skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are attempting to argue that, for at least some starting inputs (you specify an even initial input in several places), the first several steps will produce a strictly smaller number, and therefore, if you repeatedly take several more steps, you must get smaller numbers that eventually reach 1.

For starters, that would only work if your argument applied to the entire set of outputs that you'd feed back in again as inputs. You may prove that 3 cycles will bring an even input to a lower output, but that output may be odd, in which case the next 3 cycles will not necessarily produce a lower output. In fact, after 6 cycles, the output may be greater than the original input. I shall drive the point home that any argument of this form must fail:

If you name any integer n, I can find a starting value such that the first 2n Collatz steps are "3n+1 n/2 3n+1 n/2 3n+1 n/2 ...", so that the output gets up to roughly (3/2)^n * [the input]--which can obviously be much greater than the input--as much greater as I want. This starting value is "any number that is 1 less than a multiple of 2^n", or, in more occult language, "any number that is 1 mod 2^n". Observe:

k * 2^n - 1 is odd.
=> 3n+1, we get 3k * 2^n - 3 + 1
3k * 2^n - 2 is even.
=> n/2, we get 3k * 2^(n-1) - 1
3k * 2^(n-1) - 1 is odd.
=> 3n+1, we get 9k * 2^n-1 - 3 + 1
9k * 2^n-1 - 2 is even.
=> n/2, we get 9k * 2^n-2 - 1
9k * 2^n-2 - 1 is odd.
=> 3n+1, we get 27k * 2^n-2 - 3 + 1
27k * 2^n-2 - 2 is even.
=> n/2, we get 27k * 2^n-3 - 1
27k * 2^n-3 - 1 is odd.
...
3^n * k * 2^0 - 1 might be odd or even, depending on k.

You might try, say, starting with n=127. By the above argument, that will go up to 2186 after 14 steps (and will be at 4372 the step before that).

By the way, I figured that stuff out by recursively saying:

We want the biggest result possible.
Therefore, we want the last step to be 3n+1.
Therefore we want the number before the last to be odd.
This number must have come from an n/2 step.
Therefore the number before that must be 2 mod 4.
We want this to have come from a 3n+1 step.
3n+1 is 2 mod 4; 3n is 1 mod 4; n is 3 mod 4.
n was 3 mod 4.
This must have come from an n/2 step.
n was 6 mod 8.
We want this to have come from 3n+1.
3n+1 is 6 mod 8; 3n is 5 mod 8.
Come to think of it, 5 is -3 mod 8.
Then, clearly, n is -1 mod 8.
n was -1 mod 8.
This came from n/2.
n was -2 mod 16.
We want this to have been 3n+1.
3n+1 = -2 mod 16; 3n = -3 mod 16; n = -1 mod 16.
n was -1 mod 16.
At this point, the pattern of "-1 mod 2^n" is
waving its arms and screaming in our face.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I took a much dumber approach, which I automated beyond "15 mod 16" (intending merely to provide some numbers and describe the procedure to get them), and didn't see until I saw the output that it was always 2^n - 1, and didn't know how to prove it until I wrote the above. Oh well.
The initial analogy with physical attractiveness is broken. Physical attractiveness is akin to the intelligence you're born with. You may not be able to boost your intelligence much, but you CAN minimize the factor luck plays in you realizing your potential afforded to you by your intelligence.
The problem though is that there is still a line, and only one line. Either republican or democrat. If there were a third major party in between Republican and Democrat, Romney would probably fit pretty well in that one. He wouldn't be stuck in this situation where he feels the need to pretend he thinks trickle-down economics still works and Obamacare is a terrible idea.
Have you tried reStructuredText?

rst2latex has worked very well for me. The current version has math mode. I've occasionally had to write some custom LaTeX to get things like natbib to work, but it's largely been problem-free.
Well there are always going to be exceptions to the case. I would also assume there are a greater number of people going to coffee shops in San Fransisco than there are in other cities.
I have a similar project called "Social Typist". https://github.com/jeswin/socialtypist

Definitely something worth exploring. Best of luck.

Edit: last line.
I've always been amazed (until now) that the NYT hasn't been blocked (when YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and a bunch of other news organizations are). I can only guess because it's primarily an english publication. During the 2008 Olympics (when I was in China), I was consistently amused that I could read about all the atrocities committed in the name of the Olympics in the NYT from behind the Great Firewall of China.
I have a theory.

Giant productive societies will be ruled by billionaires. If the society tries to choose otherwise -- whoever else they choose as leaders will become billionaires.

I'm not sure the theory is true, but we may want to prepare mechanisms that still work for checking leaders' power, and attaining an acceptable level of competent and just governance, if it does turn out to be true. I suspect that will require more transparency than China practices.
> - "Yes, yes you are" (reply to i'm not trying to be a hater) - No, I wasn't. I was making a critical comment, but I wasn't trying to be a hater. You cannot tell me what I was trying to do.

You weren't trying to be a hater. But you can try to not be a hater, and still end up as one.

> Perhaps suggestions of how this could be made more civil while retaining the criticism would have been a better way to word the comment - want to take another shot?

More commentary like this:

> the responsiveness doesn't even work.

This was the only part of your comment that was worth while, or worded in a civil way. Rather than spew insults, be specific. As they say in writing, show, don't tell. It's poor to say it's an abomination. Rather, simply explain why.

> Stuff like "one good thing, one bad thing" or any type of sugar coating is not relevant.

It's not. And that method doesn't make civil criticism, regardless. After all: "Your font choice makes it easy to read, but what I'm reading is still an abomination" is rude and unhelpful.

The best criticism is specific then. Everything else is just opinion, and generally worthless. Opinions that merely insult are just hateful.

Hopefully this helps.
Have you tried using the list-table directive? I find it's a much easier way to create tables - it's based on writing indented lists which mirror the logical structure of the table (i.e., table / row / cell), rather than trying to produce ASCII art.
I wrote up a little comparison of reST and Pandoc-Markdown, http://www.unexpected-vortices.com/doc-notes/markdown-and-re... , which might be of interest to some.
This is why I am bullish on Google. I think motorola with Google will eventually figure it out and will take half of those $5B+ mobile profits from Samsung.
Animal farm. The pigs that led the revolution against the humans become the humans.
shuts down, has to reboot

I don't think you understand how an EMP works. The article is about a microwave gun which is more selective but less effective than a nuclear EMP. The pulse causes extremely high voltage. Durable electronics (an old car) might restart, but modern electronics are often destroyed.

It's not like electric devices in a big area don't work for a long amount of time.

Unless they are EMP hardened, they will not work forever, which to me is a pretty long time.
Yes. Click on presenter's name: http://startupschool.org/2012/
Ask HN: How to approach your potential buyer?
Hello HN,

Just wondering if anyone here has any suggestions on how to reach out to a potential buyer of our startup. If anyone has any email template to kick off the discussion that would be great.

Thanks in adavance!
This is exactly why I just reserved one. Our son gets home before us, and it's nice to know when he gets home. Currently I get a Growl notification when he turns on the PC, but if he doesn't turn it on I won't know when he gets in (and he's not in the habit of calling us, which I guess is the ultimate solution, but this is a good alternative). We have maid service too.

I'm less concerned with opening it remotely versus just knowing when it's unlocked/locked.
You need to update your tutorial page to reflect the new design.

Other than that, this looks really cool.

Good work, guys.
Samsung says to book patent provisions after U.S. ruling
The same CEO who said that the iPad mini at 7.9" is perfection, but "who would ever want to do a 7" tablet?" - reminds me of the hitchhiker in There's Something About Mary:

Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the excercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Ted: You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?
The problem is an app-specific DRM scheme is impossible to implement. The user would be able to intercept any API calls the app makes to an external program, at the very least capturing/spoofing the signal to the I/O drivers. The only way to make a secure system in this sense is if the software can establish a chain of trust and be confident that it is not running on top of 'compromised' software. An solution to this, which I believe is common on phones with official support for rooting, is to have a cryptographiclly secure way for a software to verify it is running on a non-rooted stack (I assume through signatures). At least this way, the only thing that disabling the system-wide DRM will cost you are the apps that specifically request the system-wide DRM. A better solution that I have not seen implemented, is to be able to run both a rooted stack, and a provably non-rooted stack at the same time. I am not sure if this is technically feasible to do for the kernel (maybe with firmware support?), but it seems completly doable for userspace programs.
The Kwikset motorized deadbolts have tapered bolts to help compensate for poor alignment. I'm not sure why it's not more common with other locks.
Other then the export features to epub, how is this different then just using google docs?
No worries - thanks for pointing it out. We'll correct that as soon as the traffic dies down a bit ...
Microsoft rejecting Apps like Apple except their store is empty
She also contributed her financial and legal knowledge to YC. The others were "only" programmers.
Mark Cuban is a master of sales.
Yes, of course.

I'm all for teaching as many undergrads as possible about writing an OS - so many valuable lessons that aren't easy to teach in any other context.

Still – there are always a few who really take off. Such might enjoy a tutorial that walked through doing a full USB stack. Maybe... :)

I feel compelled to speak for the over-achievers because they may not even realize they could go so far, so fast, until someone points them in the right direction. It's fun to watch.
I dont think it needs to be disrupted, and even if it did, I dont think Lockitron is that product.

We are moving towards a world where everything is connected, online, and accessible. Doors and keys are not in need of an overhaul, but some day, due to advances in peripheral technologies, having a door unlock automatically is going to just seem obvious. At first it will be something only the newest buildings have, and eventually, old metal keys/locks will be something only the oldest buildings have. Do you believe that doors/locks/keys are going to be unchanged in the next 50 years?
No, you can't downgrade Windows licenses.
Policy vs Mechanism.
Thanks for the detailed feedback. Typos and the links definitely need fixing - we'll get on that after the traffic dies down.

We definitely plan on publishing the metrics, and there's some cool discoveries that have already been made. Check out Nick Winter's talk here for some examples of some of the interesting things he figured out with just an n=1 experiment: http://blog.quantified-mind.com/2012/08/05/21/

The driving force is a bit mixed. Nobodies funding it, we all just help out because we really think there needs to be something like this out there. The real core science behind the testing is Yoni Donner's thesis at Stanford, and he's the founder and lead developer ... the rest of us are just helping get it out on the web.
This really is quite true. iOS development is moving at breakneck pace and the API quality is starting to show.

Most people outside of mobile dev don't know this, but when iCloud shipped in iOS5 the API support was woefully not ready - heck, even Apple's own 1st-party apps that exploit iCloud had notorious syncing issues. To this day iCloud + Core Data support is buggy, poor, and more or less undocumented (the go-to guide for using it is a thread on the forums dozens of pages long full of angry devs and overwhelmed Apple engineers).

There are a number of rather egregious bugs still in the API today that date from iOS3, including one date parsing one that any iOS dev worth their salt has run into first-hand - every time a new release happens people circle back and are continually disappointed that major, easy to hit API bugs are left unattended for so long.

It really does seem like Apple is having trouble keeping up.

I remember when the iOS4 beta came out for developers - it was an incredibly solid beta, and the OS was stable and highly functional months before it was due. Compare with iOS5 and iOS6, the betas of which have both been notoriously buggy, crashy, and downright unusable right up until release. Devs have had to struggle with horrible stability and broken APIs in all beta builds right up until the day the GM drops.

It could be worse. Definitely not the worst API I've ever touched. But still, troubling.
For one, google docs has a free-form dynamic that doesn't really prevent people from cannibalizing each other's work. PenFM, like its predecessor Neovella, enforces a turn-based writing collaboration. But that's entirely just in terms of how it differs from GDocs in the sense of sharing the production of content.

Collaboration in PenFM happens in another, more powerful way: the ability to react to parts of a story with simple likes and more thorough commenting. Imagine having written a story, and now you have to send it out to friends & peers to review and give feedback on. Would you really rather have a back-and-forth over IM, constantly having to find the part they're referring to? On PenFM, they just click the section, type a comment, and you get notified to go take a look at what they wrote. It's asynchronous.
Well thank god we don't have any platform owners today making changes that screw over developers.
ALIGNMENT SYNTAX
Unless I am mistaken, microwaves are not ionizing radiation. If intense enough, they can cause burns but won't cause DNA damage.

Studies about chronic high exposure to microwaves show no clear signal of cancer incidence. A quick burst is pretty much considered safe aside from heating related injuries, as far as anything reputable I can find on the matter is concerned.
Msconfig is in, yes, but the startup section is not. It redirects you to the startup section of the task manager, of which Metro is not an option for you to disable. Startup is simply the ability to disable services and programs that run on the desktop.

For example, mine has Java, Steam, Thinkpad Tools, Nvidia nView, Digsby, etc. Nothing Metro in there.
Military hardware has been systematically hardened against this since at least the 1980s in the US. I'm sure most other modern militaries have taken similar precautions.

Guerilla forces would be more exposed because they would likely be using repurposed consumer or obsolete military equipment, neither of which is likely to be hardened against this type of attack.
Pandoc is fantastic, the parsing code is clear, and its extensions to markdown are well thought out.

It's not just a markdown->everything converter, though. My install understands these:

Input formats: native, json, markdown, markdown+lhs, rst, rst+lhs, textile,
html, latex, latex+lhs

Output formats: native, json, html, html5, html+lhs, html5+lhs, s5, slidy,
dzslides, docbook, opendocument, latex, latex+lhs, beamer,
beamer+lhs, context, texinfo, man, markdown, markdown+lhs,
plain, rst, rst+lhs, mediawiki, textile, rtf, org, asciidoc,
odt, docx, epub
I tend to work on stuff I want for myself after failing to convince less lazy, more capable people to do it for me. If I still want it enough to do it myself, then I do it. My impatience/random ideas and desires/tendency-to-criticize-everything must overcome my laziness to create a perfect storm to convince me I should actually fix some problem, that it's not just some random thing I'm being a perfectionist about, before I do anything.
"All Animals Are Equal. But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others."
In house corporate development is going to one big driver. Microsoft leveraged Windows dominance into profitability serving enterprise: Office, Windows, Exchange, in-house .net development, etc...

They want enterprise to migrate to Windows 8 and develop Metro apps instead of adopting iPads.

Consumer adoption is just to prop up enterprise adoption. I would bet that Microsoft makes 2/3 or more of its money from enterprise. Microsoft is money/domination driven rather than focused on delivering value and improving things.
So, pulling an old man card: creating a formal spec for Markdown paves the way for adding more syntax which negates the main benefit of it: a lay person can interpret Markdown as a text file. If you want to add more syntax, we are better off using/extending LaTeX or troff.
Awesome read!

Jessica mentions the Codecademy team launched 2 days before Demo Day and managed to signup 200k users. If I remember correctly, they launched on HN through a Show HN thread.. and so on..

What I really want to know is, how many of those initial 200k users stuck around? I was one of them and I have only signed in maybe twice since their launch.

So what does that mean? they leveraged the curious users to get VC interest? Did they really engage me, us, the 200k? is that a false positive?

I guess if the net result is a positive one Today, none of this really matters.
If you are out (at work or on holiday), but you need a maid or repair person to have access to your house, I'm guessing with this you can:

a) grant them access without the hassle of getting another key cut and less of the awkwardness of trusting them with a key (if they're worried you'll point the finger at them if you're burgled);

b) have a record of the times they made entry (and they'll know you have it, so it'll reduce your fear of them burgling you some other time using the key you gave them);

c) revoke access without the hassle of changing the locks (and giving a new key to all the other people you've granted access to) or the fear that they may have made a copy of the key you gave them.

I don't think you need to be paranoid to realize that there are circumstances when this sort of control could be very useful.
NYT has actually got blocked and unblocked back and forth several times. A funny case was that in an interview a reporter asked former president Jiang Zeming why NYT was blocked and Jiang said he would personally look into what was going on. Soon after that, it got unblocked.
>we tend to avoid blank-check crash-development programs.

If only this were true. The blank-check programs are still with us. Iraq, Afghanistan, the security-military-industrial complex. Wall Street bail outs.

Corporations are great for some things but they are just one kind of social tool and they solve one kind of social problem. There are many different ways to organize society.
Second on Arduino, it's just so much fun, you get inmediate results and you learn about both hardware and software. It should be doable for a 10 y/o: http://sylviashow.com/episodes/s1/e3/full/arduino
Seems like a perfect name, then.
Then US military with EMP hardened equipment.

It's not the technical aspects i have a problem with, it's the statement that US Military lacks skills to strike after EMP attack.

"we don't practice the same kind of map-in-hand training that would be useful after an effective EMP"

Like i've also stated: Maybe it wasn't meant to be that serious, maybe it even was meant to be funny.

Thanks anyway for clarifying this. I am intrigued.
Guess i will read into this topic in more detail :)
An online writers' workshop--not the same as Google Docs. There are online subscription systems that support such activities, such as http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/ Getting decent feedback is a problem. Perhaps there is a workable system that would compensate good reviewers. Most writers aren't rich, but they might be willing to pay other writers (who aren't rich) to review their work.
Quora is already a shame and we don't need to login or create new account to know that.
I believe the camera went out when the narrator said "Fade to black."
403 lol jk but seriously.
I'm here too. I know that we exist.

But Peter Thiel's entrepreneur/libertarian monoculture is expanding. These culture killers are celebrating the death of the liberal arts. It used to be that entrepreneur billionaires funded the arts, now they are actively seeking to dismantle them out of some kind of resentment. Things are looking bleak for the open, civil society.

Mark Zuckerberg called for the end of privacy in his book. Our society is putting sophomoric man-children in charge of the cultural landscape.
Swarm Robots Cooperate with AR Drone
You sound like you really understand the pain-points pretty well, and while we have a few ways we're considering solving this one, I would love to pick your brain about it. Would you mind shooting me an email at mike@pen.fm?
Cloudy: reverse-engineering Gmail to add attachments from the cloud
I have to imagine Microsoft picturing the majority of Windows 8 machines (between tablets and laptops) not including a DVD drive.
"Investors tend to have a herd mentality."
Crowdsourced Benghazi Attacks Timeline
If you end a line with two spaces,
the line break after it is kept.
Not intuitive, sure, but it works.

Perhaps an alternative "profile" could be specified
that preserves all line breaks,
and sites focused on poetry or song lyrics
could use that profile.
You can make the same argument against tasers. But if the choice is getting shot by a 9mm or a taser, I'll take the latter. By the same token, if the choice is getting microwaved a bit or attacked by a 500 lb smart bomb, I'll take the former.
haha pretty useful
Pandoc supports using a backslash at the end of a line to insert a line-break.
My feedback, for what it's worth, is that I clicked "try it out" and got 2 minutes into the white dot test before closing the tab. I really didn't feel engaged with it and even missed one of them because my eyes were wandering around the room thinking about other things. I suppose this is exactly the kind of thing that the tests can pick up, controlled for the various variables, but not if it's so tedious that I don't even finish the test. I'd be interested if you have the data on when people are closing tabs and to what extent I am an outlier. I felt like I was being patient lasting two (out of three) minutes, but perhaps I'm unusually low-attention spanned in this kind of task.
+1 for Pandoc. It's awesome.

Also, it needs to be mentioned that Pandoc supports its own set of (IMO) sensible extensions / defaults to Gruber markdown [1].

[1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#pandocs-markdow...
Loved it. Very informative. Being an entrepreneur is a tough road, but with preparation, belief, and determination things will eventually take its course.