skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was just checking out the realtime traffic to my sites, it was significant for a bit, then it dropped off and the OP's post dropped from the front page.
Something really odd is going on at Google.

In this post they say:

"In our last test, IE mobile still did not offer a good maps experience with no ability to pan or zoom and perform basic map functionality. As a result, we chose to continue to redirect IE mobile users to Google.com where they could at least make local searches. The Firefox mobile browser did offer a somewhat better user experience and that’s why there is no redirect for those users.

Recent improvements to IE mobile and Google Maps now deliver a better experience and we are currently working to remove the redirect."

When did they last test it? In any case, why did they say this the day before:

"The mobile web version of Google Maps is optimized for WebKit browsers such as Chrome and Safari. However, since Internet Explorer is not a WebKit browser, Windows Phone devices are not able to access Google Maps for the mobile web."

Those aren't the same reason at all. And it's not like Google is a company that should be confused about how browsers and browser engines work.

And of course here is video showing mobile IE working just fine on mobile Google Maps (pinch to zoom, panning, etc...):

http://wmpoweruser.com/video-proves-that-the-google-maps-mob...

This coupled with the ending of GMail EAS support, not allowing YouTube APIs, and their explicit statement they are not going to support WP8, makes me think they have a clear mission to attack Windows Phone, but may have stepped a bit too far too quickly on this one. But I think they'll find a way to exclude support in the future if they can find a way.
I work at Google, but don't speak for them whatsoever etc. etc. Anyway, I'm a recent grad, with many recent grad friends working here. I do not think they are dismissive of college students at all, and I highly encourage college students and recent grads to apply.
This looks very neat! On my list!
Well, yes, we would have to convince ourselves of the validity of the code that checks the proofs. But the thing is once we made one proof checker whose code we were really confident about, the checking would be over because we could use it for any proof. Whereas with human verification of proofs each new proof is a new checking job.
Why not work for a year somewhere and then decide if you want to get a full degree? If you decide not to go back, then after a few years of work experience, I think few companies will care that you didn't get a 4-year degree.
In the beginning, Microsoft was not all that visible outside the hobby market. In the early days, Intel had a negative opinion of them, and was pretty skeptical about their C compiler, for example.

It seems to be fair to say that they were not that visible for quite a period.

And for a long time, they, particularly Bill Gates, was severely underestimated. That was the parlor game of the day for journalists--underestimating Bill Gates.
I found the writing style to be incredibly obnoxious and hand wavy, and really make me stop reading.
cryogenics section, for potential resuscitation of
mathematical campaigns using future technology

automated provers like coq and isabelle, I think (I also think I'm not a crackpot but ...

http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.7012

http://mathlesstraveled.com/2012/11/11/a-computer-checked-pr...

Probably the haskell/agda camp'll want to defend their honor also
Machine checked proofs are intractably long and are not fully automatic except for very simple problems.
That is the terrifying part. I guess ignorance is bliss, but not as blissful as knowing I'm not going to be secretly tormented for years unwittingly.
I'm a paying customer. It's not that much money. The seamless/instant sync is why I pay. He could use a few more features, which I did email him about them.

The one lesson I think people should get out of this again is that it's really hard to get consumers to pay for a nice to have, here as if you solve a real business problem, companies will pay a lot more.
Http://muscula.com log javascript errors in production :-)
That's interesting. I guess 'obnoxious' is pretty subjective, but which part did you find 'hand-wavy'? The parts I've read have been quite rigorous.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_t...
Admittedly, I stopped before then when I saw the poor mathematics rendering. For some reason unbeknownst to me, the equations appear cramped and difficult to read.
This and your comment above ("Some argued that elder Tolkien would not have published his notes and thoughts in that form") are a fair point, though Tolkien really did want to publish The Silmarillion for decades, he was just unable to find the time to finish it. I actually have some family members who feel the same way as you, and they've chosen to not read The Silmarillion at all because they prefer the off-handed hints and references to earlier times that pop in LotR to remain like that, rather than knowing the full stories. Personally, I've always loved JRR Tolkien's notion that these were legends, so conflicting drafts and different versions of tales were part and partial of that history, just as most mythological characters have sometimes conflicting and inconsistent stories told about them.

While it does sometimes seem slightly strange that Christopher Tolkien spent basically his entire adult life helping with and then documenting his father's work, it's really not that different from what most people choose as their life's work.

And while it might reduce some of the artistic aura around his works, I love seeing his thought process and how he evolved his world and characters. I really don't see much difference between reading the assembled published drafts and visiting Oxford and getting special permission to view the drafts, short of the fact that they've now been curated by the person most likely to be able to put them in close to the order they were actually written in. If it helps, think of them as an academic work, purely for the Tolkien scholars that came later, and not intended to be read cover to cover by most people. It's only an accident that there was enough commercial interest in Lord of the Rings to put these books in regular bookstores.

Brian Herbert sinned unforgivably when he claimed that his books were based on his father's notes and unfinished drafts, so were basically the stories he was going to tell, while constructing the plots around characters that had only appeared in Brian's other made up Dune stories. He and his cowriter should also just not be allowed to write. They have a terrible, terrible way with words.
The giants were in the book. Everything else was in the books and writings around the Hobbit (apart from the rabbits of course). I'd heard that the Radagast scene was terrible but I didn't think it was that bad in the end - they portrayed him pretty well as one of the wizards that had lost interest in the peoples of Middle Earth in favour of animals.
I prefer the ending in the film, that the go back to the shire as ordinary folk. That when Sam proposes to his sweetheart he does it not as a conquering hero, but as a humble, nervous young man. "It was the bravest thing he ever did". Perfect.
I wouldn't call it loaded, because the same companies trying to screw over Tolkein Junior want these unlimited copyrights to stifle culture and innovation and hold a vicegrip on information. They are just hypocrites, but that is nothing new, they have been for decades.

If the big businesses get to fuck over every new idea under the sun that borrows from creative works of the last century without a license, the descendent's of the creators of those works that still, by the hands of the same enterprise, inherit the licenses deserve their compensation. It is the house of cards built by Hollywood and they want to live in it.
To borrow a phrase from comedian Chris Addison, "[t]his isn't the pot calling the kettle black; this is the kettle calling another kettle a kettle."
I hate to be so critical, but this article sucks. If I realized it was a forbes blogger site I would have skipped it; those seem to be consistently low quality.

>each one of these functions could be a robust company itself.

>3.) The Future

Seriously? I literally groaned when I saw that 1/3 of the article was devoted to something as vague and silly as 'the future' - what most companies would simply call R&D or innovation. And how exactly would that be a robust company? Self-driving cars show promise but wouldn't make a robust company until there is a product and market. Singularity is an interesting philosophical concept but I'm unclear how it will make google money (if it will even happen in the next few generations).

The other two categories, user services and advertising, are obvious to anyone who knows anything about google. And really, these two are pretty intertwined at google: user services provide an advertising medium and advertising pays for user services. It's always been this way, and probably will be for many years.
this is gold. thanks!
I am a bit angry. Sent a message to the mods about this. No reply yet!
I don't think it's implied that complex analysis is required for reading these notes. The author writes that he expects students will take a course on complex analysis "at some point" but as far as I can tell he doesn't do anything requiring complex analysis in these notes (e.g. every search for "complex" turns up something unrelated to complex analysis, and the word "contour" (as in contour integral) doesn't appear in the notes at all).
You forgot the fast-paced escape from the goblin caverns.
Ok, thanks for the explanation. I wonder if "Ask" posts fall off the front page faster than link posts.
You may not realize you've just made an argument from anecdote, but you have, and that represents a well-known logical fallacy. Moreover, this fallacy is famously favored by those who don't mind being deceptive when they find that facts, broadly speaking, are not on their side.

More on the error here, where it is referred to as "The demagogue's best friend." http://www.jampole.com/wordpress/?p=329

Again, I'm not suggesting that you are a dishonest person, or that you are deliberately obscuring the issue. I am simply noting that your approach (which is a rhetorical failure) carries the additional fault of salubrious associations.
It would be wonderful to have the privilege and dedication to learn all of this.

Do you think it would be possible to construct a high level treatment that would impart a rough idea of to the layman? One that omitted all the business about finding solutions and stuck to merely tracing the structures?

I have seen that lower-level concepts like the fundamental theorem of calculus and the Fourier transform can be easily explained in a matter of minutes with the help of diagrams. It is my hunch, but I lack proof, that the same could be done for all of mathematics. Of course I have been told a few times that it would be impossible.
What do you mean by not fully automatic? What is the manual part?

I think right now the job of describing a (sophisticated) proof to a computer is analogous to the job of writing a sophisticated computer program like a game or Facebook in assembly code. What mathematics needs is a concise language that can easily be understood by people and computers alike, like Python.
I would improve it by defining the relationships between money/happiness and energy/entropy before giving the example. I would have found it a lot easier to read.
I've been on reddit long enough to know that in order to see what I consider interesting, requires a balance of what others (e.g. subreddits) consider interesting. However I have varying levels of interest in them, and some are small and cannot compete...
He really doesn't like the movies Peter Jackson made?
Shit. Other authors weren't so lucky with their movies...
The LOTR series is a real success.
That's interesting and surprising, thank you. I'm going to need to consider this further.
I'll take your word for it. In that case, the notes can't very well be said to take you to the graduate level. There's no point in skating over arguably the most beautiful and interconnected area of mathematics (by which I mean complex analysis) in an effort to get to some nominal level of mathematical advancedness.
Why not having a MathHub (like Github) for math, i believe even the toughest problem will have the pull request, and many people could understand the proof.
Just shoot the laser at it!
This. A thousand times, this. Every time I read a post about someone who can't get a date on OKCupid I roll my eyes. Then again, I live in New York so the high population density makes it a usable site. Sure, men outnumber women and women get more messages than men — but that's how the real world works as well. I've approached far more women in bars than have approached me. I imagine this is true for everybody except for rock stars, celebrities, gorgeous people, (and introverts whose only experience would be the few times they are approached).

The only thing that online dating gets you is an opportunity to introduce yourself and, if it's a good service, to introduce yourself to someone who is likelier to be what you are looking for. It's not a magic get-a-date thing, just joining up doesn't guarantee a date, just like going out to a bar doesn't guarantee that you're going to walk out of it with a girl or a phone number.

Attractive people get more messages? Yes, of course.

The only girls on dating sites have baggage? No more than any other single girls (or guys) of their age. At least that's been my experience for the last year or so that I've been single again and dating.
Ok, what about it?
Yes! I'm writing a book about this exact idea here: https://leanpub.com/lean

The first version of the Lean Publishing manifesto, which addresses this exact point, is here:
https://leanpub.com/manifesto

Disclosure: I'm the cofounder of Leanpub, and our entire startup is a bet on this being true.
Wow. Alexis Madrigal is a massively negative person. I refuse to read anything with such tone.
>Then like a tidal wave of self-hatred, I saw my recent life in the third person, and was horrified.

wow, this seems like a good heuristics, never thought of that.
Facebook bought a $0/year revenue business (Instagram) for $1B. :-)
I think that the book "Q.E.D" by Richard Feynman does about as good a job as is possible at explaining quantum electrodynamics to the layman (I first read it when I was 17, and found it very understandable, with the possible exception of the final chapter).

As to whether you could do this for all mathematics - I'm not sure. It's quite easy to 'visualise' the FTC or the fourier transform, and they have immediate applications to things that non-mathematicians care about. I'm not quite sure how one would go about explaining e.g. representation theory of lie algebras, since all of the motivating examples would only be of interest to mathematicians.

It's a bit like the wall I hit when I tried to study category theory. It's perfectly possible for someone with very little math background to learn the basics, but until you've seen a lot of mathematics you won't understand what the point of it all is.
Surprisingly, one of the most interesting things on that page is the comment by Thomas John Mosbo explaining a subtle but profound difference between the way the One Ring is destroyed in the book and the way it is destroyed in the movie.
To call Jackson's work an "evisceration" is just so misguided I can barely stand to read on. J.R.R. Tolkien was an academic of the highest caliber, and it seems his son has retained his love of the more arcane and in-depth aspects of the Middle Earth world. I, personally, agree with them: I find the Silmarillion to be the most interesting work of Middle Earth, but that's only because I'm a massive geek.

As far as a pop-culture and on-screen rendition of the books go, Jackson's work has been superbly loyal to the source literature and to the audience who pays to see them.

This is just straight-out snobbery, and I don't care for it.
How and why your personal information is usually not protected
I think you can just override the default clean_username() in RegistrationForm:

https://bitbucket.org/ubernostrum/django-registration/src/27...

Looks like that's the only place that enforces duplicate usernames.
The problem is that all user interface paradigms that work with touch are fundamentally incompatible with a keyboard and vice versa.

Can you operate IOS from a keyboard entirely? No.

Can you operate windows from a keyboard entirely? Yes.

Can you operate windows 8 from a keyboard entirely? No.

The paradigms are so disparate it's unreal and they will never work together without massive compromise.

The MacBook touchpad is only so large because its impossible to use the keyboard to drive OSX. Its a crutch. However it easier to position with a pointing device than a finger on its own as you can scale movements.

Metro is shit - in typing this on a lumia. Its horrible but my other half is on Facebook on my Lenovo t61 (she uses only the keyboard and clitmouse which is incredibly accurate with some practice). Nokia 6303 is in the post.
The problem is, if you're setting up such a system; why should you limit yourself to a 10% cut? In the short term, if you're setting up a company that is building revenue generating sites, you can probably capture more than that in revenue if you're paying people to do the work. The accounting gets a bit fuzzy because we're talking about two classes of entities here (one in which labor expenses come out of net revenue, and the other in which they come out of gross revenue). Another trade-off is liability, who pays out if one of these projects gets sued; are they individually severable from the parent entity? If not, then setting up the system is unappealing compared to a traditional employment relationship. And if they are that raises the cost-complexity of the setup since you need to manage the transaction costs of setting up new entities as well as the ongoing overhead of managing the accounting for each of the formed entities.

Basically what you're talking about is a setup that would allow web workers to earn residual income for their efforts as opposed to the present system where the route to residuals goes through ownership of the company. Effectively, operations management as a service.

I have thought about this quite a bit. And would like to discuss this further, on the level of sharing models and projections.
He could have kicked ass scourging the shire AND get nervous proposing to his sweetheart. That's even endearing.
I could see criticizing the price, but the reason you guys are criticizing it for are ridiculous. If you buy a company for 125k and make 125k/year in revenue you dont break even, unless your expenses are insane or if you think the business can't last more than a year.

The person who would most likely buy this app is maybe a company that thinks they could bring the revenues up, integrate this into something theyre working on, and add value. Is it worth 125k? I don't know, but I imagine we will know soon.
Crowdfunding for Small Business Is Still an Unclear Path
I'd be very surprised if the notes could teach these subjects to anyone who didn't have significant prior exposure.

I'm self-taught, and these notes are probably the most useful resource I've yet come across.

It's hard not having anyone to work through physics problems with. Learning in-person is much higher bandwidth. But thus far OCW has done a fair job in supplementing this.

The problem is that there isn't a unifying thread across courses. Each course is isolated from every other course. That's a good way to build a toolkit, but it makes it rather difficult to understand how and why certain knowledge will be useful later on, and how to apply that knowledge.

So these notes are the unifying thread I've wanted.

But it's true that notes aren't a substitute for courses. Perhaps books are, though. These have served me well so far: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/books/list.html and recommendations would be great.
JQuery is Down
Constant and Global Optimization in JRuby 1.7.1 and 1.7.2
The only one I've ever touched is BioPerl. It's well regarded in the Bioinformatics sphere.
Istodaythedaymartymcflyarriveswhenhetravelstothefuture.com
This project is already open-source.
It can also be based on age range, the younger you are, the less likely you are to find success on a dating site, beings that there's a smaller dating population in your age range
I'm fairly certain Google requires you enter a confirmation code when setting up a phone number (the code is sent via SMS to the phone) for specifically this reason. It's not as though this is the only piece of software using the Calendar API; Google has already had to think of these potential exploits.
I want to try out Go...but I have to make one initial observation...It can be somewhat hard to Google (ironically) for Go programming examples. I'm sure there's some tinkering you can do in your search query to get slightly better results, but "Go" is a difficult proper pronoun to facet a search around.

https://www.google.com/search?q=go+facial+recognition

https://www.google.com/search?q=python+facial+recognition
Is it crazy to think we could see a Yahoo phone or mobile OS at some point?
Ah he has a book coming out. Mystery solved.
I can't speak for the Maps team because I'm not involved, and I can't speak for Google because, well, I can't speak for my employer. But I've been a developer in very similar situations before, and here's what pops into my mind when I hear statements like this:

The team has been pushing hard to get the new functionality out the door. They are perhaps behind schedule, nobody has yet looked at IE, and then someone finally gets their hands on a Windows 8 phone to test. It doesn't work. The product manager makes the call: cut IE support so that the Webkit version can launch on time. A redirect's put in place to avoid serving a completely broken experience to Windows 8 users, so they can at least do a search for businesses instead of having it not work.

They launch, the press picks it up, and conspiracy theories start flying. Somebody pages the team, emails start flying, there's a huddle to figure out how to fix it. An engineer (or a few engineers) "donate" their weekend to fixing IE compatibility. They work day and night until the bugs are fixed, and then remove the redirect.

PR makes a statement, and then another one once the problem can be fixed. Like all PR statements, they try to say the minimum amount possible to calm people down, since everything they do say will get picked apart by the press. They aren't engineers, they know only what the engineers tell them, and they say even less because whatever the engineers say will get wildly distorted as it passes from engineer -> PM -> PR -> press -> Hacker News.

Just my humble conjecture, as an engineer who's been in this situation several times before at a few different organizations (both Google and otherwise). I'd think critically before reaching for pitchforks, though.
The validity of copyright really isn't the issue here... if anyone and everyone could make Tolkien films then C. Tolkien's desire to get paid might be worth discussing, but that simply isn't the case.
A friend of mine wrote a good series of blog posts about the issues with current online dating sites, many of which you mentioned.

http://gobigorgoho.me/post/5834417671/online-meeting

His startup aims to solve these problems and is set to relaunch in early 2013!

http://blog.acquaintable.com/