skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know. My mom who is by no means a technical user was carefully avoiding the upgrade for a month on her iPad, just due to the bad news about maps in mainstream news. (And Then she accidentally clicked yes on an upgrade nag notification, and spent the rest of the day discovering broken stuff. Not just the maps, but e.g. the Youtube app and all the browser bookmarks disappearing).
To continue on this train of discussion, if higher levels of scrutiny scare you- don't let the door hit you on the way out!
> Google is evil... After getting us hooked on free…

This sounds like the lament of a drug addict, whose first taste was free. There are plenty of free, high-quality options, like LibreOffice, so no one needs Google Apps to survive.

Google is just another company, with investors, and a profit motive. It's a basic mistake to think otherwise.
Well, there are a few ugly bits in it, should be a couple of hours work to clean and document. I'll get around to it either this weekend or the next. Glad you liked it.
Did you ever study for a Ph.D? From your example it appears you did not.

There are also plenty of research lines to get a degree in climatology that does not involve studying this type of stuff and which are not exactly a political issue, after you get your Ph.D you can study whatever you want, I'm pretty sure there's lots of think tanks who would pay for research countering the global warming hypothesis.
USPTO tentatively invalidates key Apple multitouch patent
Google discontinuing free apps (gmail for business)
I've heard the "no swap" argument before, but can you explain this a little further?

It seems like there are two potential situations here:
1/ You have swap, you hit swap. Massive slowdown.
2/ You don't have swap, run out of memory and processes die.

#1 is not a good situation, but it seems preferable to #2 doesn't it?
"If you already have the free edition, you can continue to use it for free. This change has no impact on existing users of the free edition."

That's all I needed to know.
Well, let me say: love it.

Very good idea, if you will open source it i'll consider using it as standard interface on a project i have (with your permission obviously :))
That said, awesome job!
I am sure the Api supported this earlier - in fact I wrote a wrapper script for it on lifeisstillgood/githubkoolaid

This I guess is the UI release
This was also my initial thought. Mao as well...
The thing that makes TED(x) interesting is the broad range of topics, new ideas and unknown facts being presented, even if they are on the fringe of science. It's supposed to provoke thought, questioning and insights. If instead it becomes just another platform for established, proven ideas, what makes it different from a guest speaker round in a local school?
There is a pacemaker that uses java.
Are any of those words weasel words? "blanket"? "currently"?
Search of local file systems (<super>f) does not include results from Amazon. This is FUD.
Same, just surprised. Seems to be a shift from open and free products at Google to revenue generating products.
All that, plus the fact that they hired him AWAY from Google.

Matz is one of the "rare gems" in the Ruby community. So doesn't that make Guido one of the "rare eggs" in the Python community? ;)
I'm not sure that they do. AFAIK, they take open-source Android (that is, with no Google apps) and build on it.
It's important to keep in mind that Android is completely subsidized by advertising revenue. Making money on mobile advertising is still troublesome enough in any market, but selling advertising targeted toward "a lot of poor people not able to afford a PC" is even less profitable. As someone who develops for the web and mobile web, I'm glad to see good browsers in the hands of more users, but it's important to keep in mind what makes that possible in the first place. If Android dominates in markets where no one can afford paid apps and no advertisers spend significant money, while Apple continues to hold a lock on the more lucrative demographics, Android could actually be in trouble overall.
Bash function to copy IP to clipboard
What alternative do you suggest? Markets have their failures, but so do governments, etc.
I'm not so sure about that. Most of the pain points in Android development have to do with the complexity of the API and state management. Clojure would cost you the tight tooling integration and not do much to help. You don't often encounter the kind of gnarly concurrent algorithm stuff where Clojure shines in mobile dev.

Kotlin, on the other hand, modernizes Java, but should fit the Android toolkit like a glove thanks to Jetbrains backing. Presumably they're also designing it with Dalvik in mind, unlike Scala and Clojure.

I could be wrong though. If some of the memory/efficiency issues get ironed out I'll certainly try it.
I think Apple is relatively content to not dominate the mass market, though. Look at their computers- they are a premium price, but they still make a lot of profit on them.
Well to be honest I dont really like living in India.

Its a personal thing based on my lifestyle and might and not apply to everyone.
My situation is much the same, minus the sports. It makes finding a cofounder quite difficult when the standard advice is to use friends you have known for a long time.
I just lost The Game - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)
Except working for a small company. There's something to be said for that!
Sources for either side?
Ah, well there's your problem right there. I don't think the two problems you cite are the big problems. Those are merely symptoms of the real problem, which is that content providers are promulgating the belief that copyright is an entitlement rather than what the Constitution actually says it is: a grant. All the other problems flow from that fundamental mistake.
Oh neat! Recommend putting that on the demo, maybe faintly in the corner, I didn't figure it out.
I've never seen an ad on my phone except when using the browser.
What is low-level or system programming?
C is considered a low-level or system programming language. If a C library were a duck, this is what you can do with a duck:

#include <dlfcn.h>

void* library = dlopen("./duck.so", RTLD_LAZY);
typedef void (*duck_t)();
duck_t hello = (duck_t) dlsym(library, "walk");
walk();

Since you could create duck.so in Pascal, C++ or D, they can also be used effectively as system programming languages.

Java nor C# can walk like a duck, not even if that is what it would take to save themselves from drowning. The Go language cannot do this either.

For a language to be considered a valid substitute for C, it must simply be capable of walking like a duck. What other system programming languages are there around? What other languages are capable of walking like a duck?
Okay, so I have to say I'm totally jealous right now! I made the exact same thing for the exact same reason, with the exact same basic idea behind it, submitted it 3 times, and got just about no attention. On top of that, this interface is better so I'm jealous of that. Mine even has a few more bells and whistles. (I'm doing it, I'm gonna shamelessly plug it right here - shamelessly - https://writeapp.me).

But despite my jealousy and, I must admit, bitterness, I have to say nice work. I (hate to say :) ) I really like this.
Find yourself thinksterbating? Do something instead.
This is my first hackernews post. I thought I'd try it out.
Proving that hipsters are as trainable as dogs?
Haha, I saw this a few days on the Herald. It's my only tie back to news in NZ at the moment! The link for that one is: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&obj...

But looks like 3 News did cover it first :)
Consider the solution to the quadratic equation

x = (-b ± sqrt(b^2-4ac))/(2a)

What is x? What is a? The wonderful thing about math is that it doesn't matter. x could be length, dollars, area, volume, mass, potatoes, lines of code, chickens, or electron-volts. But in the general case, it represents a number. Why would anyone consider it an improvement to write

Given that number1 answer^2 + number2 answer + number3 = 0, answer = (-number2 ± sqrt(number2^2-4 number1 number3))/(2 number1).

The extra characters convey no additional semantics. Even when presented with an equation where things have specific units, you can usually mentally figure out the units of everything else, due to conventions, previous definitions, and mental dimensional analysis.

In my experience, the notation isn't so much of an issue as knowing definitions, closely followed by being able to translate those definitions into intuition. You must be able to remember them exactly, otherwise nothing makes any sense, and you must have an intuition for what they mean, otherwise you'll never get anything done. Consider some terms from a recent talk I attended that was outside my immediate areas of expertise: "solvable Lie group", "left-invariant metric", "upstairs", "double cover". I was able to understand the main idea of the talk, but my full understanding of the talk was sunk by not knowing the definition of left-invariance [1].

Since math is inherently abstract, it is hard, and there is no substitute for the hard work necessary to acquire an intuition for it. When doing high-level math, it is necessary to have a rigorous intuition for the subject, where you are able to intuitively see a path to a proof, and then are able to translate that intuition into a suitably rigorous argument.

[1] To illustrate my point that knowing definitions precisely is one of the keys to understanding math, here's the definition of a left-invariant metric. Let G be a Lie group with metric <,>, L_g be left multiplication, and L_g^* denote the pullback of L_g. The metric is said to be left-invariant if L_g^* <u,v> = <u,v> for all u,v in G. It makes no sense unless you know what metrics, Lie groups, left multiplication, and pullbacks are, and you'll only shoot yourself in the foot if you can't define them precisely.
Hey wait, doesn't everybody at Google stay till 10:00 PM on Friday??!
GitHub's CSS Performance
The wikipedia page is said to describe a game, although it rather looks like a description of Switzerland's political system.
The "Saved!" dialog gets a little pesky when repeatedly clicking around or focusing/unfocusing. I think it could just be displayed somewhere on the screen.

But I love the editor - congrats!

If you feel like going more advanced, it'd be amazing to be able to edit while in preview mode - this could be done with contenteditable I think, and the changes merged back into markdown when exiting preview mode...
Too much hyperbole, but I was struck by this, which I hadn't considered before:

"We often go to Amazon just to search something - to see what else Amazon recommends. We are quite literally accessing Amazon 'just to see ads'."

I haven't seen a clearer demonstration of the argument that ads, properly targeted and displayed at the right times, provide positive value to the user.
They carry apps in buckets on their heads for miles.
Because it's more fun to write lots of awesome Python code than to retire, or drive fancy cars, or go home to a fancy house.
Bitcoins are certainly not "inherently" anonymous if it requires the use of external mixing services to sufficiently hide one's activities in the block chain.
Now that they are crippling their OS, and trying to force everyone to use their App Store (which prevents powerful tools as a policy), who could they possibly be going after?
As Voyager 1 Exits Solar System, Plan To Extend Life Remains Undecided
Yeah, it's like we don't even speak a similar language.
I'm sorry, but that's an invalid comparison. We don't get our democracy straight from the Athenians. There was a two thousand year break in between, and our actual institutions that implement democracy are very different from the Athenian ones. (It was not a representative government. Office holders were chosen by lots. Citizens voted directly for legislative measures and even judiciary punishment. There was nowhere near universal suffrage etc.) Whereas the patent system in the US (and pretty much every other country) derives directly from the 1624 Statute of Monopolies, with a number of ad-hoc tweaks that were added and greatly multiplied along the way. The whole structure has become unwieldy and horribly unsuitable for modern technological development. (Unlike political representation, which might be somewhat facilitated by new technology but remains unchanged in its fundamentals.)
There is no such thing as a "relevant Amazon result" when you are searching your apps and files.
Glad you like it :) I actually did see your app during mmy search for the best distraction free editor, but then I decided it had too many features for me, and I really did not want to signup to use it. So thats why I made Pencil.

Btw, you should totally use hnpickup to find the correct time to submit to HN. Worked like a charm for me.
(Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long)
In math, you have a trade-off between entropy (in the information-theoretic sense), rigor, and size of the document (e.g. proof). Entropy loses, so you get something extremely terse.

This is one of the hardest things about reading math. It's not the notation. You can pick that up pretty quickly. It's that every character counts: math is high in entropy. We're not used to that. In fcat, if you pmterue the inenr ltertes of tyicpal wtterin psore at rnoadm, msot pleope can read it at csloe to nmroal seepd. However, in math, one has to pay attention to every jot, because y-hat (ŷ) means something different from y.
MIT students don't know what stress is. Try Georgia Tech for that one. #2 least happy students in 2002.
Ask HN: God?
Like clock-work, dinner with my mother led to another discussion about God. Her main point is that I should believe in a 'Higher Power' or something 'Greater Than Myself'.

I spend a lot of time on Hacker News and am curious what everyone here thinks about this topic. Is it essential that I believe in 'something'?

Please avoid religion bashing :)

edit: something -> a 'Higher Power' or something 'Greater Than Myself'.
Threw this together to preview markdown HTML elements - posted here in case it saves anybody some time:

http://pencil.asleepysamurai.com/hag56udxkx#p

If someone edits it I suppose it'll no longer be there, but so be it!
I feel like Hnpickup is cheating though. But I'm glad you saw mine and too many features is a totally legit reason to not use it. In fact, sometimes you just want to make your own thing no matter what's out there.
As a non-UO player: can you explain what was unique or different about it, or link me to somebody who writes about this?

MMOs bore me, and the thought that UO did MMOs somehow better intrigues me. I find it easy to believe, but hard to understand why.
This is hardly true. Mathematical notation changes all the time-in fact, inconsistency is a significant problem, because Mathematicians love to experiment with notation, definitions, etc.

Seriously, just look at a Mathematical logic book from 50 years ago vs. one today. You won't even recognize half the words, let alone the symbols.
The MicroTask Process
I like Google... And Dropbox is also good. I don't know how I'm supposed to feel! HN always tells me who the villain in a story is. Someone please help!
He also made SpaceChem, which is possibly one of the greatest games of all time. I can't recommend it strongly enough. There's a demo on his site and steam. Go try it.

(OK, one caveat - programmers/logic puzzle types may like this game more than the average member of the public.)
Electric generators can get up to 95% efficiency, meaning electrical output as a percentage of mechanical energy input. In the current case, the relevant input is mechanical energy produced by a slowly dropping weight, so there would be losses from friction. But overall, I'd expect much better than 50% in the conversion of gravitational potential energy to electrical energy.

However, in commercial power generation, the mechanical energy usually comes from some sort of heat engine, the heat for which is provided by fossil fuel combustion or nuclear fission. There is a big haircut in that step. Heat engines are generally only 35 to 60 percent efficient.

Hydro power does much better, but it doesn't use a heat engine; it's just a much larger scale example of converting gravitational potential energy into electricity.

I think the reason this contraption is valuable is that LEDs don't need much power to produce enough light to please someone used to kerosene lamps.
Mao was my first thought too.

I'll admit that my second thought was the "make a rule" rule of Kings...
Available to me in Montana.
AMD puts brakes on chip manufacturing as sales plummet
So this article is just the author complaining that he has no practice in reading mathematics. Would you be surprised if someone who never written a computer program before couldn't understand a complicated dynamic programming algorithm? Of course not, they have no practice or background!

And for the record, computer programming is much more precise than mathematics. Most people here don't do mathematics, so they don't realize how many implicit identifications we make between objects which are very very different. In programs, correct types are tantamount to the success of a program. In mathematics, we will readily identify rings with topological spaces and never think twice. Moreover, we need to readily be able to change the rules by which we consider two different things to be identical on the fly. It is simply a different way of thinking that programmers aren't used to.
I know I'm judging, but wow, MIT students (for how smart they are in general) are not the most self-confident bunch... 9-21% of students think that next to the AVERAGE, their accomplishments are impressive.

I expected this to be skewed above 50%. I wonder what response sets for this survey would be like at other schools.
That's not great news for Android's sustainability, no?
Actually, that makes me think - a feature suggestion if possible, would be to "lock" a markdown file to editing (only Preview mode available), and require a password to edit.

This would make the app super useful for a quick-and-nasty publishing solution (similar to gist or pastebin, but also for random thoughts). Good luck!
"I am driving! I like driving! I am an excellent SQUIRREL!"

That said, if these dogs drove cabs I bet they'd stop for everyone who hailed them.
I guess by degree you mean order? And by finiteAbelianGroupOfDegree7 you mean cyclicGroupOfDegree7. Of course, you should always use theorems to keep your notation consistent. :)
Yeah, I could probably put it in the corner same as the Previev mode indicator. Good idea, will get to it.

As for editing in the preview mode, that kinda goes against the whole reason I made this. I want it to be simple and minimal. Markdown also happens to be great for writing, since it doesn't look too different from plain text, ergo you don't get distracted by how your text looks.
What do you mean? Devices that run Android are not free.
Bitcoin is a good alternative to cash in the future, for privacy purposes.
Granny-shifting. Not double-clutching, like you should.
Note that 256 megs is how much physical RAM the iPad 1 has; the amount available to the foreground application is much less than that. Indeed, on the iPad 1 you're lucky if you have much more than 100 Megs to yourself while you're running.

And, as others have said, higher color depths will make some difference, and no doubt the port puts a lot less effort into RAM conservation than the original did.
Ask HN: What is the future of passwords?
Please suggest some authentication systems you know of that are more secure than passwords

I want to start testing them out with some of my projects and i promise to report back with the success or failure of this experiment complete with detailed reports.

Thank You
If this future comes true, maybe the situation will reverse and there will be a 2.5% cash handling fee instead of the fee some companies currently charge for credit card transactions :)
> Are people who write code with bugs just dirty liars, because the documentation says it will do this, but a bug means that in some cases it fails?

Yes. Dirty, dirty liars.
Mathematical formulas with real-world interpretations can use those variable names. The problem occurs when the thing you're trying to express has no analogue in the real world. What variable name should I give to a reduced Noetherian subscheme of an arbitrary scheme? If you think "reducedNoethereianSubscheme" is a better variable name than X, then you'll love writing the notation for a function on it:

f: reducedNoethereianSubscheme -> reducedNoethereianSubscheme

It's surprising how everyone thinks they can make math better, but nobody even knows about what it's like to begin with.
I think that eventually passwords will be obsoleted by crypto keys that work largely in the background. You won't even think about authentication. Security conscious users will have a master passphrase or two which they will know by heart.
I followed the link to try to edit it (I wasn't going to save it, I was just curious) and I have to say that on second use, I'm having trouble figuring out how to move from Preview mode to edit mode. Clicking outside the content area seems to move it into preview mode but then no matter what I try I can't get anything editable again.

Maybe its just my OS/browser combo or something. Maybe adding a few instructions somewhere would help.
Apple investment in the US only to add ~200 jobs
Yes, and only 31% consider themselves above average academically.

I have to laugh, but it's also sad that so many MIT students feel so insecure. I think it must be the shock that comes from being at the top of one's high school, then arriving at MIT and no longer being head-and-shoulders above most of one's peers.

Anyway, maybe the administration should see if there's something they can do to give students a more realistic view of where they stand.
$5 per user per month seems quite steep to me. The only reason I use Google Apps (for numerous domains) is because it's free. Really, I mostly use it for the email address support; I don't use most of the other features. Perhaps Google could continue offering the free version but instead provide reduced functionality.
No? How could that be a logical conclusion given current data? Also, did you honestly think that Android just randomly shows ads or something?
The big problem I have with this kind of analysis is that it's all extrapolation based on existing conditions, with the assumption that nothing disruptive will happen from here on out. You could have done the same analysis at various points in time and concluded that Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry and iOS were all going to dominate the future. The very nature of technology is disruptive and we simply cannot predict what's going to happen next.

Having said that, if this vision does come to fruition, I think it is a wonderful thing for humanity. The fact that the OS that comes to dominate the planet is free, open source and available on (nearly)equal terms to everyone from the most powerful and rich on the planet to the most poor and deprived is a truly amazing and awesome feat. A few years ago I looked at the growth of iOS and truly feared that humanity was headed for a very different future - one where the poor were separated and disenfranchised by their inability to afford access to the dominant mobile platform and the rich were slavishly bound to the constraints of a locked down and tightly controlled ecosystem where all decisions made would be in the interest of the largest company on earth. This latter future did not come to pass, and I am very glad for that (even as I admire and love using Apple products).
hell week -> dead week -> finals week