skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I meant the problem with 'your argument'.

To recap the discussion:

==========

Chirono: I find this comment interesting given the recent ... talk about not using maths puzzles in programmer interviews. This is perhaps an interesting real-world case that demonstrates how a mathematical outlook leads to much cleaner code.

thomasz: The secret sauce here is not the ability to solve "maths puzzles", but specialized domain knowledge.

I replied: That's exactly the wrong way round. You can acquire domain knowledge, you can have a domain expert assigned to you to work with you. What you can't acquire, on demand, is the ability to think in the ways that mathematics gives you. That requires extensive training and practice, and recognizing when obscure bits of theory are applied is something that doesn't come overnight.

==========

So my argument is that while domain knowledge is a good thing, and (jacquesm eloquently argued) often necessary to solve a problem, it usually can be acquired as needed through reading, study, and discussion with local experts. The ability to recognize, let alone solve, problems that are actually obscure mathematics in disguise cannot be acquired on as "as needed" basis. This is why knowledge of advanced mathematics needs to be gained early, and if you don't have it by the time you are a practising, working programmer, you are unlikely ever to acquire it.

Not having acquired such skills does not make one a bad programmer. I know very, very few programmers who hold advanced degrees in mathematics, and yet the world is full of programmers who can "get the job done" efficiently and effectively. Equally, having skills in advanced mathematics does not, of itself, make one a better programmer (and certainly not a better person.) I know many PhDs in mathematics who simply cannot program effectively.

But it does make one a programmer with different skills, and those skills can enable one to solve problems others can't, and sometimes to produce solutions that are more elegant. Not always, not every problem requires such skills. But if it does, by the time you find the problem, it's too late to acquire them.

> What advice would you give to some one like me.

I don't know what you like, what skills you already have, or what you want to end up doing. I studied math because it was fun, exciting, and I was good at it. Computers at the time didn't exist in the form they do now - maybe I would have done computing. Impossible to say.

So I can't give advice - there would be a real danger of simply trying to turn you into a clone of me, and that's a bad idea. I can tell you that understanding algorithms, time-complexity, calculus, vector spaces, and point-set topology have all been of direct and immediate use in my work.

And if you'd like a simple puzzle, here:

Suppose the demand for a product falls linearly as a function
of its price. Show that if you price the product to maximise
your profit, you will have less than half the possible market.

That turned up a few years ago in a discussion with a customer.
meta: how come this didm't get scribd'd?
Theres a tune from one of my favorite bands that in rough translation goes something like this:

I am beyond the used up cliche, that you are only supposed to write about the one who is special. Not even a single tune, not even a single rhime for the millions of the wrong ones, who were here with me, when I didn't have Her.

Believe me, they weren't dumb. Each of them knew - when there is not a Big love. A little one will do.
So in my day to day job I'm actually a component design engineer working mostly on design validation at a company that's "involved" in x86 development. I'm sort of curious, what debugging features are you hoping for or what's missing that's negatively impacting your workflow?

Honestly, when I'm debugging hardware where I have the high level specifications, the microarchitecture spec and the system verilog files that implemented the design it's still kind of a pain to trace things.

The other downside of having all the signals is that little things can be unintentionally misleading. As an example I was working with coworker trying to trace a memory transaction through some complicated logic blocks and there was a point we originally missed where the bottom few bits of an address aren't necessary for the hardware. Later after this point the bottom bits were reused to communicate transaction properties along with the significant address bits. There was a bit of confusion about why we were reading a "bad address" before we realized what happened.
I guess, Rubinius is no longer relevant? I remember it was a very promising project back in 2008.
I remember dumping registers to text-mode screen memory so that I wouldn't waste a register. Half of the result landed in the color values, so sometimes I couldn't read all of the value because it was flashing green on green. I prefered Bochs' Port E9 hack.

Oh, OS courses at the university... good old time. (Some participants complained that going from zero to bare-metal x86 was too difficult.)
Article about older adults and the internet.

Use 13 px font size.
Remote workers must be judged on how much they produce, while office workers can show up for eight hours and that’s what the office manager remembers.

That's a common situation. I've also seen remote workers get away with doing almost nothing while the co-located ones pick up the slack. I've seen remote working be used as a "reward" for some, and it's lack be a "punishment" for others.

Letting any of these situations happen is down to lousy management and leadership.

I do a heck of a lot of remote work myself - I see many advantages to doing so. But from what I've seen it's not a universal performance benefit.

I've seen smart, committed teams almost double their measured performance by deciding to co-locate to a single team room... even with all the skype video / IM / chat windows you could wish for open. There's a lot of ambient communication that happens in meatspace.

I really wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be a really smart decision for Yahoo!.
There is one use case for such a file-system - flash cards and sticks. The 64Gb version is a tricky case. I need to use it in Android (this is sdxc card), Linux desktop, Windows desktop, hey, may be Mac too! exFAT works for Android-Windows, but not for Linux. And Cyanogenmod does not seem to play good with exFAT yet, at least the release I got.
Anyone have any thoughts on why python and ruby are so similar, yet so far apart? They are obviously very close, because people switch between them all the time. And they are compared on everything (languages features, libraries, tooling...). I think it's a healthy competitive environment.
It is a different kernel with a netbsd userland. I somehow expect a Debian/minix to come out soon.
What? The iPhone was 320x480 and my current phone, which I am typing this on, is 320x480. It is a perfectly usable screen resolution, nobody needs HiDPI.
You have your parties muddled up. The website you are using is not 'the advertiser', they're the publisher.
I remember seeing a demo of Firefox OS running really smoothly on a phone which was even lower spec than this one. It made me realise the reason why mobile web apps are slow is bad browsers.
Lack of comments is at once annoying and beneficial: it forces your [JSON-based] configuration to be simple.
Today, I'll lose at least 50 karma points, but it's worth:

Why people still use Ruby?

1. Because they get dream day rates for maintaining rusty slow legacy systems

2. Because they do not want to learn new languages and can stay in their comfort zone

3. Because they think it's still 2005 and nobody cares about slow server response times

And now Ruby lovers, click on downvote or give your reasons why you still use Ruby.
The vast majority of the image doesn't change too much between frames.

I'm no image compressing genius but calculating only the deltas between frames and transmitting only those pixels that actually change by an order of magnitude (with some type of filter) should dramatically reduce bandwidth and storage size and cost by an order of magnitude.

Kind of like a large number of small git commits for slowly changing data - store large amounts of mostly duplicated data with progressive delta changes.
College Degree Required. But Why?
it does look like this, and it is unreadable, sorry mate
I call BS on most of the presentation. For example, throwing exceptions from a constructor is not only acceptable, it's the only way to prevent construction.
True! in this case 60% of the applicants were from the relevant industry.

Though I too had a initial apprehension about people not being interested in company information, analytics on the tests we ran said otherwise.
In 1999, Linux was already in the 2.0s or 2.2s; did your course deliberately use an old Linux kernel for simplicity?
As a student, I don't really like textbooks at all, printed or electronic. I consider them --and the supplemental materials like lecture slides provided by the publisher-- to largely be a crutch used by professors who either can't or won't tailor their instruction to the class and necessities at hand. That's not to say textbooks can't be useful when you're on your own learning a subject, but I've had far better experiences in-class with either online articles and tutorial work (think LON-CAPA) or good old fashioned blackboard work-through.

On a more fundamental level, there is absolutely no reason for textbooks to be priced as they are. This goes double for e-book versions, that are typically crippled DRM rentware wrapped in an interface that makes you want to tear your eyes out. I used to be frustrated that professors hadn't banded together and developed a creative commons style curricula online, or at least not required the latest versions of texts (older versions are typically far more readily available at an appropriate price). What on earth is stopping a motivated group of academics from putting together textbooks for all of the basic courses one encounters at a university? Hell, such projects already exist: Paul's Online Notes did more for me regarding Calculus than any textbook. But then I realized that the professors don't get to make those calls. They're made by people above them, which is ridiculous.
Is glyph width at base and top available to the layout algorithm? I don't know TeX that well.
Would have been more interesting without the crazy space-filling-curve-esque pattern. Harder to read this way.
It's fun, it's clean, it's simple, and it works.
I'm a huge Python fan and there is nothing in the world that would force me to switch to Ruby =P
Just curious: what made you switch?
That's like saying car drivers prefer real horses to mechanized steel animatronic ones.
true, that type of tracking is too useful, especially now that big players are used to having it. The browser's have the advantage here in both available options and agility so accelerating the arms race is probably a good thing.
Quantity.
Evan Phoenix (the creator) left in 2012 to work for LivingSocial. EngineYard, his former employer, had been funding work on it last I heard, but there haven't been any releases since 2011.

http://blog.fallingsnow.net/2012/03/28/a-new-door-opens/
Because it makes me happy.
This statement seems to be incorrect, but with some stretch it can be attributed to unfortunate wording.

The larger problem is that, ironically, the article actually fails to mention one of the key Y Combinators differentiators and ultimate marketing tool - Hacker News.
What about night surveillance? I doubt night-vision is possible at that altitude.
Congrats Ruby team - really well done. 20 great years.
This doesn't seem so clear-cut to me. Some quick and dirty calculations using 2012 data:

Yahoo: ~$280K profit per employee.

Google: ~$290K profit per employee (not including Motorola Mobility .

Microsoft: ~$180k profit per employee.

Apple: $590K profit per employee.

Apple being off the charts aside, broadly speaking Yahoo is right where they should be. This looks more like an attempt at culture change to me.

(That Apple figure is tremendous when you consider that 2/3rds of their employees work in the retail channel)
I like writing Ruby and the speed isn't at the point where it makes a difference. A much better argument would be pointing out the tens of serious security vulnerabilities this year. :)
I had to google "linux-libre". So they actually rip out all the proprietary code? Must have horrible driver support. Every piece of hardware on the market is proprietary... Where do you draw the line then. I'd rather draw the line above the kernel, so at least you get to run your free software!
There's a cleaner variation of this.

Once you see a user go through 3 cards, each failing the authorization, fail all subsequent purchase attempts without passing them to the bank. If you feel like tar-pitting the guy, show "timed out" errors and tell to contact the support or ask to try again with another card. Legit customers will contact the support and the frauds will continue supplying you with stolen credit card #s, which you, of course, will diligently log for the future reference.
I used to work in an advertising start-up, and I have no qualms about it. I think it's naive to consider it "unacceptable" or "evil" ... and there are two BIG reasons I say this: (1) Google and (2) Free Content vs Pay-walls
(1) Google essentially reads your emails and any searches you do, and provides ads based upon any/all data you provide to it (including Google+, Drive, etc.) Last time I checked Google was pretty popular and this business model was pretty well accepted...
(2) With so much free-content on the web, is it that much to ask that the people producing that content have a means to make a living? The fact that we can Google virtually ANY information in the world (even on our phones for crying-out-loud) is worth the small sacrifice that we see a few ads in the process
NodeJs Template Engines Benchmark
I read technical stuff on an iPad 4 and a Kindle DX. Both work really well (also, I use a second 24" monitor on a repositionable arm to view stuff -- OR's Safari is particularly bad on anything but a desktop computer.)
I think so. Besides the computers we had access in the laboratory were limited in resources so a smaller code base I guess had its benefits in compile time.
People still write PHP and it is even slower.
And who writes web services in pure Ruby?
The response speed depends very little on the language used.
Let me guess.. Node/Clojure/hip-language-du-jour-nobody-uses brogrammer?

Disclaimer: I am not a Ruby programmer.
Its language semantics are a sweet spot for me.

And in my kind of web applications I handle massive load via HTTP Caching, leaving your "fast" language without cache-aware architecture far behind, thank you very much.
As a UX guy, the prevalence of the Pinterest layout has made me cringe a bit. But I think it definitely has a place, given a few caveats:

1) As others have said, if your site's purpose is more discoverability than navigability, then this layout may work for you.

2) This layout can work if you have the discipline to pare down on everything else. I've found that using Pinterest-style layouts has forced us to really reconsider whether content on our page needs to be there, since everything becomes so prominent. In some ways it's helped us flatten our IA.
Frankly the data shows otherwise ... from my previous work in the industry the majority of people respond well to retargeting simply because it's relevant and useful. Hell it's been working for Google for years...
I was thinking about this lately a lot as I started doing some Python after almost 10 years of Ruby, I think it boils down to the simplicty vs. elegance tradeoff. If you want to have elegant, very high-level APIs that hide a lot of details, like Rails with has_many :posts in class definitions etc. you have to sacrifice simplicity and transparency - this is what defines Ruby in comparison to Python, in hundreds of places Ruby chooses to be elegant sacrificing simplicity when Python does the opposite. As a result Ruby code is often a bit shorter and reads a bit more easily but Python runs faster and makes it easier to understand the code in its full detail, since there is much less "cleverness" going on behind the scenes.
I solved that by buying an embarrassing number of Kindles -- I just leave one dedicated to a book as I'm reading it, and keep it in a convenient and obvious location. I have audiobooks on my iphone for the gym (using the Audible app), audiobooks on mp3 SD cards for my car, a Kindle by the bed, and have a DX, iPad, second computer for reading things which change more frequently.

4-6 Kindles and everything electronic is still a lot easier for me than storing books.
That's exactly what I mean. People feel very strongly for one or the other. Yet, even you, can't deny that they are very similar! Compare them to Java, Lisp, C, Go, Haskell, Perl,...
Of course it is. "Nght" (infrared) vision is possible in space, and anywhere else. Infrared light isn't limited to (or by) the atmosphere. In fact, infrared satellite images played an important part in the Bin Laden raid.
Well, it's Canada.

Sharing sufficient information to demonstrate there's no money here seems pretty sensible to me (hey I'm a student doing this part time and the app's only been downloaded 500 times @ 1.99 each and apple keeps 30%... so I've made $700 so far...), but if you want to sue me, go for it :)

1/10 the size of the US, and the awards for infringement are nowhere near as large as the US (no triple damages, no especially favourable venues, etc)... so this is interesting as it happens so rarely. As for the numbers, 48 trials in 2012 sort of addresses the size of the market.
Don't feed the troll, please...
You can generally solve the DRM problem through bookwarez. I have ~no problem pirating to format shift. I'm fortunate that all the academic stuff I care about is available as pdf preprints directly from the author (cs/crypto vs. bio, I guess)
I downvoted you just because of your anarchical attitude ... That is not the right way to start a healthy/useful discussion.
What do you mean by "so far apart"?
Hey grey-area, yeah I’m yet to fix all these up. Truth be told my karma count is a little low so I wasn’t even aware of the down vote links. Will amend.
That's probably an example of 'hidden in plain sight'

Other incubators may try to replicate it, maybe with a Web 2.0 look and hiring a couple of people to post news and then we end up with a (worse) BI/SAI 2.0
In my computer theory class, my professor recommends one book but says that his lectures are self-contained and reading the book isn't necessary but could be helpful.

I read books on my iPad but not technical books. I think the main problem is navigation, I'm not sure, there's just something about it.
And you deserve to lose those 50 points. Why do people still write silly comments like this?

1. Probably 75% of new startups are using rails, and rightly so. You'd need a good reason not to use it. "Rusty slow legacy systems" - what nonsense.

2. If there was a better language, they'd probably learn it? Or are you trying to insinuate Ruby programmers are dumb/lazy?

3. If you are blaming your slow web page on Ruby, you're doing it wrong.
Fuck what they think.

Harden the fuck up.
Why is this post at the top? It's nothing but flame bait. It consists entirely of feces-slinging, and not a single substantive topic is addressed.
No, this means that petty street crime, protests, rallys, etc. are being monitored but closed-door talks between politicians, lobbyists, and finance execs are not. It's directly targeting the blue-collar outdoors and protecting the white-collar.

But in reality this isn't about fighting crime even. It's about making money. It's no secret that our wars our dying down. How will the drone manufacturers make money? They re-purpose their inventions for use at home and they'll begin selling them to foreign allies who will re-sell them to foreign enemies. Add to that the tremendous manpower behind these drones and there's billions to be made.
The author also runs a blog written in C (blog.fefe.de)
"This is totally stupid and insane and only idiots will do it."

I hear your point, but this kind of language is no way to get it across.
For the simple reason that not everyone you deal with is altruistic and has your best interests at heart. "anything [said] can and will be used against [the defendant] in the court of public opinion".

Release of all information, without the required changes in human behaviour can only lead to self-censorship on a grand scale as people try and cover all the flaws an blemishes that might result in them not getting promoted (because the other candidates go to the gym more often and lead healthier lives) or getting that mortgage because you like to drink wine a little more than the average person and so your long term health might be put at risk.

The list of possible problems is endless.
To be fair, the only versions higher than 2.01 listed on that page are 2.50 (which adds the ability to store all metadata on a separate partition... not that useful) and 2.60 (which adds support for "partial overwrites" on sequentially-recorded media).

Neither of those seem terribly useful for the "UDF filesystem on a shared hard-disk partition" use-case we're talking about, so I don't think Linux's limit of UDF 2.01 is very important in practice.
Compress PNG
Compress PNG images into PNG-8 format with transparency support and full browser compatibility.
> That is not the right way to start a healthy/useful discussion.

Maybe you are right but I am just fed up that on HN the forefront of new tech still such old slow technology gets upvoted on a regular base mostly by people fearing their go to tech is vanishing away. Ruby/DHH/its entire opinionated ecosystem is so 2005.
I think they are very different too... I just can't explain how or where. Some people SWEAR by one of the two, and refuse to use the other. That's pretty harsh for languages that similar. There must be a reason... (The simplicity vs elegance argument makes sense)

Edit: I think I mean the communities are far apart.
I downvoted you for writing "loose" instead of "lose".
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So, counterpoint: I'd argue that it's much more important to spend some of that time in your 20s putting in the effort learning how to stay hungry and stay foolish. Then you have the whole rest of your life to accomplish great things.

I'm 31. I'm working on a project with a low chance of success, but it will change the world if it does succeed. (Granted, it's done as part of a large organization, but I also haven't ruled out startups if the large organization ceases to be a good place to innovate, and now I have the financial wherewithal to do so.) The main difference now vs. when I founded a startup at 26 is that now I know the chance of success is low, but I don't care. Because I've learned that just because I don't see a solution immediately doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. And that this is what I want to do, my basic needs are taken care of, and so it really doesn't matter if it doesn't work, I'll be happier having tried. And that other things that would otherwise be distractions are only distractions to the extent that I let them be so - my friends will be there when I want to invite them out, my bills are on auto-pay, and I have the right to say "no" to other projects at work.

Your 20s are a time when you outgrow most of your insecurities and learn who you are and what you really care about. If accomplishing great things or founding a startup or just plain innovating is one of them, then you can do that for the rest of your life. If you're just doing it because the Internet says you should, then you won't be any happier having finished it off in your 20s than if you spent that time learning about yourself.
Is ruby 2.x faster than 1.9.x. Any benchmarking data?