skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly, that's what a "fixed point" is.

Fun fact about fixed points #1: Put a sheet of paper on a desk. Notice the precise area of the desk's surface that it covers. Now ball up the sheet of paper however you wish, without tearing it. Put it down again in such a way that every part of that sheet is somewhere over the original area that the paper occupied. Then there is at least one point on the paper that is precisely above its original location.

Fun fact about fixed points #2: Some functions, even simple ones suitable for a desktop calculator, do not reliably approach a fixed point when applied repeatedly to their own output. You can see this in action at Wikipedia "Cobweb plot" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobweb_plot) for the function known as the "logistic map", y = rx(1-x). Varying the initial value of x (really, x-subscript-zero) and the parameter r can cause the map to converge to a fixed point, to enter a repeating sequence of any length, or to remain in a finite range without ever repeating. This last behavior is known as "chaos".
But at what price amortized over the same length of time?
Yeah, I was at GDC, and the Squad guys said, behind me in Rocket's talk "Gee, everyone wants resources, we should get that done really soon."

The thing I love about KSP is that the tutorial for how to play beyond the launch pad is literally a NASA video from the 70's about orbital mechanics.

Oh, and there are few things in gaming as rewarding as landing a Kerbal on Duna, and then realizing you've got to just leave him there because it was a one-way trip.
It is tiny compared to the old one, or any e-mail application you might use; being tucked in the corner only makes it worse.
You could look to replace either it's all about what you see as the problem. Does your spouse email you your shopping list? Do you email yourself a to do list or do you write it down in something like Remember The Milk?
Glenn Beck angry at Google for Chavez Doodle instead of Easter
Given a public key you can look up the balance in the blockchain. Casascius has a cool system where the private key is hidden behind a tamper-evident hologram so you can be sure money hasn't been removed, but obviously that's not a DIY option.
If it costs $352/hour to run the roadrunner and they can only get $150/hour in income to operate it, it don't matter how much it cost to build it.

Assuming they already paid for the replacement super-computer too etc. Otherwise, sure it matters. Instead of finding $xx-$xxx million to build a more efficient one, you might be better off to pay the electricity bill difference. This is still in the top 25 computers in the world, so it can be used for a lot of things, but we don't know all the details.
I just started Effective Django: http://effectivedjango.com/

I'm also in the process of learning more about Rails via Michael Hartl's book: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book

Hartl's book is awesome, but a LOT of new information thrown at you at once, and very opinionated. Still a great resource, though - especially for the low, low cost of free.
Old compose let me use Vim with "It's All Text" in a plain text window. I don't see any options for Vim on the new compose.
The issue with Coursera is the synchronous model. The material's good and the selection's excellent, and they deserve a lot of props for solving such a critical problem. College life is sanitized. Real World interjections are rare enough, at that age, to be handled case-by-case when it comes to extensions and such. Adult life is messy and complicated-- sick parents become more common, job demands fluctuate-- and synchronous education is just brittle. I didn't find Coursera courses to be "too fast". The paces were fine, so long as I didn't have fires in the rest of life.

It's not a "dirty secret", though. One should know and expect that. If anything, low retention is a good thing insofar as it means that the courses are demanding and people who aren't dedicated trickle out.

I feel like we have three problems to solve in online education. I'm sure there are plenty more, but 4 stand out right now:

(1) Hidden node discovery. You're 23. You just learned Python. You want to be a Data Scientist in 3 years. How do you get there? "Data Scientist job" is one node, and there are a bunch of prerequisites to those (hidden nodes) and prerequisites to those. How do you navigate this network? The 23-year-old programmer doesn't know where those hidden nodes are. In other words, the Google for Learning and Development.

(2) Forward learning. Recommendations. Things that would be interesting to a person that she doesn't know she wants to know, because she doesn't know that it exists. Since there's a lot of investment here (you're not just buying a book and possibly reading it, but anticipating putting 50+ cognitively intense hours into a course) it would be nice if the service gave indications as to why it was making those rec's.

(3) Interactivity and (buzzword warning) "gameification". When you haul out an 800-word machine learning textbook, you often have to go for a long time (hours) without the "kick". There's a flat array of 50 exercises of which 25 are easy, and 25 are really hard and will take a long time (they might be worth doing, but they aren't quick) and it's hard to pick which ones to focus on. The programming exercises in texts often don't get your creative juices flowing. Not a lot of people can get through long spells without feedback, and the skill of "making your own feedback" seems to be losing ground in our distracted culture.

(4) "Social". Online study groups. This is Big and I don't know how it's going to evolve. How do we keep quality control in place and make sure that our automated expert discovery mechanisms work?
And you just taught me that "ape" is a verb! I know, really off topic...
You really feel that JS "couldn't be further away from the machine?" What about languages that don't have a specified execution model? Haskell and other MLs, for example.
All I'm trying to say is that "a target for higher-level languages" is not a defining attribute of C in a way that makes "JavaScript is the new C" a helpful analogy.
> Why Americans were choosing to get away from each other when say, their counterparts in western european haven't been, and aren't living anywhere near such isolated, unhealthy lives, is a question worth asking.

Indeed. When Lisbon was expanded in the 1960's the new neighourhoods were laid out so that people could walk to their local church and primary school. The model post-war development in the US was Lewittown. My theory is that it was the availability of cars that caused the difference. I do not think "white flight" (read: unskilled labor) played a part, both Portugal and America experienced urbanization in the interwar period.
FYI: this does not work if you have MapGL enabled. You just see the normal map.
> What is the message Google is communicating to everyone?

"April Fools'"
even then, I'd rent a day's worth of time for a prompt with a petaflop processor :)
So I set up a VPS for the first time this week, here's how it went:

1. Shell? SSH? Wtf is this? Console? Huh? Why am I using something that looks like DOS, it's 2013! Where is the GUI and menus?!

So I learned about Shell/SSH, connected to my server, root and all that stuff.

2. Navigating folders and directories - dear god, this was a nightmare. I never used 'cd \' since '98 and that's only cause I wanted to run DOS games.

3. Kept seeing all these commands with '-' that makes installing extensions seem oh so easy! I wanted APC for PHP, stared at this page (http://pecl.php.net/package/APC) for an hour, trying to figure out what to do. Googled like mad. Searching for anything.

Learned about "pecl install APC", nope no luck. Then I was told to compile it from source. Yeah, I know exactly what that means! Spent the next 4 hours trying to understand why phpize wouldn't work!

Oh, I wasn't doing it from the right directory. -_-

I mean, I'm slowly beginning to see how it all fits together but none of the education sites teaches you this stuff!

It's like learning cooking recipes when you don't know how to turn the stove on, or what a stove even looks like. Or what's the difference between gas and electricity stove, how to turn on the tap to get water, etc. You learn a great recipe, know all the ingredients and the cooking time down to the second, but when it comes to use the tools and actually cook? Nope - cause I don't know how to turn on the stove or know what a stove looks like! (I know this is an extreme analogy)

I wish tutorials would start with projects and setting it up from scratch. If you're going to show me how to do something localhost, you have to show me how to do it on a server (and set up) as well or else I'll never be able to make that connection. (Well not never, but makes it harder)

Oh, editing files in the terminal is a blast too :P http://amath.colorado.edu/computing/unix/vi/ This saved my life that day.

So…I definitely vote for teaching the environment before programming.

PS: I did eventually install APC…after an entire day :P Now I'm trying to find and learn about setting up master/staging/production (and what it all means).

Edit: Just to give some context of why I needed VPS - I wanted root access so I can make a wiki have clean URL (rewrite) and figured why not, learn about VPS. Then that's where I realized I need to learn 10 other things to do this one single thing. The APC was a suggested caching option to improve the site, and trying to do that also needed me to learn more stuff. So it's all kind of ties together when you're trying to accomplish a (seemingly) tiny thing.
@themgt (your comment is dead)

The variety of people that I interact with socially is exactly the reason why I have not been socially starved by a few of them having kids. Four or five of them having kids is of little consequence to me. A majority of them having kids would be different. Were they all in a narrow age/maturity range, I would run the risk of that happening in a short period of time, but they are not.

I think that anyone who finds themselves, seemingly overnight, in an "all my friends need to find babysitters" situation is really the one that needs to consider the breadth of their social engagement.
The tri-labs have a rotating schedule for acquiring new machines, that include capacity and capability classes (the later being RR). The last time I was in the computing center at LANL the computing floor was quite packed. So, regardless of the claims made in the article for disposal reasons, there are other issues such as total machine weight, cooling requirements (which dominate), making room for new machines, etc...

I do not know if RR will be physically shredded, but I'm hoping that it is retired to the brand-new PRObE (http://nmc-probe.org/) computing center where RR would be available for use by academic researchers.
A tiny unreadable picture. Pretty useless...
Made me touch my monitor, silly me
Mine too: http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=prn3nvnrikl7ewpf...
People could optionally broadcast their pseudonymous votes, using cryptography to avoid impersonation.

That would actually be a lot richer than the current "one vote is one vote" systems, since you could learn which people you tend to agree with.
Almost 6,000 synchronous commits per second to a 7,200 rpm disk seems high to me.

Anyone seeing those numbers for any database that synchronously writes the log to disk?
and mine: http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userhash=prn3nvnrikl7ewpf...
I'm a big fan of Codeacademy myself. But, as someone who doesn't come from a technical background, I feel like I'm often completing many of their lessons, but not internalizing the information or actually learning how to code.

I don't plan on giving up, but I'm curious if others have had that experience or if I'm the only person who's figured out how to use Codeacademy without actually learning to code.
Regarding your latter point, I don't think monads are even that abstract. "Monad" just happens to be something out of category theory so it has a mathematical weird-sounding name that you MIGHT guess has something to do with monoids -- if you know what monoids are -- so people think it has to be something complicated when in practice it's just a nice unified interface for glue code.
Politics: Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws
What startup is that? Can you post a link?
What are Facebook & Instagram missing?
Maybe devtable[1] could be extended in a way thats a little more bent towards code education.

[1] http://try.devtable.com/
any thoughts how you would implement this? To apply the sepia filter to the street view images would double the storage used for all the images, which is huge! Alternatively to apply the sepia filter each time a image is loaded would add a lot of load to the servers, especially if the joke is spread around the world? So some kind of caching would be in place? Or is it done in browser with the flash plugin which would be the most boring option, but also the most plausible... (that would also explain why the webgl version does not work)

The world map is just images at different zoom levels with an algorithm that adds trees, that would not be a problem I guess?
The problem I have with mailbox is I feel that I don't get enough email in my gmail account to warrant even considering it.

Most people use exchange for email, I would love to see this support it.
Archos announces UT 101 and 116 UTS: two tablets running Ubuntu [4/1]
I have a hard time following the origami. After folding 1-2-3-4, I have a retangular cube. How am I supposed to accomplish fold #5? Sorry for being dense, not an origami guy. Anyone got a pic how how it's supposed to look like?
I'm the author, and yes: it's a cry for help :) I have too many projects that never gets off the ground, and hopefully this will trigger (at least some) developers to answer questions, or even ask them through a pull request. Furthermore: I don't pretend to know all the answers concerning REST, so I'm hoping this will trigger more people to contribute (it's either that, or people get annoyed by unanswered questions and just move on).
I totally agree that commitment is a major part of any educational success, and paying for something drastically increases our commitment and motivation.

At kenHub[1], we offer anatomy online training for medical students, physiotherapists etc. Since we are working in a collaboration with the Charité University[2], we offer students at the university the same content other students pay for, completely free. Our statistics shows around a factor of 8x in engagement of paying vs. non-paying students[3].

[1]https://www.kenhub.com
[2]http://www.charite.de/en/charite
[3]http://imgur.com/5eG3teP
It is an April Fool's story, of course (not by me!). For a split-second, I almost believed because Archos would do something like that.

Original French text: http://archoslounge.net/Archos-annonce-les-101-UT-et-116.htm...
The HP Omnibook 300 is what you need. B + W screen, essential productivity programs in ROM. Windows 3.1. No wireless, but it wasn't needed in 1993. Maybe they'll update it?
An anecdote, I followed this course this year, https://www.coursera.org/course/growtogreatness and the number of student increased every week.

The guy presenting, Ed Hess, was very skilled and interesting and the material was very relevant. I also enjoyed the discussion of various homework on the course forum.
I'd imagine that you're suffering because the community in general is a bit skeptical about trademark enforcement issues, and the pump was primed with that Backupify snafu.
RIP Cell processor.
Game Theory and the joy of shutting down Google Reader
MOOC providers could enhance engagement and retention by providing audio-only content in addition to or even instead of video-based content. I've got a couple hours per DAY where I crave quality audio content but am physically unable to watch videos at that time. In contrast, I've only got a couple hours per WEEK that I can watch videos.
20% time?
i have no formal experience in teaching, but given my own experience i'd have to say that having a technical mentor who is close to you is the single most important factor. important enough that it could probably stand alone (with the proper ambition of course).

i'd like to see some sort of matching service that helps match potential programmers with mentors, based on common interest. the "student" gets to learn in a context relevant to their interests, and the mentor gets an extra hand on their project.
Should i do my homework now? 
Probably the best "single-serving" Website i've ever seen.
Yes, published USA time, but most of the world's population is living in April 1st now (India, China, Japan - all Asia essentially, Australia and so on). So it's not only Iran.
It's a distributed batch-job type system, not a single computer with a petaflop core. I don't think it is technically accurate to call it a cluster, but it isn't one machine either.
I noticed that, too. I guess the point was that she had an unequal shot at Harvard or Princeton. But it looks like the system worked reasonably well in her case. It could have done worse. It's also sort of heartening that the military is a kind of leveler. No one looks down on military service, at least, I think most people consider it a plus (it's hard to start a sentence with "no one..." that doesn't have some exception, somewhere). So the military could potentially be a step stone to better things.

The problem with societal ills like inequality is that most of them can't ever really be solved. Can you imagine a perfectly equal society? I can't. But liberalism requires some suspension of disbelief. Too much realism breeds cynicism, and cynicism allows intractable problems to get even more intractable.
You can totally do that. The courses are 'synchronous' in calendar spans of time, not in lectures being broadcast live.
My mother used to tell me that my eyes were bigger than my stomach when I took food more food than I could eat. I have the same problem with MOOCs.

The future me always has more time, is always more dedicated to learning, is always more focused. So I sign up, and when the class starts I'm no longer the better, stronger, faster, future, me, I'm just me.

Still I manage to finish some, and learn a little from the ones that I drop, so I don't see it as a problem.
"where numbers are boxed doubles on the heap, etc."

Actually, you don't know that. Since doubles are immutable, the runtime can (and does) cheat, including turning many of them into integers. It all boils down to predictable usage patterns.
Well, the paper carries a date of August, 1987.

Volume 12 of Byte is 1987. Number 10 of that volume is September. Publishing dates typically lead calendar dates by up to a month or more.

Unfortunately, the next issue available, per the archive listing sorted by date, is 12:13, which identifies itself as November. (Perhaps one of their special issues came out in the intervening timeframe, in addition to October.)

I don't see it listed in the table of contents for September nor October. I'm about out of time, at the moment, but I might return to this, or maybe someone else will look at the next few months.

https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Abyte-magaz...

----

P.S. 12:14 is a "Special Issue". The next issue available in the archive is March, 1988.

It's too bad the archive is incomplete.

Nonetheless, an interesting stroll down memory lane. And I saw more than one article title I may be interested in (re)reading.
Wasn't this from last year? I'm pretty sure I remember a similar programmatic map transformation at least...
I think Craigslist is a special case because it's in a chicken-and-egg market. I personally hate using Craigslist because of their poor design, though I've heard rumblings that they're going to change that.
Ah, you're right about that. When I enter San Francisco it's just a big failure. Outside of that kinda place, it's good.
I code in CoffeeScript a fair bit, and I don't find it's that bad even without source maps[0] because of the similarity between CS source and JS output. I can put in debugger statements and breakpoints just as I would in vanilla JS.

[0]: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...
Show HN: A quick, unbloated way to listen to a song
Does/will bitcoin make Cypriot (or anyone's) capital controls ineffective?
"At more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second..." - how fast is that when cracking typical passwords or mining bitcoins? If we have an encrypted drive, how long would it take to find the passphrase with it?
Listen to Bitcoin
At least here in Italy, it seems to be more about 'restore' than backup.
I like "Computational topology" by Edelsbrunner and Harer. They start with some basic graph theory and build on that to give a solid overview of algebraic topology, persistent homology, and even some Morse theory.
This wouldn't surprise me. Based on the console output, Counterstrike Source does the same thing. Lots of output about Direct3D that look exactly like messages from wine. I suspect they did this to speed up porting.
The best analysis. The only thing I'd add is:

There is literally no other language you can write in that will run against the following, Oh multiplex for osx, linux, windows, ios, android, symbian, and windows phone, blackberry, etc whenever possible: IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, Old android browser, webkit derivitives, etc. JS is the only language available everywhere so everything targets it. That's that. No other reason.

Ideally a bytecode would be created with standard libraries and a browser extension and js fallback for a more efficient language that even js can be compiled to. But we have this not atm.
The author of this post misses the point of the expression completely. The expression has nothing to do with assembly language but it has to do with the fact that Javascript will be further and further abstracted away over time but yet, all these abstractions will compile down to Javascript. In due time no one will be programming in Javascript except for a few geeks. This is similar to what happened to assembly language and in that way Javascript compares to assembly language.
I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing.

For Stanford's database class that just finished we had 64 thousand register, but only 20,000 actually do some work, and then close to 5k actually take the final or get a statement of accomplishment.

My blog response:
http://sef.kloninger.com/2013/03/online-ed-retention/

I'm the engineering manager on Class2Go, Stanford's open-source MOOC platform. Check it out: http://class2go.stanford.edu/
just create a label and archive it. deal with the label when enabled
Oh I agree, what was there was nice too by the way. Shame it never made it though.

At least we have dtrace!
Remove sponsors from the site and you will be bathed in HN appreciation and support.
There is a good technical thread started on stackoverflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15731724/whats-the-easies...