skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed, by the time that you get to an introductory analysis course in the US (a 300-level undergraduate course!), students generally are confused about what the givens are in a proof, and what exactly they are trying to prove, let alone getting from point a to point b. Most have not had to "prove" anything since 9th grade geometry, and are used to plug-and-chug solutions backed by geometric concepts stripped of formality. Still, I think that few students would get to this point without having those concepts, and if I get confused on a problem my first step is usually still to "draw a picture"! The two go hand in hand in my opinion, but due to the demand from the engineering departments for teaching mathematical solutions (I don't know the full history of how the curriculum developed but I suspect this and its associated budgetary reasons are a large part), half of the learning process is severely delayed.
Don't display them to the user without two-factor authentication then. Everything can be compromised at some point.
WHat's wrong with Android installers? A single file with a single button to press.
For what it's worth I never needed a mentor for CS related studies and I ventured as far as going through the Dragon Book which isn't usually freshman material. Thankfully CS correlates heavily with programming and for everything programming there are many good communities online waiting to help you out. You can post purely theoretical question on StackOverflow or other StackExchange sites and get a decent response pretty quickly.
SMS is great and should not go away. Charging a non trivial amount per message is ridiculous. US carriers are the worst offenders on this. They charge up to 20c to the sender AND the recipient.
Hacker News App Comparison for Android
In case anyone else is curious, the section you're thinking of is

""F. Voices. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, you may use the system voices included in the Apple Software (“System Voices”) (i) while running the Apple Software and (ii) to create your own original content and projects for your personal, non-commercial use. No other use of the System Voices is permitted by this License, including but not limited to the use, reproduction, display, performance, recording, publishing or redistribution of any of the System Voices in a profit, non-profit, public sharing or commercial context.""
By that logic MS should also bundle multiple video and audio player, calculators, image editors, file explorers, email clients and who knows what else. And what's that if not bloatware?
http://signup.academicrecess.com/ works now
Already popped into my mind. Good suggestion!
And how the market exists if nobody have the money to buy food and drink?
> (I have no idea on iOS, I suppose it is even worse, do they have VLC on iOS?)

iOS's built in players will play arbitrary media files as long as the codecs are supported, you just need to have a file browser application that can open it locally or on an SMB share. I use one named 'FileBrowser'[0] on my iPad that has worked well so far.

[0] http://www.stratospherix.com/products/filebrowser/
Send private tweets to anyone
I ran a similar, although not so scientific experiment a few years ago. I tried to pick up girls in clubs with and without gestures when I was talking to them. This was over a one month period. The actual numbers are classified, but gestures won.
I'm neither and my sentiment stands.
I'm pretty sure the guy's an evangelist for Microsoft. The article seems so over the top that it's infomercial territory.
For many this list has just one item:

- Adobe Photoshop

If you rely on it for work, than you can't just switch to Linux. GIMP is closer to paint than to PS.
Eh, I think the reason ycnews is good at all is because of the old-guard commenters and the 'fear' of becoming popular.
I think we're already there to some extent. We need less people to keep everyone alive than there are people alive.

So far this has lead to oodles of unemployed and unemployable people rotting in social housing.

I think the whole thing needs looking at.

Automation of everything will enslave us as much as not automating it. We need a healthy balance, even if it does invoke smashing a few looms.

Insert comment about how Marx and Lenin got the right idea...
MP4 is a container format, MPEG2 is a compression algorithm. A variety of video and audio compression algorithms can be used inside the MP4 container although H.264 is probably the most common.

DVD does use MPEG2. Blu-ray supports a variety of algorithms for video and audio with the BDAV container (.m2ts), commonly MPEG2, H.264 (AVC) and VC1 for video and DTS-HD MA, Dolby TrueHD and garden-variety LPCM for lossless audio.

Today, most Blu-rays are being authored with H.264 or VC1 encoding for video. That being said, space savings are achieved by trans-coding the raw .m2ts to much lower bitrate H.264 and downmixing the audio to, say, 620kbps DD5.1 or even just stereo.
Assuming the system keeps up. Right now it is nearly impossible for many of us to work part-time without taking a huge hourly rate cut. You can (sometimes) work as a contractor/consultant, but then the tax and healthcare systems are stacked against you.

I personally think it is insane that we still work 40 hours per week today. Many people seem to deal with the ridiculous situation by wasting time at work (e.g. surfing Reddit for half the day). This is bad for the bottom line and, more importantly (because the effect is broader), bad for employee-morale.

I think part of the problem is that many in our society (talking about the US here) equate hours with "work". If you don't put in the time, you must not have done the work. And if you do the work in less time, you should just do more work (even when that doesn't make sense).

This jives with the message we keep hearing from the political class. That we have had things too good and that we just can't afford for everyone to have such "lavish" lifestyles any more. They seem to think things need to move in the opposite direction, more people working longer for less compensation.

I strongly disagree. But then, I am much more concerned with the quality and general happiness of my life overall than I am with how many widgets I create or consume.
Unless you were truly exceptional, the "understanding" phase tends to get skipped in the first three calculus courses in favor of computation. Before you disagree read the following bullet points:

- What is the tangent line? How does it connect with the derivative?

- What is a limit. How is it used to make the above rigorous?

- What is the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus? Why, non-rigorously, would you expect it to be true?

That is not a random list. That's a list of the most important concepts taught in the first Calculus course or two. If you couldn't give a quick impromptu explanation of ALL of them, then you failed to master the key concepts. (Don't worry, most can't.)

To get to Terry Tao's formal math stage, you'd need to take proof-heavy courses such as real analysis.
Help make a truly deserving girl a Nobel Peace Prize Winner.
I am from the UK and just finished integrating Spreedly Core with a site I developed on Friday. It was a painless process and made interfacing with the traditional merchant account much easier. I would highly recommend it!
Windows 8 UI is a mistake.
Just that response seems to prove the cartoon's point.
Interactive theorem provers can quickly get you from stage 1 to 2.

If you are interested, [1] describes the experience of a professor teaching how to write correct and readable proofs about program semantics using the interactive theorem prover Isabelle/HOL.

Isabelle/HOL can make you learn fast because it allows one to get instant feedback on a proof. Proving things may then become surprisingly addictive.

[1] http://www4.in.tum.de/~nipkow/pubs/vmcai12.pdf
Big Data Problems in Monitoring at eBay
I think it is awesome that the author volunteered to help out. It would be awesome if the first three or four pages of HN were stories about people volunteering to "do good." But I think I missed what the author did to make FEMA better. What "FEMA hacking" did the author accomplish?
If you use Ubuntu or similar there is also eSpeak

espeak -w output.wav 'I love jiggy'
We'll create a virtual reality to live in. Probably will simulate the 21st century. The machines will feed us intravenously and will be powered by the energy we put off. Now the question you have to ask yourself is, how do you know this hasn't already happened?

On a more serious note, we're already paying people to live who aren't working. Its called welfare. As time goes along, I suspect we'll have growing numbers of people on welfare while your average job becomes increasingly technical. If people on welfare were to become more motivated as a whole to learn these technical jobs, it would probably speed up the process to get to the point the author describes.
Also, a question: does anyone know of a really thin brands of USB keys, that isn't any wider than a normal USB stick?

Most USB sticks are fairly fat compared to the connector. This makes for a slight bulge in the stash belt.
This is awesome! Just been playing my guitar with it. When the strings are vibrating you can see spikes where they cross over the frets. What's great is that when you change chords the pattern of the spikes changes.
Presenting the twelfth disappointing game in a row from bullshit artist Peter Molyneux: Server Not Available - The Mobile Game.
The point is to understand the magnitude.
The time spent on these adds up. To huge possibilities.
Like the Wikipedia example.
Since it's Sunday and I'm in procrastination mode I took a little excursion into the rabbit hole and found this:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/fell...

The money quote:

"More than that, though, the big, big problem with the Pr(sunrise tomorrow | sunrise in the past) argument is not in the prior but in the likelihood, which assumes a constant probability and independent events. Why should anyone believe that? Why does it make sense to model a series of astronomical events as though they were spins of a roulette wheel in Vegas? Why does stationarity apply to this series? That’s not frequentist, it isn’t Bayesian, it’s just dumb."
This article reeks of astroturfing, something I see a lot from the Microsoft troupe. Other comments seem to support this. I get the feeling I'd like Microsoft's products a lot more if they didn't try and fake this stuff.
What happens when a minority of people still need to do unautomatable jobs in order everyone else to prosper?

Current situation seems to be this: hand a white collar to everyone but a few (and they don't get to do anything meaningful), pay them allowance. Force everyone else (a minority) to take a job where they are overworked for a considerably smaller pay.

I'm sceptical on whether we can make workless society work.
I didn't get it either, but my guess: The engineering student took a literal view. You told him to evaluate the statement; you gave him a rule. If you say all odd numbers greater than 1 are prime, then so be it.
> 1. What do you do if your house burns down?

I backup important stuff encrypted to S3 with a script.

> 2. Do you have this local cloud poked out to the outside? How do you handle security? Is there a simple web interface that you can get to something when you're away from the house and your personal equipment?

I use pfSense [0] as a router / security appliance running on a Atom based micro ATX board with a 4 ethernet ports. I connect remotely using OpenVPN terminated at the pfSense box and use Viscosity [2] on the client side. File storage is on a FreeNAS [1] server. Very easy to setup if you have basic networking knowledge. The only downside is that there is no built in support for OpenVPN in iOS. There is an app that handles it if your device is jailbroken.

[0] http://www.pfsense.org/

[1] http://www.freenas.org/

[2] http://www.sparklabs.com/viscosity/
"Did they bother heading his warning? No. Instead, they laughed in his face."

The company that makes valvoline, Ashland Inc., seems to be at an all time high. It's going to be a long time before synthetic oil companies are not needed. I don't see tractor trailers, construction machinery, large trucks, etc. going electric for a very long time.
A thousand times this. Linus may be amazing at the low level, but he absolutely SUCKS at user interfaces. Git's CLI is a prime example of this.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses. It takes strength of character to acknowledge where you're weak, and it takes strength of will to follow only the good examples of those we admire.
I don't see how, really. Gelman himself is a (rather famous) Bayesian, and if you read the comments, you'll see that Randall himself pops up and basically cedes Gelman's point.
Please write the sequel to my book, I will not be including my book, but someone who has read my book will provide a review.

The review may be in a language you speak (and may be in a language they speak,) and they may have understood my book, but I am a clever author and they were the cheapest reviewer I could find. They are not themselves an author, nor can they read, but they have talk to authors before and have looked at the pictures in my book (I had not realized they were there!) and asked me questions I did not understand.

Oh, and I will not correct, evaluate or pay you for your sequel but readers of my book can choose to also read your book. I can cancel or up the fee for my book whenever I feel like it, so future readers may not exist.

I would say that it is a "correct fact" that it is a disadvantage to undertake the project I suggest even though you may on occasion succeed. Similarly, I would suggest you avoid building on your own dime on a closed source framework. But hey, I can't prove that golfing in lightning storms is a bad plan, so go nuts..
Fixed that. Thanks
Yes, the thing that always strikes me about the Forbes 400 is how old so many of the people are. Clearly the normal way to end up super rich is to have something that grows fairly rapidly, and then give it a long time to grow.
ABC looks at Windows 8 hybrids [video]
Wow, this is embarrassing. I took statistics, but it's been almost a decade. I got a pretty nice review on Bayes' theorem in an AI class I took last year though. I thought I understood the xkcd comic quite clearly, but I'm completely lost on the posted article.

Apparently, Munroe was a bit confused also.

>The truth is, I genuinely didn’t realize Frequentists and Bayesians were actual camps of people—all of whom are now emailing me.

http://andrewgelman.com/2012/11/16808/#comment-109366
When a Palm Reader Knows More Than Your Life Line
How Microsoft Lit Up London’s Night Sky to Launch Halo 4
Good suggestion. simple to implement. makes it more friendly
While it's true (and should be obvious) that a competent statistician wouldn't make such silly mistakes, there are quite a few scientists who are not-so-competent statisticians who publish results with those exact errors.
As a hiring manager, I tried to have my recruiting managers or sourcers handle the notification of bad news whenever possible, but I made the mistake of doing so myself a few times and will never do it again. While certainly most people either don't reply or simply provide an extremely rude e-mail response upon the no-offer status, I've had a decent share of stalkers. The behavior has varied from:

- Women crying.

- Men telling me I was going to starve their family to poverty if they don't get this job.

- Men harassing me repeatedly.

It goes on. Admittedly, even back then (~2005/2006) I was too easy to contact (phone number in resume online), but dealing with the no-offer responses from candidates was by far the most stressful thing I've ever done related to hiring, and I have the utmost respect for the usually young folks in recruiting who have to deal with it on a daily basis. I personally found the, "we may have to let you go if your performance does not improve" conversations easier.

So, yeah, the comments responding to this post make it sound like all kittens and baby smiles if you give the, "no hire" mail, but it's pretty far from that in reality.
I found DLNA to be a better solution than SMB for this application, though it will still need a separate app on Android. minidlna should be a good fit for the Raspberry Pi. Apple is doing things their own way (DAAP), but you could probably run a DAAP server as well to cover all clients.
Show HN: andthewinner.is - Make realtime voting seamless
Improve your Git commits using patch mode
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A few pieces of advice, having just gone through the job search process myself.

1. 6 months isn't too early to be looking for job, but I wouldn't worry so much about current advertised positions. I'd focus on meeting people at companies you'd want to work for in the future and developing relationships with them.

2. Don't over-think the first job. You may not like it but the biggest danger is having too much time on your hands while you look for a job. It can get depressing.

Here's a blog post summarizing my experience job hunting and living in a new city without an apartment or job:

http://dalethoughts.com/2012/11/what-its-like-to-move-to-a-c...
> first I've heard of software failures being involved in election coordination failures

There are a bunch of vague reports that Obama's team had a similar failure of a big new computerized voter-tracking system on Election Day 2008, but they had also distributed the traditional paper "strike lists" to volunteers, so those were used as a fallback.
http://www.edgekick.com/fb/mittromney shows some pretty graphs for the decay.
> A lot of it has no way out of the single classroom

It feels like a lot of it has no way into other classrooms, because of increased control over curricula and teaching. Some of that's a good thing; evidenced based teaching is important.
Absolutely. If it's an imperative for the hire-er to say "no thanks", it's just as important for the unhired to be polite, too, to say "thanks for your time" and move on.
I think this is very interesting, it looks stupid at first, but that is exactly the kind of experiment i would want to do on humanity if i had the power of Peter Moylneux.

It's so simple yet players are communicating using words written on the cube, and when the 50000$ chisel (currently in-game purchasing doesn't exist, but it will soon) is available, i bet it will be purchased immediately.
Show HN: A Phylogeny of Android Bubble Shooter Games
> 'defer' is currently very useful in loops, open a bunch of files in a loop and schedule them all to be closed at the end of the function. If defer was block scoped this would be impossible.

Why couldn't it work at both the function and block level? I too would like to use defer at a block level. I find myself creating functions just to gain usage of defer, or not using it when I'd like to.
Your second paragraph mirrors my thoughts. As I've said before, Norway de facto has a system like this already. People who are for some reason unable to work (usually due to low skills or illness) get an allowance from the government which is just enough to live a comfortable life. We are able to pay out this kind of welfare since the petroleum industry is very lucrative at the moment.

People who are jobless due to low skills are paid to receive more training, and payment is only made if the person enrolls in some kind of education program. People who are jobless due to long-term illness get a more or less permanent monthly payment.

A system like this is probably what we'll end up with, where the richest are taxed hard enough to make it work. There are doubtless lots of challenges associated with this, but it is the only workable system I can see to make sure that people don't starve even as we have the richest society in human history.
I don't think 1 to 0 is really a reliable result.
Universities receive perhaps 1-10 apps per slot. Business receive 100s of apps per slot. I don't think there's really a comparison to be made.
How to Successfully Acquire a Tech Firm
I don't understand how the two camps can exist. Don't the two methods produce different results? Surely, only one is true. Which is it?
Ask HN: Is metro UI similar to tilling window managers?
Not sure whether to consider this a mental exercise or if this author is serious in his assumptions.

If he is serious, the author seems to have forgotten about all of the jobs that cannot be automated. Book writing, art, entertainment, inspirational speaking, posting funny cat pictures and original memes to the internet, innovation and clever software development, music and musicians, and more. Prostitution, legal services, etc.

Even if all of these were to somehow be automated people would still need each other. Service industries are also important.

Could you imagine living in a reality where every job is done by a machine but because there is only one person running the show there is no one around to support or improve on the code? None of society would move forward. We'd be running on legacy architecture and legacy ideas. And then what would the point of living be? Likely we'd see a whole lot of anomie and disassociation. What would be the point of learning if there were no purpose in applying it?

The "logic" fails when the author assumes that society in the future will be an "either/or" instead of the spectrum of human experience and automation that it always has been and always will be. We are nothing without machines, and they are nothing without us. They need us to reproduce them and improve them, and we need them to help us to maintain homeostasis with our environment. It is a symbiotic situation, not one of bleak and utopian/dsytopian absolutism.
He's a Microsoft employee. It would take about 2 seconds to click the link on his name to see that.

Are you implying he is lying? Half of the iOS posts are from folks like John Gruber or Marco Arment. Are you suspicious when they write a post? Or when someone from Mozilla writes a pro-Mozilla post, etc? Are you suspicious that Apple may actually be bankrupt, because their earnings numbers come from a suspicious source -- the Apple CFO?

In this case he's giving useful data to those on the fence about Win8 developement. I see no reason why an individual would lie, given he doesn't even have corporate anonimity to hide behind.

With that said, the numbers look good and promising.
The point of Gelman's reply is that the comic is actually comparing a Bayesian to an absurdly incompetent Frequentist, so there' really no conflict. No (modestly intelligent) Frequentist would mis-apply this methodology in this circumstance.
The way to combat the Zetas is to join hands across Mexico in a non-violent protest and chant "Just Say No to Drugs". It worked in the 80s in the US.
This is great. Thanks for posting. Much less rambling than the art of electronics!
Apple makes tons of money on the MBP, even if this business is dwarfed by the iOS devices they sell.

Who cares? Apple will release what makes them tons of money; that is just how they work. If they can fit it into a good product, they won't care what Apple fan boys or Apple haters said in the past, its completely irrelevant to them.