skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Imagine a company with 100 employees, and 100 shared workstations.

Now imagine everyone has to be able to log on to each workstation.
Nice design. Really like it and the interface. But before I commit to [any] new service, I would like to understand my future time commitment to [1] start with you and [2] stay with you.

I would suggest that you add a couple of Starting Up tutorials - smth like:

Tutorial 1/2/3

"I have my collection of photos on Ubuntu/Windows/MacBook"

Level Beginner

Time estimate 5-10-15 min

Goal: in 5 min your collection is backed-up and synced with your mobile device.

ToDo....................

If starting up with you is easy, then make it easy for people to discover this in the form they already got used to (most good libraries and plugins announced here have Quick Start Up section).
SeaJS: A Module Loader for the Web
Share your adventures with your friends realtime
Could you give some examples?

[EDIT: unlike the other replies I don't actually disagree with the parent, I just want some examples!]
It did talk of "obligation for a completely transparent government" (emphasis mine).
Oh, please. Enough of the Reddit hate; I chose this format because it expresses my frustration succinctly and humorously.
Are you looking for people to work remotely?

Also, I'd suggest adding (or switching to) a different model for pricing instead of mirroring Flickr's model. Something more oriented around charging for adding new photos so that if someone "lapses" on their subscription all their old stuff isn't suddenly inaccessible. For example, charging $100 a year for permanent image hosting for anything uploaded while under that subscription and then adding some sort of rate limit for adding new photos if the subscription lapses, or something like that.

Second, the site design is great but I think it could be improved significantly by making more bits actionable. For example, clicking on different parts of the pricing widget should take you to the appropriate page.
Poll: How many programmers don't know about bit-wise operations?
Recently this item was submitted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5506458

It's simple, clean, clear, and explains the first steps in elementary bit-wise operations.

For me, I learned this within hours, if not minutes, of my first encounter with the concept of computing. But I'm an old fart, and definitely behind the times. Everyone below the age of 25 has had a life full of computers, and for most people, they have no concept of how these things work, even though they use computers every day.

But programmers are somewhere in between. They don't just use computers, they make computers do things.

So what's your knowledge and experience of bit-wise operations?
I use them all the time, and do complex things with them when they're the right tool;
I know about them and can do modestly complicated things, but don't;
I know a bit about them, but wouldn't really know how to use them "in anger";
I know of them, but can't use them;
I found that submitted item really interesting, and want to learn more;
I found that submitted item to be entirely new to me, but don't really want to know more.
And that simile also has nothing to do with what happened.

First of all, this is not a matter of me doing something wrong because I didn't learn enough of gits internals or didn't understand the cryptic the error message. The problem is that the error message appeared in the first place. In a sane revision control system, that would never have happened. Or at least, if a push fails because of a conflict, a git pull should have solved that.

This is not a matter of damaging the engine by revving it, or damaging anything else by misusing it. Because the history is not the engine, nor is it a child in a child seat. If you are going to use car similes, and you started it, then git is the car, and the history in your repo is your travels. The error message hence says:

"I'm sorry, you can't press the has pedal hard right now, because your engine is really a dwarf on a bicycle, and he is busy going to the loo. If you press the gas pedal hard now, the car will move, but you will suddenly appear where you were yesterday!"

Is that a sensible error message to you? Now, this is a road where you can take backup of where you are. So I did that, and tried, and to my astonishment the error message was right. The engine in my car was a dwarf on a bike, and I did find myself back where I was yesterday.

And the only way to avoid these things happening is : 1: backups or 2: Learning how the car is built from scratch, so I never press the wrong button or pedal again.

And you know what? That makes the car a crappy car. Requiring intimate knowledge about how to build and repair a car is something you needed in the infancy of automotive power. Not now. And it was something you needed when using RCS and CVS etc. Subversion solved that. Suddenly you could use a revision control system without knowing everything about how it is implemented in detail. But with git, we are suddenly thrown back to the RCS days.

That's the point, and that's why git sucks, and no misguided and incorrect car simile from your point can change that.
Clickable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5506458
Shors algorithm also breaks elliptic-curve cryptography.
Or provide an AMI?
Agreed. But the way, I see it there are a lot of coins you might not have heard of, novacoin, terracoin... Nobody ever buys anything with them, but their prices are on the rise. As long as you make it, people will want it.
Was the link posted elsewhere? I'm interested in this flowchart.
That you have a computer at all is in large part due to the overwhelming demand for accurate ballistics data and codebreaking during WW2. It's very easy to play '6 (military) degrees of separation' and conclude that virtually any human activity supports the killing of people. Like baking at home? Your bakery hobby slightly reduces the demand for manufactured bread, thus making it more affordable to a heartless military machine. And so on.

If you're not actively and directly involved in military activities, there's little that you can do about the knock-on effects of whatever it is that you're engaged in; and even if you can quantify the human cost of your activities, it needs to be offset against the positive externalities. For example, the same software that allows Palantir to identify 'bad guys' who are potential targets for military attack is equally capable of identifying peacemakers or other constructive individuals who are good candidates for receiving financial aid or suchlike.

Technology itself is neutral. Don't use it as a stick to beat yourself over the imperfect state of the world.
I stopped reading when the article suggested that millions of calculations, when done on other computers, take months.
Oh, wow, I've never seen the variant that breaks ECC; that's really quite awesome. Time to read some papers!
IIUC, the point is that Rakudo nee Perl 6 is a whole different community and language and all should move forward accordingly:

"I sincerely hope to see Perl 7 released quite soon. No fuss, no bother, no long list of “blocking features”. Just BAM! ship the next version of Perl (5) as Perl 7. And I sincerely hope the greatest success for Rakudo. I don’t even care if it takes another 13 years to release, it’ll be worth the wait."
Not really, calculating and displaying that much doesn't take any more time to code, in fact it takes less.
I'm sorry, it's really not. The state of design on the web is quite bad currently thanks to the number of developers who think design is easy and do it themselves. It's a 'you don't know what you don't know' thing.
Last year I needed to do a small project to run on a web server with only Apache available. Rather than go to the pain of requesting some new web stack installed I wrote a single CGI script in perl 5 - just as I used to many years ago.

I did it the old-school way with no fancy framework, just CGI.pm. I made fun of myself to my collegues saying it was great to live in the 90s again. But actually, after a few hours coding it became clear that we haven't progressed very far.

It was a single script and it just worked. It was also much more fun than persuading a web framework to do what I wanted because I was actually programming and not configuring.
^This. I'd rather not have to flip my screen upside-down, thank you very much.
Fortunately the transitions between slides allow you to get a good sense of the 3D.
But I don't see any instructions whatsoever.
Thanks. We felt for London commuters just the live image of the map would be enough to enable them to visualise their route. And for tourists/infrequent users the added route planning would show them how and why they should take a particular journey.
You can also manually open and close stations/lines and get instant feedback on how that effects the planned journey (although this is mainly hidden in the UI)
My photo collection is over 300 GB (I shoot raw) and I have a relatively slow internet connection; can I do a first sync by sending a hard disk somewhere?
Nope nothing wrong with it at all :) I respect your way of working.
I have found in my time, some programmers have never heard of them, nor understand why you would ever use them. That said I've also found if you sit down with them for 5-10 minutes and explain they see the light and become interested enough to go and play with them.
I vaguely recall license terms which disallow anyone from using the code for military purposes - maybe it's time to adopt stuff like GPL/CC by extending them with an (optional) "do not use this software in machines/systems which have the power to kill/hurt people, or enable people to do so"
Out of interest, when the chemically accurate simulations are made are there any surprises? Or do the estimations that are normally used good enough for most purposes?
Thank you for the links. I was trying to find a 'source' but came up empty handed.
Flash: Back from the dead again?
I like the elegance of bitwise operations and use them sometimes in signal processing applications to avoid a performance hit, though I'm no expert. But I avoid them in any high level code because a) the compiler is likely going to optimize that anyway and b) to be as human-readable as possible, the code should clearly describe the objective rather than exploit the underlying mechanism. In other words if I want to multiply or divide then I prefer to write that than rely on the reader's knowledge of what bit-shifting does, and also so that the code in question would run properly on some hypothetical ternary computer or suchlike. As I'm mainly a hobby/ad-hoc programmer I can afford not to care about the probable overhead this imposes.

Great question, I hope this stimulates some discussion.
Cool, I'll definitely use this in my next project. But one thing is strange (German keyboard, Google Chrome Dev): it's not Ctrl+; which popups the tiny bubbles, but Ctrl+Ü instead. Do you use scancodes... or better yet, how does the actual binding work?!
Complete horseshit. Worked at a great startup till January. Company had to pivot, extend runway, I was laid off. Damn I miss working with those guys. The team was super helpful, gave me a decent severance and have been trying to help place me with other companies. I've been unemployed since then. There is no safety net in this city, nor any other.
I should've have noted that this came from the Philosophy in a Time of Software discussion list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/philosophy-in-a-time...
Having stuff on the moon does not prove humans went there. We could have just sent autonomous rovers, a couple of robots that made foot impressions, etc.

For those who believe in a conspiracy, even if we had visible dead bodies on the moon would not convince you that we managed to fly live people there, let alone have them come back. After all, it would be way simpler to just send a dead astronaut up there?
Can you give an example of a piece of math notation that you think could be improved?

Maths is more like a human language - the writing necessarily does not contain a complete picture, just like a book can never unambiguously describe a scene. This is what sets it apart from the computer programs you have compared it with since a computer program is a complete, unambiguous definition of the thing it is describing.

All that math notation does is give us a language that sits somewhere between description and precision to let us talk about concepts that are very hard to formulate in natural language.

If it was made completely precise too much would be lost. Context is everything, and sometimes that requires you to understand the previous work in the field. I don't see a way around that.
North Korea isn't as isolationist as people think. It has both imports and exports. I recall reading that it has a chain of eateries in china that send back revenues to it. What it keeps out is culture.

Totalitarianism is easier then you think. You need a powerful state security apparatus, and then you make people it's victims, and it's instruments. So neighbors inform on neighbors, children on parents. You purge any people who publicly disagree with the state in the name of security, and even if people privately disagree, they won't do anything.
>>IN my experience, mathematical objects and concepts are simple, at the same level of difficulty as, say, quicksort or an AVL tree. All of math is that way. What's hard about math is the notation, not the concepts or mathematical objects that are presented.

Okay. So can you give some examples of better notation for an operad or a quasitriangular quasi-hopf algebra? Or even tracking the indices on tensors as in Riemannian geometry?

I'm not saying your wrong, the book Structure and Intepretation of Classical Mechanics makes some minor notation changes for greater clarity, or instance. But I don't think it terribly helpful to state that "math notation is horrible; no one can understand it but mathematicians".
No. Ubuntu has its own community governance. Though Canonical does employ a number (perhaps the majority) of Ubuntu developers.

Policies are ultimately managed by the Technical Board and the Community Council, both of which have members who are not Canonical employees.

Mark Shuttleworth does have ultimate executive rights to do anything he wants, and he does own Canonical. So yes, Mark can set whatever policy he wants. But his use of this veto/executive ability is generally documented and he doesn't use it all that much. Certainly not in the details of MySQL and stable release updates.
At the moment, the linked submission is sitting at 2 points.
The default is 1 point, and I'm the +1 up-voter. People
writing code should know these things, but the move away
from learning real low level languages means many people
never learn these things.

NOTE: The "low level" languages are assembly, microcode,
and machine code, but never C. In spite of claims to the
contrary, C is a high level language.

When employers have to give tests like FizzBuzz or ask
candidates if they can swap two variable without a third,
then the knowledge level of "most" (self proclaimed)
programmers is well below understanding bit hacks.
Was it http://www.hacktivismo.com/about/hessla.php ?
I use them lots in my hobby embedded DSP C project. I use them approximately never in my web dev day job.
The cost of interruption for developers visualized
If you are looking for a minimal alternative to RVM, you should also checkout chruby (https://github.com/postmodern/chruby#readme). It's only ~90 LoC, supports bash/zsh, optionally supports auto-switching of Rubies, and doesn't install obtrusive bin-stubs.
Running PrestaShop 1.5.x On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Wheezy/Ubuntu 12.10
Also I think that you should not offer unlimited. What if someone will dump his favourite 100 PB of photos? If I would be using your service, I would not want you to go down due to abuses of your service's normal usage, i.e. normal users would be fine with such limit.

Just put it in.
Mathematical notation can change to fit the problem. Sometimes a paper will introduce its own notation to make the description clearer.

If I was to pick a programming language most like mathematical notation I would go for lisp. You define the language to suit the problem.

A nice example is the Wikipedia page on least squares:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_squares#Problem_statemen...

Everything is concisely described provided that you know the notation for calculus and summation. One definition builds on the previous.
> Why didn't police follow the thread?

Triage. In many places, the police have too many more important crimes on their hands to worry about a stolen bike.

> I suppose pawnshop owner should have compensate her.

Someone is inevitably getting screwed in this situation. It's not clear that the pawnshop owner deserves that any more than the buyer. (There are situations where ve would do, though.) This also depends on her being able to prove she bought it there, but it's likely that wouldn't be difficult.
The stereotyping is strong in this one.
But the merchant is still down a TV. Those things aren't free.
This poll result will have a lot of error from self-selection.
As a trivial example, I would argue than infix notation[0] is needlessly complex, and that's pretty much the first math notation we introduce to children.

In CS, it's a notation we inherited from math and, literally, only use because of familiarity (the aforementioned introduction to children at an early age).

Infix sucks. It's ambiguous to parse, requiring the introduction of parenthesis. No one likes using the parenthesis, because it's ugly and takes up space, so on top of this (arguably bad foundation) we add in operator precedence. Genius -- except no one can remember all the rules. And when you leave out the parenthesis, and hand it to someone else, and it's ambiguous (i.e. has a complicated application of the operator precedence rules), how can you be sure the person meant what they wrote down?

The simple fact is that this:

2 2 +

Is no more difficult to a child to understand than this:

2 + 2

The former has a lot to recommend it, and high-end calculators use it for that reason. The latter just plain sucks. But thanks to math, and it's inability to improve its own notation over time, we teach infix notation to 5 year olds.

Now, this is super simple example, and math can't even get this much right. With more complex mathematics, we see additional symptoms of the above problems:

1. complex, implicit rules associated with the notation

2. a tendency to "leave important stuff off" because the notation is too verbose

The latter happens all the time. I work in 3D rendering, and basically no one writes out full equations for things, ever, because it's so verbose. So to save space, we just leave it out.

Now, I know it's missing, because one time, I just happened to see the full, correct equation. But what about that A la carte math user? Can they just read the paper and then go ahead and write some code implementing it? Not even close. Laughably not even close.

Of course, I cheated here, because even this equation is presented in dozens of different ways (I'm thinking here of the Rendering equation[1]). Depending on who's writing the paper, you'll have have to decipher it out -- including dealing with all of the "missing" stuff they've left out to save space.

All of math is like this, though. There's is no such thing as a self-contained math paper. Things are rarely "written out" at the level of detail we expect in CS.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infix_notation
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_equation
I imagine the most common use of bitwise operations is setting and testing bitmasks.
I think Michael has some personal problems to work out. I can confidently say that I (and most of the hackers here) don't see what you're doing as "gimme money", or see you as a scam.

I personally think what you have done is great, and can really relate to your experiences so far in tech from my own early experiences.

I wish you much success in the future.
I have not used Kik. I use WhatsApp. I would think the following would be reasons why WhatsApp scores over its competitors.

1. No need to log in - WhatsApp uses your phone number and a hash of your IMEI number as credentials to log in to their app. Although this means that your account could be compromised, its ease of use is therefore unparalleled.

2. No need to authorize people to add you - this means that if you have anyone's phone number, you already have them on your contact list. If I had to choose one reason for WhatsApp getting over a 100 million users in a short time, this would be it. A lot of people find this a privacy issue (including myself), but most people just don't care.

3. Sending images and video through WhatsApp is super easy and the content is compressed.

4. WhatsApp has restricted their emoticon set - I think this makes a big difference in keeping the clutter down.
Are you in Europe (like me)? Chip and Pin credit cards are common here. But they are not common in USA. It causes no end of problems for American tourists who come here, since their cards don't work in many shops.
If you are interested in learning additional bit-wise operations, this is a very-well curated collection of such tricks
http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html
I don't know where you are from, but in germany basic statistic knowledge (like what you described: mean, median, standard deviation, confidence intervalls) is taught in high school. It's pretty common knowledge.

Where are you from?
The only metric you should work on reducing in your program is complexity.

Of course, some complexity/warts will be needed.
Please see my reply to tome below.
I find that very hard to believe. I'm ok with the talk about hackers being 10x more productive than regular developers. But a $100m bonus would mean that guy is about 1000 times more valuable than the average. It defies common sense in every way. And it's not just because I'm jealous and resentful I'm thinking that, no ones time is that valuable.
Yes. The content of the computer was not a problem for me, it's the hassle of getting a new one. Don't think my spreadsheets have any value in the underworld.
I use them a lot when I'm designing hardware, but I never use them when I'm doing "regular programming", there's no reason to do it if I can use more readable, higher level constructs.
I miss when webpages used to look like that!
Because 90% of all programmers don't do much than writing plain CRUD applications.
Thanks for the reply. I'm not convinced by your point on infix, but I do find it interesting.

Regarding infix, in most mathematics that I've seen there tend to be only two levels of operator precedence: some form of multiplication taking precedence over some form of addition. It's in computer programming where you get multiple levels and it becomes hard to remember.

1. complex, implicit rules associated with the notation

Again I would appreciate examples.

the Rendering equation

That's not really mathematics. It's a mathematical result of engineering presented in mathematical notation. If you want to argue that engineers horribly abuse mathematical notation then I'm right with you on that point!
I know them since my early ZX Spectrum and Z80 days.
((width * bytes_per_pixel)+3&~3) anyone? Can't remember how many times I've done that for Windows bitmap stride. WORD/DWORD/QWORD alignment was something I had to do frequently in C or C++ code. Even fixed point math for speed in the really old days.
WhatsApp is AFAIK based on XMPP.

Anyway, the protocol in use isn't important from a user perspective. Using XMPP or being 'open' isn't relevant to users, ease of use and network effects are.

Skype is another example IMHO.