skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's the big deal about an act of charity being 'selfless'? Doing good things in the world should make people feel proud of themselves. Sure, it's not as 'pure' if the actions are motivated by pride and ego, but what does it matter? Good things are being done regardless. We should be applauding the generosity and positive impact of the deed, not nitpicking over its altruistic imperfection.
Do you have any cites? Here's what the World Health Organisation say (Sept 2011):

(http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/)

> Around 3 billion people still cook and heat their homes using solid fuels in open fires and leaky stoves. About 2.7 billion burn biomass (wood, animal dung, crop waste) and a further 0.4 billion use coal. Most are poor, and live in developing countries.

> Nearly half of deaths among children under five years old from acute lower respiratory infections (ALRI) are due to particulate matter inhaled from indoor air pollution from household solid fuels (WHO, 2009).

etc etc

This isn't to say that the device is any good.
Ask HN: Would anyone be interested in using a new Codeigniter Admin Type Module?
Please note that the project is not a front-end utility but more of a starting point for new projects.

Last year, I had started work on a personal project as I was working on a lot of Codeigniter based websites, but then I was just one year old into the Web and work got haywire. My modules were quite messed up as I had picked them up from a number of my projects.

The motivation behind the project was that as a developer I needed a better and faster starting point for my projects. A set framework with a decent UI for my local projects. So, I used Twitter Bootstrap and quickly wound up a small project which I could just fork off for my new projects.

What I was able to build over the couple of months was an admin dashboard with these features -

* bcrypt for password hashing (was using SimpleLoginSecure)

* Add/Edit/Delete Users

* Add/Edit/Delete/Assign User Roles

* Separate website sections for Administrators and Users

* Master Site Management - Site Name and Description

* Notifications for users - Text based (static, manual)

Most of the modules built were quite flexible to be extended/rewritten easily.

After sometime, earlier this year, I started using Laravel and then I felt that most of the features I felt were missing in CI were there in Laravel, and I stopped my project.

From whatever I have learnt over the last few months is quite worthwhile in working on my project again as I can imagine the architecture better. And I have thought of some new interesting modules to incorporate in this version like -

* Modals (based on Twitter Bootstrap) - which can be called via a common controller and extended for different functionality

* User Role based feature assignment

If you would be interested in using such a project for starting your work, I would appreciate some feedback in terms of the features you would be looking for, because each developer has his personal preferences in terms of his starting stack.

Note: The project name was "Igniteplate"
It's not that mathematicians are stupid, they just that they have backwards compatibility problems.

The notation of mathematics is centuries old. It's very hard to take notation away from the set that must be learned, but easy to invent more.

Eventually old constructs can fall out of favor, but that is a long and slow process.
Math notation was't so much designed as accreted, and it shows in how awkward it can get. Dijkstra indirectly makes this point (among others) in "The notational conventions I adopted, and why" at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF
If someone were awesome (maybe somebody like John Resig), they could come up with a math notation framework that started terse but could expand to more detailed definitions with a click. E.g., Starts with (capital sigma) but expands to 'Sum(1..n)' and then expands again to 1 + 2 + 3 + ...n. Clicking the + changes it to 'add' which maybe links off to Wikipedia or Khan Academy. Clicking the numbers might change them to a pictograph of a group of widgets, etc.
Top Overused Professional Buzzwords 2012
Stallman is talking about a search of a local filesystem.
Sadly, UO didn't shape the way MMOs evolved, with the rare exception of niche games like EVE.

Current MMORPGs are almost exclusively of the DikuMUD / EverQuest / WoW lineage, just hack and slash with very few other options for interacting with or changing the game world.
> If so, those mathematicians must be extremely stupid.

Not necessarily. Before modern times mathematicians worked alone and didn't need a notation that others would understand. Newton, for example -- his calculus notation wasn't very good, and over time Liebniz' notation ended up being used instead (completely apart from the issue of who invented the calculus).

> Surely persons of average intelligence must be able to come up with better notations, and find proofs for stuff that is out of reach of those morons?

This doesn't support the thesis that mathematicians are stupid. Most mathematicians only care that they understand their own notation, and give less weight to its comprehensibility to others. And some mathematicians in the distant past deliberately used obscure notation to conceal their work from others.

I would look to educators to come up with a more comprehensible system of notation, not necessarily those at the frontiers of mathematics.
Many states have had tax stamps for marijuana and other street narcotics on the books for a long time already. You can still buy them and some are collectible [0].

They were used so they could add on even more jail time and so they could seize assets easily since taxes weren't being paid. There was a federal marijuana tax stamp too starting in the 30s I think but it was ruled partially unconstitutional (maybe in the early 70s?) since the way the law was written in order to purchase the stamp you had to incriminate yourself.

[0] http://terrefhosting.net/gerry/marijuanastamps/state-stamps....
Wikipedia is not designed to be a pedagogical repository; arguing that the mathematical language sucks because a terse summary in wikipedia is not enough to understand the material is missing the point.

Would you be able to calculate the probability of finding an electron within a certain distance from your pretty pictures? I would be able to do so fairly easily from those equations. What about computing special functions in higher dimensionalal systems? The generalization from equations is straightforward; our minds can not comprehend higher dimensions in pictures.

As you wrote, yes it requires a quite a lot of focus ... but that's the price one has to pay in order to be able to build models that describe the world and allow us to make predictions. That is not to say that adding pictures or explanatory sentences is unnecessary; but you can't replace the equations by only a combination of words and pictures and be able to make predictions (such as, for example, in quantum electrodynamics where predictions and experimental results agree to better than one part in 10^10 ... equivalent to something like 1 mm precision in measure the distance from coast to coast of the US) in a better way.

Scientific theories are those that are testable. You can't pretend to understand a scientific theory if you can't use your knowledge of it to make quantitative predictions. You need math for that.
On Legacy iPhones and Cannibalization
Metasploit 4.5: 1,000 remote exploits and sporting a brand new phishing engine
Why do people point out these anecdotes as if they refute real numbers and trends?

India and China aren't the only places where Apple is losing (relative) mobile marketshare.
Solid Scarf
Which is a beautiful thing, no doubt. The creative process is amazing, but reading through years worth of scribbles isn't the point of the proof. Write a proof, then accompany it with a blog of sketchbook scans and a detailed walkthrough of getting there.
Show HN: a distraction-free Markdown editor
Richard Feynman in one of his quantum physics lectures explains that he is going to abbreviate a few things because they are a pain to write out longhand on the chalkboard.

I think this is the main reason everything is so abbreviated, it comes from the era when doing lots of manual calculations by hand called for efficiency in notation over clarity.
Could you give an example of one that's particularly egregious? I've seen a couple that seemed questionable (based on my gut feeling, not any specific knowledge of the subject), but none that seemed as absurd as the crystal folks.
As blue LEDs are much brighter (at least perceptually), they need to be dimmed down a lot to be reasonable in many applications.

Unfortunately when the OMG-blue-LED fad first hit, many manufacturers apparently just treated them like other colors, and didn't modify their designs to account for the brightness difference, resulting in the searchlight-in-the-eye experience.

My perception is that things seem to have gotten a bit better since, with designs being modified to make blue LEDs less blinding, or manuf.s just switching back to more traditional colors....
> The reason math is painful to read is because it's either obvious, in which case it's not painful to read, or because it contains new ideas that you need to work hard on before you can grok them.

The same could be said for code that uses only single letter variables and functions.

It'd be a lot easier with readable variable names.
I've also seen cases of legitimate science that is nonetheless way too out-dated and unsurprising. For example, one TEDx speaker presented a bold, "game-changing" (eye-roll) presentation on how charging for roads at peak times reduces traffic.

Wow, charging for a scarce good ... why didn't I think of that???
I do Android freelancing, and I'm starting to see requests for apps that look more like traditional embedded software than smartphone apps. Controllers for industrial equipment, personal medical devices, props in simulations. Real Technology stuff.

That's not exactly new, but my perception is that it's picked up a lot in the last few months. And I think it's just the tip of the iceberg. For anything you can imagine wanting to control with a touchscreen, putting a cheap Android display in a case and connecting up over USB or Bluetooth seems to be making a lot of sense to people.

I fully expect Android skills to be profoundly in demand in a year or two. Study up now; it's not really a quick system to master.
Unfortunately, in Isla Vista, CA, where Freebirds is separate from the rest of the chain (original location, long story, different owner), they see fit to overcharge starving college students, so Chipotle is still a better option (despite it requiring a bit of a bike ride).

The Habit having moved in across the street is, I think, causing them to feel the cruel sting of the free market, so maybe they'll become competitive with Chipotle once and for all.
Math notation should be terse because you have to do symbolic manipulation on the expressions. It's easy to argue for longer variable names when you are just using the ready-made results. I think it's acceptable to use long names for programming.
It doesn't matter if the driver knows what to do in an accident, if they're not actively driving the car there's no chance that they could react fast enough to do anything useful. The person sitting in the "driver's seat" is just another passenger.

If all a plane had to do in an emergency was decelerate to a stop while avoiding obstacles, we would have gotten rid of pilots entirely some time ago.
Hm, did I time it wrong or why did no one see my earlier submission? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4887373
Maxwell's equations were not "written down to explain it to someone who doesn't already know what it means". They, quite simply were written down to express relationships between the motion of charge, and the behavior of electric and magnetic fields as a consequence.

You have to understand the physics behind the equations (what's charge? what's an electric field) as well as the mathematical structure (what's a vector space? what's a line integral?) in order to make use of them. They are equations used to answer questions like "What happens to the strength of this magnetic field if I increase the velocity of this charged particle responsible for generating it"? They aren't meant to be explanatory (but have the beautiful side-effect of explaining how light propagates in a vacuum.)
ARC isn't even an iOS feature... it's a compiler feature.
> People criticize c++ because you can overload the operators to mean anything you want

By the same people who struggle to read math, I guess.
The programming is a tool to aid learning, not replace all the other tools at your disposal. Use it when it helps.
it is for me and i hate it. It's as annoying as when facebook added the right side events bar and throw the news feed off center.
It's principally about control, performance is a side effect related to control and abstractions.
Yeah, the original iPad is the most memory-constrained ARMv7 (i.e. iOS 5-capable) iOS device out there.
My experience is that when you genuinely and truly love where you work, "under-utilizing" vacation doesn't really come into the equation
Ok so who else is seeing an opportunity to completely undercut all those Taxi startups?
Actually you are the one with the narrow view of the market. Look beyond your young cousins.

The rest of the world are using Android devices not Apple.

Android phones has 80+% market share in a number of countries in Europe. Worldwide, Android tablets are slowly gaining market share from the IPad.

In Africa, Android phones cost less than $100. In a few years, it might be under $50. A lot of poor people will not be able to afford a PC but a cheap phone is probably the only computer they'll ever have.
Anyone current versions of this on GitHub? I think it might even be fun to read the version history.
In my experience, most boutique development shops and agencies would love to put about 80% of their work through employees, and 20% through trusted contractors. Typically you need to be a product engineer--web, ios, etc. Expect to get paid about half of what you would for contracting work you source yourself. To get this work, go to conferences and be friendly with people in this group.

If you can't meet these people, build some open source thing they want (when I did this five years ago it was imagemagick integration for RoR). They'll contact you and pay you to customize it.

I have friends who've used https://grouptalent.com/main/talent/. They had a pretty good experience.

Good luck!
And also Mao [1], which has been an unbelievably source of entertainment

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_(card_game)
I wonder how much effort had to go into reworking the orginal codebase to make this performant. The Infinity Engine that was used for BG didn't use OpenGL acceleration until BG2 and IcewindDale. I bet this was a fun project to work on.

I doubt they are using the GemRB open source implementation [0] since it is GPLv2.

[0]: http://www.gemrb.org/wiki/doku.php?id=start
I read about it on a handout as a blurb of work going on at CalTrans at one of the job recruiting fairs. This is their web site: (http://www.dot.ca.gov/research/researchreports/index.htm) Their search technology sucks though. Still looking ...
That is fine for you, not everyone needs to know about Wiener path integral formulation of quantum mechanics ... which is based on functions that are almost continuous everywhere but nowhere differentiable (the set of functions that are differentiable and with which you are familiar is a set of measure zero i.e. it is comparable to using only integers instead of real numbers). The limit process, which you discard as not meaning anything, is essential to understand the Wiener path integral formalism. Fortunately, mathematicians and physicists did not "lose sight of that" ... and are able to go beyond what your limited understanding would limit you to. I don't mean this in a deragotary way - you obviously don't need to understand at a deeper level than you do; few people do ... but to those that need this deeper level, the mathematical formalism that you dismiss is, in fact, essential.

Edit: my apology for making an unwarranted assumption about what your level of understanding is.
Which Websites Are Sharing Your Personal Details?
How We Moved Our Data Center 25 Miles Without Downtime
Python wasn't phased out of consumer-facing applications because it was never in. Google has a lot of machines, but those machines receive a lot of traffic. Efficiency matters, and byte-for-byte, cycle-for-cycle, Java is more efficient than Python.

Don't ask me why Google didn't throw lots of resources at making Python more efficient like they did with JS and V8. I often wonder that myself.
My friends and I used to occasionally play a card game called Mao. The winner of each round (the first to get rid of the cards in their hand) could make up a new rule governing game play for following rounds. But they didn't announce their rule, instead punishing players who broke it by giving them an extra card. By watching the punishments, you had to try to work out their rule so you could avoid breaking it.

With the right group, it was quite fun, if rather tiring. You need to not take winning too seriously, because it's quite easy to make up a complex rule no-one will ever get - one of my friends had 'you may not play a prime number card on another prime number card'.
The notion of scope as an integral part of mathematics is a particularly interesting suggestion. Mathematics is the study of abstract, quantitative truths (and falsehoods), and these truths, being universal, have universal scope (although you can constrain some truths as special cases of more general truths, but I doubt this is what the author had in mind). To consider this a problem indicates that the author is searching for a tool rather than a way of thinking.

The scope issue is not just for theorems. In programming, scope is about what meanings get bound to what symbols, whether those symbols are types, operators, data, etc. Even in math, we can see a notion of "binding" vs. "bound" vs. "free" occurrences of a symbol: seeing something like "∀x∈N.x+k≥0" would make me think "Ok, I see what `x' is, but what's this `k'?" Treating every definition like it's at top-level makes for unreadable code and unreadable math. Ever had to search back through a document looking for the definition of some notation only to find it buried in an earlier proof of an unrelated theorem without so much as a "Definition: …" marker? I would much prefer not to have to do that again.

Transferred to another domain, "Why should we need scope? What good would that do?" becomes "Why should pronouns have antecedents? What good would that do?" It is important to acknowledge that mathematical notation is also a tool for explaining the ideas one has discovered with it.
Thanks for making my evening.
Guido is a boss.
Because the NSA wants it on. And what makes you think the switch works?

Where do you think these features come from? Windows has it and probably put it in for the NSA, Google has it and works with the NSA as equal partners. When I first read and saw these enhanced search subsystems in Windows and Linux that built search databases by scanning the system's file contents and saw how much cpu they used I immediately said to myself "Somebody's searching for something and it isn't me!"

Furthermore I've always believed that Ubuntu was an NSA front from its very inception.

(Puts tinfoil hat back on).
With the creator of Python on your team, what can't you do?
Yes you can. It works well as long as it's up but they have a tendency to go down randomly.
As a bad analogy - It's like asking everyone to ignore other programming languages because C++ is popularly used and the others are not (even if they are more elegant and better structured)
I don't get it, and I found it very hard to read meaning into all the superlatives.

Haven't there been more Linux devices than Windows devices for a long time now? For every PC that maps 1:1 to the owner's digital life, there are probably three toasters and a smart fridge running Linux. In the future, they will run Android. How does that help Google or hurt Microsoft? Apple could probably switch all their non-iOS iPods to run a modified Android and not a single thing would change.

So far, Android has only "won" the smartphone game by numbers. And in the process, Samsung has become an internal monopoly. I'm not convinced that this is the solid foundation on which mankind's digital future will be built.
You are moving the goalposts from "lying" to "being accountable". "I did not lie, so I should walk free" is not, in general, a valid argument in court (but it can work in defamation suits. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation#Defences)

"You lied, so you should be convicted" isn't true, either. If it were illegal, why do people have to take an oath in court?

Lying may be morally or ethically bad, but in itself, the law is fine with it.
Classen's logarithmic law of usefulness
Is it a good idea to grandfather the maximum users ? Or will the existing accounts still be able to use 10 users ?
Yes, I agree, but this won't help a company that claims technical expertise about their own product, but whose advertising copy contains such an elementary error. My use of "lying" was hyperbolic, but imagine how the investors -- or the SEC -- would react to such a "misstatement of fact" in a larger company.

For me, the other issues -- deceiving the public, public safety, and due diligence -- lead me to use what might not be the best word to describe it, but lacking a more convenient term, I often use "lying" in a case like this, where the future of the company may well hinge on the initial impression this page creates.
An encryption algorithm can be no stronger than the random number generator that created the keys. Any weakness in that generator will allow an attack to improve his odds in a guess and check brute force attack.
Loving it.

The page loads much quicker now and looks cleaner. The main focus on the site is now the video and comments. Well done!
How much math do you think it took to program this website?
Exactly. I've got a couple of apps about to hit the app store so I'm gradually making my way up the curve. I agree it's not the easiest API to learn. The basics are actually pretty straightforward but the details you have to consider once you start doing real apps can be tricky.

I'm really hoping Kotlin takes off as an alternative Android development language though. Java's OK but a more modern and flexible language would certainly help.

Do you have any good pointers or references for Android dev in these kinds of environments?
It's tough; people are always going to want to base your judgment against your own work, but you don't need to be a designer to 'get' design, just as anyone can call themselves a designer to begin with.

If I'm an influential designer and my identity is known to the critics, it will have an effect on their responses. Likewise, if someone with a lot of followers critiques me, it will weigh heavier than the rest of the feedback simply because people equate of # followers with quality/experience/etc (even though that isn't always the case). I think for this reason, anonymity is at least important in the early stages so as not to skew results. Maybe give a week or two window to shuffle some people through, or wait until it hits a certain comment threshold, and then let the poster determine if they want the thread to go public or stay private.

I'm personally more apt to give better advice if I know my comments aren't going to be ignored right-off-the-bat based on my age, gender or job history, to be honest.

As far as incentive to keep coming to the site and giving legitimately good feedback, give them credit that they could display on their site, like a StackOverflow badge, provided that Swrm has a reputation like StackExchange and not one like Klout, where people will actually be proud of it because it means something.

What are your perspectives on keeping people from being anon?