skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but "I can't do math" is a shorthand for "I can't do math beyond arithmetic, and even then, I often can't do that in my head." That is not equivalent to "I can't read." It is more equivalent to "I can't read Proust without getting bored and confused."

The author in the OP acknowledges this substitution of "I can't" for "I currently struggle with." It's complaint about semantics that misses the point, I think.

Rather than complaining when people say they can't do math, we should find out why they feel that way. I suspect a large part of the reason is that math education is pedantic and boring (memorizing axioms and doing rote calculations, when we should prove them, for example, or apply math in ways that doesn't involve trains leaving stations) and when people do speak their minds about their difficulties with mathematics, they often face snooty responses like this one in the OP, rather than a lighter touch.
Have you tried using tabula? https://github.com/jazzido/tabula
Here is the general algo: Make a ton of money, surround yourself with yes-men/women, make asinine statements based on intensive market analysis (sample size of 1), use your PR machine to recast tax avoidance as philanthropy.
It's just a theory, but I think some mathematicians intentionally 'unlearn' or 'forget' arithmetic when they start to understand what math is about because people who don't understand math will ask them if they add and multiply all day. Theoretical mathematics is an entirely different beast than what most people think it is, so mathematicians get a lot of dumb questions about it. When someone asks if they add and subtract all day, if they say 'I can't even do arithmetic', people may be more inclined to rethink that stereotype.
I don't think the author forgot that, he seems to refer a lot to 'most people' and 'usually' enough to acknowledge that his assertion is not a truism. Besides that, it's a rant, those are often filled with generalities that need to be pared down before we can get to the real discussion.
This post really supports the theory that doxing is a form of violence. That definitely explains the guy's creeped out feeling in the interview, and the fact that the hiring entity tried to blackmail him as well.

That's assuming that employers actually are browsing sites where people bitch their jobs to snatch up disgruntled workers on the cheap - seems like a bad/fake idea, but hey.
Indeed it is curious that someone mentioned the one username on the one website that ended up being this guy. Surely the conversation went a little differently, but that's not to say it didn't happen.

Most interesting to me is that this poster HAD to make this post and get his side of the story on the Internet first.
Intel details out-of-order Silvermont architecture for next-gen Atom CPUs
I've done a large amount of canvas work over the past years, especially work with improving canvas performance (one of the articles on my site is linked-to by this article). What follows is fairly self-promotional, but relevant to the topic if you're interested in canvas performance.

I've been compiling canvas performance tips for two years now, and have a full-color (syntax highlighting and images) book coming out very soon[1] with its own Canvas performance chapter at about ~40 pages. The book has about ~200 pages total of Canvas tips, oddities and tutorials. These aren't fluff, I don't take pages and pages to re-implement stuff like gravity for a game example. I tried to keep it pertinent and pure.

If you're interested in Canvas, please give it a look[1]. The book will be out in June or July.

And if you're interested in getting help for Canvas, come to StackOverflow! Back when I had free time, if you asked a question on SO about canvas there was a +10% chance that I was the one who answered it. I've been too busy to participate in the last year, but I'm just beginning to come into some free time again these days, and there are several other wonderful people who also hound the canvas tag.

Also, if you're looking for live help with Canvas issues, give the StackOverflow JavaScript room a try[2]. They're very friendly if you are, and always love interesting (read: not jQuery) questions.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0672336278/

[2] http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/17/javascript
Tavis Rudd is using it in the real world, and says he's faster with it than typing. There's a link to his presentation on the github page.

He advocates it for anyone, but for people with RSI it'd especially be a godsend.
It's been back and forth. GOOG was worth more than MSFT until quite recently, but MSFT was up 18% in April.
Gruber took ad money from Microsoft. This is just Siegler's one-up.
The Xbox 720 is a couple of weeks before release? That's news to me. I've heard Christmas 2013, or even delayed into 2014.
Getting The Momentum Back: How to Revitalize a Stalled Project
I'm not sure how I feel about this.

There's a part of me that's saying that I don't need to continue to pirate Photoshop/Fireworks (I'm not a designer, but I do handle some graphic content for our company), and the other part of me is saying I should still go pirate Photoshop 7 (super lightweight compared to any other PS version.) And, what I mean by that is, not everyone needs to upgrade every version. What happens when shit hits the fan with a version of Photoshop and all the CC customers are forced to upgrade?
Pivot forward
I don't think the author meant that people aren't walking calculators. I believe he implies that people don't want to understand how to evaluate a math problem. Most people that "can do" math still use a calculator; additionally, they understand what's happening and they can identify an answer that is absurd (because of a key-press mistake).
This is great for consumer web/mobile apps, but it doesn't work so well for medical software or avionics.

Don't kid yourself; this is exactly what works for medical software or avionics. I never said we didn't test; I just said this is how we get stuff done: We use stepwise refinement instead of waterfall, so estimating is suddenly much less important.

(For the record, I'm 100% enterprise and 0% consumer web/mobile apps. As we speak, in my other session, I'm building an aerospace prototype I intend to deploy within 48 hours.)
"The interviewees in my study who were most angry about affirmative action were those who had relatively fewer marketable skills — and were therefore most dependent on getting an inside edge for the best jobs."

Completely wrong. She got so close and then completely missed it.

Poor white people exist. They're the ones who are most scared of affirmative action not because they are losing an inside edge, but because they don't have one. If you're a rich, prep-school attending legacy to Harvard, you can easily support affirmative action policies because you know your own admission is safe. If you're a blue-collar white kid, you know you're the one who is losing your seat for the affirmative action admission.

Affirmative action doesn't scare you if you have an inside edge. Your Uncle/Mother/frat-brother/whoever is still going to fast-track you. But if you don't have any of those connections and privilege, then affirmative action is terrifying. You see yourself as being penalized for an advantage that you don't actually have, it's not leveling the playing field it's putting you at a disadvantage. That's why those with relatively fewer marketable skills are against it.
A Year Later, What Google Drive Means for Startups
I think you are setting the bar too high. Nothing is perfect, but Wikipedia is great.

If you have some better idea how these things should be handled, then please explain.
> "Build as much as you can by x" makes more sense than "How long will it take to build all of Y?".

As a developer this makes total sense and I love it.

However, my clients certainly don't!

I asked for advice on this a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5643259. One great response (though I can't work out how to apply it), more very welcome
This is definitely not true. More money is spent on building and renting supercomputers every year even through the recession. There is tremendous demand out there for solving problems that would just not be possible without them. I believe Google's self driving cars collect 1 GB/sec of data.

It's just that we have a hard time imagining why we would ever need such a powerful CPU which is why you are saying this. Why would someone in 2005 ever imagine we need such a powerful computer in our pocket in 2013? What possible uses could we have for it?
That's a good question, I was too almost to the burning point. But honestly I still have to figured out which was the problem or which solutions we could adopt. I have that slight belief that there is a more general pattern over there, not sure yet about the whole thing.

As "defense" of PhDs program I could say that it definitely trains your mind to look at things with a deeper perspective.
So if you're supposed to trust all hops on your message, quantum cryptography has no real appreciable improvement over standard digital communications (where the same problem exists).
Remember when he unabashedly ran positive press for Path while they were getting reamed for rummaging through people's contact data without asking? And didn't announce that he had significantly invested in them?

Maybe he could do that for other people.
As a replacement for walking in the woods unaided it'd be terrible, but as a replacement for sitting in a cubicle it might not be so bad.
I believe that lots of people really can't do math. Most people are fine until fractions. Many people never gain any intuitive feel for what "2/5 * 7/8" even means. It only gets worse with algebra. They can often learn the mechanics of fraction arithmetic and solving equations, but they will never understand how to apply the knowledge later in life.
Unfortunately this case serves as a proxy for so many other issues that it is difficult to discuss the challenges of geography and jurisdiction on their own.

It can go the other way, too. Recently, the Supreme Court uncharacteristically upheld state protectionism in the case of Virginia's Freedom of Information Act only requiring the release of information to Virginia residents.[1] The arguments include obtuse statements by the usual suspects, but an interesting part of the law includes an exception for journalism that circulate Virginia.[2]

The law did not address whether that includes every news source that publishes online.

[1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/sjs/a-reivew-of-oral-argu...
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-says-st...
Similar to, yeah. The word startup usually implies that there's a lot of long-term work involved. So that, but for weekenders or the guys who want to build a quick MVP.
Well, no tips, but I do have a question:

I'm a web dev who's been looking to start trying game development, particularly with canvas. However, I've hit a huge wall with any type of graphics programming. Have you found any particularly good resources while trying to learn canvas, or graphics programming in general? Or anyone else here? If you have something feel free to email it to mrjordangoldstein at gmail.com if it doesn't seem strictly relevant to this thread—and thanks!
I always though Wikipedia was run by lobbyists and publicists who have their clients best interests at heart.
I fail to see how keeping Fireworks around would help SVG. Does Fireworks even support SVG? Isn't it using layered PNG as native format?

Both Expression Design and Fireworks are now out of the way, so Inkscape could get a lot more traction.
Surely if effort and attention to detail were applied most of these people could work their way through whatever math task was set before them. What they should instead be saying is; "I don't do math".
Wow! To think, this guy was such an Apple/iOS fan!
Ujson doesn't handle floating point numbers properly
This can't be overemphasized. My favorite (apocryphal) Einstein anecdote is the one where a society matron approaches him at a party and exclaims, "I don't know how you can deal with all that math. I have so much trouble with math." Einstein replies, "Lady, you can't imagine how much trouble I have with it."

s/math/computers, and that line comes in very handy in my own social life.
Easy: Angry Birds!
Just some feedback. When I read the first part of your comment, my brain was engaged with what you're saying. "How do we feel about MG Siegler's overlapping careers as investor and writer, and about that trend, and about the TechCrunch legacy, and" thud a Gruber comparison.

Then I stopped thinking, because I don't think I can learn anything from someone who thinks John Gruber and MG Siegler are comparable; the only thing they seem to have in common is an appreciation for Apple products. So... your issue is, you don't like Apple fanatics. Got it.
but given that price of bitcoins has skyrocketed over the past 3 months, what's your actual growth in bitcoins being processed, not just dollar amount?
I don't see the problem with a biased person working as a VC, his job is to make money, his opinions are irrelevant (unlike his "journalism" work).

I still despise him and think he has no place in Google Ventures, I just don't see his bias coming into it.
the guy is a whore
Cheaper way to get MBA
Do casual readers of TDW really pay attention to the handles those stories were posted under? That certainly isn't the sort of thing I pay attention to, and if I did, I wouldn't expect that other people do.

I would expect that in 99% of the cases where the answer to "Do you read TDW?" is "yes" the answer to the followup "Have you read the posts by [foo]?" would be "...uh, I have no idea.".

This story seems completely fabricated to me for this reason. EDIT: Mind, if TDW had a different format, more like HN perhaps, this wouldn't have raised my eyebrows. If I were asked in an interview (after revealing that I participate on HN) what I thought of tptacek's take on javascript crypto, I would not be surprised in the least.
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Great stuff!

When I showed this to a coworker, he pointed out http://api-status.com/
Telling people they can do math because they can add is disingenuous at best.

"Ciphering" is the term that used to be used for figuring sums and such. Nobody pretended that was math. At the school house it was called "arithmetic". It was one of the three "R's" not something with it's own Phd granting departments at universities.

People who say they cannot do math are speaking with the knowledge that they are looking up toward a massive intellectual edifice containing ideas they do not understand - whether they are looking up to high-school trigonometry or differential equations or Bayesian statistics is irrelevant.

What is relevant is that they are not looking up to ciphering as unobtainable - at least not those people likely to be conversing causally or academically with a tenure track academic.
Not to be snarky, but this seems like a major win for Google in at least two ways:

1.) Tap into Siegler's influence and impressive list of contacts.

2.) Shut down a rather effective, vocal critic of your company. I can't imagine Siegler will continue his current line of Google rhetoric.
Do you have ways of augmenting your daily buy limits as a company? Or will your transactional capacity be capped at the rate you've been managing during the past three months?
Slacking Off
Genuinely thanks for the good luck. Day by day we are figuring out things over things. We got some attentions in this past months and we'll definitely need advise in a lot of fields.
Hopefully you will hear from us again in future! (still not about a bastard mesh-up between CoffeeScript and Bootstrap! :)
The only thing slow about Canvas I've found is when the canvas area needs to be resized : i.e. canvas.height or canvas.width changes. Drawing itself hasnt been an issue for me.
It doesn't work well for management with MBA background. These guys want to have all excel spreadsheet cells filled in upfront. And more important, there must be someone to blame for bad estimates in case of any problems.

In corporate environment it is more important to have your ass well protected, than to speed shareholders many reasonably.
There are three other defense mechanisms at play:

1) I already made up my mind based on emotion or tradition or the salesperson was cute or whatever, and I was hoping the math proves my select decision is correct, but its not looking good and/or I've found a easier / better justification so "I can't do math"

2) I'm getting totally financially reamed over this (housing bubble / car lease / rent / mortgage / tuition / credit card) but its less painful to say I can't do math than admit I have awful financial judgment.

3) I suspect the result of this decision is going to be a minefield, and the other party is more traditionally mathematical than my side's ethnic / school major / gender / job title / whatever so I automatically come out ahead regardless of result by not making any decision and defer via "I can't do math" because first I don't have to put in the effort and secondly I can't be blamed.
The article leaves out another rumor that the new Xbox will have 3 settings and developers can chose which to use.
1) Always Online
2) Activate Online
3) No restrictions
In my case, my abuser threatened my life if ever I told, and used to brag about how good he was at finding people. With the implication that he could track me down.

If he'd recognized a billboard like that, he could have taken it as an opportunity to warn me. I would have believed that warning from someone I viewed as incredibly powerful. Which would make the billboard entirely useless.

But if he didn't see the ad, he couldn't deliver that threat. If by chance I became aware that he couldn't even see the ad, it would have undermined my impression of how powerful he was.

Would it have worked? I don't know. Quite possibly not. Maybe it would for some but not others. The only way to really find out is to try it.

Furthermore they should keep track at the other end of how many kids calling saw that billboard. If those statistics say it is effective, then roll it out to a bunch of places for as long as it keeps on working. (Over time abusers will become aware of the trick and be on the lookout for it.)

As for the marketing issue, I hear you and do not disagree. The technology could be used in very bad ways. I just happen to think that this is a good use of it, and is something that is worth trying.
As client devices grow both in computational power and sheer numbers - I think scalability will be facilitated by offloading at least some of the heavy lifting to the client.
New Fund Formed to Hunt Zombie VCs & Private Equity Funds
Programming with an Aggressive Posture
People who say "I can't do math" are lazy? Sorry, but I think that's a gross oversimplification of the issue (which is also evidenced by the comparison to physical exercise) and the two assumptions fundamental to that opinion are just plain wrong. Namely:

> So what do people actually mean when they say that they can’t “do” math? Usually they are really stating one of two things. First, that they don’t like mathematics. Secondly, that mathematics is more difficult for them than other subjects, and that it takes a great deal more effort on their part to learn it.

He conveniently chose the two reasons that are easiest to dismiss (irony, anyone?). What he fails to account for is the fact that math education is so poor that many people don't truly understand what math is. Beyond arithmetic and algebra, they think it's some really complicated stuff with big numbers and funny symbols that geeky people with glasses do -- it's practically a foreign language to them, except it has a reputation for being much harder.

Why is this? If I had to guess, I'd say it's based on the fact that math involves a lot of critical thinking and critical thinking is very difficult to teach. Those who attempt to do so often do it very poorly, which leads students to the false belief that math is extremely difficult. On the other hand, it's very easy to teach someone to memorize formulas and plug in numbers, so that's what we're most often taught in math class. That's good enough to get us through the standardized test so we can graduate from high school, but memorizing formulas and plugging in numbers is not "doing math". So I believe many people are completely justified in saying "I can't do math".

What's more, people who "can do math" should be taking the blame for those who say "I can't do math" rather than using pointless semantics to wag a finger at them.
> Adam Orth was an exec in Microsoft's gaming division.

This is not accurate. He was a (not the) Creative Director, which is several levels down the hierarchy from anyone that would be considered an executive. Think of it as one step above Senior Designer.
apple fans who are biased against anything non-apple who both act as journalists (to a differing degree). There are similarities.
I think that's an uninformed metaphor because it assumes both math is totally foreign and should be able to be read by anyone. if you write code for a server that handles HTTP requests you wouldn't explain the guts of HTTP in your comments, you'd just assume if the reader wants to know more they'll figure it out themselves.

I think sometimes mathematical definitions, especially advanced ones that rely on simpler definitions, are too complicated/long to recant every time you use them, which you have to. If I want to prove something relating or relying on uniform continuity I don't want to state the definition every time both because its repetitive and because definitions often use the same notation, so I don't want my uniform continuity deltas and epsilons getting confused with my normal continuity epsilons and deltas. Try proving advanced things about field extensions and galois theory using induction like that and you may actually run out of symbols.

That being said it is hard to read real math writing/research which can be both dense and obtuse even if you're used to it. Maybe that's why you need a PhD to consider entering the field.
Play video without plug-ins? Mozilla-OTOY codec turns tide
What happened to Crunch Fund?
They still do! Right click desktop, new > briefcase. When you delete it, its description is "synchronizes files when you use two computers". No idea how it works now, but it's there.

EDIT: Windows 7, not sure about 8.
>> This means that you can cut the project off after any $n number of sprints and know that you're getting a level of functionality proportionate to the time that was spent on the project.

Telling them $n sprints can be meaningless -- in practice, things just get pulled out of a sprint and pushed into the backlog, never to get done within $n sprints.

I worked on one project where the client specifically asked for "agile". Meanwhile, their behaviour during the execution phase was that they wanted to see waterfall style results.

It wasn't until the PM finally switched back to a waterfall that the project started seeing meaningful results-- i.e., the "let's move it to the backlog" tactic used by the technical team could no longer take place.

Of note is that this is the classic story of a company that adopts "agile" despite the fact that the culture of its employees did not suit the methodology.
I'm not sure how an article in a print magazine reproduced online for free can be "link bait".

I think the wording you are looking for is "I did not find this interesting or worthy of my time", which is fine, but I wish people would let other members of the community decide if they think a link is vote-worthy or not rather than arguing the merits of an upvote in the comments.
OTOH, if the authors of the library know more about the fast rendering paths on various browsers than you do, they can actually give you better performance than "coding to the metal," so to speak.