skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have also found that one of the motivations to program is to do things that have not been done before. Everything you create is an innovation, in one way or another.

Whereas if one is a doctor or lawyer, introducing innovations into the field is much, much harder.
From a user's point of view, if walled gardens help support app devs making more apps, and those apps are worth more than the $1.99 or however much they cost, this is a net gain.
Thanks. I estimated the value based on spectral class, which gives us an idea of composition based on how they reflect light. I combined this with current prices for materials mostly from the London Metal Exchange. Other costs such as getting to the asteroid and mining overhead are factored in.
Agreed, I was expecting something rather different than this pop back-and-forth. I would have known to ignore it if it had been correctly titled.
Looks nice, but it seems to eat all kb input on 10.8 except for up-down arrow keys :(

oh-my-zsh, retina MBP, 10.8.2
As a high school student with final math exams coming up soon, large gaps in my mathematical knowledge and a bunch of useless textbooks, I went for the "buy now" button just after reading the "I will teach you everything you need to know about equations, functions, vectors, limits, derivatives, integrals, forces, accelerations and optics" tagline.

Then I saw that there is no e-book option. It's 2013. Get with the times.
This is the reason why I am a programmer too! I'm flirting with devops lately and it's being so much fun.
I have the PDF version ready and will setup a shopping cart (ejunkie?) very soon (like tonight) because several people asked for this.

Reading math in print is really good: you can flip back and forth through the pages.

How much should the PDF cost? 29$ sounds a bit steep for a PDF no?
But your two cousins, who may have smartphones, could both have your grandmother as a shared friend — and thus, since they were both connected to you and were connected to your grandmother, Facebook assumed you might know your grandmother?
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/
I swear this exact same thing comes up over and over again every few months.

I don't have the time to write much about this right now, but long story short - the top comment here is correct. When his some of his real life friends used one of the Facebook smartphone apps it uploaded their contacts to Facebook. Then when he signed up, it recognized him as being in his friends' mobile contacts and suggested them to him.

There was a great article here last year from somebody last year who experimented with all of this with a few fake, isolated accounts. If anyone can find the link that would be great.

Basically he found out that the above was true. He also found out that since Facebook logs every search you make, people who had searched for his name before he ever signed up were recommended to him when he did.

Yes Facebook are denying this, but he had clear evidence that proved the contrary.
Problem one: A mouse still offers more granularity than your finger

Problem two: Starcraft is not the best "quick game for a fun little diversion". Maybe I've got the wrong idea here, but IMO RTS is the Monopoly of video games, and I don't play Monopoly on the bus.
http://www.energy.eu/
The Post-Productive Economy
If it's almost complete, then finish it. Load it on your tablet and start marketing yourself. Talk to local restaurants and ask then to try it out on 1 or 2 devices. Give it off for free and just collect feedback. It is a decent idea and has potential.
At least there you know why Linkedin thinks you may know them, and you don't know them so it doesn't really matter. What I care about is that it figured out my entire family tree without much to work with.
Shouldn't it be cheaper because it's an ebook? Free to distribute and higher profit margins.
@cameronh90 @veeti @Who828 I hear you guys.

I will have the PDF version ready by later tonight. How much should the PDF cost? Is a DRM-free PDF good enough or should I do the .epub format?

(in the meantime, check out the free preview: http://cnd.mcgill.ca/~ivan/miniref/miniref_v3_preview.pdf about one third of the book is there)
Schizophrenia: Thinking different
I meant that I hope you explain elsewhere in the book why these notions are related. Too often in physics people just accept how things work out without understanding why mathematically. For instance, the whole point of introducing limits is to make the "obvious/graphical" answer of "download speed" rigorous, but students rarely make that connection regardless of how many times the professor or textbook reiterates it (most likely because they don't read the textbook or go to class to begin with).

Do you in your book mention that calculating the exact download speed is impossible (and why this is the case)? Do you mention that the download speed one sees in their web browser is an approximation via a limit? These are the kind of important connections that get lost in the bullshit and the calculations.
If you make this promising book available in eBook format you are guaranteed at least a few sales from HN readers, and indeed very likely from many other readers who prefer digital books over paper books.

I would advise that you make the digital copy of the book available as soon as possible—I am an interested buyer as well.
You don't need to pay for a physical copy, so it would make more sense to charge so you get the same profit from each, or maybe a bit less.
I am programmer because I am naturally curious and because I love creative problem solving. What honestly pisses me off, is that these days programming is way more boring than what it used to be. The paradigm has shifted from low-level to high-level and as such we've lost steady, stable interfaces and systems and moved to very rapidly changing playground which promotes dirty lookups of stackoverflow and google for details and quick hacks over problems, rather than coming up with creative, well thought solutions and superior implementations to problems faced. I simply can't keep up. I love C because I can say I am very familiar with how it works, with what it interfaces and how set of libraries operate. And that has been for 10 years, and will probably remain so until the end of this decade - at least. But working with things like C in 2013 is about living in the past. The future is now. The future is more rapid changing systems, less truly understanding how things work, and more and more just looking up what's needed and then hacking it together.

I am afraid of change, because it requires me to move out from my comfort zone to something which does not interest me nearly as much as what originally got me into programming - understanding how a computer works and how to tinker with it. These days there's no place for actually understanding systems when it comes to modern programming tasks which mostly happen in the web space.

Makes me feel sad. What to do? Have others moved to something more modern from mere bit twiddling and actually found the new ways interesting?
I think the irony is that this prove Google doesn't know social but Facebook does.
LinkedIn once suggested someone with the same (very uncommon) name as my neighbour, but it wasn't actually my neighbour. I have never contacted my neighbour electronically. Either a weird coincidence or it somehow worked out I know someone with that name, somehow.
Reading about Convergence, it sounds like it hardly does away with the security model of HTTPS. Best I can tell, it's just HTTPS & multiple CAs, as compared to today's HTTPS & single CA.

Nothing wrong with that, but you speak of getting rid of CAs- it doesn't seem like Convergence does that.
That's a very good point. Doctors and Lawyers, to take your example, are obviously intelligent and by definition successful people. Yet their success is capped, there is a ceiling in these careers - a lawyer can never really change the world affecting literally millions of people. Sure he can work on an important case, and sometimes the law can change as a result of important cases (well not so much the law, but the interpretation of it) but he/she will never make a world-shattering breakthrough, a product used by hundreds of millions of people, in the way that a software engineer can.
Assuming you're interested in even compensating yourself for the time you're spending on this, I wouldn't go too low. Maybe base price of $19, and free when you order the physical book? That would still give you some wiggle room to do sales and give discounts to people who ask. Many people will happily pay that much, and if you were to go as low as, say, $9 (closer to 8 after transaction fees), that's really not that much, and you'll need to sell a lot to really make money and be able to keep doing this.
I nice and somewhat related paper is "Simple and Efficient Compilation of List Comprehension in Common Lisp" by Mario Latendresse:

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~latendre/publications/listCompF...
Outstanding. This is how I feel as well.
It seems things are so abstracted away these days, you just need to take it for "face value". I had found myself going to Google and Stackoverflow looking for answers while attempting to learn programming. It was somewhere along those lines where I was honest with myself and said there's no way I'm a programmer - I'm just using other peoples' code and reverse engineering it.

That was the point I decided that there was no sense pretending anymore and got into a different line of work.
I'm sure halo knows there are other browsers. Remarking that a website is unreadable in a widely-used browser is a legitimate comment that doesn't deserve snark.
Do you believe that is an incorrect notion? It most certainly is a cost. Even if certs were free, there is overhead. Not a lot of course (on modern hardware), but it is there.
If you're a doctor it's much harder because a lot of innovations in that field now require both at least a doctor and a programmer ; )
Process is a great tool - and if used properly -can keep teams more efficient and maybe even propagate some culture or history.

And then Rands touches on something important: every time there's a new policy addition in the office engineers groan. Why?

* Because a manager is going to try to "fix" something (and will probably make things worse). ("Yes, we know the bug tracker sucks, but (sarcasm) yes blame the _developers_ when the requirements change half eay through implementing the ticket")

* "If you listened to us in the first place... We wouldn't be overworked and making these mistakes you're compensating for"

* The "green lieutenant" problem. (see any war movie for this)

See enough of those and yeah you'll roll an eyewhensome manager bursts into the door with a great idea... Especially when asking "why?" too mny times certainly will get you branded as a trouble maker.
I have few suggestions on this matter,

1) If a book is interesting and its priced around 15$, I would purchase it no question asked.

2) I hope you can release a EPUB/Mobi version of the book in the future and make it available to people who bought the PDF.

3) This might be pushing it but if someone has purchased the ebook and wants to get the paperbound after certain period of time, it would be sweet if you can offer major discount on paperbound for those people (look at Oreilly for an example)

4) Similarly offer ebook version of the book with the paperbound copy, almost every publisher does it these days.
I was just discussing writing this same exact book for/with my wife. Se^(2^(x))^e does not interest her. The standard in my past has been mathematics books that use equations that do not/rarely occur in nature. The concepts are priceless, but the problems/solutions do not use common integers.

Breaking a problem down six times to actually start applying the principle I am learning is my largest downfall. It makes me lose interest in the subject at hand. I would rather understand and be able to reference the concepts.

Like many others, an ebook would be more delightful. Yet, I may buy the paperback this weekend.
Hi Ivan, glad to hear it. You can count on my purchase.

Regarding pricing, yeah, you probably want to go cheaper than your print version. Maybe $19 or $9, depending on how much profit you are expecting to make on the physical copies.

To be honest, you're probably best off a/b testing the price, as it can be very surprising how consumers will react to various price points. I've seen situations were significant price hikes result in much higher sales, presumably because of the implied value of the product.
I am not sure what you mean exactly.

By "going colo" they would need to layout all the upfront hardware costs. These would not be insignificant. They would then have all the operational overhead of maintaining all that gear.

You may have a higher monthly cost for AWS services - but without needing to buy any physical hardware, you have way less to worry about. Further - if you need to scale, it can be done in seconds rather than weeks/months given lead times for procurement, design time, implementation time (i.e. scheduling the install in the colo, coordinating the need for more space etc...)

This is just scratching the surface...
Los Angeles - Full time - technical

Ad Hoc Labs (makers of Burner for iOS - http://burnerapp.com) are seeking talented engineers (back-end, mobile, telephony) interested in our mission of building a privacy and identity layer for the phone. You must have strong fundamentals and production-scale experience. Fluency in Python a plus.

Significant equity participation and leadership responsibility are possible for the right candidates.

Contact greg [at] adhoclabs [dot] co.
Pricing based on cost (with fixed "this is a fair amount of profit") is a terrible pricing scheme.

patio11 talks about this a lot. Here's a podcast where he talked about it (more in the context of B2B software, but many principles still apply): http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-...

If you scroll through his comments, you'll see many instances of him telling people to charge more for things and explaining some of this stuff news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11
I really appreciate the thoughtful response and constructive criticism! I think that much of it is valid.

All of this actually fell out of a desire to better understand Clojure's `for`, which is a piece of code I would have run away from not too long ago. (Earlier versions of this post made significant mention of `for` and its implementation; that it was totally stricken from the final version was, I think, an unfortunate product of editing.)

I'll certainly think more on your second and third points.
Thanks! It took a while to write, but I was motivated by the positive feedback I'd gotten on HN previously about writing an introduction to DynASM.

Some feedback I got from Mike suggested very simple optimizations for the BF JIT that will let me catch (and exceed) the performance of bf2c. That might be the next article in the series.
I hate to be the one to say it, but I didn't feel very inspired by this post. I felt the author could have been a little more modest about his accomplishments. It almost read like a resume highlighting his biggest development accomplishments. I don't think I can blame him though because I was just as proud at that age. If you do programming long enough, and particularly as a freelancer or independent, you'll become quite humbled. There are moments of pride and accomplishment, but it can be very humbling with all the competition out there.
For reference have a look at the % price difference for other book sellers, like O'Reilly:
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596802363.do

I'd be selling it for $24 for Ebook (and make it available in PDF/Epub/Mobi to cover all readers), $29 for print, $32 for Print + Ebook.
Agreed.

The getElementById got me! Will jQuerify that ASAP.
Real Life UX: Pizza Wars Part 2
A nitpick: I don't know how you can say the 17th Amendment "usurped" states representation in the Senate. The states ratified the 17th Amendment, and willingly gave up their powers in that sense.
Cool thanks. Makes me think of my own video voice overs.. equally horrible..
Codular - Tutorials for New Web Developers
but there are many more people opposed to it then just the 2%. Take for instance me. I am no where near close to that 2% in income, and unless you want to give them official representation in proportion to their tax burden then I claim what your doing is tyrannical. I bet I could convince enough people to a. Care and b. Vote about it that we could overturn it.
While interesting, that is property of decimal notation rather than the integer number itself. In hexadecimal notation, 2013 is the first (since 2007 -> 0x7d7) with duplicate digits ;-)

1987 -> 0x7c3
1988 -> 0x7c4
1989 -> 0x7c5
...
2007 -> 0x7d7
2008 -> 0x7d8
2009 -> 0x7d9
2010 -> 0x7da
2011 -> 0x7db
2012 -> 0x7dc
2013 -> 0x7dd
An ebook being cheaper isn't a big deal for me, since my view is the price more to do with the content than the format. For other people it does seem to be more significant though. Maybe it should be the price of the physical book less the costs of printing/binding/etc. such that you get the same amount of money in the pocket at the end? (I don't know if that's how it works, having never published a book!)

PDF is good for PC viewing and will work on pretty much everything, though EPUB and Kindle formats will make things better on e-readers and phones/tablets since they support re-flowable content, but I guess would probably require more work on your part to support.
Yeah I'm holding out for an ebook as well. I'll check back again tomorrow.
I'm on the complete other end of the spectrum. No sideprojects. Doing anything other than working on the startup always made me feel guilty. Just my blog that I just rebuilt/designed in December: http://paulstamatiou.com Hoping to write more in 2013
"I don't remember it being very difficult to jailbreak"

http://www.autoomobile.com/news/iphone-5-ios-6-untethered-ja...

iPhone 5 & iOS 6 Untethered Jailbreak: Where Art Thou?
15 mins ago by Rick Berke

It has been a few months since the rollout of iOS 6. In that time we have yet to see a successful iOS 6 untethered jailbreak for the two main smartphones in waiting – the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5.

iPhone 5 & iOS 6 untethered jailbreak progress report

This has left iPhone 4S users on iOS 5 and iPhone 5 users left with no option but to remain locked down. So where is the iOS 6 untethered jailbreak? Let’s take a look at the progress so far.

Starting off in September, we saw the first evidence of an iOS 6 jailbreak from chpwn, who gave us a glimpse of an iPhone 5 jailbroken and running Cydia.

Then in October came news from @planetbeing of a tethered iOS 6 jailbreak under development, and the solution was usable but needed a developer account.

Then it November @planetbeing returned and said that he was even closer to a public release but “missing critical pieces.” At the time he showed IntelliscreenX running on an iPhone 5.

Then in December we were met with a number of hoaxes including a very convincing one from Dream JB. Lastly in the last days of the year, famed iOS hacker pod2g in an interview with iDownloadBlog said that he was, “very confident about the next 6 months” when it came to an iPhone 5 compatible iOS 6 untethered jailbreak.

And that’s where the music has stopped. If so, it may be deep into the summer before the iPhone 5 will be jailbroken. We sure hope this isn’t the case.
Circuit: new concept of structured asynchronous programming
Cool. I'll reach you at your email once I get it up. Thanks.
Yeah it's cached by Facebook. That's why if you want to change your meta and/or open graph tags info, you need to feed your page to Facebook's Url Linter (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/).
That's a very good point, and thanks for the link to liquidfeedback. It's very interesting, especially how it seems to do almost all of the logic needed in PostgreSQL.

> Proxy voting allows those with little skin in the
> game to drown out those significantly affected
> by proposed laws.

But that's exactly what you'd get today in a representative democracy. If there's a fringe issue that 1% of the population really cares about they'll have to convince their representatives to vote their way on it. Since the representatives go for the popular vote they'll probably vote with what the 99% wants 100% of the time.

You'll only get minority issues through if the minority cares enough about it and it doesn't negatively impact everyone else, or if the negative impact from not giving the minority what they want would be greater than just giving them what they want.

I think you'd be more likely to reach a consensus like that using proxy voting than you would be in a direct democracy. With proxy voting any fringe issue will by default go to some general issues political party of your choice, which is likely to have a reasonable position on miscellaneous issues like this.

With direct democracy where 1% really cares about some issue but the 99% doesn't care either way (so much that they can't be bothered to vote either way) you might never end up passing it because you have another 1.5% population of voters that just votes "no" on everything out of general principle.
I'm not faulting the BPF authors for not inventing DynASM, I'm just illustrating what DynASM buys you over the more traditional approach.

Without a preprocessor you'll always be dealing in encoded instructions instead of symbolic ones. It's manual work that is surely nicer to avoid if you can. I'm surprised that you're put off by the preprocessor aspect of it, given the benefits of this approach.
For me programming started as a means to an end. I am entrepreneurial and I realized the www was a frictionless distribution method for many great products and services. I was naturally curious about how things work so it was easy to learn the skills. Now a days I get joy from solving and automating but I try to remember that I was an entrepreneur first and in the big picture hacking is still a means to an end.
Pretty neat, I've long wanted a Lisp that used indentation rather than unreadable parentheses, but didn't get far in trying to set it up. Good work! Next step is to make it transcompile down to a standard Lisp so it can make use of all the other existing libraries made for Lisp.
Why is this even news? Facebook has been crawling links for ages every time you post on the site. The crawler is how the link you paste gets a title, description, and sometimes a thumbnail.
Android lacks things like X11

...or does it??

http://my20percent.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/android-x-server...
> This is something the EFF used to be good at, but now is quite bad at, and despite the fact that EFF mostly supports causes I agree with, I urge you to direct your donations to ACLU or other civil liberties charities instead.

I'm not sure if that line of logic actually follows, but a rather important distinction is that many causes the EFF supports (that are publicized) have an impact globally, while the ACLU, well the 'A' in the name already says it, no?

Now I still prefer to support my own local digital civil liberties groups (such as Bits of Freedom, that do great work on explaining tough computer/security/privacy subject to ancient politicians), but if we're going to be urging people to support this and not that, better give to the EFF because what they do is actually useful for more people.
I'm glad you appreciate it.

I thought about deleting the posts. I'd really rather practice not worrying about what people think about it. It's a part of me and if others can't accept it, that's okay.
I can't wait to rewire Google Glasses and run the entire thing off of a local server.