skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When dealing with infinities you need to be really precise, and very careful. When you ask about "a ring of infinite circumference" I have to ask - what do you mean by that? The only thing I can think of that's related is a "circle if infinite radius", but the usual interpretation of that is a straight line. Then we're back to an infinitely long hallway.

So - what do you mean?
In the first article I briefly mention my motivation for covering GAs first when teaching ML: it does a great job of introducing ML core concepts, and it's interesting. It's hard to teach ML to many people if you start with the comparatively boring kNN or k-means; starting with GAs gets people excited early and provides a foundation off of which you can jump into the more traditional ML topics. It shows students that there really are interesting things to learn, and they're more likely to stick it through the "boring" topics. I've been teaching this stuff for a few years, and this approach hasn't failed me yet.
But what's the difference with ca. 1999-2002 when Loki ported popular games to Linux, Corel released Wordperfect for Linux and their own Linux distribution, Red Hat was the darling of the Linux world, and VA Systems IPOed?

That window of opportunity is gone. Home users are moving to tablets for most of their computing. For businesses there is little incentive to move to Linux, Windows licenses are relatively cheap and come with hardware. Retraining personel is more expensive.

The traditional Linux desktop provides a fine UNIX workstation and if the crazy desktop experiments stop, it could compete with OS X. Linux for the average home user has already succeeded as Android.
Finally an article that really breaks it down for someone like me (college calculus knowledge) to understand. Thanks for sharing this, super interesting.
Use toggle to update a boolean type attribute
That's the implementation of Jobs' desire to destroy android
Why termites explode
If we hadn't added those things, HTML&Cia. wouldn't even be a contender to replace native performance now. It would still be a simple technology meant for static information.

If your argument is more in the line of why do games keep getting bigger and meaner, needing more resources, when we could have stopped advancing 3D a decade ago and every computer would be able to play any game today; then that's a whole other discussion. But I like the path towards true virtual reality with photorealistic graphics.
I talk about that technique in the article. It's called the "greedy algorithm" or "greedy solution". In this example, the GA handily defeats that approach.

Edit: the greedy algorithm gives you a solution with a total value of $4,901. So far, the best observed GA solution yields $5,968. 20% or so is a big difference!
Missing Life-Lessons
I'm no lawyer, but I do not believe it's possible, or at least it's highly unlikely that somebody would go to jail should they not pay up in a patent case ruling against them. If anything you'll have your assets seized and you'll file bankruptcy and that's the end of that. Pretty shitty, yes, but far from getting sent to jail.

Yes, my post was sarcastic, but at least I'm rooted in reality instead of speaking in pure conjecture and hypothesis. There was more to my comment than just sarcasm, though you chose to ignore it and instead continue with the rhetoric.
I've come across this while building the feed list for http://skimfeed.com.

To keep signal to noise as high as possible, I've had to remove all regular news sources from the site (CNN, MSNBC...). They're time wasting, regurgitated junk adding little to no value to readers lives.

At the same time, I think ignoring mainstream news completely is not the solution, it's nice to know what the masses are consuming and it keeps you up on trends.

Conclusion? everything in moderation.
While I generally agree with your assessment, I'll make the small point that the radioactive-isotope contamination of the areas surrounding Fukushima will have subtler human and environmental effects over the course of the next 50+ years. Sure, these won't result in death, and perhaps not even serious illness, but they are effects that last long after everything is repaired.
Thanks for posting here. How does this project relate to XMLVM (from Google employees)? We used that in order to bridge an Android app to iOS and found it to be pretty impressive. Is this based on that foundation, or a purely new effort? The main difference I see from XMLVM is that it tried to also bridge some aspects of UI, as well as was a bit more generic to attempt to bridge to C and C# as well.
There's a distro for almost everything and there's certainly one for the unassuming family PC - Ubuntu. It passes the "Mom test" for me and keeps my technology hesitant mother very happy. Email, web browsing, online banking, photo sharing, printing/scanning just works. If anything it's easier than "that Windows thing" (as she describes it).

Even if that were true (which I dispute, even in recent weeks GRUB broke after an upgrade on my Linux machine, resulting in an unbootable machine). What is the incentive for the average user? They already have a computer that came with Windows for 'free'. Tablets are many times simpler than either Ubuntu or Windows.
Infinite scrolling is what I hate most about Facebook UI.
> This is Google/Android's fault the same way that it is Microsoft/Window's fault that the Acer you bought from Best Buy is nigh-unusable due to everything it's trying to run when you first boot up...

That isn't Microsoft's fault because they've already been slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit over exercising that kind of control over Windows. They theoretically have the power to enforce such a restriction but choose not to in order to cover their ass. Considering the various payouts they've made to governments for telling OEMs what to do, it's hard to blame them.

However it is Google's fault because they have no such restriction with Android. As the scuttled Acer Alibaba launch demonstrated, Google has no qualms about exercising its power in a potentially destructive way to bully their partners into toeing the line.

They get final approval of what ships on the phone, the design, and the changes to Android. If they don't like what they see, they can revoke access to the core Google apps like Gmail and Market, making it essentially an AOSP device. The Skyhook investigation taught us all that.

So in other words, Google has the power. They use the power frequently. They also are not in legal hot water over exercising the power. However, they won't exercise the power to benefit you because they value their close relationship with carriers way more than they value you as a customer. Mainly because you're not really a customer, as an Android user you're the product being sold to advertisers.

There is no reason to give Google a pass on this one. They are the only ones with the power to stop carrier and manufacture bloatware from ruining the phone, and they deliberately choose to ignore it because maintaining relationships with hardware partners and carriers is more important to them than your experience with the phone. That's the bottom line.
Ah, whoops. My bad.
Clinton's speech at the DNC emphasized updating Americans' skillset as a "pull strategy".

As it relates to tech, this means enabling people to apply technology to leverage their current skillset; from manufacturing jobs to the arts.

As it relates to entrepreneurship, this means investing in programs that encourage entrepreneurship - of any industry - throughout country. YC is an efficient model for entrepreneurship in tech. In the beer industry, the Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream program (http://btad.samueladams.com/) is another good model because it offers a variety of resources and levels of assistance.
Union membership in the US is very very low and accounts for ~7% of the private workforce and only ~11% overall. Finland, for comparison, has ~70% union membership, and also tops the rankings for education, among other things.

Convincing low waged people that the unions are in some way anti-american is just pure evil genius and took an amazing amount of chutzpa by the politicians who claim to represent them.
I understand a healthy media diet but as an able/concerned/voting citizen, I cannot justify abstaining from news* entirely.

*News being defined as important information about important events. (Not TMZ, GMA, opinion columns/shows, etc.)
I'd like to address all of your bombastic remarks, but everyone else has picked you apart pretty well, so I'll just address the comment about short range urban transportation being a "solved" problem.

I disagree. The bicycle is not the complete solution. compared to a board. Their actually huge. you rarely see a cubical that you could fit a bike in and most businesses don't have showers after your sweating bike ride to work. I think a board/public transit solution is a huge step.

1) Choosing your house or apartment: If you could board a couple miles to any type of public transit stop this decision really opens up. I emphasize ANY public transit stop. Some buses can only hold 2 bikes, and have you ever lugged your bike onto Caltrain. They really haven't learned anything from Europe about ergonomics of a train stop. Sometimes you have to lug your bike up 4 feet of stairs onto one of those trains. The board is light and small and EVERYONE on the bus or train could have one. And think how it open your transit schedule planing to choose from stops in a couple mile radius. The rent you can save from this decision will pay for your board.
2) Cubical space: How sweet is it that you could park your board next to your desk? I'm totally getting one of those hooks from the kickstarter video.
3) No sweat: Sure, I guess you could get a (massive) electric bike, but frankly who wants an electric bike? Not cool. The zero sweat solution to your commute would be one of these boards. I'm sure you and your colleagues would prefer if your didn't sit in meetings covered in and smelling of sweat from your morning ride. You'll have to get the exercise somewhere else.
Christian Fundamentalism is easily traced as a response to Christian Liberalism; you can find pretty good information on both on wikipedia.

Here's a caricature of how it went down:

(mid 1800s, Liberalism): "Hey, it turns out when you look at ancient copies of the Bible from 2 different areas, there are occasional differences in spelling and word order. Therefore, the Bible is totally fiction, but teaches moderately useful lessons, so long as we understand the figurative language it's using."

(late 1800s, Fundamentalism): "What? You guys are quacks. The King James Bible is totally reliable because God specially preserved it. Therefore, there's no figurative language whatsoever, everything is literal."

It's my perception that Fundamentalism's influence is waning; I run into far fewer "fundies" than I did during my childhood (but I live in the same house and attend the same church.) In surveys I've seen, a lower percentage of people self-identify as Fundamentalist, and a lower percentage agree with certain key Fundamentalist doctrines. They may be louder than before, but I don't think they're any more prevalent.
What if we let philanthropies operate like businesses?
List of disposable email domains
The why am I bored of hearing about it?
I think news and several other activites can be grouped under the "will this have made any impact in my life within 5 years?" good procrastination umbrella.
> I'm asking it to run a program and then do something different. That's well within the range of human abilities.

No, actually, it isn't, because that easy-sounding informal description of what you're wanting the program to do isn't accurate. (Or: If it is, then your argument saying that an AI can't do it is wrong.)

The problem is that some of those programs won't terminate, and neither the hypothetical AI nor a human being can reliably tell which ones those are. And if you don't know whether the program you're looking at is ever going to terminate, how can you reliably do something different?

This may sound like a nitpicky technical difficulty but honestly, it isn't; it's a deep fundamental flaw in the argument you're trying to make.
Just yesterday I was at the grand opening of www.startgarden.com in Grand Rapids, they're giving out two $5,000 "experment" investments every single week one of which is ONLY determined by people voting on the net.

I've made the call to found my startup in Grand Rapids, the cost of everything is just so much lower than the valley that you can get a LOT more runway for funding. Plus in your seed round the state will co-invest up to $250k on a dollar for dollar basis.
This argument also proves that people can't really think, because I can set you the following challenge: "Work out what number you'd name in response to this question, and then tell me the number one bigger than that."
I've stopped going Reddit, for a similar effect.
I came across this a few months ago while trying to implement a solution for turning HTML into PDFs server side. This is definitely cool and useful but it's usefulness is limited for now as native PDF readers on the desktop are preferable. Even on iOS the built in reader is nicely done. Chrome on Windows and Mac always opens PDFs in a tab and handles it well I think. That said, this can definitely be of use in Chromebook type situations. I'm sure it'll end up in Firefox OS too which I have hi expectations for. The awesome thing about Firefox OS is that it's all JavaScript and good old fashioned web technologies under the hood so this will fit right in.

So alas, I'm still searching for an easy way to convert HTML to PDF server or client side. I haven't looked at the code yet but I do wonder if one could get that functionality out of this if they wrestled with it enough. (I know there are other ways to turn HTML to PDF but a client or server side script to do so really is the best solution for my situation).
I had to chuckle at this but banks far superseded his passion for completely open sourced solutions so I think he just tolerates it like we all do...
I will have to look into this, http://kernelnomicon.org/?p=133 u-boot on the raspberry pi.
I think this is a great idea, but the web version of the document is surprisingly difficult to navigate and read. In fact, it's downright unpleasant. I understand why it is available as a hardcopy version through a publisher, but I wonder why the PDF isn't available for web use.
Do you think news is the best channel to make an informed voting choice? It could be argued either way, but it's certainly not clear.

In Switzerland, the best source of info is usually the documentation that comes with the voting papers. News is just noise and opinion.
This have nothing to do with bittorrent, the bittorrent protocol and torrents came long before people started sharing illegal copies of software. It's a great technology and it's actually meant to make downloads faster.
"the gcc they include in the NDK has Objective C disabled for seemingly no reason" - I wonder how heavily they modified gcc to cope with security models etc. Quite possibly there's a very good reason. It might have been a ton of work to get it working properly.
Check out my sample links. Data is from the World Bank.

www.bricbracs.com/worldbank/foodfactor/

www.bricbracs.com/worldbank/footprints/
Subreddit for nootropics, aka smart drugs
From this article:
http://www.apple.com/environment/renewable-energy/

"By the end of 2012, we’ll meet the energy needs of our Maiden, North Carolina, data center using entirely renewable sources. To achieve this, we’re building our own facilities that will provide over 60 percent of the clean power we need."
I'm implicitly targeting X11 through writing a QT application for Linux. The continued existence of goofy low-level apis not fully encapsulated by higher-order calls and not relevant to the role of the modern desktop certainly doesn't seem like anything to celebrate.
Why did the union keep demanding more and more?

Why didn't management just make all employees joint owners of the company?
Did you stop absorbing news altogether or you just stopped looking at mainstream news? What is your definition of mainstream news?

I think it is reasonable to be an observer of your local news - the news which affects your immediate environment - otherwise rest of the long distance news is irrelevant so I am in agreement.
make a QR code stream, and decode it in browser.
Meet Gala: The New Window Manager for elementaryOS
While that is a problem, it wouldn't solve the uncanny valley problem with scrolling either way.

Standards for correct UI feel on iOS are extremely high, and you are looking at spending more development hours trying to create a write once run everywhere platform than just writing native code.
Goodspeed 10-sim wifi hotspot delivers cheap data abroad
My personal, ad-hoc strategy for keeping up with news (aside from HN):

* Glance Newspaper headlines on the metro or at newsstands.

* Every quarter or so, pick up a copies of The Economist and New Scientist.

* Hit wikipedia for an intro to issues/subjects that I find interesting.

* Track down books/papers on anything that I want to delve deeper into.
who said it was "best"? surely a variety of sources would be better than any one. and excluding news from those seems like a significant omission; particularly when the justification seems to be "bad news is nasty and makes me feel bad" (the other argument seems to be that you can do better things with your time, but i would have thought 15min scanning the BBC, say, while having your breakfast would be a pretty good way to manage time).
I have mixed feelings about X. On the one hand, it's a very impressive bit of kit. It offers a unified protocol that separates the program drawing the window from the hardware that displays the window on the screen. This allows the program and the hardware to be completely separate, possibly even running on separate machines.

On the other hand, that very separation is X's greatest hindrance. It imposes a fairly large cost, not just in terms of performance, but also in terms of complexity. You have to deal with a network protocol just to display things on the screen. No other windowing system imposes this level of cost on the developer, and it can be argued that the reason we never got a Linux desktop was because of X. Simply put, Apple showed us what could be done with a Unix system if you abandon X and set allow your GUI API to talk directly to the hardware. A large part of Apple's success can be tied directly to their decision to forego X11.
I've always liked the post provided by BetterExplained[0], but this article is more thorough while remaining simple. Would probably still use the BetterExplained post for a first introduction, I think.

[0]:http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-quakes-fas...
Ask HN: How does Google test its ranking algorithm?
In gigantic datastores for which the results are hard/to big/both to evaluate how do they test changes to the ranking mechanism?

Do you have to create an algorithm ranking algorithm? For large enough systems when does that stop?
Why are we all buying SoCs with restricted permissions?
You still hear about important events. I haven't bought a newspaper in years, but I can keep up with my family in political discussions.

If something is important, people mention it.
It is true about physicists, also mathematicians (look at the Fields medal winners.)

On the other hand, novel writing is by and large a middle age and older persons' game. There are a handful of great novels from people in their twenties, but most of those authors go on to write even greater works later in life.

There are advantages and disadvantages to youth. Trying to pretend that everyone is equal and it is all a matter of how hard you try is one of the great fallacies of our era.
The British Interplanetary Society is still around and active... http://www.bis-space.com/
Huh?

I'm talking mobile web, not HTML5-written faux-native apps.
"Since I object to general surveillance, I use cash for ordinary retail purchases. I use a credit card only in the situations where I am forced to disclose my identity anyway: car rental, airplane tickets, and hotels."

http://stallman.org/archives/2003-sep-dec.html

"If you buy by credit card, companies and governments can monitor what you buy, too. So I buy things with cash. If the business says 'no cash', say 'no sale'.

http://stallman.org/archives/2010-nov-feb.html

"I never use self-checkout machines unless a store gives me no choice..."

http://stallman.org/archives/2011-nov-feb.html
Show HN: At-a-glance personal aviation weather for Android
bor·ing/ˈbôriNG/
Adjective:
Not interesting; tedious.
Maybe, but the question remains, is it viable now? Is Firefox OS viable now? The answer to both is an emphatic no. However it's felt more in regards to Mozilla as they don't have the resources to build Firefox OS and maintain Firefox along with other projects like Thunderbird. Android still doesn't have a good open source mail program and the port of Thunderbird was a hope.
Yes. The bean counters are finally in charge and the only thing that will cause a change will be the market's reaction in the shape of buying or not buying products.

Doing what is awesome is out and careful is in. Sad.
Are you guys actually generating PDFs from user input? If so, I'd be really interested in finding out how you do it if you don't mind sharing. I've found a number of apps that allow you to generate PDFs server side but often the installation is near impossible (dependency issues), e rendering is not good enough, or the API makes using it with a web app clunky. I did find a solution (don't recall the name) that actually used Webkit to render web pages and then turned them into PDFs but I was never able to get it to work in an app. It only seemed to work some of the time and only through ssh. But if you can't say, then I can respect that.
Uh, it's marked FOUO, not Top Secret, and it's going to be made public when it gets issued anyway, troll.
This is about PDF to HTML conversion.
The iPhone 5's A6 SoC: Not A15 or A9, a Custom Apple Core Instead
It is a pain to debug C++ on Android even if gdb comes with the ndk. Practically speaking, it turns out debugging C++ code can be done on any platform (Xcode on Mac, codeblocks on Linux, whatever). My entry point C++ class has a unit test that tests all the components... I have yet to find a significant bug that was not reproducible on another platform one way or another. For the record, if you dont want to figure out the NDK gdb setup mess, printf outputs to logcat.
I wasn't there when the contract was inked, just for the lawsuit in the aftermath. Obviously in hindsight they should've pushed to retain more.
We are Sorry ~ GoDaddy
What a great question. It scares me every time I release a new update on an MMO that I work on with only 2,000 concurrent users, let alone changing an algorithm that affects millions of peoples financial.

I would love to hear if anyone has insight on this as well.