skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a developer (who has worked with many other developers) I agree with your disagreement. Developers are just about the worst market I can think of when it comes to not wanting to pay for software even when the value is there.

In my experience, there is money to be made in that market, I've worked for companies that paid big money for crap like ClearCase, after all. But in these cases the product was basically forced on the developers from IT/management/other departments.

So, yeah, there is money to be made in this market, but in most cases you'll have to be prepared to go through the old fashioned good ol' boy sales model. Trying to sell directly to developers is a very, very difficult road.
Running slowly for me, I am having to wait for the text.
Open Letter to the President: Physics Education
It strikes me that one aspect of the "get 100,000 people on the legislature's front lawn" mode of political speech is that it also proves that each and every one of those 100,000 people cares enough to spend hours arranging transport and then standing around outside. Short-circuiting that process by putting it on a webpage with an upvote button that takes orders of magnitude less time to click blunts the message by a similar factor.
I'm sure. Minority shareholder is not exactly a safe place to be.
My favorite tool for this is the Saleae Logic[1], but I've had mixed success with the cheaper Bus Pirate[2] as well.

[1] http://www.saleae.com/logic
[2] http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Bus_Pirate
> who really should know better

> their feelings of superiority and elitism vis-à-vis the common man

> hypocrisy

I really think you should take a step back from Apple news and relax. If the Silicon Valley is doing it wrong, then go and exploit this imbalance to boost your business. Judging people for their OS choices is not productive.
B2D sometimes works for infrastructure providers like Atlassian or Github. However, even those providers mostly cater for other businesses, not for independent software developers. The majority of developers - whether freelance or employee - has no incentive to pay for those services. They would have to convince their client or employer to use these services, which can be difficult especially if there are firmly entrenched incumbents.

Another problem for using services like Github is that most clients consider their source code a valuable asset and don't want it anywhere else but on their own servers.

Functional services like Twilio suffer from similar problems. It's hard to convince enterprise clients to outsource such functions to external providers even if their service is better than what can be produced in-house.

So, while there certainly is some value in B2D products, I disagree with the notion that it's larger than B2E.
I think this exchange is part of the reason no one talks about this stuff, which is unfortunate.
Could not handle HN traffic?
It doesn't matter how it's shredded; you still shouldn't be throwing paper that had someone's social security number on it (especially when that someone is a detective whose whole identity has now been revealed) off of a roof on national television.
I'd guess in those states there are not that many private prisons.
I find I type slower because the text keeps moving.
Day Job: A Story of Chasing Dreams
It only seems to work correctly in Chrome.
The one about the soldiers is almost the most worrying, because it doesn't even make any threats.

The one about Obama seems to make a much more detailed threat than the one about "burning the airport", too.

Anyway, this can't be resolved in a HN thread...

I must admit, I always wonder what is the better strategy: keeping your mouth shut and trying to make the best out of circumstances, or becoming vocal and trying to change things. In theory I think remaining silent is much better, but it is hard to fight those urges of talking too much.

Just saying this because obviously free speech is not working out online.

Actually I am not an expert on the free speech issue as practiced in the US, but doesn't it apply to opinions, mostly? You can't say "1000$ to the person who first kills person X" and then expect to get away because it was just free speech. I suppose the difference could be that expressing a death warrant is not an opinion, it is a call to action. But maybe if you phrased it differently ("soldiers should die"), you could get off the hook? Tricky subject...
My Larry Hagman Story
Analyze your Twitter followers
I'm intrigued what substantiates rorjobs.com's claim to be "the leading" Rails job board ;-) It certainly looks very nice, though.
(I might have missed it in your tutorial, but if not...) It might be worth noting for your readers that attr, style, property and similar methods can accept an object as the argument. Might save people a tiny bit of typing...

root.selectAll('rect')
.data(rects).enter()
.attr({
x: function (d) { return d.x; },
y: function (d) { return d.y; },
width: function (d) { d.w; }
});

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/pull/277
Well, no idea how you calculate that. Google would have to be down several days every year only to offset the staffing costs for running your own equivalent to google apps. And that's not even getting into hardware, licenses and the expensive windows-lockin that everyone seeks to escape nowadays.

I guess we'll just have to agree on disagreeing here.
Good or bad faith doesn't enter into it.
I do not think it is fair to compare Software and Abstract Mathematics. Software is mostly an Engineering problem, while Mathematics is mostly Science and Conjecture.

And even if they locked themselves for 14 years, there is no "single mind at work" there. Mathematics are built "on the shoulder of giants" through generations of brain dedicated to it. There is no such thing as pure invention - new discoveries lead to new theorems, new leads that other people take on.
...the proof itself is written in an entirely different branch of mathematics called “inter-universal geometry” that Mochizuki—who refers to himself as an “inter-universal Geometer”—invented and of which, at least so far, he is the sole practitioner.

In this universe, at least...
Objects are nouns. They have attributes. Some of them can perform actions. Those actions ("verbs") are methods. It doesn't make sense to ask a noun to perform "where" or "length". Which part of this is confusing?
As an outsider all this (line of reasoning--not personal) just sounds like is "not invented here" syndrome. That may or may not be fair. But isn't this what tenure is for? You can't get fired for just learning, right? Why is there so much lack of intellectual curiosity and so much self-centered-ness on "academic ambition". Are the two so self-contradictory? How much great work has gotten swept up under the rug by this attitude toward "peer review"?
Must have seemed like a brilliant plan: where better to hide the papers than in a confetti parade?
The problem with blind hashing is that database transaction log likely has enough data to link blind hash back to the user record. Further, databases such as PostgreSQL or Oracle have version stamps on all records, which allows precise calculation of record age, allowing them to be linked together. MSSQL, depending on your index structure(I.e. if you use heaps), migh also betray the fact that records were created at the same time due to ordering of records. Most certainly, page allocation algorithm is likely to betray some of the same, albeit with less precision.

Bottom line is that if you're worried about database file or backup leaks, blind hashing is not adding meaningful security. It only helps with SQL injection and text dump vectors.

Edit: Duh, it's covered further in the slides!
They would probably be crucified, if they were subject to something like HIPAA.
Ah, my bad. Apologies.
Stable distributions are something else, not related to marginals or conditioning. They come up when studying laws of averages.

Gaussian distributions belong to the class of stable distributions, though, because of another of their properties: independent Gaussians, when added, are again Gaussian.
That tracking is amazing! Is there an open variant so that I can look under the hood? Or could anyone cite what their implementation is based off?
Developers are stingy until:

(a) they raise funding

(b) or they have some revenue or profitability

(c) or they work for BigCo or at funded start-up

In situations (a), (b), (c), my observation is that developers are not afraid to fork out $10-$100 per SaaS service.

Your point to sell to marketing/product etc. hold holds true and I would agree 100% from experience. At the last start-up I worked at, it was the Product people that would regularly find cute little SaaS tools to fill holes. It goes without saying that most SaaS tools should not be made with the stereotypical hardcore dev in mind but rather with product/marketing/sales in mind just as much.
I dislike the aesthetic of the ad. The edge of the iPad is aligned exactly to the edge of the magazine. At first glance, I thought this was some sort of printing error: it look egregious. I like the asymmetry, but there is some sort of mottled grey texture behind the majority of the page which is grating. I appreciate that the cover depicted on the device is identical to that of the actual magazine. As for the exaltation due to the 'feat' that it "immediately displays how I can use the device in real life," I don't believe that that is unique to the ad. Most advertisements show how the product can be used. That sort of how ads work. There's very little value in showing a product that isn't functioning or showing a feature or facet that the product doesn't have.

It's a passable ad, nothing more.
Some relevant background > http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4781825
Right. (You also need X and Y to be independent, or at least multivariate Gaussian -- i.e., X and Y can both be Gaussian but (X,Y) can fail to be Gaussian as a pair.)

The product of Gaussian random variables is certainly not Gaussian.
Why do you think our political system is broken? I think it works pretty well, all things considered.
I don't think it's even just the incentives of academia, but of life/interest as well. Tenured professors could choose to devote their next few years to learning inter-universal geometry. But they have to guess: is this likely to be a more interesting/useful thing to learn than something else they could learn in those same years? It seems so far that most are heuristically guessing no.
Worry not, I think it was pretty clear.

Some people around here just need to complain about something in every article.
Even if his proof turns out to be flawed, It is likely that the new system he constructed will still provide us a new and usefull way at looking at math. The good thing about working outside of mainstream is that their is far less inertia holding to the old ways.
Assuming his work does represent a new branch of math, he has reduced the problem of the rest of us discovering/inventing it from stumbling blindly to making sense of his papers.
I am a huge fan of your store. My suggestions:
1-Sell shirts and other physical things
2- My favotire thing about your store is that the cool stuff is easy to see.. Its curated. Well done.
3-Interact more with local entrepreneurs, and people like the Artisans Asylum. Maybe teach classes there.
4-Writing workshops?
5-Buy a MakerBot 3D printer and charge the public to use it?
6- That Egg machine is amazing. Someone should make a documentary about that.
7- Model after the Trident in Boston... Sell coffee, set up some wifi, and turn the store into a place where smart people want to hang out.
"Interneting" - An ever-growing list of non-technical links
Yeah it's a real puff-piece, more a thinly-disguised advertisement than it is an article...
Well, if the proof is first formalized, it's easier for machines to verify. But formalizing it is much harder. This is similar to the situation in software, where uptake of formal-verification tools that can prove correctness of programs is relatively low (though Agda is making some very interesting progress).
The edge of the iPad is aligned exactly to the edge of the magazine.

This framing suggests that the iPad is to scale and isn't scaled down (as it might be assumed to be if it were centered). All of the blank space is also supposed to give you a sense of how small it is relative to the magazine.
Enterprise is lucrative in part because, at least historically, most developers have been out of touch with big business (with the possible exception of big software companies). So, the best ideas hadn't been picked over.

However, developers tend to hang out with other developers and be comfortable around other developers. So B2D is a very crowded niche.

Everyone who wanted to avoid learning about the problems of a new market has settled on B2D. Why start competing with this huge group?
Both inspiring and a little worrying.

I agree that democratisation of medicine is a helpful process and think that it is great that sufferers of diseases have good forums for discourse, sharing ideas and, most of all, support, because cancer can be a lonely diagnosis.

But.

To a certain extent medical knowledge, and knowledge of treatments, can be no more democratised than the design of an expert system, or a complex back end to a large system.

Why?

You still need experts in the area and people with no training are going to have a limited contribution.

At the same time, there is the problem of which paradigm the patient is going to be treated in. In the same way as a project manager may decide 'we are going to use Python, C++, running on a xyz backend' or some such, the treatment needs to be based in MEDICINE. not that nutritionists, physiotherapists or speech pathologists don't have a word in - they are part of the multidisciplinary team that is part of the medical treatment team, but a decision needs to be made that you are practicing MEDICINE to treat this patient, not pseudomedicine. Using Pseudomedicine would be like having a coder for your IT project that only knows pseudocode.

From 'the cure' website:

The dietary strategies, the changes in lifestyle, the homeopatic oncology, the traditional chinese medicine and the many energies which you all have given me have all had the best of results.

Anyone with a half rational brain should be alarmed by this statement.

It is not that lifestyle changes are bad; they are good - they help a patient adapt to their new situation. But Traditional Chinese Medicine and Homeopathic Oncology are not treatments; they operate under fraudulent principles - they are, at best, Lifestyle interventions that claim to operate by exerting theraputic effects.

And so, the democratisation of medicine, which is empowering for patients, and a good thing, creates distortions in the marketplace, as the uninformed but impressionable patients make treatment decisions based on emotional appeals about 'holistic therapies' that are less toxic - but also, and what is swept under the carpet, less effective.

Disclosure: Final year medical student
Companies are simply offering wages that are comparable to some worker in China would get. It only makes sense in a flat world. Question is: do we want that?

In the IT industry, specially IT support and break-fix development the same thing happens. Local people don't want to accept low salaries? Let's look what India or the Philippines are charging. Problem solved.
I do not think that is the case. Their is the skeptism resulting from the huge amount of work between accepted math and his results that give mathmaticians concern. It is almost definite that his work contains some flaws, what is not definite is wheather it contains fatal flaws. Many are not willing to invest the time to learn something that might turn out to be useless.
DIY Body Water Cooler - As effective as aircon, more efficient than a fan
I normally get a 50-70 WPM score on typing tests, but got a 6 on this. There was a fair amount of errors but surely 6 isn't the best representation of WPM with adjustment for errors.
Looks interesting. Is there a ETA?
"I had no direct access to my own information, since I use Linux and OSX rather than the files' Windows-based viewer. As a software engineer, I found software and programming tools to hack the files and make them open -- but a nontechnical person would have difficulty making use of their own medical data."

A lot of people make a big deal out of the damage done by proprietary code you can't see. I think more damage is done by proprietary formats you can't read. Compounding this problem is the dismal understanding of most users about what their information even is. (See: People attributing impossible properties to malware.) So any hope of users liberating their data is greatly diminished.
Learned something today: Macy's has an "official confetti".
I love this guy's videos, and this one's no different.
"Full disclosure: I work at edo, a card-linked offers provider"

Right, so, thanks for the not-at-all-biased critical analysis.
I think blogging publicly will get you over the fear of being judged, and doing it in your real name helps even more.

But, that can be a tall order for some people. You don't have to publish everything you write. You could totally write 10 crap articles and publish 1 good one.
There is no algorithm that can determine the truth of any proposition in arithmetic (for example). It is impossible, in principle, to construct such an algorithm. But given any proposition in arithmetic, the mind can decide its truth value. It is in this sense that Penrose claims the mind can not be modeled by a computer program. It may seem odd now, but at the time there was still a school of artificial intelligence that assumed that a big computer running a really sophisticated program could be equivalent to a human mind. Penrose was trying to show that this idea is a non-starter.
Looks pretty cool - I like how it's building on meta-startup niche that is "startup"
Wouldn't the easiest way to check this proof be to enter it into something like Coq? That way you'd only have to understand how to translate each step rather than learn each field.
It would be a much better experience if it were immediately obvious that words marked in red must be abandoned.
I'll leave that to someone more qualified than me, Geoffrey K. Pullum:

http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...

He "is head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh and co-author (with Rodney Huddleston) of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language".

But, go ahead and write like Strunk if you want to sound like a stiff 1890s dandy.
Sometimes it skips to the next word before you are finished a word, and it's not clear if you need to press space or keep typing, but pressing space skips to the next word after THAT. Pretty frustrating, actually.
Sounds like an opportunity for you to capture the market.
Having spent a long time targeting the market for developer tools, I think you're underestimating that market based on your own experiences and social circle. It was a multi-billion dollar market in ~2006, only including IDEs, SCC, static analysis tools, architecture, and process-related infrastructure, and seems to only have grown since then.
Those specific examples, and a few more in the article, did seem over the top; I assumed they were meant ironically due to the topic of sex.
Can anyone explain what "inter-universal geometry" is?
Results after the first one fail to load in the latest Firefox. It looks like a Firefox bug btw, the style and script tags are not being added to the created iframes (except the first, which is always ok) unless I mess with the timing, either by using a 100ms delay in setTimeout() or a breakpoint with Firebug.

PS: it's a fantastic tutorial, thanks for writing it!
The threat model is that attacker stole your database backup and is now trying to brutforce passwords in it, by computing all plausible permutations of characters, hashing them and seeing if they hit a match. Because attacker is attacking a mass of passwords, he is likely to use a parallel computer, such as a GPU or an ASIC, to decrease the cost of he attack.

The defense against this scenario is to make hashes expensive to compute and hard to parallelise. If an algorithm is using a lot of RAM it's hard to parallelise because a piece of RAM can be used by only one computation at a time, hence this algorithm is hard to attack, but your own server is computing things sequentially as users come online, so a single piece of RAM can be freely reused. This is why low RAM usage is bad.

I did not quite get the idea behind the ROM thing, but I think it means you have a large multi-GB piece of strongly random data, which is used during hash computation either entirely, or piecemeal where pieces are picked pseudorandomly and not predictably. A GPU cannot store multi-GB chunk of data, so it will have to travel externally to fetch required data, which is easy to do for a sequential machine, but creates a huge bottleneck for a GPU, making parallelism hard again.
That though could still be B2D. "Hey Mr Developer we need to do an online questionare. How long would it take you to build something like that?" "Go checkout Wufoo" (out of my hair so I can work on more important stuff)
I also am getting what I believe to be an inaccurate wpm. I am getting 30 but I normally score around 65wpm. It might be because it makes the mistake of counting actual words instead of 5 character chunks.
Yep, flipped the billing bit. All I need is the extra bandwidth though.. The sole Go app instance is standing up like a champ!
Four Perspectives On Augmented Reality And Its Future
CKSideBarController, a UITabBarController for iPad
Generally true, but there is a cycle count for the battery. The cost per mile, even with free electricity, might be around $0.02 in overall depreciation, maintenance, etc., vs. $0.15 or so for an efficient gas or diesel. I assume if EVs get super popular, there will be an aftermarket battery refurbishment option, though.
I think I'd agree with you.

One aspect that I think can sometimes be troubling, is whether it's fine to just have a blog that is a miscellaneous collection of stuff covering a variety of topics, versus a blog that is about X, Y or Z at the outset. I guess this is just "the blogger trap" ( http://www.marco.org/2009/04/05/avoiding-the-blogger-trap ), but I get the impression that a blog for a specific subject would have a better reception, versus "I'm just going to write about whatever" which might have less reliability, in a sense.
Mochizuki
Ask HN: How to learn to touch type efficiently?
Over the past few years I've learnt to type pretty fast with my (very bad) adapted 3 or 4 finger method - I really would like to learn to touch type properly though, any recommendations on how to learn (the last time I looked into this was when typing games were distributed on CD ROMs for Windows 98)

I'm also interested in Colemak, I've never used it but heard good things.

Thanks guys!
I totally agree with you. Sometimes the anti-MS feeling here is absourd.

C# is an amazingly designed multiparadigm language with excellent tooling that works in plenty of OS and devices. If it will come by google the open source world will be wet already. Having an ideology is ok but shouldnt be confused with technical merits. Some examples:

IQueryabe<T> and expression tress let you write expressive queries that run on the database but have compile-type checking. Amazing for mantaining big datacentric apps.

Async/await let you write complex asynchronous code as if it where usual imperative one. With for, try catch, etc... The compiler changes it for you.

And all this on a real language that runs fast and you can use in your work to build phone apps, web apps, win apps and also, but not just, compilers and authomatic theorem proving applications.
3D 'Wiki Weapon' guns could go into testing by end of year, maker claims
I had a phone interview once where the person on the other side was (the hiring side) was trying to suss out my skills.
"Do you know real-time object-oriented programming?" they asked.

I would be so tempted to reply "Do you?"