skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point was that .999=1 is a direct result from the fact that the number line is continuas.

Imagine that you had a number system which does have holes in it (for example, the difference between .999... and 1). Now, take 2 object, one at mass .999..., and the other one of mass 1. In this hypothetical system, these objects would have a different mass. Now, take a third object, whose mass is between the 2 of them.

I consider it a critical property of our number system that we can be guaranteed to have a number representing the third mass.

As a historic note, the Greeks believed that any 2 numbers could be expressed as a multiple of some unit. For example 2 and .333... could both be expressed as multiples of 1/3. Eventually, they proved that this system could not accuratly moddel their world (the diagonal of a square for example).

I suspect that if we did have a number system such as you described, we would eventually discover that it did not work well enough for us, and switch to a continuas one.
First, to get it out of the way: People are very right in mocking Apple. They deserve every bit of that. What they delivered with their Maps app is embarrassing. I do not want to defend that.

The problem, however, is that this article assumes something to be unequivocally true even though we do not know whether it is: That Apple decided to build their own maps in order to hurt Google.

It takes two to play. Both Apple and Google have to agree that Apple gets to use Google’s data – and on the conditions. That we know nothing about. We do know, however, that the old Maps app was perpetually stuck in 2007 while Android phones gained 3D views and (much more important) vector maps and turn by turn navigation. If Google refused to give that to Apple it’s perfectly understandable that Apple goes looking for alternatives.

I’m not saying that’s the case. It could really be that Apple’s intention here was to hurt Google – but we cannot, as this article does, just assume that to be true. (To quote: “We all know the reason why Apple is doing these things. They’re more focused now on hurting Google than thrilling users, just like they were with Microsoft in the 90s.” – no, we do most certainly not all know that that’s the case.)
I generally agree with this however, it can often go beyond just product. The old adage of sell on value not on price applies here. Don't underestimate the power of marketing and sales to be able to really position product differentiation, service, value, ROI, etc to beat out a lower priced competitor.
You've already answered your own question. Start with the code your code already depends on:

https://github.com/michellesun/zuppa-di-bella/blob/master/re...

Flask==0.9
Jinja2==2.6
Pillow==1.7.7
Werkzeug==0.8.3
beautifulsoup4==4.1.1
lxml==2.3.5
pymongo==2.2.1
requests==0.13.3
wsgiref==0.1.2

Surely some of those have open issues. Maybe even issues that would be relevant to your own projects.
>In the hands of someone who knows what's going on, programs get much simpler

I never really got this argument. With RAII types that have value semantics (ala shared_ptr) what is so difficult about memory management in C++? I guess there are reference cycles, but weak_ptr can help there. Manual ref-counting (like a COM AddRef/Release pattern) can be tricky, but that is where attention to detail, code reviews and basic competence come in. RAII wrappers with value semantics help here too. Most problems I have seen with that have been people simply not bothering to learn even the basics or using "smart" objects without understanding how they work or how to use them properly, which really isn't that hard, honestly.

>that isn't IMHO a good reason to dislike the "magic" behaviour of exceptions.

Agreed, my primary pain point around exceptions is people that write functions that mutate some state and are interrupted in the middle via an exception and stack unwind leaves objects in some franken-state. Transactional semantics in the face of exceptions don't just happen except in trivial cases (i.e. functions that don't mutate state or have trivial unwind semantics where they must only restore say a single mutated value).

That said the same problem exists anytime there is state mutation and multiple, failure exit paths. For some reason I guess the code I have seen using error code return style tends to handle this better. Could just be some kind of selection bias.
I'm glad you like it, but homebrew discourages people from submitting their own projects. I agree with that policy. It filters out a lot of junk.
Facebook had lists. I was happily using them. Then Facebook added more lists with default names, with no way to delete them. Now I'm never 100% confident I've got everyone in the correct list. Who knows what will happen the next time they update?
makes you wonder why they are asking then.
The historical revisionism among the Appleistas is a bit disconcerting. This is not a matter of the "suits" overruling Jobs' "pirates". Apple's current anti-Google jihad is Jobs' baby. This is what he wanted. Now, it's entirely possible that he would never have authorized iOS shipping with a broken maps application, but to suggest that Apple's current direction is anything other than his idea and his impetus is naive in the extreme.
I'm sure it is. In fact, I've wondered if Google might try something like that (e.g. if/when they release an iOS app, expose some custom URL schemes for third-party developers to use if they want).

That being said, there is another problem. I can't see Apple looking kindly on developers deliberately routing around a system API to use a competitor's. Perhaps, given the current PR issues, they'd be forgiving in the app approval process for the moment, but I certainly wouldn't count on such forbearance.
It's amazing the news about this riot has spread the way it has. It's common practice in China to limit the number of workers from each village in order to differ congregations of people and suppress acts like rioting. I have heard of protests when the factories are closed and no one is listening, but ultimately news about protests is usually limited. This must be a big one.
Data Barns in a Farm Town, Gobbling Power and Flexing Muscle
I have an 8-foot toenail that needs a little clipping; what tool should I use?

More seriously, what needs an 8KB-long name?

(That bug post contains a few workarounds that'll let Drupal get back to GET for one of the listed cases. Drupal's case is particularly pathological as it's trying to be everything to everybody; it's like being a handsaw AND a sander AND a varnish for the floor AND a dessert topping.)
When you buy milk from the store, do you pay a dairy tax?

It isn't a tax to enforce payback of borrowed funds.

And taxes can be defaulted or negotiatied downward, says the lawyer in the ad on the TV.
I'm talking a lot less professional than SME. More like the equivalent to a lemonade stand in the manufacturing world. Those businesses won't make it inland without some logistics miracle. If you are involved you know what I mean.
You haven't seen much from Thiel it seems. He addresses the lage growth of economies such as China extensively, and identifies that much of their growth is not adding new science or technology to collective knowledge but simply "catching up" to the U.S., others, with much "copying" of technological process. This, he says, implies that eventually once they reach parity, there will be inevitable slowdown and in addition does not solve the overall situation of slowdown in worldwide technological and scientific innovation.

2008
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9302

2010 http://lockerz.com/u/20643924/decalz/7182285/charlie_rose_pe...

EDIT:

From summer 2012, very good:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/17/transcript-schmidt-th...
I'm afraid the obsession is not on Apple over Google but on the media and blogs over Apple and every single thing they do. Of course Apple will watch its competitor closely, especially since both are now headed in same direction. And of course they need competing services.

Likewise, I'm sure that Google is watching closely every move Apple makes. But nobody in their right mind would say Google has an "obsession" with Apple.

This map thing is a fun anecdote, but I'm not sure how big of a deal it really is. And yes, the maps are worse than the ones Google has develop for the past 7 years -it was to be expected- but Apple didn't have much room for movement here. If you cannot go forward on the current path, and standing still is not an option, the only possible move is take a step back and find a new route. Simple as that. Painful, sure, but it had to be done sooner or later.
What if by 2018 "friends only" is no longer an option? Or what if the software extracts this data out of explicitly public Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin posts that were intended by the user to read neutral and employable?
A doctor or his fiance can't get a $150K loan at 5%?
It seems this becomes another tune-able parameter. The concurrent transactional behavior just depends on the characteristics of the time synchronization.

This also, unfortunately introduces a new failure mode ("bird pooped on GPS antenna" exception) that has to be handled. At worst it would revert to using plain NTP servers. But is just something new that possibly didn't have to be considered previously.
The US govt is underwriting the loans. That is what needs to stop.
Wild parrots assign unique call identifiers to their offspring
Here we go again. Other than Jobs tantrum in his book and countless of headlines and blog post, where is this fantastic "jihad"? I see the same level of love/hate between Apple and Google than between Microsoft/Google or Google/Amazon. We just overanalyze it to disturbing extremes, but thats about it.
Thing is, as much as I believe Jobs definitely was the one to start this(it's his quote after all), I don't think he'd cut off his nose to spite his face.
I personally like Go's error handling so I wouldn't consider doing it, but what exactly would be the issue with doing so?

The reasons not to that I have seen are all basically boil down to "Because you're not supposed to, it's not what it's for". Because of how recover works it certainly wouldn't make sense to use it exactly the same as try/catch is generally used, but what exactly would be the problem with using panic/recover for more common cases (less 'exceptional' cases...) if we've already decided to not value writing idiomatic code?

It strikes me as a terrible idea, but try/catch does too.. I guess I don't understand why it would be even worse than that.
But out of state students are intentionally overpaying and don't deserve much sympathy.

In state students get a pretty cheap deal still, only the ones who don't get admitted have cause to complain.
Interesting. I was just theorizing and wasn't aware of any actual recorded cases of this, but I am not surprised.
Or, ya know, you just do:

if (!herp_derp()){
...
}

or

if (herp_derp() > 0){
...
}

and don't actually check any of the error cases that you should be checking, like return = -1, -2, -3 etc.
Bad example. A Harvard poetry major will make connections and do fine. A George Mason poetry major, maybe not.
I remember being up in the Anti-Atlas mountains of Morocco and the family we had dinner with had satellite TV but no running water. They had news on (Al Jazeera if I remember - but maybe Al Arabiya or something else - Saddam Hussein had been killed that night so it was BIG).

Anyway, they had a meat dinner for us as special guests but otherwise mostly had a vegetarian diet because meat was very expensive. Nonetheless, the TV was critical for both information and entertainment. They also had cell phones.
Not at all. If a function can't or shouldn't be responsible for handling an error, it can return that error. The result is that the error passes back up the call stack until something handles it.

It's very similar to exceptions, except you have to consciously choose to do it. That's a virtue to me.
Well, I don't think the article said that the current problems were once again caused by the "suits" overruling the "pirates". I think it just mentioned the suits and pirates to give a bit of background on what happened last time and why.

Based off what I have heard of Jobs he was more than capable of conceiving of and carrying out a vendetta against Google of this scale, without needing any help from be-suited MBA's. The point is not who decided to go after google in the fist place. The point is; taking it to these lengths is stopping Apple from focusing on what is really important: Producing great hardware and software, that will delight users.
Law school is a cartel controlled by the ABA. That is a special case.
I was waiting for something like this (translate, thought about writing, and then realized someone without 2 kids and a mortgage will beat me to it) after getting the infamous dumb search and being forced to install go launcher / use gensture search. This is actually what I was missing for my galaxy s III to save it from being replaced with an iPhone 5 (ok, google maps is an added argument, but this is was beaten to death already). Thank you, and please say no to any acqui hire attempts from Google (and get a good lawyer in case Apple sue you for violating omni search patents).
your comment jihad needs to be reanalyzed.

You are right though. Need to read less in the lines. I do believe Apple is suing to protect its best interests. There is really no other way to protect your product than through litigation.
Insurance is a great way to hedge against career ending injury.
Ad Tracking Success
Eh, I think it's in the best interest of the employed to throw around numbers like $300k / year and $1mm bonus just to shift the window. If people say them enough, eventually someone will pay it. Maybe to one of us!
Mathematics is an example of one of the fields that doesn't require significant investment to enable "hands-on" learning. Suppose your child's interest is piqued by chemistry or engineering, though. Math is certainly necessary there as well, but in order to explore concepts on more than a theoretical basis, expensive equipment is usually required. Maybe hacker spaces and similar community collectives that pool resources to obtain otherwise prohibitively expensive equipment can help fill that void.
The example is easier to extend to include additional logic after the call or another return value.
In my personal opinion, if you're not thinking about an exit strategy, you should be.

In the bigger picture, Apple's top two smartphone competitors build transit directions into their mapping solutions. Apple can't afford to leave transit the exclusive domain of third-party developers indefinitely. To use Joel's phrase you're "picking up nickels in from of a steamroller". You should expect to get Sherlocked eventually.
We have good evidence for turn-by-turn, though: when Apple decided "ok, we cave, here's an SDK and an App Store", the contracts with developers had a weird clause saying you couldn't build a turn-by-turn application that was later changed to only that you could not build a turn-by-turn application using the data that Apple had licensed from Google; while this isn't for certain, the obvious interpretation of this is that when Apple built the iPhone they licensed Google Maps but with the clause "the iPhone cannot do turn-by-turn", which got awkward with an SDK, and later got fixed in legalese to specify "we cannot do it, but if someone else independently has data and licenses it, they can".
5th post on e topic and still no one cares? hmmm....
Are you serious?

What do you call the patent war between Samsung, HTC and every manufacturer of Android phones and Apple besides a proxy war?
I've said it elsewhere, I think this is a better explanation of the Maps fiasco than saying that Apple thought they could pull it off. We don't know of course, but we do know that Apple suing Google's OEMs has irritated Google's inner circle. So Apple can ship Google Maps without making call outs to Google's servers, and Google has implemented a payment scheme this year, recipe for reciprocity. [1]

[1] Ok so generally reciprocity is mutual benefit but I couldn't resist the alliteration.
Because one of the nice things about Go is that I don't have to worry about this.

Is not just unidiomatic code in itself, but it creates unidiomatic APIs that behave in ways Go programmers don't usually have to worry about.

Unlike Python programmers, who should always be worrying about what exceptions any function or method they call could throw, hell, even setting a property or adding an item to a map or list can throw all kinds of exceptions. And this is rarely documented, and when it is documented it is usually incomplete, because whoever wrote that code doesn't know what exceptions might be thrown by any other code he calls.
Google maps sucked when it first came out. It will be fixed and both applications will improve. I think this is will only turn out two awesome map applications rather than just relying on google for everything.
Unrelated: Trailing curly brace at the very bottom of your page :)
Do job titles matter to software engineers?
I agree in principle. But I think the assumption that pumping more money into fields like education will generate a substantive improvement has failed. The problem with our education systems is cultural, not fiscal. School does not teach children how to think and argue, it teaches them how to pass tests and coast.

This article is a good example of the many many things that could be done other than pumping in more money to improve ed.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4557023
I have such a programmer crush on Brad. Somehow, despite living in Seattle all summer, I've yet to be able to attend any Go/golang talks or meetups. Sad.
Have you seen the Error function in the HTTP package? http://golang.org/pkg/net/http/#Error
Scientist prepares paper for CHES conference - with a little over-the-top wording in the _draft_. Paper is leaked to the internet and blown out of proportion.

It's still interesting reading. Maybe Microsemi will finally listen to these guys and stop using the same password for the backdoor in _all_ of the following chips: "all ProASIC3, Igloo, Fusion and SmartFusion FPGAs" [1]

Ok and PEA is just their patented method of automating differential power analysis using a test jig - it does the repetitive process using a microcontroller and some sensors instead of doing it after sampling everything with an o-scope. It's a good idea and they have worked out the fiddly little details... but a pretty simple concept.

[1] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/%7Esps32/microsemi_re.pdf
Sometimes it just doesn't work, no matter what. Sometimes you're just meant to be big. I am a former wrestling local city champion, currently a kickboxer, and also practicing jujitsu. I move fast and sprint like I'm 140 pounds, I can roundhouse kick someone that's 5'9 in the head, and I'm almost at a split. I can do 50 pushups, 12 pullups, once ran 8 miles, and have done high intensity cardio 5 days a week for 2 hours everyday. Yet I'm 250 pounds and a huge gut.

My diet? Eggs, veggies, rice, fruits. No sugar at all, and yet I have not been able to lose weight for the past 2 - 3 years. I have slowly watched the scale climb up no matter how many calories I cut or how many carbs I don't eat. Sometimes you just can't fight your body and you're meant to be who you are.
> Why would you trust him with your data?

Absolutely not. Unless I was a non-technical user looking for an easy way to share my pirated software/audio/video etc, in which case it's almost a plus that the guy in charge is going to try his hardest to avoid being shut-down again.

> Or if you are an investor, with your money?
For me the answer is a firm "no" but other people will weigh risk/reward differently.
Maybe I was the only one in the dark, but if you've not seen it, this cable is damn cool (yes, I'm a geek).

It's not "hollow" like USB cables, where the "male" plug is actually a "female" plug in the sense that there is a negative space in the usb connector that is filled when it's plugged in. With the Lightning port, it's just a male nub with the pins on both sides. Meaning you don't have to worry about orienting it correctly.
So the major factor here is generally proposed to be dietary fiber. People on a high-fiber diet are healthy, and that's really the major separating variable between laboratory diets like the one in this article and real diets that make you fat. Going off the description of dishes in the article, I'd estimate the subjects had a daily fiber consumption of 40-60 grams, most of it soluble.

Studies that look at meat consumption generally do not control for fiber, though they usually mention the correlation in many populations between increased meat consumption and less fiber consumption. Of course there are correlations with fiber and CAD and cholesterol. But we already knew that.

It's a rather significant confounding factor when anyone uses an extremely high-fiber test diet to argue for the health value of various other characteristics of said diet. This author does it all over the place. Frankly, a mere 12 pound loss over five years may not really be too impressive, depending on where they're starting. I imagine Mark Sisson could post better results than that. Similarly, I imagine the guy who wrote The China Study could post better results than that... most diets will!

What they've got statistically significant, but pretty much any diet that cuts out processed foods alone will show statistically significant changes...

The sole really impressive thing is the prostate cancer improvements: but there are too many confounding factors to determine what, precisely, is causing the improvements. Maybe there's some anticancer compound in a vegetable emphasized in the diet. Diindolylmethane comes to mind, or beta-caryophyllene.
give it time...
According to the latest reports surfacing it started with a fight in between 10 workers from different production lines involving a guard somehow. It is already mid day in China and no one know what the exact story is.

Maybe more accurate to call this a group fight with a few thousand spectators. Like I said earlier comments earlier most people seemed to be pretty calm.
My rules for less email distractions
Playing fair is too much of an expectation in any part of the world today. The worst part is cheating, unethical activities and all forms political activity to unfairly benefit from the system by denying other deserving people of their rewards is called smart work.

Its pretty common in human beings to exhibit this activity. We just happen to work in organized employment spaces to see manifestations of these problems in these ways.

The crab mentality. Have you ever taught about it? Middle class people tend to like and hate each other at the same time. As much as they like to help each other they are also jealous of each other internally. Nobody likes the other guy growing or doing better than him. If there are two colleagues at the same financial level, they generally have an untold secret pact that they both will remain the same way for ever. If the other guy ever discovers that you have a secret project to build, sell something new. Or that you have been working off office hours for some extra cash, Or that you have saved and invested to be more rich that him. He feels cheated, that some very sacred pact was broken. Like a contract that binds two people in the same group was broken.

If your projects get out in the open before you can make some money out of it. They will try to sabotage it in a way or the other. Like trying to emotionally drain you out, or try to demotivate you, or scare you by the potential risks of failure. Or if they are shameful, they may just very openly try to kill your project in the best way they can. Many people would have noticed this attitude among friends and relatives.

The fact is most of the people around us are jealous. More than liking their own progress, they hate seeing you progress.