energy according to human perception - the interesting part is that the particle is only in state 0 or 1, never "in between".
Should try and get sergiotapia.me then, lots of people are using .me for personal pages.
Try buying your own lithium ion battery that'll last eight hours then. Companies need to make a profit too...
Not tacky at all mate - http://jamesjguthrie.com
And a few less-featureful templating-frameworks in 140 bytes or less: http://www.140byt.es/keywords/template

Notably, the examples found at https://gist.github.com/964762#file_test.js has the closest parity.

Edit: On second thought, I think the previous gist can reach parity with just a helper function for iterating and escaping:

function engine(a,b){return function(c,d){return a.replace(/#{([^}]*)}/g,function(a,e){return Function("x","with(x)return "+e).call(c,d||b||{})})}}

function iterator(o, k, f){
var i, v = [];
for(i in o[k]){
v = v.concat(f(o, k, i));
}
return v.join('');
}

function print_kv(o, k, i){
return [" ", i, ":", o[k][i]];
}

hello = engine("Hello,#{iterator(this, 'users', print_user)}!")
// We don't have to pass iterator, on the next line, but it should demonstrate
// how we context can be overwritten
hello({users: {a: 1, b: 2, c:3}}, {iterator: iterator, print_user: print_kv})

// Or don't pass print_user
print_user = print_kv
hello({users: {a: 1, b: 2, c:3}})
// "Hello, a:1 b:2 c:3!"

// Overload it!
hello({users: {a: 1, b: 2, c:3}}, {print_user: function(o, k, i){return " "+i}})
// "Hello, a b c!"
Ask HN: Who's Looking for JavaScript Developers, and what typeof?
Though I've been building JavaScript web apps on the side. And would say I understand it well. I still have a hard time really grasping what the landscape is like for JavaScript developers looking for work.

JavaScript seems to be achieving the status as the universal language of programmers...(Do you know english sir?). But there are now so many tools being built on top of JavaScript, and all fighting for attention, is there any place for the really good pure JS guy?

Edit: Don't get me wrong. I'm not against any frameworks. I just wonder is their such a separation that the CoffeeScript guy should just stick to coffeescript and Backbone.js guy stick to only those positions.
Browser bookmarks are a way unrated feature.

Or Catch.com or pinboard.in or similar.

I also tend to print Web pages to PDF and stash them in a Dropbox folder for later review.
Maybe like this?

http://bidgely.com/technology-peek
Anger is not the only use case for the word "fuck", nor is expressing an emotional state. Really, there's a fuckload of other fucking examples; enough to make one tired as fuck just fucking thinking about them, so I won't enumerate them here (those readers who give a fuck can now exclaim "thank fuck!").

"Respectable" media are beholden to their advertisers, who in turn are concerned that specific demographics might be scandalised by certain words and affect their bottom line. I don't think HN or much of the internet fits into this category.

Academic papers are an interesting case. I suspect their avoidance of the word fuck is a combination of their inherited sense of propriety and the fact that such an ambiguous word as "fuck" rarely has a place in scientific writing.
Enough is enough.

Samsung: I'm willing to go to all thermonucular over this.
Optimistically: Promotion, Pessimistically: Money-grubbing
> Byte-wise access to objects is legal and completely portable between conforming implementations.

That makes absolutely no sense. Just think about endianness for example. Type conversions in C are extremely tricky, and in many cases are not guaranteed to be portable across different compilers even on the same architecture. There is a good explanation of what you can and cannot count on in chapter 6 of Harbison and Steele's C A Reference Manual.
Not to play semantics, but "A software framework is a universal, reusable software platform used to develop applications, products and solutions."

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

There's nothing in there about how lightweight they have to be to not be considered a framework, so I think you're being a tad pedantic.
TSA Racial Profiling May Hide Larger Constitutional Problem
Good for Snoyman...he's one of the most hardworking people in Haskell open source. I still don't quite understand what FPComplete does, though.
http://www.clipsal.com/ecomind

have to pay a sparky to clip the wireless monitor on. but if i'm going to be coughing up $250 for hardware, getting a sparky out for 30min is not my barrier to entry.
Alleged Xbox ‘Durango’ development system sells for $20K on eBay
Art being an activity of free will and constraints free is a common misconception I am surprised to see shared by Larry Wall.

If you write music for piano or play piano you are moving in a highly constrained environment. The extreme example is Chinese calligraphy, probably the most constrained form of art, and at the same time the one where the artistic expression of the self is the most salient.

So no, please don't oppose art and discipline, it's a mistake.
They're called _rumors_ a for reason. People expect most rumors to be bullshit anyway.
I'd be curious to know if I'm the only one who hates Google Web Font's user interface (http://www.google.com/webfonts)?
If I Were The MPAA... How I Would Deal With My Car Break-In
Looking at issues in https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Filesystem-Guide it seems to be there would be a big win in having an LLVM VM - you'd be able to have synchronous IO and have threads.
I once hit upon a P2P twitter-clone project. It thought and think the idea is great, but you still needed a twitter account for some reason, that was a bummer.

So if someone comes with a P2P twitter clone, that would be something:
- no advertising
- no censoring (china!)
- large cache of tweets stored for offline viewing
- all kinds of additional services could connect, like history logs, searching, discovery, notifications.

A drawback would be the lack of speed, as p2p networks have delays, obviously. But this could be overcome at least partly by making followers also p2p neighbors, me thinks.
I don't think chicken and egg necessarily applies here. It's not a general consumer app in the sense that it's more likely to be adopted by teams. If I manage a small 10 person remote dev team, I may just tell my employees to all get on it and use it.
Ask HN: How do you sell to grammar schools in the US?
I'm considering exploring a startup idea from a friend. He works in a grammar school. There is a federal regulation for which he needs to track a bunch of info for each student. Right now, he tracks it through a google docs spreadsheet that he built. It's a lot better than not having it, but he sees that it's not optimal, and he asked me to see about building something.

I'm excited about the possibilities because this would be directly helping to solve a real problem.

But I'm worried because I think this would be very difficult to sell. According to 1 study I found, most purchasing decisions for this particular regulation are made at the district level, not the school level. The further the separation between the people doing the work and the people making the purchasing decisions, the more a sales team seem necessary, and the less effective standard micro isv/startup approach of careful google ads, a/b tests, etc. seems. And a full-time sales team is not something we can afford, nor can we drop our day jobs to drive around and talk to execs.

Does anyone here have experience selling SaaS to grammar schools?
Advice greatly appreciated.
This looks cool - but I literally have no idea what this product/service is/does.

Cool video, but tell me what you do.
Like programming, it really is just symbol manipulation and nothing more. I strongly disagree. Arithmetic, perhaps... but not "math."

Some of the best math proofs require little-to-no direct symbol manipulation. You might be able to reduce a mathematical statement down to the symbolic level (eg. using sets), but so much of the beauty is in the simple intuition. One simple example: the pigeon hole principle -- you can teach it to a 3 year old, and yet its incredibly powerful.

EDIT: If you read about Lockhart's Lament (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread), he specifically writes:

The cultural problem is a self-perpetuating monster: students learn about math from their teachers, and teachers learn about it from their teachers, so this lack of understanding and appreciation for mathematics in our culture replicates itself indefinitely. Worse, the perpetuation of this “pseudo-mathematics,” this emphasis on the accurate yet mindless manipulation of symbols, creates its own culture and its own set of values. Those who have become adept at it derive a great deal of self-esteem from their success. The last thing they want to hear is that math is really about raw creativity and aesthetic sensitivity. Many a graduate student has come to grief when they discover, after a decade of being told they were “good at math,” that in fact they have no real mathematical talent and are just very good at following directions. Math is not about following directions, it’s about making new directions.
Indeed, myself and others were doing [A]VBAX apps in IE before the term "AJAX" hit the mainstream. Not always async, and using VBScript in the browser instead of Javascript, but loading XML from the server and doing XSLT to build the DOM. It actually was pretty nice, at the time. IE5. You couldn't do things like that in any other browser for years.
App.net made its goal. But can it make it?
What My Son's Disabilities Taught Me About 'Having It All'
What's with a lot of fanboism posts lately??? Heck the linked post doesn't even offer a clear picture of either of the IDE's. IDE's often look similar and its no secret. This is because developers often have to use different IDEs for different tasks and relearning a drastically different IDE is just a waste of time and resource. If I have to be in OP's shoes, I would find even Xcode to be a direct clone of Visual Basic's IDE!!!
The javascript was added much later by popular demand to make the time accurate.
Remove it and it remains functional.
check out http://noredink.com they have managed to make progress with the school system.
I added the JS much after the fact that I posted this here due to popular demand to make it accurate.

Remove the JS and it remains functional, as in the first version.
If all of these vague insinuations were so valueless, then why are all of these privacy-raping sociopathic websites trying so goddamned hard to expose them all, whether publicly or to their "marketing partners"?

NB: to better under stand "social networking", wordsub "sociopathic" and you'll be far closer to the truth.
Bad fats aren't saturated fats. Milk is saturated fat. Milk is pretty awesome for you, especially if you are trying to gain muscle.

Trans fats, as you mention, are the real bad fats. The whole '80s and '90s in terms of diet really, really screwed us up. I wish I knew then what I know now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat
Maybe I misunderstood but isn't it right there on line 222?
Nice! I assumed login was required since it seemed like it forced me to. But great that direct links are public.
You seem to have answered your own questions.

Yes, the Faraday cage protects against EM interference. But so does turning your computer off. Your main computer is fried? Pull out your old laptop and dust it off...
Threading in Gmail was definitely huge. They beat a lot of desktop mail clients to the punch, too, which always surprised me.

Seems like Branch would become One More Thing To Check, as opposed to a replacement for e-mail. I don't think they're going for an replacement, either. I think I get their point, but I also can't see it as much more than Twitter repackaged with unique slang and a squeaky clean UI.
CSS optimization should be the last thing a developer does, if at all. Most of the time, it's not worth it.

As a general rule, just be as concise as possible. `.nav ul.actions li a` could be turned into `.actions a` as long as it's alright for the .action anchor tags not in the .nav element to have the same style. But if you use .actions elsewhere and want the .actions list to look different in .nav, that's fine.
Oh, you are one of those "Well, actually" people. Gotcha. I can do this.

> So pay 2$ and get updates for free.

No, that's not what he said. He said he expects update and support. He didn't say that those updates and support should be free. Merely that updates and support is available. It's akin to paying for anything, really. I expect if I pay for a computer, for example, that they make available to me updates and support.

So let's not play the "Well, actually..." game, and discuss things like an intelligent adult.

And, even if he did mean that he expects updates and support for free for the rest of his life, does that really warrant a response or consideration?
That's dangerous for long-term reliability - you need at least RAID1!

("Redundant Array of Independent Dockets"?)
I think it would be cool if calculators weren't allowed in school unless you programmed them yourself. Now trying to enforce that might be difficult but it is an interesting idea.
Can someone give an example of an application that would be built on top of App.net?
Part of that is due to distortions caused by tax regulations. Advertising spending is basically a tax writeoff so effectively costs nothing.
Interesting, that clears up my reservations, thanks!

I feel like the biggest issues might be missing ambient spatial awareness for the user - with that non-wideangle lens and mono microphone you can't see the whole environment at once, you have no idea where somebody is talking from, and you cannot turn quickly enough to always track what's happening in a room, if people are leaving/entering etc.. How do you plan to make the user feel more "there"?

Also, micro-managing the movement of the bot would take up a lot of time that I don't have to spend when I'm present locally. E.g. when I'm present myself, I just look somewhere, then think "I want to go there" and it all happens automatically. With the bot, I have to manually navigate around plants and desks. It would be great if we could do the same thing with the bot: just touch on the screen where you want to go, and the bot figures out the rest. Or show a floor plan, touch where I want to go and the bot does it. Do you have plans in this direction?
Thanks that makes sense. I've been meaning to get to know ragel better.
Bitcoin has hit 12 USD
Even further, John Cage and his ideology of chance. Non-determinism only worked under heavy constraint, and it worked amazingly.
I think a lot of people are "missing the point" because of the poor job Dalton is doing of describing what exactly he is trying to do. By the score of my comment [1] on the original announcement a lot of people agree.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4241821
I like to think of branches as public email threads, but I get in trouble when I say that publicly. Obviously has poor connotations :)
That's a valid point for a small team. There's not a lot of friction for them to add an additional chat tool on top of what they already use. I'm guessing that most people's Skype contact list is like mind: various present and former coworkers, family, friends, and so on. These additional contacts beyond the small team are what makes it hard to replace Skype. Everyone's already using a perfectly functional chat tool, so it comes down to whether push-to-chat is that compelling of a feature that you'd pay for it.

Also in terms of a general consumer app vs. a team-based app, perhaps the terminology can reflect this? Instead of a contact being a "buddy" (which doesn't sound professional) what about just calling them "Contacts" and the ones you want to be able to insta-chat with you can be marked as Trusted?
At least list out the 50 countries. After reading the blog post and hunting on their site for 10 minutes, i still cannot find the countries Plivo is compatible with.
Currently I am learning Ruby on Rails. And Michael Hartl's tutorial is the best source out there. Next comes Codeschool's rails for zombies.

The key point lies here is how you make the tutorial interesting so that the user does not loose focus or concentration. In other words to make it fun to learn. I believe Codeschool is exactly doing it by making small videos and then asking a set of questions and rewarding points to the user. Codecademy too but without videos.
So I would suggest if you are developing some tutorials then integrate as much as activity for users you can.
I also agree to some level with joel42. After certain level you do not need tutorials anymore. It is just for beginners.

In addition, I think those days of University style teachings are over. Or it will be obsolete soon where the receiver end has to sit down idly for hours to learn and then start doing once the lecture finishes.
From evolutionary point of view our brain is not wired(designed) to sit down for hours to learn efficiently as it can not absorb all the information thrown to it in a single try. It works best when learning by doing approach is practiced. By adding small piece after piece or tweaking pieces to the building block.

However it is my personal opinion. Take it with a grain of salt.
Hey,

We are working on a blog post to do that as we speak you should have something within next 10 mins. Thanks for the patience.
If you want something to get where email is today, you don't do it through an API. You do it through a standard protocol.

We already have something that handles messages from all over the world. It's called Usenet.
Where will it stop?

Am i right in thinking the majority of bitcoins that will enter circulation are now accounted for?
> What I can't wrap my head around is how one would implement pointer-arithmetic with these closures?

(defstruct memptr
mem
(ptr 0))

(defun allocate-memory (size) ;; shared by malloc and static allocation
(make-memptr :mem (make-array size :adjustable t :initial-element 0)))

(defstruct place-ptr
closure)

(defmacro vacietis.c:mkptr& (place) ;; need to deal w/function pointers
(let ((new-value (gensym)))
`(make-place-ptr :closure (lambda (&optional ,new-value)
(if ,new-value
(setf ,place ,new-value)
,place)))))

(defun vacietis.c:deref* (ptr)
(etypecase ptr
(memptr (aref (memptr-mem ptr) (memptr-ptr ptr)))
(place-ptr (funcall (place-ptr-closure ptr)))))

(defun (setf vacietis.c:deref*) (new-value ptr)
(etypecase ptr
(memptr (setf (aref (memptr-mem ptr) (memptr-ptr ptr)) new-value))
(plate-ptr (funcall (place-ptr-closure ptr) new-value))))

(defmethod vacietis.c:+ ((x number) (y number))
(+ x y))

(defmethod vacietis.c:+ ((ptr memptr) (x integer))
(make-memptr :mem (memptr-mem ptr) :ptr (+ x (memptr-ptr ptr))))

(defmethod vacietis.c:- ((ptr1 memptr) (ptr2 memptr))
(assert (eq (memptr-mem ptr1) (memptr-mem ptr2)) ()
"Trying to subtract pointers from two different memory segments")
(make-memptr :mem (memptr-mem ptr1) :ptr (- (memptr-ptr ptr1) (memptr-ptr ptr2))))

As you can see I don't do anything with type declarations, so arithmetic performance is going to be terrible. Multiple levels of pointer indirection work correctly with pointer arithmetic, since all pointers which can be legally added/subtracted are first-class objects.