skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple losing market share significantly in both India and China where pretty much Android has closer 90% marketshare.
YouTube Gets Google-esque New Look
The problem with math isn't symbology or notation per se, it's that it's not evolved to take advantage of modern technology. It's an artifact of pencil-and-paper being the medium of choice for expressing ideas. We can do much better.

When you are looking at an equation, you are looking at the purest distillation of an idea. Underneath that equation sits countless layers of abstraction and reasoning. Why can't I peel back these layers and see them on my computer or iPad? The equation is the iceberg tip peeking out of the water onto the paper, I want to see underneath. Let me feel around and slowly and confidently fill in the places where my understanding is fuzzy. Prevent me from moving back up to the final equation until everything underneath is fleshed out and solid in my mind. And if bits start to fade, let me quickly react to snap them back into focus.

This is what we are doing mentally anyway when we flip back and forth in a math text referencing previous proofs and equations. Math needs it's "hyperlink."

Anything I say here has been said better and more convincingly by Bret Victor:

http://worrydream.com/KillMath/
http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

Though I will argue that at least in his Kill Math writings he's throwing the baby out with the bath water in a certain sense. Let's keep the symbology as a optimal way to encapsulate our knowledge for the amazing mental leverage it gives us, but give us a way to move up and down the ladder of abstraction in order to facilitate understanding.
Pretty much everyone I know who is using the free Google Apps is using it just for webmail and according to this outlook.com allows you to have 500 users per domain instead of free Google App's 10 users.

While I'm still grandfathered in to the old Google Apps free tier on a couple of domains, I'm going to try switching one of them over to outlook.com and see how it goes.

I never would have bothered paying attention to this if Google hadn't killed their free tier, hopefully whatever gain they get from that was worth the potential loss of users (even though they offer it for free, they still benefit from my data and showing me ads in mail, now it is likely they won't).
It's not a local search. If you want a local search, do a local search. If you type a search into a global search box that is supposed to search the Internet, expect it to search the Internet!
I believe it depends on where he got this information. If he had heard that information from a scientist in the field, then I believe that a reasonable person could believe what the scientist said. After all, that is that person's field, they deal with it all the time.

That said, now that we've discovered something inaccurate, as long as that information gets back to them, what matters is what they do with the new information. If, after having been informed of what's correct, they continue to say what they had been saying, then we have a real problem. Otherwise, I don't think we have enough information to say anything.

Really, my problem with your statement was calling what they did the "next worst thing". I think that's a bit extreme for what was said, given the little we know about the situation.
Flickr I think was the original inspiration. Basically no one wanted to pay for the real domains like they did in the first bubble and it was basically a red flag to spend your money on one.
it seems like a great alternative but what kills it for me is a lack of IMAP support.
C++ gives you an insane amount of control, is exceedingly manual, hard to use, hard to learn, and you can easily screw yourself over by using it - but it gives you so much performance that it's worth the necessary expertise.

Go tries to be safer and more automatic, like Java. While it's more organized and prescriptive than C or C++, it's less religious than Java about everything being a class. So it encourages the pragmatism and low-levelness of closer-to-the-metal languages while also abstracting out a lot of the details which get in the way of just writing systems.
Given the vast sums of money that patent trolls are blood-sucking out of legitimate software and web companies these days (see another post currently also on the front page of HN), I'm personally quite looking forward to a massive swing of the pendulum in the other direction.
You're right. I did say it was a back of the envelope calculation. :-)

If you have a 50% efficient generator, just double the size of the ballast; 20kg is still reasonable. Or double the height, though that would be somewhat harder; you would need some kind of pulley arrangement. Or some combination of the two.

Also, I think low voltage DC generators can do considerably better than 50%; the numbers for this kind of application can be quite different than those for the kind of large scale AC generators we're used to.
Meyer's matrix analysis has an excellent, and relevant, quote:

The great French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) said that, “Such is the advantage of a well-constructed language that its simpliﬁed notation often becomes the source of
profound theories.”"
Most federal loans these days are at 6.8%, and max out at around $5,000/year for undergrads (which is only half the cost of tuition at a state uni here). Private loans tend to lean more towards 8-12%. Also, good luck even qualifying for the latter if you don't have a rich parent with collateral to cosign for you.

It's a good thought, but I think it's much less useful today than it was in the era of 2-3% interest student loans. My teachers always use amazingly low interest rates in math problems and then get all shocked when I mention how much even the government charges these days.
That's kind of a strawman argument.

cyclicGroupOfDegree3 is a terrible name, unless you need to be really specific about degrees. cyclicGroup, please. (and I could imagine: cyclicGroup.degree() == 3)

dP is also a terrible name. My first thought goes to derivatives. directProduct is the right name. dProduct, dProd (if you like the Numerical Recipes style, expounded below) are better than dP, but still wrong for a library.

So first, let's assume directProduct is a library somewhere; maybe one you've even created. So let's reconstruct:

val z = directProduct(cg1, cg2)

Better, and more believable. And if the declarations of cg1 and cg2 are obvious (ie, the lines directly preceding) then you might have a case. I imagine directProduct(group1, group2) would actually be a happy medium. And if you use z in the next line or two, I'd let that slide.

The thing about Numerical Recipes is that often you're taking math syntax and coding it. Often doing so requires a good deal of commenting and temporary variables. One thing the book gets very wrong is it's function declarations (the function body is a separate argument) -- at the very least, rooted in a past of 80-character-lines and before code reviews. The first example in the book:

void flmoon(int n, int nph, long* jd, float* frac)

ought, in a modern era, be something like:

void MoonPhaseToDay(int n_cycles, int phase, long* julian_day, float* fractional_day);

If for no other reason than I can have some hope at understanding the second argument, or finding it again. You'll also notice flmoon is a misnomer -- it computes more than full moons!
But that said, what about pure existence proofs?

There are algorithms that we can prove exist, but we have no idea how to find them.
Also new outlook.com support multiple accounts/mails very well

Edit: Basically you can create as many accounts as you want then link them together and you get n * 7gb skdrive space
Now if you really want to bend your brain, go look up PerlNomic ;)
This article does a good job of putting this problem into perspective - patent trolls earned $25B last year. That's a good chunk of the entire software industry, and it's a huge problem.

The question is, will the America Invents Act fix it? That seems to be the most important question[1]. The thing is that someone, preferably someone really, really famous and respected, should propose something concrete. E.g. I'd like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Larry/Sergey to make a concrete proposal. As for cost, I bet it would be free: what lawyer wouldn't jump at the chance to draft legislation that will be championed by one of these men?

[1] http://www.patentspostgrant.com/lang/en/2012/07/patent-troll...
You've never visited a Google restroom before?

The practice started with "Testing on the Toilet", which was a way to educate developers about unit-testing best practices. (This was back in 2005 or 2006, when Google very much had a cowboy-coding culture and a lot of products were just thrown over the wall for users to perpetually beta-test.) Then we got "Learning on the Loo", which is general life-hacking tips that started in 2010. I forget the official title of the Go series, but a friend and I were joking that it should be called "Going to the bathroom."
Nokia had the N900. They had MeeGo (back before it was a joke). They had a good shot at being part of the smartphone market.

What other "ranty innacuracies" would you like to point out?

Windows Phone 6 was a (mild) typo for Windows Mobile 6. (Not WP7)
And soon enough offices abroad.
userfox (s11) launches custom data: even better welcome emails
Their blog post on 'Testing on the toilet' - http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2008/08/tott-100-and-count...
By that token, neither is cash money - every bill has a unique serial number.
The compressed notation is not just about saving paper and ink.

It's all about the amount of mental power and work you have to exert. If I'm filling a few pages with equations, if I have to write 'force' instead of 'f' all over the place, it's going to take me about 5 times longer. I'm going to only fit 1/5 of the content on each line and page, (OK, 1/5 might be excessive, but the principle holds I feel).

Programming languages have similar properties. Why don't we always write integer instead of int, loop_variable instead of i, and have no compact way of writing unnamed lambda functions?
Isn't English fun! :-)

My interpretation wasn't entirely unfair. The "for" and double "of" result in an ambiguous meaning. "top" is most commonly a superlative, similar to "best" or "most popular", as in "the three best actors". But you used it in a different sense, as in "three top actors" (though this doesn't usually work with "the" before it.)

I do see where you're coming from though and what you intended so this is mostly linguistic wankery for a good Friday night in ;-)
So is Google Apps since 2009: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com.au/2009/09/google-sync-now-...
> Do mathematical formulas have to use Greek letters rather than useful variable names like "distance" or "speed"?

I feel that using "useful variable names" like you describe would actually make it less useful because they overlap with common language and writing them out in say, formula, would make them too long (and thus less readable).

I find that for any common topics, there's a subset of "default" variable names that are used so often that when you see it, you pretty much instantly recognize what it's meant to represent anyway. Using Greek letters is no problem as you get used to it eventually, and they make things stand out more than simply using the 26-characters Latin alphabet.
With the possible exception of maps, none of the things you listed require the incredible performance of today's smartphones.
I have yet to see an app with ads that didn't also demand a pile of permissions it shouldn't otherwise have (location, phone information, network activity for an otherwise offline app, notifications, etc) just to make the ads more valuable.
I couldn't possibly disagree more with your post. :)

The language of math requires exact precision which makes extracting what the series of abstract symbols "mean" incredibly difficult. Trying to learn new mathematical concepts from wikipedia is damn near impossible. Here are two examples.

b-spline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-spline
spherical harmonics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_harmonics

Trying to figure out what those walls of symbols mean requires quite a lot of focus. Dig up source code for either and it's orders of magnitude easier to understand. The images for spherical harmonics conveys more meaning and understanding in a fraction of a second than spending 3 hours with a piece of paper and the equations would.

The language of math sucks.
There is some concept of scope in math. At a fairly early level, a student learns sums and integrals. The variable of integration/summation's scope is just within the integral/sum.

At a higher level, some things have scope equal to a subfield of mathematics. A gothic p, for example, represents a prime ideal in algebraic number theory. It represents a parabolic Lie algebra in Lie theory. (Actually this causes problems when you're doing Lie theory and number theory at the same time.)
It's not really about seeing how long you can stomach being a starbucks barista with your $100,000 english degree either, haha.

I think there's a good medium between the two that most people fail to notice--it's good not to be too obsessed with money, but when I hear people say that "money doesn't matter!" I instantly suspect that they have always been rich enough to never have actually experienced living without it. It matters quite a bit when you are struggling to pay rent on your crap retail job, and routinely having to choose between gas in your car or food in your stomach.
By the first time they see the Amazon links, it is already too late, information they might have expected to be local and personal has already been transmitted to the Internet to be see by who-knows-who.

I don't agree with Stallman on everything, but I do feel increasingly uneasy with nearly all aspects of modern computing when it comes to privacy and so I support him in calling this sort of thing out.
Just store your mail in an EncFS or truecrypt container on your VPS then?

Who/what are you trying to defend against?
Please explain.

Bitcoins are inherently anonymous, it's just hard to convert between bitcoins and real-world goods/services/currency without identifying a wallet.

This is not a social problem (can't be solved with technology, even though lots of tech tries). This is a technical problem (advances in privacy services can make bitcoins more easy to use safely).
It sounds like "Calvinball".

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_Hobbes#section_6
You can press "delete original" when you edit it. The original gets removed from S3 servers once the Delete request propagates through Cloudfront.
Your logic is broken.
The less-annoying competition pays less, and end users don't have a choice of ad "vendors"; only app authors have that choice. App authors will choose whatever maximizes revenue; if more annoying ads drive off a few users but bring it more revenue from the remainder, the app will use more annoying ads.
A new game of fetch! LMAO!
I see both sides of this issue. But I also see the end user's point of view. As an Android user, I like that I can press the search button and essentially search all of my apps & the web at once. Personally, I see this as an okay feature.

On a side note, are Amazon results shown only if one is using the Amazon application for Ubuntu? I use Amazon frequently, but not the Ubuntu application and I've never seens Amazon results. (On Ubuntu 12.10)
Why do you need Django/Rails for web development?
Webmasters/bloggers: Easy way to get your site's social share count
'Revenge Porn King' Hunter Moore Hit by Anonymous
Anyone knows how much money they need / are planning to get through this? Perhaps a crowd-sourcing campaign could be organized to match that?

Or is this a long-term plan creating an Ama$on O$?
In India at least, Apple/iOS never had anything resembling meaningful marketshare. Android has replaced Symbian and whatever's left of blackberry as the ubiquitous platform powering phones from INR 5000 ($95 ) to INR 35000 ($625) not "taken away marketshare from Apple" since they didn't have any begin with.
UK Government condemned for not backing IPv6
By the time the N900 came out Nokia had already lost to iPhones and Androids. It's predecessor devices were neat but they weren't phones, the N800 was a weird little pocket-sized tablet. Usability of the whole series was underwhelming.
Google Fiber nationwide buildout would cost $140B
Can you recommend me a setup for using Arch as a desktop? Eg: which UI should I install?

Do things like sound, video, usb, etc work fine?
Pebble uses a holiday e-card to say their kickstarted watch won't ship by Xmas
You managed to get the right answer with the wrong math. It was 20 lbs for 2 meters. They talk about a run-time of 30 minutes, which would be about 100mW.
Quitting your job is the easy part. Legitimately replacing it is the hard part.

There are some nice thoughts here but I'd like to know what the plan is to survive. Its certainly possible to make it but I feel like this is glorifying a situation that most people once on the other side of the fence are going to be under stress and realize things are not necessarily so rosy. You have savings - great step. You have some things your working on - great step. Now how do you start making just enough money before your runway ends and you have to either go back to a job or start eating into your own time to do consulting (which is basically employment from my perspective).

Ill admit Im a relatively risk averse person but Id say the best plan is the 1 step plan where the time you are spending on your own business becomes more profitable than going to work - easier said than done but thats my 2 cents.
new design is cleaner
Good Point, by shear population, they dictate a lot. I will think about this some more. One global company becoming a leader, by a large margin, is something I dislike. Too much power in the hands of one piece of software.
'Up and Running with Node.js' is a much better book:

http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781449398583/index.html

And seriously, before jumping into node one needs to know some javascript. Haverbeke's 'Eloquent Javascript' and Resig's 'Secrets of the JS Ninja' will provide a starting point. They're one of these rare books you thought 'boy, I wished it was longer...'.

'Up and Running with Node.js''s code aren't thoroughly polished yet (eg.chapter 2), but plenty people refined and posted them on StackOverflow.
I think the implication is that Rasmus used to work for WePay, a YC company (i.e., that's what makes it 3/3). Etsy, Rasmus's current employer, didn't go through YC.
You make more money and I'll have better stories
I don't think this encryption is supposed to provide plausible deniability in the most general sense. Stuff was DMCA'ed from megaupload all the time, but that was never a problem. There were many many many uploads of the same data and you could always find a working copy. There was a lot of friction because some people wanted all copies to be deleted, not just the link removed. This encryption allows for plausible deniability against deduplication. Mega can't possibly know what are all the copies of some content, so even if they comply with DMCA requests as before, nobody can force them to delete all provided copies.
Any cheaper than $50 per user per year and you're in the free range. Just to keep this in perspective, $50 a year is a pretty good value when you think about what you're getting in Google Apps.
Great, now I need some whiskey. Thanks. >.> :P
Searchable database of leaked AOL searches from 2006
I think, like most things, most of this stuff is case-sensitive. If the situation resonates with you, then the experience of what happened is valuable.

It sounds like you already have your mind made up and you've committed yourself to making the leap. Lots of people aren't there yet.

As for freelancing - your best bet is hitting the pavement and meeting people. People tend to kick jobs to friends or people they personally have connected with.

First step might be to, instead of waiting for work to bang on the door, open the door and go out and get it :)
All signs of intelligent life at /. disappeared years ago, as their parent company was repeatedly lobotamized.
If there is one thing that the "internet" has lost, it's games like this. I used to love playing #wolfgame on IRC. Even Ultima Online (although hardly a typical heritage game) definitely shaped the way MMORPGs evolved.

Anyway, back onto Nomic. After reading the Wiki and seeing the "Initial Rule Set" [1] then reading through a lot of the archives it became clear that "chaos" and administration was the downfall of this game.

Eventually, the constitution that formed became so unmanageable and untrackable that it was impossible to progress. Judges were needed to resolve the rule disputes on every single vote and rule loop-holes were hard to spot (albeit an intended point of the game).[2]

But guess what we have now... Freaking version control. Companies/governments are tracking their constitution on GitHub at the moment, so why can't we also track the constitution of games such as this on GitHub as well. Last month GitHub launched their "create a game" contest that incorporated some form of "Pull"/"Push" feature into the game.

Well how incredibly awesome (I'm getting giddigy as I type this), would it be if we implemented Nomic voting rules using pull requests (for the votes), and have contributors sign up if they want to play the game.

Tracking the constitution changes was clearly the biggest technical challenge back in 1990s, and now we have tools to solve this problem totally.

GitHub makes Nomic awesome.

Ps. Ultima Online just made me feel all nostalgic. I miss West Brittania Bank, Felucca, my 24x24 Stone Keep (presumably fallen and reclaimed now) and my enormous Runebook library.

[1] : http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/nomic.htm#initial%20set

[2] : http://www.nomic.net/deadgames/a/
The meat of claim 1 is: "instructions for detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display;
instructions for applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device; and
instructions for processing the command;
wherein the one or more heuristics comprise:
a vertical screen scrolling heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command rather than a two-dimensional screen translation command based on an angle of initial movement of a finger contact with respect to the touch screen display;
a two-dimensional screen translation heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to the two-dimensional screen translation command rather than the one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command based on the angle of initial movement of the finger contact with respect to the touch screen display; and
a next item heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items."

(Notice the ands.) So this is claiming the ability to distinguish three different specific gestures.

(Besides Graffiti, I don't remember old touch devices using gestures at all, although I'm sure there were some.)
Lead With Your Heart
I never saw anything about this for some reason. I just found it quite interesting looking through there. For example, I typed 'dropbox' and found only one person searched for it:

http://search-logs.com/user/9524039-power_of_attorney

That search history looks fairly worrying.
Very inspiring story. It shows the power of Internet, bringing people together all over the world and giving them a chance to learn and improve wherever they are. In the past only a few percent of the world population had access to good learning tools and teachers.

I honestly believe the world will be a lot more interesting place in 20 years. A new generation or two with access to good quality learning tools on any topic.