skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a picture from the examples:

http://minireference.com/miniref/lib/tpl/miniref/landings/im...

I'm not a big fan of that picture. We're trying to
compute f'(400), judging by the text (scroll down a bit on the first
page). What the image suggests, afaict, is that f'(400) that can be
computed as the limit [f(x+h) - f(x-h)]/2h with x=400 and h -> 0 (in
the picture, we see the case h=80). At least the graphic appears to
connect the two somehow.

Nothing to that effect is mentioned in the text... just the cookbook
recipe 'at^n becomes ant^{n-1}'. So why is there even a triangle here?
Two things are fishy here. The limit and the triangle.

The limit: Taking the aforementioned limit for the derivative is
rather weird. If the function is differentiable, you'll get the right
result, namely f'(x). If you consider the limit for the function x ->
|x| at x=0 e.g., you'll get a limit as well, even though that function
is not differentiable.

The triangle: I would expect it to connect the three points
[x-h,f(x-h)], [x+h,f(x-h)], [x+h,f(x+h)]. Instead, we get three points
whose X-coordinates match the ones I mentioned with Y-coordinates that
are chosen to have the slope of the triangle match the slope of the
function. Why? (If this were about the mean-value theorem... but it's not!)

So what I'm left with is a plot with a triangle, no text that explains
any of that, and nothing I can make of it myself.
Actionable Intelligence: The Mouse That Squeaked « Dan Kaminsky's Blog
Don't say that, Monopoly is a terrible game :(.

But I get your point.
An app that lets you quickly validate your ideas
How does BrowserID work in the use case of a native mobile app?
SEEKING WORK - Brisbane, Australia or Remote.

I'm a full-stack javascript developer and web designer with many years experience.

http://lemoncreative.net

Strongest Areas:

* Design projects

* Front-end development in HTML, CSS & JS. I'm also well versed in AngularJS, jQuery, etc.

* Back-end development in node.js or PHP.
I'd just like to say that if the physical book included the PDF (for no extra cost) I'd be all over this!
Does Google Glass comprise of only a micro display? I assumed the technology was a little bit more sophisticated than that.
This reminds me of a recent experience I had with the Bing bot.

This most recent YC round, my co-founder and I used Skydrive to edit our application. Skydrive integrates pretty nicely with Word, even on a Mac, to allow for collaborative editing. It's like the best parts of Sharepoint, minus all the crap, and inside of a modern UI. I'm a diehard Apple user, but I also subscribe to the "right tool for the job" principle ... in this case it worked pretty well.

Anyway, inside the document were links to some private areas of our website that contained demo materials for YC. As requested, they were not password protected, but also not linked from anywhere else. While submitting I ensured that our nginx logs would capture visits to these URL's in a separate log, so we'd know when it was being looked at (sidenote, seeing visitors coming from inside justin.tv + the rincon hill towers is kind of exhilarating).

What surprised me was that almost immediately after we began working on the document, the Bing bot was going apeshit exploring the domain and the 'private' URL's. I had to quickly add a robots.txt to deny all on the root. I thought it was pretty interesting. At first I felt almost violated. But then it seems logical that they'd be indexing every URL in every document stored in their datacenter, why not?
Among other things, it has to do with the practical allowances for different communities of opinion, or factions within the polity. The smaller the group, the less opportunity there is for distinct subgroups to form, especially ones in opposition to others. There's also a more uniform experience of the polity that tends to shape opinion. The overall effect is that there's less variety of opinion, which makes direct democracy a closer approximation of the polity's feeling on something.
> Is a DRM-free PDF good enough or should I do the .epub format?

Definitely epub, makes it just much easier to read, at least on my used platforms (kindle, ipad mini)
If spot prices spike and spot instances are shut down, on-demand replacement instances are launched. Spot instances will be relaunched when the price goes back down.

I heard this at AWS re:invent, and thought I must have misunderstood. I'm still confused as to how this can possibly be a good strategy.

The pool of EC2 on-demand instances has a finite size -- it isn't magical -- and does hit its capacity limit from time to time. When there's high demand for EC2 instances -- say, when there's an outage in another AZ -- you're likely to see both spot prices going up and a lack of capacity in the on-demand pool. As a result, this strategy seems designed to only ask for on-demand instances at the times when they're least likely to be available.
Houston, we have another problem - Space is bad for the brain
It is entirely possible to move higher up to very HLL's and still have a very deep understanding of how things work.

I have been using Haskell, a very high-level language for about 4 years now, and there is so much deep stuff to learn. Not superficial "playground is changing" stuff, but deep, nature of computing and logic stuff.

The Haskell eco-system is very open, and the optimizers and compilers have excellent utilities to look under the hood. This all makes it very possible to actually understand what's going on.

It is definitely harder than it used to be, because we're using more sophisticated tools to solve larger problems.
How often is it important to treat code as data (in general) and would you say it makes things less complex than a C-like language?
Wow thanks! I actually didn't know any of those languages!
But then how does it handle running an x86 game on an ARM device?
Quite right; I've heard that same warning before, and nowadays if I feel the urge to check my pockets, I check all of them in no particular order.

I've traveled extensively and never had my pocket picked -- a little planning goes a long way.

I don't flash valuables or any large amount of cash, I keep money separated into "using in the next few hours" in an accessible-but-somewhat-safe location (like deep in a front jeans pocket) vs. "needs to last until we find another ATM" someplace that's hard to access even for me, but I can still keep an eye on (e.g., not a backpack on my back: I imagine someone just slipping a blade down the side of a backpack, then just watching to see what falls out...).

Related: choose traveling companions who keep their wits about them, and who will keep an eye out for you (as you watch out for them).

It also probably helps that I'm tall and athletic -- I suspect many pickpockets would generally avoid people who might successfully chase them down after a bungled attempt.
There should be a healthy life/work balance. Doing nothing but work is unhealthy. Side-projects offer a nice break from the norm and the ability to be creative and learn new things. Usually my side-projects wind up helping me in my normal work later on. But, you don't have to do side-projects. Just make sure to not burn yourself out with work. Do you feel guilty eating, sleeping, exercising, travelling, meeting with friends? Hopefully not.
That's a very impressive list. One thing great about programming is the path from idea to product is fairly smooth if you can do it all by yourself. Great list.

Mine is much shorter. Didn't have time to do more.

- Jsoda, https://github.com/williamw520/jsoda, API unifying SimpleDB and DynamoDB.

- BoxupText, https://boxuptext.com/, pure browser side encryption.

- Daily Badge, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mhillsyste..., app for tracking daily goal.
Why not offer all three?
Interestingly enough, it doesn't appear to be showing up in everyone's Google Calendar ... which would explain why Google seems to be utterly quiet on this issue. sigh
Right, Google makes you opt-in to G+ to read the content -- at least if you have a Google account that you're signed into.

All I want to do is read public content. I shouldn't have to agree to anything to do that.
MixRank - San Francisco, CA (full-time, intern)

Seeking: Engineers, Designer

Big data, web crawling, data visualization, machine learning. Happy to chat with anyone— send me an email: scott@mixrank.com.

We're also hosting a friendly, casual programming competition tomorrow, Wednesday the 2nd, in San Francisco (SoMA) at 7pm. Email me if you'd like to drop by.
#failmeaningfully
Oh, don't misunderstand me. Vim is complex alright, and like I say, it has a pretty steep learning curve, but it has just the right amount of complexity for it's purpose (in this case, quite a lot). Hence, an example of good design in my book.
This has been happening a fair amount recently, and it's really annoying. Another example — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4933472 — was when the HN editor changed the submitted title from "Why I Won't Relocate to Work for Your Startup" to "Why I Love Being A Programmer in Louisville" ... the title of the blog post was, in full, "Why I Love Being A Programmer in Louisville (or, Why I Won't Relocate to Work for Your Startup)", but the part that was relevant to the HN community was the part about not wanting to relocate (not anything in particular about Louisville).

I don't know why people at HN (pg? someone else?) are applying such a heavy hand to the title editing, but it's getting tiring. Perhaps there are good counter-examples, where they've made links more on-point by changing them (I'd be interested to see them if anyone has them), but the posts that stand out in my mind have been made both less relevant and less interesting thanks to editing by someone at HN.
Holy crap: google+ doesn't let you scroll up/down with up/down keys?!?! Wow this is abhorrent
On the substance of the submitted article, I find it interesting that Taiwan outranks (a little) the United States as a place to be born in 2013 by the methodology used here by the editors of The Economist. The listing is broadly plausible, but of course in most countries it is better to be born as a well-off person in a stable family than as a member of that country's underclass in an unstable family.

The lottery of HN submissions: when to submit to be noticed? That question is raised by the two previous submissions of this interesting article.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819542

(40 days ago, 4 points, no comments)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4863788

(29 days ago, NOT canonical URL, 6 points, one comment)
"What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Here are mine. All of them are open source:

- Punch - http://github.com/laktek/punch (my most popular open source project)

- Punch Blog Boilerplate - https://github.com/laktek/punch-blog

- Extract Values (JS) - https://github.com/laktek/extract-values

- Distraction Free Writing for Vim - https://github.com/laktek/distraction-free-writing-vim

- Go wrapper for Stack Exchange API - https://github.com/laktek/Stack-on-Go

More than that, I enjoyed blogging a lot in last year - http://laktek.com/2012

8 out of those 24 posts, got featured in HN homepage. Those discussion threads helped me to learn more and raise my bar. Also, I made lot of new friends thanks to HN.

Thanks for all the inspiration HN. Looking forward for a great 2013!
Very interesting, thanks! I've spent a bit of time working on a library to accomplish this, and Boto has been extremely helpful.

The watchdog isn't very sophisticated -- it just checks to make sure that the correct number of instances are running in each auto-scale group.

How did you decide on the right number of instances? The article mentions 20%--is that based on latency, a cost-saving target, or something else?
Come to terms with being “only” an engineer
design is intellectual property and thus it's not ok to use it (or better "pirate" it) without permission.
2013 is the year to pay it forward
Personally looking forward to the ebook coming out! I was actually just this morning going through and signing up to a bunch of mathematics related Coursera courses. For those interested, quite a few are starting soon:

[Jan 7th]
Calculus: Single Variable - https://www.coursera.org/course/calcsing

[Jan 7th] Calculus One - https://www.coursera.org/course/calc1

[Jan 28th]
Algebra - https://www.coursera.org/course/algebra

[Jan 28th] Pre-Calculus - https://www.coursera.org/course/precalculus
Excellent response, thank you!
On one hand this could be a great alternative distribution channel, on the other hand developers get nothing and another risk is Apple can shut their accounts down at any time.
Consequently, people pirate less.

That’s speculation, sure, but I haven’t heard anyone offer anything better.
As long as the computer microphone can hear the guitar, you don't any hardware.

That said, if you want to plug your guitar into the computer microphone jack, you can. You just need the right adapter to go from the wide guitar cable to the thinner headphone jack.
Ask HN: Anyone using standup workstations?
Is anyone using a standup workstation? What has your experience been thus far? I am considering getting one.
+1. not sure how a post like this can make it to the front page.
Nice job Blake; DreamIt 2008 :-)
Excellent. I recently got my 9yo daughter started on those simple electronics kits with various components mounted on a cardboard frame and springs for terminals to interconnect them in various ways. But that's rekindled my _own_ interest in electronics (which I haven't really indulged in >15 years) and I've been considering Arduino or some stuff from Parallax based on the DEF CON badge from last summer.
I teach college biology, and I've never seen a textbook in my discipline that wasn't written in a soporific and meandering style. Some are worse than others, but I've never seen a textbook I thought was good.

If I needed to fill a gap in my knowledge or learn a new subject I would never resort to a textbook until I had exhausted every other available option.
This is pretty interesting stuff. Out of curiosity, have you thought of an interactive book? It brings higher level concepts alive.
I just tried the Beethoven intro lesson for guitar -- first off, these are awesome for me as an almost-n00b guitar player!

Two suggestions:

- When you're holding really long notes the interval to see the next note is really small [the tab moves forward only once the long note ends so you don't have as much time to transition your fingers because you don't know/remember the next note; while in practice these should be the easiest transitions]

- Indicate the note lengths as well in terms of fourth or eighth notes, for those of us who like to count along.
I can definitely confirm the existence of visual/kinesthetic learners (in the limited realm of dancing). I've worked as a dance coach, and there's a distinct grouping into people who need to see steps demonstrated, and people who need to be guided through steps.

I can also confirm that people communicate in a way that describes the world in visual/auditory/kinesthetic terms, and people often have a preferred mode of communication. As a result, it is often helpful to choose a similar mode of communication. (My personal speculation: Not because that's their learning style, but because it is a more familiar kind of speech. What you say becomes more relatable)

But I certainly do agree with you that the "learning style" model is oversimplified, and can't be applied as such in many settings. (How on earth do you teach computer science in a kinesthetic way? ;)
Are you also planning on doing an ebook + physical book combo as well ?
Old school :)
>Netflix ratings in my experience are pretty decent indicators of the quality of most movies, so for some crowdsourcing the value of media may work. (You need a good algorithm and a large enough data set of rated movies.) Others may choose to go more with suggestions from readers whose taste they trust.

This model works pretty well for things like feature-length films and season-long television series because there is a certain lack of accessibility built into the platform. Very few complete amateurs will make a feature-length movie or season-long TV program. If someone completely unskilled in the art attempts either of these things, people will be able to tell extremely quickly that the content is of very low quality.

Contrast this to ebooks or (even worse) poetry. A novella- or novel-length ebook is much easier for someone with no ability to complete. Even worse, if they have a basic grasp of written English, it takes much longer to work out that the content is really low quality. Novels take longer to get going, and there's more leeway to assume an author may be intentionally doing something that seems odd for a specific effect later on. Poetry is perhaps the best example of this kind of problem - it's pretty easy for lots of people to dash off some word salad that can pass (at first glance) for modernist poetry. You have to actually give it your attention to see if anything of any sense is going on.

The upshot is that crowd-sourced curation works great for forms of media that are hard to produce and popular, because the ratio of consumers/judges to producers/content is favorable.

It works pretty badly for forms of media that are easy to produce and less popular, because at some point you end up with more content than consumers willing to try it, especially seeing as the average quality is so low.
I read the first 10 pages of the pdf. I'm not sure who you think your target audience is, but this book doesn't seem to serve any of them.

You gloss over huge sections of algebra, and in doing so, ignore incredibly common mistakes that students make. Take a look at the top of page 9, 6 \sqrt{x} - 7 = [...]. You solve that out, but give no reason as to why you got rid of the 7 first, the 6 second, and the radical third. This is not an easy concept, nor is it an academic distinction.

Math might be easy for you, but it probably isn't for your target audience. You're assuming entirely too much about what your readers will know.

Beyond that, some of your math (and math history) has flaws.

"So this is what number meant during the whole middle ages. The notion of 2.5 goats didn’t make any sense to the people of those days. They would have been totally confused by the menu at Rotisserie Romados which offers 1/4 of a chicken."

This is entirely untrue. Even most illiterate peasants knew the basics of fractional parts in the middle ages. 2.5 goats didn't make sense, but 2.5 stone of barley did. The church prohibited usury, but lending still happened, so they had some knowledge of percentages as well. Despite the fall of Rome and the horrible loss of knowledge that followed, math wasn't completely lost. In 725, monks knew enough mathematics to predict the date of Easter (based on the lunar cycle, mind you) years in advance. And math flourished in medieval Islam.

Heck, if my memory serves, fractions were invented in Ancient Sumer, ~4000 years earlier.

"We can move a function f to the left by h units by subtracting h from x and using that as the input argument:
g(x) = f(x − h)."

This actually translates the function to the right. This is also where I stopped reading.

I really want this to be good. I love finding wonderful new resources for teaching mathematics. I'm sure you put a serious effort into the text. But I fear your no bullshit guide is just going to scare the shit out of its readers.
There was a period where Hacker News consisted primarily of people on the right-hand side of the spectrum. People who were working inside of startups or had lots of experience with the web and our industry. Pretty much everyone knew what sharding was, and MongoDB wan't very popular.

These days we've got a lot more people and they show up all across the board.

Clearly if this is on the homepage, it was voted there by your peers. This kind of knowledge is completely obvious to many of us, but not everyone is on your level. Cut 'em some slack.
The concept map is fantastic!
I need an iOS developer.
Why Heroku's Culture Did Not Change After Sale to Salesforce
For what it is it seems pretty reasonably priced as it is. I wouldn't drop the price too much.

Also you mention formats in another comment. It'd be nice to have a choice. ePub is easier to read on some devices, but then PDF is easier to mark up (I'm thinking Goodreader) later on, which is nice for this sort of thing. Anyway, once you have an ebook version that's another sale from me :)
If you are willing to help lots of nontechnical people jailbreak their phones you better have a lot of time for the thousands of support questions they flood you with.
I disagree. Looking at the title, & reading over the preview of the book, I think that the concise, anti-politically correct tone the author uses is one of his best selling points. After all the book is titled "no bullshit". And there's already plenty of texts that use ostensibly comforting words to artists.
yerdle (http://www.yerdle.com) in San Francisco is a seed-stage, mission-driven sharing economy startup looking for designers and full-stack developers.

We believe we can eliminate 10-20% of retail by helping people share what they already have with friends and family instead of buying new.

On Black Friday we launched a web app at http://yerdle.com, and an iOS app (http://yerdle.com/mobile). Right now our stack is Rails + backbone.js + mongodb.

We have an amazing team with backgrounds from Saatchi & Saatchi S, Walmart, Zipcar, Sierra Club, Facebook, 350.org... and we have money in the bank.

More details: http://www.yerdle.com/jobs

Local candidates only, please.

Questions? I'm Carl Tashian, co-founder and vp of engineering, and you can reach me at my first name at yerdle.com.
Eh, I'm pretty sure you should still feel violated. The fact that they are parsing your private documents for information that they can use to help another business unit is really sketchy. It would make me wonder what else they are scanning my data for.

Personally, I'll never use an MS cloud service because of this anecdote - not that it was that likely to begin with.
I don't mean to be negative, but I've never been impressed with people who have dozens of side projects. Instead of writing 10 crappy side projects, who not make 1 great side project?

My side project, at the time is called Giotto: https://github.com/priestc/giotto. It's a python web framework. I started it in April, and still commit to it almost every day.
You make a great point. Though what you yearn for still still exists (and will continue to). Maybe its just that you are so wrapped around the internet/startup craze where no system is made to outlive the calendar year. You should look into (industrial (embedded)(robotics)) applications. Very tough problems, and very little brogrammers/rockstars.
There is more money in those markets too. I know people who clear half a million working with embedded applications like the mini2440 board. Problem with this market is that it is not publicized like the web 3.0 startups. Its a bit hard to break into it due to the fact that it is one of the best kept secrets out there. Want to break in? Buy some embedded boards (like the mini 2440), install Linux ? android : tiny, interface it with some hardware (like control the lights in your house (which is simple)), and blog about it. But don't blog/tweet/like about it. just create a nice simple blog. Then send links to the blog to the people whithin the industry (or just do a Show HN post).
Do hangout in forums having to do with embedded applications/robotics.
(The digits of pi are definitely not randomly distributed, since they can be generated by a deterministic algorithm; and a randomly distributed infinite digit sequence need not have that specific probability of finding a d-length sequence in the first N digits, unless the random distribution is specifically uniform. Someone is correct that the relevant term here is 'normal'.)