skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"if we're going to talk about math, let's get out of the abstract and into the specific. Let's talk details. Examples. What could be more math-y than that?" (from the codinghorror post)

This topic seems to come up relatively frequently, and I appreciate Jeff's attempt to add to the conversation with some interestingly selected quotes. Still, the above quote to me highlights how many people, including Jeff, vastly oversimplify the math side of the equation. To put lbrandy's comment slightly differently, knowing a large number of mathematical facts will not make you a good programmer. But to me a basic explanation of “mathematical inclination” could be: a strong understanding of how a mathematical system is governed by rules, and how a problem can be parsed, compartmentalized, and addressed in pieces. It seems fairly self-evident to me that those skills would be shared by anyone whol could be described as even a competent programmer.
>What's the distance between a point and a line segment?

I think I agree with you. I would argue that the mathematical ability needed to solve the question above is to realize how to phrase a query to google, find the resulting formula, and turn it into code. You don't need to be able to derive it, for the vast majority of jobs out there.

Also: I've noticed that most programming is equivalent to what in grade school and high school they called a "word problem". Most of the class would groan when we had to do these; I loved them. I suspect if you struggled with word problems, you would have a hard time programming.
1-setup the biggest cloudcomputing host.

2-profit.
The BBP algorithm is not only parallelizable, it's embarrassingly parallel. Each term in the series can be computed independently of the rest.

In case you missed half of the joke: The PiHex project computed the quadrillionth bit of Pi back in 1998-2000... and was run by yours truly.
Bring back GOPHER!
Intro to Load Balancing for Developers – The Algorithms
Personally, I think we peaked at Netscape Navigator Gold.
TS Eliot refused to publish George Orwell's Animal Farm
Exactly. Jeff Atwood doesn't even mention recursion in the article once. Even he can't claim it's a highly specialized technique. I mean, ever try to walk through the DOM in JavaScript without recursion? Recursion is very closely related to induction, which in turn is a fundamental tenet of discrete mathematics.

I really should stop clicking on Coding Horror links on HN. Jeff is a very different style programmer than I am (and possibly a much better one). But his lack of understanding of the "other programming" is completely infuriating.
Maybe it's my engineering background, but I don't feel like this is semantics - it's unfair to categorize logical thinking as "mathematical" thinking. There are plenty of us from different backgrounds who are big on logic, and IMHO make great programmers. Mathematicians are far from the only ones who can think logically, and the term is at least somewhat misleading.
true. it's incremental innovation. However, they're bad at it too IMHO. Search hasn't changed since they've launched. And even then, they had nothing new..Their new algorithm..blahh. Using microcomputers for search processing. Thats the startup thinking, alright, cut all the costs, do it cheaper, do it better. There is no recipe, but they hit the right time. Thats what they did right, recognize the moment. However, google search sucks, and it sucks badly. Crawlers are as bad as spam. It clogs up. It's inefficient...and Google is too big to do anything about it, it's victim of its own size. There ARE better ways. I miss those days when we pulled hair by trying to save a KB in the mem.. efficiency and efficacy for their own sake.

Regarding the 100/month, my starting point is that you've gotta live anyway, regardless where your efforts are. I understand your view, I am trying to change it in self, and found that I approach my business efforts with much higher perseverance... = I am doing it no matter what, and I will find the cheapest way to do it, it's worth it!

Good Luck!
This was an IM conversation.
Which takes nearly as much, if not even more effort.
must have been smoking pot..
I just found a Forbes article about a guy who started a small fund that invests in the SP 500 Index while congress is out of session and moves everything to T-Bills when they're in session. He joked about it for a while until he ran some numbers and found that historically the SP returns ~16% while congress is out of session, and sub 1% while in session.

The markets don't like uncertainty, and nothing is more uncertain that the idiocy that congress brings when in session.
Graphics programming is a very small subset of programming in general. You're basically saying "all programmers need math because some programming needs math"...

There's plenty of cutting-edge stuff to be done that doesn't require an intimate knowledge of mathematics. I would have to say that being good at arithmetic seems to be pretty important in programming, though.
Senate Legislation Would Federalize Cybersecurity
"It's a Blub thing" nails it even better, IMO. PageRank, MapReduce, the Amazon recommendation algorithm, clustering algorithms, .... inventing those required a solid knowledge of and comfort with mathematics.

Of course, strictly speaking this doesn't mean that mathematics is necessary to do great work. Other qualities - say a good understanding of community (think Flickr), or psychology (Facebook), or design (37Signals) - can be equally useful. But, yeah, that post has "Blub" written all over it.
I get the impression that Jeff is a much better blogger than programmer. And he's not my favorite blogger. I say this not just from his self-deprecation, which I've learned not to take at face value. But these weird non-sequitur "questions" he comes up with for article titles suggests he is not at an adult level of proficiency with his craft. Asking whether programmers "should be 'mathematically inclined'" is like asking whether movie directors "should be visually creative." They damned well better be, or go find something to do with their lives that is not a waste of their and their audience's time.

When I was, oh, twenty or so, I used to be one of those systems programmers who thought that the fanciest data structure I'd ever need was a hash table. If you write real code, that other human beings use, one of those humans will eventually use it in a way you didn't anticipiate. And in that use, N will suddenly be large! The user will expect your code to work, and with reasonable resource consumption. "Mathematically uninclined" programmers' code will die with large N, and they're not "inclined" to fix it.
Why should the next generation of tax payers be forced to pay for them? People can save money, while they are working. It shouldn't come as a surprise that you get older every day.
I'm sick of April Fool's jokes on the web. I understand the allure, but it's energy mis-allocated. Gmail, autopilot is dumb. And thanks for the spam this morning SlideShare. Jerks.

I don't ever, and haven't ever, utilized April Fools to contact my users to make a joke (at their expense).
Not surprisingly, these look just like the default Blueprint styles. Most CSS frameworks are awful because it takes less time to start from scratch than it does to overwrite all of the framework's defaults.
How difficult would it be to write a virus that fixed common system vulnerabilities? Could one write something that would run Windows Update, download Spybot and some other free antivirus programs to do a sweep, update Java and Flash, etc.?
I agree. I posted what I thought was a relevant article from my blog (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541628) only to see it drop off the new page under a tidal wave of jokes. I do appreciate some of the jokes, but does HN really need to be filled with them?
I believe Cheese Weasel Day, due to the fact that it is an IT-oriented holiday and relatively unknown, is interesting for hackers (and not a spoof either)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541732

I believe it's still okay to submit things that are light-hearted as long as they are topical, right? Nobody wants a joke board, but an IT grass-roots holiday with a silly name is an example of a submission that can do double-duty. It doesn't have to be all Erlang innards.
What's the difference between mathematical inclination and logical inclination?

Logic is a strange area since it bridges fields, primarily math, philosophy, linguistics and computer science.

In my experience, designing software more frequently taps into logic as applied to philosophical arguments and conceptual formal logic more than heavily mathematical areas of logic. The reason is that creating software is basically the process of taking something from the real world and reducing it to a series of logical components and relationships. This is pretty much the exact process for applying formal logic to philosophical questions.

On the other hand, actually coding the software taps far more into the mathematical and linguistic aspects of formal logic, since it's involves piecing together units of mathematical logic to construct a logical machine.

In practice, this whole process is obviously more nuanced, interconnected and filled with gray areas.

It's also certainly possible to argue that all reasoning is math, but this isn't a new concept and dates back to Plato.
Crack the encryption on someone's DomainKeys implementation so that I can sign mail as coming from them. Then successfully spam the world.
Competition Among Open Source Compilers: The BSD Issue
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Healthy eating for healthy families and maintaining healthy diets.
If I heard serial cooking, I might think: cereal cooking - however silly, you might want to pick that .com up as a misspelling (it looks available as of right now)
That sounds painful - and interesting.

Do you happen to know what kind of userbase that is?

Since IE7 is pushed pretty aggressively by windows update I would think there must be a few large corporations in there who have rejected the update thus far?

At least I want to think that because IE6 being stuck at 30% gives me the shivers. On our sites IE6 has been constantly dropping since about December and is now at around 18%. That's still too much but at least the tendency is right here...
We actually don't know how the category menu will evolute in fact, as we are going to index some blog and continuing to add recipes on categories will be a huge work! Anyway thanks for the keen words ;)
To be fair, that's a really boring post.
I sure did. Funny thing is, I was into this stuff back then (at one point me and another guy were chasing the record for the largest 7-tuple in arithmetic progression; we ended up with the second largest), so I'm sure I heard about your effort at the time. BBP survives in my memory a decade later, but not PiHex.

I have to say though, your original comment was definitely an obscure reference, even on HN :-)
I think this topic is bringing a lot of emotional involvement, since swombat has been downvoted a second ago even if his post is totally reasonable and calm , and just now i've been downvoted, for no apparent reason since i'm totally reasonable in my words too, so i guess maybe we should just stop arguing ;)

Also, isn't downvoting supposed to be used for offensive posts, and if so, how were our posts offensive ?
If you don't understand something immediately it's not funny. Thinking <=> Not funny.
I thought this browser was the Bees Knees back in the day. Holy awesome support for TABLES, Batman!
Firefox still supports Gopher:

gopher://hal3000.cx/1/Begin_Here
VKontakte | Welcome
phrase a query to google, find the resulting formula, and turn it into code

You left out the part where, months later, you pay a mathematically-inclined consultant hundreds of dollars to fix the bugs in the formula that you cut and pasted without understanding it. ;)

Numerical methods was a very interesting class, even on day one. You'd be amazed how easy it is to screw up simple formulas by doing the math in the wrong order -- the finite precision of floating-point arithmetic means that you have to be constantly on your guard.
First Aprils Fool I like today.
I tried it, and the robot called my phone. It came from a +46 number. Sweden? nice.

The robot voice was very hard to understand though. You really should record the voice yourself or get a friend to do it. Also, I needed to press 1 to activate, but to deactivate I must call support? huh? Why can't I just press 2?
I don't know. It wasn't that bad. I didn't find it that novel, but it's good to recap things from time to time.

Just skim the bullet points. I like writers who use bullet points because if I'm getting bored I can skim more easily.
Red Hat ponders going proprietary
Er, if you are going to invoke Dijkstra, then you need to be aware of proving programs correct, and without at least a mathematical inclination, you are lost, no?
Nice writeup. Had no idea you could do that with Google Spreadsheets.
If you haven't seen it "Who killed the electric car?" is an interesting film/documentary highlighting some of the shortsightedness of car manufacturers..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

It was aired in the UK last night on More4 so may appear on their on catch up service at some point. Otherwise parts at least are on youtube.
Who, exactly, is asking you to feel sorry for Get Satisfaction?

They clearly apologized, said how they would do things differently in response, and then did those things. I'm not sure what more you can expect of human beings.

There may be other aspects to their business model that remain questionable, so yes, take them to task for those (apparently they left the fee for taking competitors adds off the page in place, for example). But I do not think talking about how their actions make you feel is especially productive.
I can remember after downloading that to my PowerMac 7200/75 "Wow, now I can create my own web page!!!"
RIM opens software store for BlackBerry
Graphics, physics, all my work in biotech, all my work in video edition, all work I've ever done. Vast sectors of programming are math intensive. There are few which aren't.

Also arithmetic and even more so logic pretty much = applied math.
The problem is that the april fool's web jokes/hoaxes have been overtaken by media wnkers (see the guardian newspaper's attempt). It used to be original in the early google days, but now its just another example of the redundant, thoughtless nonesense that only a pr executive can produce.
Hmm, then maybe it is as sleazy as GS in that aspect.

Still, I couldn't reasonably end up on a Yelp page and mistake it for a Morton's Steakhouse feedback page. That's the bigger offense.
It's great to see that these guys are still alive and kicking. The founders of Bitboys have come a long way: they got started with graphics programming some 20 years ago, creating demos for MS-DOS and sharing them with other demomakers. (The Internet wasn't generally available in those early years of the European demoscene, so demos were exchanged through BBSs and by swapping floppies through postal mail.)

One of their most famous creations was Second Reality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G_aUxbbqWU -- it may look plain today, but remember that this was made in 1993 and ran on a 386 with plain VGA...
That looks good, thanks!
If it was entirely clear a crime had taken place, we'd be discussing Macy's conviction, not his indictment. More importantly, there are more people who's veracity you're questioning than just Morrow: the city attorney, two city inspectors, and a police officer.
It’s very easy to underprice your product
It really doesn't. I'm an experienced front-end coder, and I can tell you right now that the amount of extra work I put into IE6 support is really not prohibitively high. The bugs and issues in IE6 are well-known and well-documented, so it's a simple matter of professionalism to be aware of these things, and account for them, as you code.
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I have to say though, your original comment was definitely an obscure reference, even on HN

I think a lot of people who have been here for longer than you were aware of my connection to PiHex -- it has come up a few times.
Thinking logically about how to model and solve a system using abstract concepts.

Which is often just as much or more in line with philosophical applications of logic than purely mathematical. As I noted in other comment, you could then argue that all philosophy and reasoning is basically conceptual mathematics, but people don't generally view philosophy this way despite the concept dating back 2500 years.
With apologies to Nate Lawson: delete any website, blog post, message board, or email thread that talks about Conficker.
By your persistence on this point, I assume you're both British (or otherwise only familiar with UK law) and think UK law is relevant on this point.

It's not.

I'll leave you to ponder the question, "If Fried's complaints in his blog post are 'defamatory', what exactly are all the consumer complaints on Get Satisfaction's site, then?"
MySpace/OpenSocial is a disaster. A buddy of mine works as a consultant for Ask.com. He spends his days building Nascar trivia apps for Myspace. And Nascar gift apps.

Want to know why Ask.com has a Nascar (#96) and Google doesn't? Because Ask.com's "southern demographic" never discovered google/facebook as the bigger and better. Their own studies show that their primary internet usage is (1) Myspace and (2) Ask.com.

So aside from the fact that a majority of people who use Myspace equate it "the internet", and Facebook has a worldwide appeal, you're 100% correct.
I was wondering if it might be useful for subsequent programmer to be explain on the spot (as, for example, in an IM conversation--thanks for that follow-up) that the code is indeed doing what is desired by the business logic.
Thanks for the feedback. The voice is the synthetic voice which actually does the live calls as well, so if you think that's hard to understand then we need to get that fixed.

The authorization message could be clearer, though. It's asking you to press 1 to authorize. What it's supposed to communicate after that is that if you have no idea what RoboNOC is, i.e. if a customer has entered an incorrect phone number to authorize, then you should contact support so that we can take a look at the account. We're assuming here that if you click the "call me now" button you want to authorize the phone number if it goes through.

Caller ID varies between which VoIP server picks up the authorization call. We're trying to get them standardized but there are a few hoops to go through when trying to get downstream providers to accept caller IDs with numbers they don't control.

Thank you again!
Pricing can be usable too.  Is there a better way for you to price your product?
The irony of the programming language toolkit explosion is that it looks like it's more fun to write tools to write programming languages than it is to write programming languages.

Cool stuff though.
Oh, wait a minute. It's April 1st, folks. Even Jeff Attwood might not be this bad a programmer.
The GS guys are doing an amazing combination of groveling and passive-aggressive whining about being caught at the same time.
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pre {
white-space: pre-wrap;
}

Install the Stylish Firefox extension and add this style.
If you hate math, and need a means to learn it forcibly, code video games, particularly 3D ones. The experience will probably break a few bones, but you'll come out learning more than you ever would have if you just kept writing webapps all day.
Or Rick Astley.
I've been using a related framework called BlueTrip CSS (http://bluetrip.org/) that combines elements of Blueprint, 960 and Hartija print css. It's a very good framework for rapid website prototyping.
Not once in that entire letter do they say the word "sorry". You'd think a company so experienced with corporate indifference would have the courage to admit they made a mistake, say I'm sorry, state their next actions to fix the problem and move forward.

I know these situations are tough, but Thor spends way too much in the letter promoting and PRing instead of apologizing and fixing.
Gopher is to be discontinued in future versions though.

The good times are definitely over.
I think "damning" is a little hyperbolic. Anyway poets are generally not very astute politically (c.f. Ezra Pound).
"you shouldn't even maintain a list of supported browsers in the first place."

Does "any reasonably standards-compliant browser" count as a list of supported browsers?
Smalltalk is easy. There is so little grammar, that implementing it is a snap.

If the toolkit explosion is making it so easy, then maybe Stallman's original GUILE proposal will finally happen. (All scripting languages running on a common platform.)
When I saw this I thought of an idea, not sure if its out there already...what if you could text 911 with a crime in your area, and then it generates heatmaps of twitter-like updates and as more people send messages, it raises the temperature/urgency of the issue a la n4g.com
Pros:

Very simple UI compared to Twirl.

Persistent tabbed search results.

Cons:

Takes up entire screen on my 1280 x 800 laptop.
Depends on what your frontend looks like. The average run-off-the-mill HTML site can ofcourse be made to work in all browsers with little effort. The real pain starts when you want to do interesting stuff. Advanced AJAX and javascript magic just doesn't work in IE6 without horrible overhead - partly due to the lack of sensible debugging tools.
What features of IE7 are difficult or impossible to emulate in IE6? In my experience, getting sites working with IE6 is really easy. There are very few things that IE7 can do that IE6 cannot. (It is funny that this argument is usually only made to disparage IE7 but never to support IE6.) To support IE7 you've already given up border-radius, display: table, automatic PNG transparency, SVG, a lot of the DOM, and a lot of the other things that make developing for other browsers so easy. With IE6, you can get a lot of the functionality of IE7 with just a little Javascript (already written for you by others), a few conditional comments, and a little extra CSS. You might have performance issues with adding all these workarounds, but workiing with poor performance is usually better than not working at all.
Logic is not "a ka maths," it's very much interdisciplinary, and it's the bridge between math, philosophy, computer science and linguistics. That's why even something as simple as an SQL query uses concepts drawn from each of those fields.
Was thinking along those lines. Start transferring money from all accounts to all accounts. Stop when everyone has the same amount of money.
Should be fun for a while.
Damn right, the Internet has really taken all the humor out of April Fools jokes. Pretty much everything has been done to death already and in most cases wasn't all that funny in the first place.

Never the less, they're a perfect example of the lowest common denominator problem with collaborative news sites. The barrier to entry is essentially zero so they have a much wider base of people to draw votes from.
the first rule of conficker...
Completely agree. I'm a 4th year med student and even I follow the same line - if it's not my field, I let the professionals in that field handle it.
Oh, you didn't hear? He with the largest digit wins.