skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We seem to accept what's essentially illiteracy in all the subjects that require more precise thinking as the status quo. Most people don't seem to understand much about chemistry, physics, logic or computers either, and that doesn't get them in for a lot of stick.

If people are poorly taught and have gaps in their understanding that are never adequately addressed, then I can see how they'd think that the problem was them - that they couldn't do maths. Couldn't make the connections that were expected of them and portrayed as normal functioning for maths.

Maths is different to history, and many other subjects, in that regard. If you don't understand something in history, it probably doesn't have a massive list of dependencies that you're going to fail a lot of stuff in the future on. If you don't understand something in English, the worst that's going to happen is you have an esoteric interpretation of the text. You can still do those subjects if you don't really understand them, as long as you use the right buzzwords and hook them off the right things.

I suspect part of the answer may just be that admitting you can't do history or the like is different to admitting that you can't do maths in that it's unclear what someone would even mean by claiming that they can do history. Certainly the claim that someone knows a lot about the broad strokes of history would rarely be justified these days.
Some quick investigation and I'm pretty certain its:

http://www.statsmix.com/
That Chinese doesn't make much sense in case anyone wonders.
This is a distinctive feature of thedailywtf articles.
Hey asr2bd, Alessandro here from CoffeeStrap. I think that research in the field of web application & Co could, and should, be done way more than today. The whole architecture of the web is incredibly complex and we are using tools that could be improved a ton. Now I am rushing to catch a flight, if you want to share some thoughts on that give me a shot: alessandro at coffeestrap dot com
Totally relevant:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1356
Agreed. "Quantum LAN" would be a more appropriate, if less exciting, term.
Win a Crowdfunding Package to help you crowdfund
This app can't change your life
Yea, that bit of Chinese in the title is simply the name of the app, Babatuba.
10gen(MongoDB) - New York City, San Francisco Bay Area (Palo Alto)

Full time - Developers,Solution Architects, , consulting Engineer,Technical Account managers, Technical Service Engineers,etc...

We're developing and supporting the open source and document style database: MongoDB. To date, we've raised over $80M, including strategic investment from Red Hat and Intel. Last year we doubled in size while revenue grew 4x. We're solving huge data problems for companies like Disney, eBay, Craigslist, foursquare, and over 500 others…recently closing out additional very BIG name companies.

...with that said... Feel free to reach out to me if there is any interest working here.

...still reading?... We are looking for all types of positions & backgrounds My e-mail is - jason.chen@10gen.com . Drop me a note so we can setup an informal chat.
Quite. You can define a textures+trimeshes+motion format and have the decoder be well defined, then have encoders compete to do better, as we have seen with the 2d codecs.
Clearly starting form something in GL, like a game walkthrough (How much of youtube is that?) is easier than starting with Bladerunner. A Pixar movie would be somewhere inbetween.
Alternately, they're sick of employees running their mouths off about things like this and fueling the rumors further, like that guy who got canned for talking about it on Twitter. Keep in mind that MS has tons of employees, and the majority of those people are not privy to the details of products that haven't even been confirmed publicly yet.

I find it entirely credible that they wanted to make sure that nobody would cause another "incident" before the public announcement, and were willing to tell a little more than would be normal to do so.
>Why give out an error at all?

Because that is useful information. What benefit is there to hiding the information?
For some reason I would find it hard to take him seriously as a business person.
They found a general law (a square root relation) and tested that law on two types of materials. Now of course they can’t go around saying that material X will have n cracks at speed v because material Y had m cracks at this speed.

However, given a glass which produced n cracks at an unknown speed, they can take an – ideally – identical glass, hit it at a known speed, count the number of cracks and infer the previously-unknown speed. If the square root law is indeed as simple as I imagine (I didn’t read the paper), they will only need one data point to estimate the unknown speed, though more are obviously helpful. Over time, one could easily build up a database of materials, since there are only so many different cars, that shouldn’t be too difficult.
Interview with the Hotmail Guy about Jaxtr
So interestingly that page served up a javascript exploit that got as far as signing me out of my Google account but didn't do much else. Always a bit disconcerting when that happens.

That interesting sidelight aside, I really didn't find anything useful here, so I'm curious what the interest is.
Maybe he's there to hype the crap out of the companies they invest in? Hyping and writing is all he does.
Even the Nest, with it's simple dial would probably scare them, because smart things scare stupid people.

Sigh. Yes, that's it. They must be "stupid."
>> These days, if you're estimating, you've already lost.

Well, if you're in services and are pitching to win a project, not estimating will virtually guarantee that you've lost the pitch to someone else.

If a potential client tells you they've got ${insert amount here} to spend and asks you what you think you can deliver to them for that price, "whatever you've got at the deadline" is usually a non-starter.
If only we had his real name, we could blackmail him into admitting the setup.
Did Android ever get their act together on BLE? Last I checked there are a lot of phones out there with perfectly good BLE chipsets that the OS doesn't acknowledge.
Assuming you are really a one-man team, you’d still have to set up the web server, database etc., which I imagine to be somewhat cumbersome on an ‘unknown’ platform.

An interesting usecase would be a LAN-local server, which would (with server-side data processing) avoid the slow uploading of data over the internet and could still utilise native computation speeds on the server.
http://www.taurususa.com/product-details.cfm?id=717&cate...

http://www.smith-wesson.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Produc...

But most people just use Duracoat: http://www.lauerweaponry.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=category.d...

As in the famous, and very real and functioning California legal Hello Kitty AR-15: https://www.google.com/search?q=hello+kitty+ar-15&tbm=is...

Or see this curated list: http://www.kittyhell.com/category/hello-kitty-guns/

To my eyes, most of these guns look to be real.

If your mind isn't completely closed, you might take a gander at: http://women.nra.org/

As for your more general point, since the members of the NRA don't agree with your positions on the consequences of an armed polity, we are indeed very much in alignment with the firearms industry.

Granted, we might be wrong, but you can't blithely substitute your opinion for the opinions of NRA members and then legitimately come to your overall opinion. Ah, it also goes without saying that we don't believe in the concept of false consciousness. We don't think anything is wrong with Kansas (especially now that it's under conservative state government for the first time ever and going even more pro-gun).
It seems to me that the questions we're asking in the 2010s seem to be less about "how can we make a new technology" and more about "how can we use the technology we already have". We already have pretty much all the computing power we need for most tasks* at our fingertips, and the question is now what do we do with it? It's the same for other technologies. How do we use, say, social networking, or databases, or what have you in a way that people want to use and that we can profit from?

* I don't want to fall into the trap of Bill Gates saying "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need."
Guild Wars 2 Online Community
I find it hard to believe that anybody actually thought that Microsoft was going to build a console with a built-in PR disaster. There never was a statement from Microsoft about this, only 'consistent rumors'. I have a feeling that this is just news because news sites need controversy to drive page views.
The NPOV and sourcing rules are what they are (quixotic, doomed to fail), but one thing that I think doesn't get enough attention is the violence they do to style. Wikipedia can at best read like the output of a really good text summarization algorithm; usually it's even worse. I love reading Wikipedia, and I love it even more when I come across gems like "the midget commits bowel movements" [1] that gets edited down from the delightfully insane to the beigest beige.

I am aware that looking for reading pleasure in Wikipedia is a fool's errand, and I'm not suggesting that anything change; but the relationship between the Wikipedia house style and their rules about "objectivity" is perhaps under-appreciated.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trapped_in_the_Clo...
They only come in black, so you wouldn't be able to see it on my laptop.
COST SAVING SOLUTIONS FOR GROUP HEALTH PLANS THAT ASSIST EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYEES
Where else is there for US customers to move?
How about I write my comments in Turkish? It's your fault you don't understand them, after all.

The art of programming, and of comments, is the ability to communicate to another human, and incidentally to computers. (I believe that was a paraphrase of Knuth.) If the terminology gets in the way of their understanding, then use a different terminology.

(I can fight my way through a mathematics paper, myself. But why be obtuse in your communications?)
Sony exec: Developers can block PS4’s Share button functions
+1 for Fireworks is my groove and Photoshop doesn't feel right. Sad indeed.
The Hunt for Steve Cohen
I work at a large company. Emails reminding people of existing polices are quite normal. Sometimes it is in response to someone violating one of the policies.
Nautilus: Online Science Magazine
Why Java Makes Me Tremble In My Boots
Maybe they were tired of all the speculations and simply sent a mail clearly stating what the reality is so that the employees won't feed the rumor machine.
And shit talking Android and reluctantly admitting in each review that it's basically perfect but then stilling digging at it and boasting about how iOS can cure cancer.
I think he may have been joking about the fact that Office is bloatware, and somewhere in that bloat, may hide a half assed diff tool.
When Startups Need More Lawyers than Employees
Customers do notice the logos. I know from first-hand experience.

I've been selling my photo-deblurring product on the web for about a year now. I've always processed payments through Stripe, and I've always served the entire web site using SSL. The green padlock is in the address bar.

And yet, back in the early days, I got questions from potential customers several times a month asking if my purchase form was secure.

My solution? I added the text "Payments processed securely" and a generic padlock icon near the credit card info part of the purchase form. In the eight months since then, I haven't had a single person ask me whether or not my site was "secure." Silly, but effective.
This is great for consumer web/mobile apps, but it doesn't work so well for medical software or avionics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5663379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5663388
>On Soundslice, we're drawing guitar-chord charts completely on the fly (again, see an example), which is a relatively involved drawing routine -- and it's still near-instant performance. That's across all modern browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox and IE 10).

OK, let me get this out of the way. Drawing guitar tabs on the fly is not by a long shot an "involved drawing routine".

If that's his standard for canvas performance, then sure, canvas is plenty of fast for that.

(I don't say it's not a quite complex algorithm to position and determine the guitar tabs: I say that it's not that graphically demanding to draw them. It's easier on the canvas/CPU than even the tamest of platform scrollers for example).
Speech recognition is cute as a tech demo, but I doubt it'll be very useful in the Real World.
Add mtgox, btce-e, bitstamp.net, and bitinstant. Those are web apis that need some monitoring and could have a lot of value.
I am simply horrible at estimating. I get paid to work on difficult (at least to me) problems; things I haven't done before. A typical project involves trying 9 things that don't work before I find the 10th that does. There is no way I can estimate that sort of thing.

Thank goodness I'm pretty good at managing (i.e. reducing) expectations. When pressed for impossible-to-estimate estimate I fall back to giving a range: "2 weeks to 2 years"
Side note: What is it about graduate work that burns people out on their field? I've met quite a few people with masters and PhDs who switch fields afterward and basically run away.
Couldn't have said it better myself. There hasn't been a more unashamedly biased "reporter" than MG Siegler in recent memory. At least Gruber never tried to be anything approaching legitimate.

I don't understand how he could be expected to be even-handed as you would hope a VC managing a large cash pool would be.
I expect he will learn "to love" Android, like another recent Google employee did http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226164
Not necessarily as unlikely as it sounds -- I've had several instances of people asking "have you heard of Colin Percival" when talking to people about the problems I find interesting. If he phrased things the same way as his pseudonym or raised similar issues, someone might easily recognize a similarity.
Ask HN: Is there a side project network?
More specifically, is there a network for people to find others to collaborate on side projects with? I mean, we all know other developers/designers/marketers, but, the ones I know, are mostly too busy to take on another project.
The destruction would be by the lack of trust. Since there is nothing but supply and demand considerations keeping bitcoin's value high, guess what would happen if demand were to vanish
Cartoon Fortune 500
A couple weeks before release? Unlikely.
This times a lot. I'm far from a naive user, but I recycle a handful of easily memorable passwords for most of the services I subscribe to. And I'm willing to bet that most of you do too.

Security is a tradeoff, and we tend to forget that complex, unique passwords have a very real cost. They drastically increase the risk that I will lock myself out of some service, and dramatically increase the workload of authorizing myself when I do want to use it. With a few obvious exceptions, this tradeoff is a huge net loss for the average user.

In other words, the risk of some stranger wanting to post as me in HN is acceptably small. The cost of having to install KeePassX, then download my passwords file from Dropbox then decrypt and copy/paste, then make sure the paste register is clear, then securely delete my passwords file every time I borrow a friend's computer is prohibitively high.
If I Lived 100 Times: Predicting my year of death.
http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000...
Is it using WebKit for rendering?
Its true, you can buy fanboys.
Adobe abandons its Creative Suite to focus on Creative Cloud
Mathematics offers a standardized, internationally accepted notation for its various problem domains. Turkish is not the standard language of software comments. So I don't think the analogy holds.
And credibility of Google Ventures went down today.

His posts were filled with clueless rants with a side of his small minded ego. The guy is full of him self without accomplishing anything that would warrant that.

It actually annoyed me so much I wrote a grease monkey script years ago to block his garbage from TechCrunch (before they redesigned):

https://github.com/AlekseyKorzun/TechCrunch-Douchebag
It traces back to cultural and educational issues.

Math has typically been taught devoid of any context or relevance to our everyday lives. Even in college, you just mindlessly plug and chug formulas to get by. Some students don't see the use in it, beyond perhaps the parts needed for basic financial literacy (which many do not have, either).

Better and more engaging and relevant and effective ways to teach math have already been developed, such as Realistic Mathematics Education.

But people actually say things like "I can't do math" in regards to all forms of literacy, I believe. It depends what standards you are mentally comparing yourself to, I guess, such as professional vs. social standards.

"I'm not good with money, or I'm not good with the business stuff" - financial literacy

"I can't write" - as in, I can't write books or novels or easily do other professional writing tasks. Again, there are pedagogical techniques that can help students write more, write better, and have more interest and confidence in writing.

"I don't read" - most folks nowadays don't really read books or novels anymore, what with TV, movies, and the Internet.

"I don't know computers" - how often do we hear that - that's computer literacy. I hear it less and less though nowadays.

To tell you the truth, maybe it will be nice when one day people feel forced to admit "I can't code." Because that would mean that programming and computational literacy is something taught in most schools.
"If the terminology gets in the way of their understanding, then use a different terminology."

Literally the reason mathematics exists.
I had not meant to imply it was a solved problem in food. More that it was not one that they ignore. As you pointed out, they can be wrong sometimes. Probably more often than folks would realize. (Also, it is not just the daily operation, but again, the estimates in moving into new territory. I don't have numbers, but my hypothesis would be that is the most risky estimation that happens in food. Not the least because most small chains do not have the staff to adequately run the numbers.)

And, yes, it is hard. That is part of my point. It is hard, but they address it and give it an effort. With luck, they make progress at getting better.

Contrast with devs. We spend a lot of time blaming others for why it is hard. (Requirements change, etc.) Ironically, this is something that day to day people have to deal with and adjust for accordingly. Based entirely on the historical perspective of dealing with similar items. That is, all of these are metrics that are trackable and reportable. With luck, they can be anticipated through estimation.
That is why Bill Maris, the managing partner at Google Ventures, wrote: "MG Siegler is joining Google Ventures as a general partner (...) we’re thrilled to add his unique perspective."
Pretty much any exchange... I use Dwolla to MtGox. Not ideal, but beats the hell out of Coinbase.
If the honeychecker is compromised you are no worse off than without a honeychecker (unless it lulls you into a false sense of security) but as long as it's not hacked it adds detectability. Not sure it's worth the effort but it's an interesting idea.
The Birth and Death of a Running Program
Nonetheless, it is one extra worry you do not want to have
I only think the author forgot that there are people that REALLY cannot do math.

It might sound bizarre and weird, but I met more than once person, that did their best to learn, and were intelligent with many other things (one of these persons had a degree in law, another in international relations, and was doing a masters in international law), yet could not do 29/3 without a calculator...

Or even worse, I knew people (in that case usually working with more low level work, like burger flipping) that even trying, or even if needed (ie: cashiers) cannot do it right even with a calculator, their grasp of math is so weak (even if they want to have a grasp) that they cannot even use the correct operations.

Also the same apply to many other fields, I knew intelligent people that could not read, or that could not grasp history, or geography, and so on...

People keep forgetting that brains CAN be very specialized, and be great with something, and terrible with other, and I personally believe that the old way of teaching professions (ie: throw the kid to work with a Master in that profession) was better because of that, currently you throw kids on the school, and the ones that might excel at some things that are not on school (like Music) reach adulthood thinking they are dump and they don't make a effort even in thinks they do have a talent to do.
Would the number of professionals which only use a Mac really be at all significant compared to the number of workers in almost every business and field which use MS Office running on Windows machines?
VP8 is catching up in modern SoCs. So H.264 won't have that advantage in the near future (it still has it now, given the existing hardware base).

Some things need to be clarified first though, like recent Nokia's patent sabotage to VP8. Not sure what is going on with that.
LA is a technology oasis for some, a tech desert for others
Something like http://www.techcofounder.com ?
Good to know, as such it would be a more apt comparison to use the currently best Go versions from the benchmarks game as they better reflect where Go stands performance-wise (with the usual micro benchmark disclaimer).
Uh, is this extrapolating off of a one day peak? Given how inconsistent the whole bit coin market is, I'd want to see more than one data point.
Meet The 'Liberator': Test-Firing The World's First Fully 3D-Printed Gun
>If a potential client tells you they've got ${insert amount here} to spend and asks you what you think you can deliver to them for that price, "whatever you've got at the deadline" is usually a non-starter.

But isn't that the core of the agile software development philosophy? You, the client, turn your requirements into (somewhat independent) stories and prioritize them. We, the developers, take those stories and implement them in priority/dependency order. We ensure that the software is working at the end of every sprint (via extensive automated unit and integration tests). 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.
Explaining Complicated Philosophies With Gorgeously Simple Postcards
They do because that website hasn't got the faintest grasp of what "Conflict of Interest" means. One or two years ago there was this thing that Wikipedia calls an RfC on conflicts of interest, and you had to scroll down half of a huge page before someone would even properly define it. That person was someone with an IP address. Wish I could find that one.
Ah... yes. Well at least we discovered that I can do a good impression of an over-anxious startup founder :-)
| the majority of those people are not privy to
| the details

From the article:

| internal Microsoft e-mail sent to all full-time
| employees working on the next Xbox

I'll concede that not all MS employees working on the next Xbox might need to know everything, but it's not like this was a broadcast to all MS employees to avoid employees from unrelated business units from running their mouths.

| like that guy who got canned for talking about it on
| Twitter

Adam Orth was an exec in Microsoft's gaming division. He wasn't some random uninformed Microsoft intern shooting off his mouth on Twitter.
Subtle Theatrics