skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This is not newsworthy.

This is one of the largest tech companies in the US running a media campaign to attack one of the other largest public tech company's products. That alone makes it newsworthy. The fact it was such a lame attempt at a time it's crucial for Microsoft to have some marketing success in mobile also makes it newsworthy.

That it was picked up by niche press and turned into a viral wave doesn't negate that. I'm sure (a large) part of Microsoft's intent in this campaign was for it to turn viral and get picked up by media outlets. If it had gone according to their plan and turned into a tidal wave of complaining about Android, I expect they would have hoped for media coverage as part of that.
If you use your Internet connection for business purposes, you should not be on a residential plan in the first instance.
Warning: you can never un-see the images....
Dogs learn to drive in New Zealand
> However, the teaching of math would greatly benefit from an explicit executable form that makes no assumptions

I'm skeptical of this logic. I think nobody would be able to learn mathematics if they had to keep it all in their head at once. "Unobfuscated" maths, i.e. maths that has every single logical deduction written out from first principles so that you can (to use your words) "execute it", would be impossible to understand because, fundamentally, we are not computers.

Instead we learn some, we internalise it, and then we can appreciate the new notation that encapsulates what we have learnt before without exposing us to the underlying complexity that we simply don't need to solve higher problems.

Mathematics is beautiful. If anything, it's programming languages that have the catching up to do.

Edit: more generally, the blog post seems to be a case of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" -- if you spend all day programming, then it might make sense to try and relate mathematics back to something you're more comfortable with. That doesn't mean that it's the most sensible way for everyone else to learn mathematics.
OLPC is a tablet designed with the source code available to everything at the press of a button. So, there is no "security" so to speak.
> Shuttleworth seems to imply that they're not doing this for money, but he doesn't explicitly say it

What else would Amazon referrals be about, if not money?
Completely agree with you, but from your experience, how many fewer do both very well? I have always been interested in both and I can't imagine having one tool without the other, as they both enhance the way that I think about things. Programming makes the concepts of variables and sigma notation even easier to understand, while math makes it far easier to solve problems. Do people actually get by in programming without math?
Counterpoint: It's really hard to appreciate a day job for what it is until you're filling out HR forms to ensure your new baby has health insurance coverage from birth, and you let yourself appreciate the terror of not having that in a system that will do it's damndest to screw you over for any lapses. I have a friend who had a baby and had a gap between the 30 days during which the baby was covered by her health insurance, and the time he was covered by her husband's health insurance from his new job. The gap was the result, if I recall correctly, of her forgetting to timely fill out some paperwork. In that gap, the baby rolled off the changing table and hit his head. The baby seemed fine, but she faced the sickening choice between racking up a multi-thousand dollar hospital bill or just hoping the baby didn't have any internal injuries. Ultimately, they took the chance and luckily it worked out for them because the baby was fine.

These weren't poor people, by the way. They were students at an Ivy-league school who were in the transition period between graduation and six-figure jobs.
I wonder if this guy did the Googlezon video (that is the one where Google and Amazon merge and become a planet dominating company) people would start work at Google and then post it to the company wide 'misc' mailing list. It was almost like clockwork.

I think Android has had an impressive run. There is an interesting article about how it dominates Chinese smartphones but Google isn't getting any return on that investment (80% of Android phones in China ship with Baidu as the search provider). That is something that didn't happen with Windows.
Moving stuff into CSS seems to be a good direction. i.e. you don't have to code shadows/animations/etc. in JS anymore.
There has been many attempts to produce something to compliment the hacker news site and allow for more unstructured chat. Not sure anything has really stuck though.
> I'm skeptical of this logic. I think nobody would be able to learn mathematics if they had to keep it all in their head at once.

That's what functions are for.

> Instead we learn some, we internalise it, and then we can appreciate the new notation

Those new notations are functions, simplified abstractions of more complex processes that allow us to think in larger concepts and not sweat the details.

> Mathematics is beautiful. If anything, it's programming languages that have the catching up to do.

Perhaps, perhaps not.
I'm inclined to agree the demand for 1Gbps residential connections isn't there at the moment.

I have a 120Mbps residential connection. I's more than sufficient for me, and I'm probably in the 99th percentile in terms of residential bandwidth use.
The idea of doing ALL payments and transactions by mobile is a horrible future. It is the lack of privacy that cash gives us, and the complete dependence on mobile phones, corporations, and banks. What about people that don't want to have smart phones and refuse to pay via paperless? We have the ability to choose what technology to use - let's not get rid of cash shall we?
I still think its cool to count cars on the freeway by putting one of these on a pole next to the freeway. Pretty amazingly sensitive.
Maybe because these tricks do not work on old browsers ? that's why Bootstrap uses javascript.
You missed this gem: "becoming an Argentina for disgraced technical managers" which I suppose implies that Google's evil managers are like hunted Nazi war criminals, and Google is shielding them from international justice (their war crime being orchestrating "calibration scores").
I've done the same as him, and I just make sure I use spamassassin. It works just as well or better than GMail at catching spam.
> That is something that didn't happen with Windows.

Baidu dominates on the desktop in China as well. China is a unique situation, since the government actively encourages domestic copycats of foreign companies while preventing/making it difficult for those foreign companies trying to enter the Chinese market.
On the role of experts in creating personal belief systems
That was quite insightful - thanks!
Who says we have to lose our privacy because we use digital payments? Just take a look at Bitcoin.
Does Javascript-based encryption imply Javascript-based key generation? Key generation could be done on a server despite the presence of a progress bar in the web client. It doesn't have to stay only the server, or even be kept on the server at all.

Actually, all the screenshot is showing is Javascript-based entropy gathering. It does not demonstrate that any of the other steps are necessarily done on the client.
Having quit my day job back in 2000 to go into business for myself, I think I can give you a quick summary on the process to use:

Step 1: ensure you have at least 12 months of living expenses in cash. If you don't, then sell everything and move in with your parents or friends so that your expenses go down a LOT. If you don't want to do this, you might ask yourself how bad you want to create your own business.

Step 2. Spend all day talking to potential customers. Skip online research. Go talk to people. If you don't have something to sell (yet), tell them you are building it and you'd like to show them screenshots. You will suck at this conversation at first, but you will get better.

Step 3. Sell, sell, and sell some more. If you have a product, sell to customers. If you don't, sell to investors. Either way, you have to persuade somebody to give you their money.

Step 4. Pat yourself on the back because you just did something that most people only talk about.

Step 5. Network your ass off and only hang around other entrepreneurs who will support you. JOBers will most likely only knock you down because they envy what you have done (and they dont' have the stones to do).

Trent Dyrsmid
It bears mentioning that Python can satisfy many of Go's use cases too. A fairer way to put it is that there is a lot of overlap across modern programming languages
Changes to Google Apps for businesses
The new generation should know it and the older generation to remember it.
No. Do you treat every thing you say like it was a widely viewed online appeal for significant amounts of money that might otherwise go to another project helping people in the 3rd world? If your answer is yes, I'd guess you are lying. If your answer is no, then your point is irrelevant.
Also for me, a startup has a disruptive nature or mission for an existing market that seperates it from the normal competitive pressure created by new small businesses, franchises, etc.

I never understood who or what Dropbox was ever disrupting to earn such high valuations but that's ok. Sometimes just have to admit when you can't see the forest for the trees.
Or just click the link below the buy button that says "Continue reading
the free version", which just removes the hiddenhalf div.
Frankly, there are 2 kinds of programmers.

People who do this:

val result = directProduct(cyclicGroupOfDegree3, finiteAbelianGroupOfDegree7)

and the second kind, people like me, who do this:

// Compute the direct product of 2 cyclic groups
val z = dP( cg1, cg2 )

You can easily guess that the 2nd kind are math majors. If my math professor started writing everything out in plain English like the first example, he'd never be able to cover a theorem per class. He'd still be writing the first lemma and the hour would be up.

So he resorts to 1-character symbols, precise notations, and terse comments. The idea is - if the reader doesn't grok direct products or cyclic groups, he's fucked anyways, so why bother ? And if he does grok them, why impose cognitive overload by spelling it all out in great detail, just use 1-character symbols and move on.

Now both these styles are in direct conflict with each other, and in the Fortran/C/C++ community during the 80s-90s ( when every respectable programmer had a copy of Numerical Recipes on their desk ), you would emulate the 2nd kind.

In the 2000s & later, people got rid of their Numerical Recipes & exchanged them for "14 days to EJB" and "Learn Python in 21 days" and "Master Ruby in 7 days" and the like...the community started becoming a lot less math-y and a lot more verbose, and style 1 is back in vogue. Nowadays I get pulled up constantly in code review for using single character names....but I think this too will pass :)
My former boss did a successful startup in his 40's with a wife and three kids. The recipe was:

1) Spend that time becoming an expert in your field and developing a network of professional contacts;
2) Marry a bright, accommodating spouse with a stable career and generous health insurance;
3) Be willing to work your family into your business life so you don't become alienated from them.

I think it's a bit of HN echo chamber thinking to believe that you can't do a startup while married with kids. Outside Silicon Valley, a startup by a married person will raise fewer eyebrows than a startup by a 20-something.
I agree. I always felt that if math theorems were presented in a programming language, they would be way more understandable (especially if the good practices are respected: meaningful variable names, etc).

Mathematicians love to talk about rigor, but when it comes down to write their ideas, they often have little enough of it.
2-factor hax0r for 2-factor auth
Programming languages aren't explicit executable forms, they are abstractions. Unless you are working with machine code or assembly, you're getting the abstract ideas which get expanded by the compiler. What it sounds like you're advocating is to write out 3+3+3+3+3 instead of 3*5 (the latter is assuming).
Well, the big feature of Go - non-process-based concurrency - is still impossible in (C)Python.
Really? Can you get some pictures of that?
see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4884665
Yes, it dominates the desktop, but Microsoft doesn't depend on search revenue quite like Google does.
Wow, scrolling down from that article was a hilarious reminder how much more cogent HN comments tend to be than any other comments on the interwebs. "Grrr! USPTO is mean to Apple! How dare they! I'm mad!" Etc.
Yes, but if you notice that you can't sell that particular kind of bike, there will be less profit motive to steal it. (Scrap metal only. Why would someone buy a bike you can't pedal, and which will break if you try to fix it?) Also, the risk/reward equation might change if the device started reporting its GPS location to the owner and/or police.

I would also put a photocell on the device inside the internal shifter which would also set off the self-destruct mechanism. If I sold these, I'd have a warranty in case of malfunction. The trick would be to make them malfunction infrequently enough.
Yeah, but you're also not Larry Page (I assume) nor do you probably have 4.6 million followers on your G+ page.

Lots of companies and other organizations give out free or discounted flu shots every year, but they don't get the publicity this does. Raising awareness is a big part of maximizing the value of this effort, since the shots don't just benefit the individual getting them but their community as well (since it reduces transmission overall.)
Nonsense. To take your example of a Brazilian programmer, he doesn't have to stop speaking Portuguese to speak English. Your hypothetical woman has to stop being a woman. Same applies to your other examples of exclusion. If I learn Japanese to participate in the direction of Ruby language, I don't have to stop speaking English, German, or Chinese to do so.

Exclusion based on lack of knowledge is fundamentally different than exclusion based on innate characteristic.
What is it that Dropbox offered to lure him?

Well, isn't Dropbox written in Python...?
Dropbox also have a desktop client that's written in python. Presumably with a slightly different UI layer and packaging method depending on the target OS, but with the underlying functionality shared.
Google doesn't just make money on Android via search; they have a pile of other services integrated with Android, and they also make money from app sales and ad-infested apps.
I don't work at Google, but toured their Austin office during a hackathon. A friend confirmed that they did as well for their Mountain View campus.
[Jupiter Broadcasting](http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/) already does this, their affiliate plugin automatically appends their referral on any of about a dozen sites they can, and that is their main source of revenue for their podcasts.
The main reason it's hard to read math papers is because they contain complex, difficult ideas. Even professional mathematicians take a long time to read papers, and they usually won't be able to understand papers outside of their own specific field of math. I agree with the author that math papers could borrow some ideas from programming - explicitly defining all variables/functions, scoping, etc - but acquainting yourself with the conventions of the field alleviate most of those problems.
If Vic had continued to use Twitter in a personal capacity and was somehow punished for it, wouldn't that fall foul of employment laws? Where do we draw the line between work and personal life? Maybe it's time for employees to be branded like cattle, after a hefty payment of course, so we can at least be done with this nonsense.
Yay, child labor.
He is of the opinion that if you can't write the algorithm, you don't understand it; forcing students to write the algorithm aids in teaching them a real understanding.

Absolutely.

I had memorized the notation for derivatives. Until I was able to realize how the notation tied to finite numerical approximations, I never really understood it.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, the right way to approximate (d^2/dx^2)(f(x)) is to write an operator d defined as d(f)(x) = f(x + dx) - f(x). And now your numerical approximation for the second derivative is (d(d(f))/(dx * dx))(x).

Now replace your d operator with the much better d(f)(x) = f(x + dx/2) - f(x - dx/2), and see how good your numerical approximations become!

The notation actually means something. When we switched from infinitesmals to limits, we lost sight of that. When you try to write the algorithm, you're going to be reminded of its meaning, fast.
People have tried this idea before and it's never gone down well. There were those old Safari search plugins that injected Amazon affiliate links into the results, or otherwise replaced existing ones with their own. That caused outrage.

The other thing is, I don't want my experience on Amazon to be modified by the things I type into my OS's search box, which I would expect to be private. What if, in a fit of loneliness, I search for my porn directory, then get a bunch of related items appearing on my Amazon front page?
Psy Will Make $7.9 Million This Year From 'Gangnam Style'
Why do I have to "sign in" with Facebook or Twitter to read it? A hemorrhagic pox on both of them.
Because, realistically, given choice upfront most will probably choose to disable it even though they won't mind it if its there. When installing an OS I don't want many questions. I just want to get on with it. Ask me a question and you won't get my full attention and given the option to disable something I might just disable it.

Maybe a compromise is a notice while installing that the default is to search with Amazon and instructions on how to disable it. Those who really mind it can find their way there after the OS is installed.
I thought it worth mentioning that everyone opposed to this idea is capable of communicating in English. I am guilty of being monolingual, but if the most popular online source code management community used a language X that I did not know how to speak (especially if X was considered the lingua franca of software development), it would be a huge barrier of entry to me. While I would do well to learn X, an english localization of that platform would greatly ease my transition and encourage me to communicate with the predominantly-X speaking community. I would like to get the opinions on localization of github from people who are currently unable to communicate in English with a high enough proficiency to read these comments and voice their position here.
What seems to happen in practice is that either:

(1) If a majority of particpants are skilled in English, the less skilled will just submit the best they can, and the better speakers will correct (e.g. at patch-review time) anything too confusing in the same way they correct code bugs.

(2) If the majority of speakers aren't skilled in English, you often end up with amusingly misspelled variable names and odd comment grammar, but most people can't tell the difference anyway, so it's cool....

[I work for a Japanese company, so many internal projects just use Japanese for most comments/commits (although I'm free to use English if I want, because most people can understand it more or less).... but because of character-set restrictions, variable names are still mostly amusingly-misspelled English...]

E.g., there doesn't really seem to be all that much of a problem.
I agree with the sentiment, but the word "spyware" has always suggested subterfuge to me. It should be obvious to anyone running Ubuntu that if they're seeing Amazon links, then something's being transmitted to Amazon.

I don't agree with it, and I think it's the wrong move and certainly shouldn't be done without prior user consent, but let's not get hyperbolic.
Can ads not be used responsibly? Must apps with embedded ads be referred to as "infested"?
Running cellular radio and GPS is several orders of magnitude more power intensive than low power communications. For this reason, you want the high power cellular radio and GPS to only come on in exceptional situations, and then only for short bursts if possible.

That said, it's a good idea. But making the bike hard to sell is the main deterrent. It's hard to sell a non-functional bike. By removing most of the profit motive for stealing the bike, you decrease the amount of security necessary to protect it effectively.
As a customer, should I expect less protection and safety because of how often the room is rented when I'm not there?

Unfortunately, it's impractical if not impossible to regulate behavior based on _frequency_ unless you're going to continually monitor the activity.
The discussion I'm referring to represented ending up somewhere that you don't want to be as a bit of a trap.

E.g. if Guido ends up writing shell scripts, but his real skill-set/passion is for databases. It's quite possible for him to under-perform, and then that performance used as a reason for the 'database team' to not take him.
Low cost, at-home blood tests are the future of personal medicine
Are you saying that based on any fact, or just a personal bias? Do you have any familiarity with fire laws or lodging regulations?
24 ways: Giving CSS Animations and Transitions Their Place
3 Keys To Mastering The Life Sciences Supply Chain With A 3PL
Of course, if you order online or via the app, you can't make use of some of the other hacks identified: two full bean portions and 3/2 meat combo. In that case, the wait in line might be worth it.
I always feel like I'm getting away with murder when I ask for the onions and peppers after they skip right over them.
I guess most copies of Windows in China are pirate too.
That's an argument to moderation. Something he's explicitly stated should not be done (pertaining to software patents, sorry, can't find the reference). Although extremely hyperbolic, you can imagine a choice between killing 10 innocent people or 0. The middle ground is to only kill 5, but it doesn't make it correct.
"Today latest Q3 data and 20 months after Nokia CEO annoucned the premature death of Symbian, in Q3 Symbian sales has collapsed from the 29% market share it had when Elop announced it, to 2% now."

So tired of this total misuse of a statistic. Yes, Symbian had ~29% of the market when they switch to backing WP7. However, that's leaving out the fact that 29% is down from 47% in 2009, and that the rate at which people were abandoning Symbian for Android continued to increase. Furthermore, that market share was almost entirely cheap dumbphones. The reality is that Symbian was never a popular smartphone platform and was not ready for a global shift from dumbphones to smartphones, and that Apple and Android disrupted that market and split it among themselves. That whole section was littered with ranty inaccuracies. OP goes on to talk about "Windows Phone 6" as a confused combination of WinMo 6.5 and WP7.
I'm not sure where the hostility is coming from.

Although Kalydeco has been approved, it is unavailable in the UK to most of the patients who qualify for it as it is undergoing a "pricing assessment".

My argument is two fold:
1) Measure such as "life expectancy" are a poor indicator of the quality of health care one receives.
2) Although the US healthcare system has many problems, it covers many, many drugs, often used to treat serious illnesses such as CF and cancer that aren't covered by countries that have single payer systems.

So I take it you disagree?
This technology is not classified secret (hardly anything is), but God help you if you export it from the US without an ITAR and/or Department of Commerce license.