skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just knew that the first two were going to be the Monty Hall problem and 0.99999...==1. I'm actually surprised that so many people don't accept that last one; I understood it immediately when I learned it (I was 12).

The third blows your mind until you realize that, simply put, infinity is not a number and common arithmetic doesn't apply.

The sixth is not really math, although it perplexes a lot of people. I remember that a few years ago my sister didn't get that, if searching for "termX" wouldn't yield any results, searching for "termX and termY" also wouldn't give anything, no matter how much "termY" would.

I'd never seen the 8th, but it's beautiful, and very simple too! Does it really confuse people? Maybe I'm too mathy, but it's obvious to me.

The 9th one is a classic, but I feel it's less "controversial" because if you know (or have been told) that the series diverge, chances are that you have a relatively solid base of mathematical knowledge.

I encountered the 11th in a list of geometry problems recently; I had to prove it. The first time I saw the problem, just before starting a geometry course, I didn't have a clue. I shitted my pants thinking that I was going to fail the course if my exam was like that! Then, after a few weeks of study, I came back and immediately saw the proof, without thinking much (you just have to use the intercept theorem: each side of the parallelogram is parallel to one original polygon's diagonal).

The 7th and the last one don't seem too different than the Monty Hall... our brains are not very well wired for probability estimation and you can see that in many situations.

The rest are nice pieces of pop math (if you feel that "pop math" is not much of an oxymoron, anyway).
Attended private and public schools (nearly a 50/50 split). Private school was not quite religious but had a Christian church next as part of the campus and some of our teachers were the priests. Became an atheist somewhere in college. Highly entrepreneurial family. Have been an entrepreneur myself since probably high school. Started and ran half a dozen businesses with my own money. Also worked in industry (employee) at various levels (Junior Engineer to CTO) for about twenty years.

Is that what you needed to know?
I liked Eric Lippert series of article on regular expressions http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/tags/regular+exp...
Really?

"Despite speculation on the Internet that Summly only licensed its summarizing technology from SRI International, an independent research institute, Mr. D’Aloisio said the technology was developed by Summly and that the company owned 100% of the intellectual property behind the service."

http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2013/03/26/what-does-30-mil...
I was an 80WPM 3 finger typed after typing a ton playing runescape as a kid. After being forced to take two years of formal typing class, I became a 120WPM standard typist. I only had 2 or 3 years of bad habits to break, though.
+1 for seeing the word free so far and every book I've gone to click on is not free. Very frustrating.
Pretty obvious joke, management as Brownian Motion
Not that I disagree about adding a description, but why wouldn't you watch a demo video if you want to know what the app does?
I understand curried functions are a very common thing to build in functional languages. So some nicely 'pretty printed' version would be nice. Or at least the least some kind of "can't print a function" in a nice way.

This looks like the kind of thing I get when my C linker has horribly choked on my code, what is the benefit of displaying: M1690418375.show_M1690418375 to the user? What should I do with that piece of information?

How do I 'add an instance declaration for (GHC.Show.Show ([[a0]] -> [[a0]]))'? I'm guessing that this is basically "suggesting" I implement printing for all functions? Or just for map? I'm not sure. I'm sure I'm not doing it, and it may well not even be possible?
I doubt it, I've heard of other peoples' experiences with bribes (not China), and they're FAR less than an average U.S. treatment.
The useful thing about a physical insurance card is that everybody can read it when you're unresponsive and in need of help. A smartphone app is not going to be able to replicate that.

Only thing you could do is change your lock screen to include this kind of data (and/or a pointer).
Compute price bottom may be in sight
You can't fool proof a framework into making it impossible for a developer to make it insecure.
I agree with most of the people that commented already. I have though about getting a watch (novelty/binary). Then I realize that my phone is always on me and the time is right there.

The only watches I've seen appear to be to signal status. Smart phones do that just as well too.

There are probably special occasions that a watch would be better than a phone but I can't even think of any decent ones. Best I can do is comment that watches are touching you and could include that feedback from your body...heart rate, bp etc. Pretty narrow use case if you ask me though.
Or just Twisted.
I don't have much time to write this comment. But before I head to school I'd like to posit that these sorts of attacks are largely our fault.

When I say "our", I mean the loose knit group of sysadmins, self proclaimed "computer people", hackers, phreakers, security experts, and government officials trying to quell the increasing lurch of botnets and malware that has gone on since the Eternal September.

Botnets get big because users don't know any better, users don't know better partly out of laziness, partly because they feel they can't know any better. I don't know of a single site I can point to and say "If you really give a shit about not getting your credit card data stolen, go here." Instead as far as I can tell the majority of users in this demographic have their needs "met" by fraudsters selling bogus antivirus packages and weird proprietary utilities.

If you want a computing environment that can survive open, it needs users who can use open.
Y Combinator Demo Day 2013: Still looking for the next Airbnb or Dropbox
Demo videos are not suitable for play in certain situations - like when I don't have headphones.
Management has its place, but the power relationship is all fucked up. It should be more of a symbiotic guidance/mentoring relationship than a "serve my career goals or I fire you" extortion that generates buttloads of Fourth Quadrant Work ( http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadra... ).
Unofficial Flipboard Flipit Google Chrome Plugin
So if you don't want any static typing, don't use TypeScript. But if you are adopting TypeScript to retrofit some kind of static typing onto your code, and if you use any kind of functional programming helpers (map, reduce, filter, etc.) then generics are basically a necessity.

Otherwise you have two options: define separate methods for mapArrayOfNumbers, mapArrayOfStrings, etc. or have a lot of casts to the ground type and write a lot of code that isn't actually statically typed.
Agree, this is mostly controversial for non-math people. Although the Monty Hall problem supposedly caused a lot of mail from people, some even math teachers, who got it wrong but didn't realize and/or admit it.
Videos have higher time commitments than well formed descriptions. I grudgingly clicked on the video because there is no description, but I almost closed the tab instead. Then I immediately skipped to the middle of the video anyway.
I'm not really disagreeing with you, at least in the sense that I do agree that market economies create wealth and wealth is a necessary pre-requisite for funding research. What I think I'm getting at is that I disagree with the common trope that market competition creates fundamental innovation. I think market competition makes companies slaves to the bottom line, fighting tooth and nail in the dirt just to survive. To the extent that the market creates innovation, it does so in companies well-insulated from market competition (monopolies, oligopolies, etc). The decline of Hewlett Packard is a great example. When they became just another hardware company, competing on price in printers, PC's, etc, they ceased to be innovative.

Interesting reading: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/features.... You should really buy a copy of Tim Wu's book to appreciate Vail's line of thought.
MongoDB 2.4 Javascript Changes
It's not only the glossiness, it's also about the original size. Barcodes work because they are at a fixed size, and a picture on screen can seldom reproduce the exact same size.

This is also why QR Codes have reference points (those three corner blocks or the big centre block)
RightScale says its free price-tracking service can wring the most out of cloud
I guess if the dev in question is super lazy. Even with great refactor support, I never begin a refactor until the code I want to touch is covered by a test case.
Fear is a hell of a thing.
Microwave ovens don't heat from the outside in, like a conventional oven. Microwaves are passed through the food, and the changing magnetic field causes water and fat molecules to move through a process called dielectric heating. The rate that food heats up within a microwave is completely dependent on what it's made of, not where it is.
pipes?
It just reeks of stupid to me.
I get no text in the blue box, but my Chrome is past the required version...

Your browser version: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.43 Safari/537.31

Currently Google Chrome 26.0.1403.0 or above is required.
Walter Jon Williams' "Hardwired", 1986. Protagonist had billions of dollars on a chip that he had implanted in his body for safekeeping. I thought "that will never work."
He also had people jacked in to the stock market, getting 10-second loans to trade with. I thought that would happen one day, but we just have algorithms doing that for us.
In my case: I'm reading this on the bus in a loud environment where I pay through the nose for mobile data.
interesting - the high intensity coding approach did not start with Epitech. It started with Epita, the school created before Epitech. The 15 hours on boarding was called the swimming pool (you learn to swim or you drown). You started that right at the beginning of school with no programming experience. Number of students "giving up" (leaving the school right away) was broadcasted via a Unix based IM system. Goal was only to keep the students who "get it". We would have daily projects to turn in before midnight and most projects names where taken out of the Hitchhiker's. Nicolas is an awesome guy and is very smart as is his right hand Kwame.
He was the sys admin for the school and led all the technical curriculum. They are both big believers in learn it / dot it yourself and that's what Nicolas already implemented at Epita as most of the technical classes were led by students. They can be tough but they are great technical mentors. I learned a lot there and I think it was worth the money.
I remember that on our first day we had to code 'bdsh' (a light database in bash). I went to them to ask "what is bash?" (because at the time I was barely nailing the login screen). Answer was "man bash". Then I asked "what's man?" - answer was "man man". That's pretty much the approach.
They aren't planning to add collection methods, just to provide a means for existing methods like Array#map and Array#filter to be typed. Right now there is no way to write a type signature that says, given an array of numbers and a function from numbers to strings, Array#map returns an array of strings. This allows that.
Are edutech startups plugging an innovation gap in our universities?
Aaaaah, I get it! I can never tell something on HN is a Michael O'Church-ishm or something I ought to be familiar with. I am going to have to start using that one.
And really, does a $99 Apple/Samsung/Google &c. watch act as a social signal? I don't think so.
For me one of the draws to vim isn't vim in its bare state, but vim with my plugins of choice, and I have yet to find a vim emulation plugin that loads the vim runtime, with the exception being eclim for Eclipse; unfortunately, the vim-mode for eclim is just vim with a janky plugin, and the embedded mode doesn't work on OS X because MacVim can't be embedded the way vim-gtk can.
That is astounding.
Does that mean you have no choice but to choose less secure defaults over more secure ones?
Mobile Games with cloudbase.io
MongoLab: Emergency maintenance in response to security vulnerability
>Management has its place, but in most companies it's a class of intermediate extortionist thugs who keep talent down: you support my career goals, or you're gone yesterday. Only the most progressive companies (Valve, Github) trust engineers to work directly for the company. No wonder our industry is so fucked.

Wow. In three sentences you likened management to the mafia, said they were only concerned about themselves, complained about lack of trust towards engineers, then said our industry is fucked, all without a hint of irony. It sounds like you want everyone to trust you for your genius talent but you don't feel you should have to extend any trust the other way. That's now how trust or human interaction works, and the whole statement makes you come off like an immature prima donna. You're making us look bad and I'm almost embarrassed to share the same job title as you.
If someone wants their e-mail to be truly private and secure what options are available?
If that thing accounted for all the social webs, I'd never have a job ever. =p
I would agree with you if it weren't for the "government-is-evil hyperbole" line. I took that as an example of saying "that person must be wrong about their experience because this other thing I experience is actually good." That line says to me "you are wrong" with a description that tries to explain why. I admit I could be mistaken but that's the way I read it. I saw nothing in the comment along the lines of this is how it could be if some things were different.
Mostly database systems. Building a custom ERP system for a client right now, .NET/SQLServer now (because that is what I know best), SomethingFree later when their crushing work debt is over (and the system I'm making will help them get rid of their work debt, the system they are running right now is awful). But I've also done some minor hardware prototyping and graphic design work for a few people. It's basically whatever people want me to do, having gained a reputation for being a guy who can figure things out.

Hell, I've even made enough money for random toys off of my own line of t-shirts aimed at military veterans. It's been nuts, all of the different things I've gotten into in just the last year. Without the soul crushing traditional employment arrangement, I'm able to really get a lot of new projects going. Even considering opening a coworking space in which I charge desk-rent!
"These attacks are peaking at 300 gb/s (gigabits per second).

Is that around like 3000 compromised computers? Maybe 2-5 botnets worth? I might be a bit off on the prices here, but that sound like maybe ~$1k/day on the market? would be nice to get a price tag on the "'biggest attack in history'".
I'd see it as akin to "forcing" yourself to learn a foreign language. You might think it is worthwhile but at the same time not find it a pleasant process.

(I'm of course not implying that everybody will find either of those tasks unpleasant).
I agree, the problem however is that threats are constantly evolving and getting more complicated. Even most IT people don't understand the threats properly (I know I struggle).

It used to be that could just tell people to install a security suite on their computer and they'd be mostly OK. I don't think that's really true any longer.

You could also partly lay the blame at Microsoft's door in getting users to start connecting to internet with an OS designed without any reasonable security (Windows 95).

Now that we have operating systems with better security it's hard to change people's usage patterns to take advantage of that.
Ahm, nazi?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
The main problem is that some people decide what's good and what's not online and paint with the broadest brush possible. Spamhaus, sadly I say, is used by a lot of providers as gospel and a lot of innocent sites are hurt.
I think it is an analogy to brownian motion - the random movement of particles in a fluid.
You do realize there are actually courses in a technique called touch typing? Fortunately, it won't clash with your bad habits. I can hunt and peck on mobile keyboards yet my brain uses a whole different part of my memory to keep my touch typing sharp and untainted from the lazy use of iOS' autocomplete, never confusing the two.
19-Year-Old Student Develops Ocean Cleanup Array
It isn't better if that power is given over to you and your buddies who are not democratically elected. It is worse.
You've answered the question "What do you think management's role should be?" instead of the question he asked.

And how can you have a symbiotic guidance/mentoring relationship when most devs consider management to be just about the worst scum on the planet? Relationships are a two-way street.
They try sometimes, and then I tell them that I'm not going to do what they want but what they need. The lack of debt thing makes it really easy to be up front with clients, which somewhat ironically makes it less likely any issues will grow to the point that one or both halves of the relationship end up disgruntled.
There is a decent iOS Archon.
Do people honestly still believe this trope about the hospital needing your physical insurance card when you're unconscious? That they downgrade your emergency care if you don't have the good insurance? This is not a thing that happens.

The physical card is so you have the info in a difficult-to-lose form when you go to a doctor's appt, check into the ER with a broken bone, etc.
We need content writers
The top layer of our backend is node.js running behind nginx. We use redis for storage, along with a bunch of flat files for certain things. Under that is a mostly ruby / mysql layer that manages a bunch of C programs for doing various number crunching tasks.
Good point about the title. But to answer your question, as far as I know Ukko told me that they want to expand quickly to the US and also countries such as Russia from the Eastern side.
3000 computers means each one is putting out a full 100Mb/s, which unless those 3000 computers are in data centers seems unlikely.

Seems like 30,000 nodes at 10Mb/s would be more likely?

But I don't have experience in botnets, just curious.
This is not a new problem -- newsgroups had this problem back in the day. I think the solution now is the same as it was back then -- better scoring/sorting/killfile tools that the end user can control.

The death of newsgroups, was also the death of an structured, parseable discussion forum, where the end user had the final say on how they'd see the discussion. Nowadays, we need moderators and the forum software on the server to re-implement these things that newsreaders had worked out.

I've setup my own ttrss instance, and it has some basic scoring abilities. Unfortunatly not all rss feeds provide the text of the article (or even the lede) in the feed directly, so the scoring ends up crippled.
More often that I'd like, I've seen people get too deep into their projects, and forget that things are supposed to be fun.

They start trying to coerce their project into a business, and it not only looks sad, but destroys what they loved in the process.

I certainly understand the temptation, but I hope I maintain the wisdom to know where the line should be.
Except millions of people do master very hard videogames, which has little benefit once you stop playing that game. Vim is a game I keep on playing eight plus hours a day throughout the years (at my day job then on my side projects.) Oh, and I find it a lot of fun to force limitations to improve my usage. Maybe you should only really get into vim if you find the whole thing fun in the first place.
you can replace vim with eclipse and all you said still stands valid.
My connection is crappy and I don't expect the video to load reliably.
To play devil's advocate:

- Can't failures be counteracted by having failsafe measures? For example, if the market goes down more than 5% in a few-minute period, the market temporarily shuts down for a cooloff period of several hours to diagnose what's happening.

- Isn't HFT irrelevant to long term investment, given that it erodes away short-term profit, leading to accurate pricing of the stock?
Brownian Motion is a fractal that is the limiting case (step size -> 0) of a Random Walk. It scales as O(x^0.5). For example, the per-day volatility of a stock might be 1%; then the per-year volatility is (in theory) 16% (assuming a 256-day year).

At work, there seems to be an accurate square-root metaphor (probably unrelated to actual Brownian motion) in the use of resources and time. You really get stuff done in 3 hours out of your 9-hour day; the other 6 are meetings and face time and bullshit. 2 days out of your work week see real, macroscopic progress; 3 are wasted. Seven of your 49 work-weeks are on projects that actually get used, and the other 42 are on manager-blessed busywork. Six years of your career end up actually mattering; the other 30 are wasted on jobs that go nowhere. So you get 3 h/d * 2 d/w * 7 w/y * 6 y = 252 hours per career that really mean something. Better make the fuckers count.

That's depressing and probably not that accurate. If you can take charge of your time and responsibility for your progress, you can do a lot better.

Brownian Management is the pointless drifting about that goes on when no one has any sense of direction. It generates the world where (as they say in many businesses) 90% of work is counteracting negative side effects of other work.
Get a rhythm going, so you type at a steady pace (slow at first, of course). Say each letter out loud. H-A-C-K-E-R space N-E-W-S period

Don't look at the keyboard, either. Just practice this for a little bit every day (re-type a blog post or two, including the source code) and you'll get the hang of it.
It was the original title of both the linked article and the HN headline. ("This Pizza is worth $750,000")
Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack
Much like advertising is 90% ineffective, but no one can predict which 90%, it seems very hard to predict which code will live on forever. Deep enterprise back end stuff gets cancelled in 6 months due to reorg / whatever, some crazy CGI written as a shell script lives for decades.
Back in the 80s, i got home from school and started loading some karate game on my c64, the load time was like 10minutes, when it was done it played a sound bite of a long drawn out, growling , karate punch sound HIIIIYahhhhh!!!!, I turned the volume up to full blast so I could hear it when it was done, and went downstairs to heat up a burrito. I'm home by myself and I'm like in the 4th grade, anyway I guess I forgot about the game and I'm eating my burrito when I hear the horrendously loud growling hiyah, it sounded like zombie apocalypse, I shit myself and ran outside, I've never been so scared in my life. I found my friend on the street and told him there was a ghost in my house. We grabbed some sticks and went inside, totally shitting, only to find the game ready to play. I felt like a dumbshit.
Take Lua to the Clouds and Luvit
Small Humanoid Robot Helps Autistic Kids Direct Their Attention
Vanderbilt University engineers and autism experts designed NAO, a humanoid robot that's helping autistic kids overcome developmental issues.
The great thing is that the time-altering mechanics actually work really well and they even managed to make a user-friendly UI for what is arguably a rather complicated concept.

However, the actual RTS part is woefully mediocre and has problems such as bad unit AI and bad path-finding. At least this was my impression of v1.0. I guess I should take another look one of these days and see if the numerous patches have improved things.
Scheme is pretty simple.