skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Re: the original post IMHO, I find it has many logical flaws and while it is trying to draw attention to the fact that programmers need to learn math it may end up scaring people away.

Background: I have a BS in EE from IIT Bombay, An MS in Applied Math from USC and an almost PhD(everything but thesis) in Pure Math.

I also loved teaching math as a TA and was able to teach engineers multivariable calculus and differential equations so that they lost their fear of it.

But for the last 20 years have been in the database business. I am very enthusiastically returning to math in the form of data science in the last year.

I find that especially today it is necessary for math to be made accessible without having to prove theorems - that's for professional mathematicians.

Programmers use hardware often without knowing diddly-squat about semiconductors. And that's just fine if you don't want to or need to. We drive cars, use mobile phones and all sorts of machinery without needing to know anything about internal combustion or the CDMA algorithms or even how theory of relativity figures into GPS.

I think the insistence on setting a high bar for people to learn/use/apply math is unnecessary mystification and obscurantism.

Math is beautiful, useful and powerful. If you know math you should be wanting to simplify it's teaching and instruction, thinking hard about making it useful for the non-mathematician and also making it easier to access in a breadth-first fashion rather than the depth-first fashion in which it is currently practiced.

I know many people, engineers and mathematicians who believe that simplification is "dumbing down". I disagree vehemently.

Today if you are a programmer and want to learn math I have a few of suggestions

a) If you want to apply it in engineering take a couple of classes on Coursera/Udacity - it will be a slow an steady way to re-activate your math neurons (it's also insurance against Alzheimers to keep learning new and hard stuff).

b) Learn some statistics, learn to use R. (Coursera again)

c) Learn some linear algebra, minimal, then learn MATLAB (Andrew Ng's Machine Learning class on Coursera or a similar one by AbuMustaffa (sp?) of Caltech)

d) If you absolutely don't want to learn a new language then look at Machine Learning by Marsden which uses Python and then pick up NumPy/SciPy and look up the exciting stuff that's happening with the IPython Notebook.

e) If your focus is on pure CS the take the Algorithms track(s) by Roughgarden (Stanford) or Sedgewick (Princeton) on Coursera

This way you dont have the notation issues - R has a syntax, MATLAB has a syntax just learn it. Python hopefully is note even an issue.

Start using your math brain a little at a time - absolutely no proofs required - and THEN once you see the beauty and want to learn more and want to learn why, THEN dig deeper with the fundamentals. If you don't that's fine too - use it, put its power to use and become a better developer and engineer. Math is not trivial but it's not as hard as it's made out to be. There's way too much noise in the channel.

Good luck.

(feel free connect with me on twitter if you want to get more help (@nitin))
Why does -4^(1/4) return only porn sites on Google?
Here's an article from Headius, JRuby developer: http://blog.headius.com/2012/11/refining-ruby.html
I think this also correlates with YC consistently having statistically significant high success rates. There doesn't seem to be much else to add to what is a fairly rigorous application.
1, out of 68 that applied.
Both comments were written by the same person.
> It would appear to be a widely held belief, that Google is the pioneer and leader in the field, at least with respect to the software/AI.

To be precise, they swooped up the leaders in the field from the DARPA challenges, but same difference I suppose.
I enjoyed it quite a bit too!

I don't know if you saw it, but there's a discussion about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5173570

I'd love to see a whole series of documentaries covering SV history, and the entire computing industry... A man can dream... ;)
Very worth reading if you want to know what it's like to drive a Tesla Model S on an actual road trip. The New York Times reporter John M. Broder finds out that the gauge in the Model S to estimate remaining mileage before the next charge is badly confused by temperatures below the usual temperatures in California.

I remember back when I used to have a travel-intensive job that I was flying into airports all over the United States and getting into unfamiliar models of cars rented on the corporate account. That was sometimes no fun at all. But all of those cars fit everyone's familiar mental model of displaying fuel remaining. The Tesla Model S, by contrast, reports miles still able to drive in a dynamic model that can rapidly get out of touch with reality. And of course it takes a good bit longer to fully recharge a Tesla, even with high-speed recharging, than to pump gasoline into any other kind of car. This will take some major getting used to for most drivers.
Yep, a tutor notification system is on my to-do list. Good idea.

Thanks again for spending so much time with it.
Ask HN: My dad just died suddenly. How to setup a Memorial site ASAP?
Dear HNers,
I just lost my Dad yesterday very suddenly and everyone in my family is still shocked. We have all very fond memories of him and this may be a good idea to have a memorial site for him for everyone to share things about his life. Since I am pressed with time with other issues such as funeral preparations and legal stuff, I would appreciate if you could suggest any good solutions for that purpose, ready to use or easy to install. Thanks to all for your kind help, and this kind of info may be useful to others too when the time comes.
The show itself is terrific.

Releasing all the episodes at once, 2 days before the superbowl no less, so far appears to have been a very poor way to spend $100 million.
Packets of Death - An Update
It'd be nice if my scroll wheel still worked on this site.
PG, is there any chance you can clarify something for me?

All I have left to do is make a video demo. I don't know if this question is "cheating":

What would you rather hear about in a demo, the founders and their past ability to succeed, or the idea, and why it is original and viable? Or both? Or neither?
Given your example of cell phones, there's a lot more costs to bringing a new type of cell phone to market than the ~$50k on patent searches.

Since we're talking about driving innovation, someone who genuinely advances the technology is able to gain some protection on their investment in R&D by applying for (and hopefully obtaining) a patent(s).

If all you're doing is bringing another same-old cell phone to market then the question is what benefits are you bringing - or rather, does society benefit more from your same-cellphone than the someone who is innovating and introducing something new and novel.
Of course, we've funded lots of Canadian startups. There are some in every batch.
I partially agree. Petitions alone seem fairly empty of impact. The weight of your vote seems so easily dismissed.

I had that exact thought and built a site where petitions are paired with giving the charity to add extra "oomph" to your opinions. The idea being that you can either donate to charity on behalf of your idea in order to make the importance clear -or- you can donate to charity if/when the objective is met as a form of incentive.

So far, I've not been able to get any traction though, so the idea remains to this day an experimental concept. Nevertheless, I've channeled all of my own charitable giving through the site for the past year on behalf of ideas of interest to me.

I figure, why not? I possibly win by convincing the powers-that-be and/or the charities win by receiving donations.

I invite you to take a look: https://brianstaskforce.com/blog/more-than-a-petition
CNet founder Halsey Minor bought a ton of real estate against his paper fortune and then lost it all in the financial crisis: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/the-sorry-f...

Larry Ellison has been living off credit for the last decade or so; he's put up ~$4B worth of Oracle stock as collateral. http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Inside-look-at-a-billiona... http://www.forbes.com/sites/calebmelby/2012/09/25/larry-elli...
We fund a lot of startups from outside the US. In fact the Stripe founders are from Ireland.
I'm going to have to agree with this. I was the one complaining about ALSA to begin with, but PulseAudio is just another layer of indirection around ALSA. In other words, ALSA sucks, but it's more widespread than OSS, and it at least gives you some control.
Building an audience takes time. When you have an asset this good, you should try to build an audience. It's simple to come into contact with spoilers which is hugely annoying. There's no social media activity. No water cooler talk. Little anticipation. Etc, etc.
The DOJ did not lie. They just made a correct yet misleading statement.

Incidentally according to Aaron's lawyer, the prosecutors were going to be trying to convince a judge of a lot more than 2 years. Whether they would have succeeded in that is an unknown question.
Talk about why you picked this specific idea. And don't read from a script. It's weird how many people ignore us when we tell them not to read from a script. It's like they think we can't tell.
This is why there is http://articleak.allalla.com/
Apple IPads Neutered for U.S. Government in CACI Mobile Push
Can't believe this didn't get upvoted. Easily best analysis of what likely went wrong, and how to fix it in the future, I've seen so far. What a bummer HN won't see it.
Mash-ape or maSHAPE? Either way, I'm a fan of startups whose names could easily be Pokemon.
Nothing happens. All I see is a "Please allow camera access.", even after I allow it.
I think that's the wrong attitude - you shouldn't think of Kickstarter as shopping. I've funded sixty projects on KS, so far, and I don't keep track of which ones have succeeded. Okay, yeah, the Pebble was kinda expensive for a random lark. But usually I just kick in $5 to $25 dollars - less than I'd spend going out to dinner. And maybe, some months later, I get a surprise package with something cool in it. I feel good about that.
I made $200K and PayPal locked my account
I'm the creator of turn.js (www.turnjs.com), a javascript library for books and magazines. I released a commercial version in July 2012 and six month later I made $200K. I don’t know how, but I made it.

PayPal has closed my account because I don’t have a social security number. It seems like I don’t qualify for one because I’m just “an international student” from Venezuela.

I have been working really hard to release a product for publishers that converts PDFs to HTML5 for books and magazine with the brand-new turn.js 5th release.

I don’t know what to do or where to go. I don't have more money.

Please help.

Any suggestion would be appreciated.

blasten@gmail.com

Emmanuel
We are also considering Code Igniter. But it seems a little outdated. It doesn't take advantage of some of the new happenings in PHP. Composer, Autoloading, Monolog, and Unit testing. using PHP Unit.
Thanks, that's all I needed :)
This is what turns me off so much from academia. Is this really that typical at most universities? I know that there's always been a large emphasis placed on publishing in high-impact journals (and often), but isn't the open publishing movement beginning to have an effect, albiet rather small?
A high speed rail network shouldn't just be a dream
Of course an EV is going to have trouble in cold weather -- it's just physics. It's just surprising to me that so obvious a situation didn't come up in testing the software. As a resident of Toronto who was interested in the Model S, it's a bit eye-opening.
>you need to get comfortable with proofs

True, but this is simply not the point of programming/CS. Back in grad school in CS, we used leiserson. Leiserson has proof of quicksort! I mean, that's fucking crazy. He mathematically derives amortized runtime of quicksort.I really loved leiserson. But even my professors hated it...they'd say, lets skip over the proof section, its not important. Nowadays people use Skeina. Skeina is like a storybook. It tells you - do this, get that, if you want to know more, read leiserson! So skeina basically punts. This is why everybody loves skeina, because no proofs. Just straight algorithms that can be translated to code. Skeina is slightly better than Numerical Recipes cookbook, in that it tells you what to do & points you to the why, but doesn't tell you the why. But math is all about why.

Now look at a typical grad math course. They love artin. artin is full of proofs. Well, show me how the direct product works out. Ok, install GAP, & bang out some 10 line script, & boom, done! No refactoring, no nice variable names, no explanation...its as opaque as it gets. You just call the function & it'll do its thing. You want to know why ? Well, that's programming, & we are mathematicians, why do you want to know those things, its some messy bullshit C code, they have this thing called data structure in programming, you have to know about pointer, reference,...dude just type the script & get back to Artin.

So each culture actively repels the other, even though they are massively co-dependent. Even department level politics are driven by that rivalry. Math depts are money losers net net. CS otoh brings in tons of dough. Guess who teaches all the difficult discrete math courses in CS ? Yeah, its the math profs! Crazy, I tell you.
Well, we do have proof assistants. I think people are starting to use those in more diverse fields of math now--I remember seeing an article about an algebraic proof in Coq, but I don't remember any of the details.
1. I never said keyboard/mouse was bad. I said no-one's branching out, despite the open platform, because the lack of standards and support makes that painful.

2. You may want to keep survivorship bias in mind. (If you had a game that kb/m wasn't ideal for, would you even bother releasing it on the PC?)
First and foremost, sorry for your loss!

A couple of ideas. I used to work closely with the funeral industry and many funeral homes are now offering services to setup web-based memorial sites. You may want to check with the funeral home.

Another idea is to set up a Facebook page as a memorial and invite your family/friends to subscribe to the page.

Finally, legacy.com is a site that offers memorial site services.
I agree with you and the OP that creating a standard notation for all math is problematic. And you're right that there are conceptual difficulties behind the math that are not going to be automatically resolved by clearer communication. But a lot of the difficulties are accidents of culture.

To continue the programming language/mathematical notation allegory, you can use whatever notation you want to describe your program in a Lisp with macros. But you have to actually define what your notation means. Neglecting to provide the definition of the macros would be the equivalent of a logical argument that leaves off its premises or the state of math publications today from the perspective of the poor sap that has to read them (and the mind of the person who wrote it).
What's more important is that he produced that much money. You can't give away what you haven't produced.
Genuine question: all those comments focusing on Bellard's humble character, do they refer in negative to some hype developers, brogrammers, those who use only the latest fashionable tools, write blogs and rants and books?
Ask HN: How prevent Google ads on top of search results for my web site?
When users googling my web site specifically, Google shows 3 ads with competing web sites results on top of my organic result. That's very confusing for many users.<p>Is there a way to prevent Google from showing these ads on top of my web site result?<p>http://www.dennisgorelik.com/images/postjobfree_com_search_results.png<p>http://www.google.com/search?q=postjobfree.com
Ring vaccination?
My friends think I'm dowdy. Until recent years, I was very conservative about estimates. Every "event" in a trip adds 5 minutes, no matter how "nothing" it seems. I was often too early, but never late.

A Tesla S with the 260 mile battery, I would treat like a car with 130 miles range. Plenty for an around town commuter and errand vehicle. A Leaf, I would treat like a 50 mile range car.

Also, why don't those things come with a propane heater? Electric heat makes no sense.
For sure. The lack of charging stations will eventually be solved, but longer charging times and unreliable readings might be with us forever. Hopefully the cost offset for fuel will make it worth it.
https://www.mashape.com/about

Mashape comes from the fusion between the words "mash" and "shape".
You're a fool for using PayPal. Everyone knows how dangerous it is.
It's not the discoverability of the libraries that's the problem, it's that the utility of these libraries is generally not that great for anyone except the authors. One common type of library handles data transformation, normalization, and maybe even workflows. These abound. But they are rarely useful in other people's hands, because to extend them and actually get any work done, you need to spend as much time learning them as it would take to write it from scratch. And the advantage of writing it from scratch is that you know it intimately, and all of its assumptions and flaws, which you don't know about somebody else's code, even if it's extremely well documented. Take something like Taverna [1], which is probably very useful to some people, and had been recommended enthusiastically to me by many people, but after spending three hours reading documents and searching the web, I could not get it to do what I needed to do, so I wrote a simple one-off bash script that interfaced with our cluster system. Alternatively I could try to hack in loops, but that's going to take me 10x as long, will require me to interact with many other people who obviously don't understand my problem since they did not consider it a fundamental need, and may not even be accepted back into the mainline, at which point I'm off on my own fork and lose the benefit of using a common code base. Waiting 1-10 hours to hear back from the dev mailing list is unacceptable when you're trying to get work done.

Is it more important to get the result, or to use other people's code? Reinventing the wheel is a minor sin compared to not getting results.

[1] http://www.taverna.org.uk
An analogous case is the programmer who relies on libraries and abstraction and "knows just enough to be dangerous." Statistics and optimization mathematics in particular are vulnerable to this. If you haven't read the proofs or you cannot prove it yourself, then you truly don't understand it. I'm not claiming this is you since your post doesn't imply that.

However as an example, if someone is solving linear or non-linear programs using <insert software or library here> but hasn't bothered to thoroughly study the mathematics underlying either and is just plugging in numbers from the constraint equations they came up with, then I would not want that person doing any sensitivity analysis. There would just be no way to be confident that they are interpreting the results correctly.
It seems like the charge right before he stalled was the issue. I know he wasn't at a super charging station but he probably should have spent a couple of hours re-charging it instead of an hour.

Cold weather and running something that is power intensive (the heater) will drastically effect your mileage if you are relying on a battery to power your car.

Tesla probably should do a better job of communicating this but it doesn't seem like a flaw with the car.
Don't you have one in Venezuela? They were more than happy to accept my Greek id.
That is extremely useful, actionable advice.
This blog post states the obvious: early adopters better know what they're in for and what they're doing. The author isn't an experienced early adopter and doesn't know what they're doing, and rightly concludes that the technology isn't ready for universal mainstream use. Unfortunately, the article entirely fails to address the point and is aimed squarely at an audience that won't get it either. It will be used as ammunition against electric vehicles for months. This subtle, yet thorough, misrepresentation is irresponsible and quite annoying.
I've been testing turn.js v3 for personal projects and am seriously considering buying it for production use in a business; it's the only thing out there for dynamically-rendered flipbooks. Sorry to hear about your troubles. At that level of revenue, I'd seriously consider charging using something like Stripe or Braintree. Your target audience (developers) won't consider typing a CC number as such a huge inconvenience.

Another note - releasing the 4th release's source code under something like the Affero GPL (or a similar noncommercial license) could drive adoption of that version, since many people like to "try before they buy" - and would like to do so with the most feature-filled version.
One of your founders relayed to me that they were doing some of the application reading/judging, my concern was there. guess he was pulling my leg.
Were you lying about being an american student?
Maybe 18 months in time and a million or two in money. I don't know for sure because we don't keep records of either.

In practice, people tend to feel they're too late before they are. E.g. while a post series A company would probably feel they were too late, the number of post series A cos that would be net ahead from doing YC is probably nonzero.
If someone was beating themselves with a baseball bat, and complained that it hurt, wouldn't you say "dude, you shouldn't be beating yourself with that baseball bat"?
Where does PayPal ask for an SSN? That doesn't sound right.
One of the worst pain points of C# for me was that the open source community is practically non-existant. So many wheels end up being reinvented because nobody has bothered to share their wheel, and Microsoft hasn't released their wheel yet.
When you say you're an international student, do you mean you're in the US on an F-1 visa? If yes, you might be in violation of your visa terms. If you have not researched this, please start reading at http://www.justanswer.com/immigration-law/330cd-holding-f-1-...
I would get a lawyer in the US. They might think that you're laundering money, until you can prove your id.
This really sucks. PayPal is terrible for doing stuff like this, and I really feel for you. While I don't have any specific suggestions for dealing with PayPal, maybe you could setup a Crowdtilt or similar fundraising opportunity and link it on your site?

I love turnjs btw. Very slick tool.
No, he was probably telling the truth. The alumni do the first pass. But (a) they just vote no or maybe, (b) each application is seen by at least 3 alumni, and isn't filtered out till it has at least 2 more nos than maybes, and (c) we look at their overall stats to make sure no one is giving all nos.
Cool to see others doing this too!

We've (Sleep.fm) allowed users to set our online alarm clock by typing or clicking a URL(sets time & sound).

Examples...

http://sleep.fm/7am
(sets alarm for 7am)

http://sleep.fm/10pmRooster
(sets alarm for 10pm; sound is Rooster)

http://sleep.fm/6amWeather
(sets alarm for 6am; sound is spoken weather report)
Yes, I got that. However, it is still medical advice...coming from a magazine. What to "fear", "use", or any other word you can swap in there is still the same thing....advice.
It's your claim. You provide the evidence.
Cold weather is going to murder your range. That's not a flaw with the car per se, but it's definitely an issue with EVs.
If the battery meter can't cope with typical American temperature ranges yet it being sold in these areas, yeah, it's a flaw. If it says 100 miles left and after 10 miles now tells you 50, yeah, it's a flaw.

Can the flaw be corrected? Maybe, maybe not. But it's still a flaw.