skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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.

I can attest to this. Academically, I am a reasonably able person, but I found math simply baffling at school. Arithmetic and algebra were fine. Rudimentary geometry made sense. When we got to trigonometry, things just fell apart for me. We were taught sine, cosine and tangent in the context of how they could be used to derive angles from other angles, not what they were and how they worked. They were presented as tools that could be used in particular ways that had to be memorized. To me, it felt like trying to teach an alien from another dimension to use a hammer without the alien having any intrinsic understanding of mass or momentum or kinetic energy or friction.

In fact, if I'm totally honest, I'm not 100% I completely understand the sine function now. And it wasn't just math. In physics, current, voltage, resistance etc. were taught as inputs to formulas. I know it must be challenging to teach about these kinds of principles that lack concrete macroscopic analogs, but I can't help but feel they could have done a better job than they did. In chemistry too, I remember being taught about valency and how you could work out the valency of an element by its position on the periodic table. I asked what valency actually was, either didn't understand or wasn't satisfied with the answer, asked again, and the teacher brushed off my question and carried on the with the lesson. "Oh well," I thought, "I guess I don't understand chemistry." That was when I was about 12 years old, and I didn't study chemistry after that. I studied biology until I was 16 because I had a teacher who took the time to actually explain things.

The worst part is, I went to a pretty good school. It must be absolutely dreadful at bad schools.

Most of this happened before I had regular access to the internet and the chance to learn about these things for myself. I can't help but feel the whole course of my schooling and advanced education might have been different had I had better (or at least different) teachers of hard science and math at an early age.
Disney teams with EA on 'Star Wars' video games
Indeed. That would be hell on one's quads.
On "false statements" and FBI interrogations
It's a great time to try Sketch: http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/. Does most of what Fireworks does much better. Unfortunately it's Mac only though.
Reminds me of how I seem to need to purge anything related to "avahi" before I can get wireless networking to work. I don't know what that junk is for but I wish it wasn't installed by default.
With facts in hand, no, vim is not a text manipulation language. vim script is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_script

I never referred to vim script. I referred to vim. To quote you, "you obviously have no clue" that vim is an editor, which contains vim script.
Drop-in replacement for Django admin (plugin support, Twitter bootstrap)
I cannot count how many times I've walked into a restaurant hoping to have some specialty dish, only to find out that they've run out of ingredients. It happens on a regular basis to me.

Sometimes that's actually expected. Some places allow a shortage to make the special scarce. Some places simply can't get ahold of enough of a key ingredient.
Then what term, if not "boss", do you use for someone who lacks technical skills but has the skills to decide how to manage the investments and balance profit against growth opportunities and for those reasons gives you direction and instructions?
I don't get this. When I play ioquake3 games I click my mouse, my gun fires, and I hear the gun firing sound. No latency.

Is the problem people trying to play sounds for games over the network with pulseaudio? Is that use-case really something that needs to be worried about?
I'm curious about the accuracy of the statement. That implication is people intentionally upload/share over a billion files every day?

Given that dropbox is more of a sync service, I'm curious if that number more accurately reflects the number of files shared total or perhaps the number of sync events that occurred?

If people are actually uploading & sharing >1B files every day, Dropbox is immensely bigger than I had thought. Instagram, for example, sees 40M photo uploads per day.
Ditto on the above lists. Similar to inter-app communication issue is some way to meaningfully work with documents and data outside of application silos, either to share documents between apps, or to get documents onto and off the device.
Honestly, does it matter what kind of designer you are as long as you have a good visual aesthetic and understanding of usability and how people will see, interpret, feel, and use your product from end-to-end? Isn't "graphic designer" just a pigeon-hole limiting title that doesn't really mean squat when thinking about product design at a high-level?

Apple, in the past, has gotten things right because they thought about product correctly at every level. I don't see why we should think they will change this habit.
Write down your questions as you're exploring this brave new world of computers. What excites you? What confuses you? What is the coolest thing you've learned today? In 20 years, it will help to know what the roots of your passion were.
I don't even understand where this myths come from.

Linux "the kernel" switched 15 years ago from OSS to ALSA for drivers, ALSA has been backwards compatible with OSS since.

Gnome and KDE used to have their own user space sound servers (called EsounD and aRts) mostly to impement software mixing. They were completely replaced over 5 years ago by PulseAudio which is backwards compatible with both as well as applications using ALSA or OSS API.

You could code an application using OSS API and be compatible with the first release of linux that had sound. What problems do you have exactly with your beeps?
I'm not sure how it can be said that Apple has missed gestures, since my iPhone and my Macbook's trackpad are my most-used gesture input devices by a longshot. Every other gesture-based input I can think of that I use is for one-offs. The iPhone and trackpad I use every day.

edit: I will say, I haven't had a chance to read the OP yet so I could be off base here.
Yeah -- to be honest we were very lucky to have the kind of client we had. One word of caution I would give is splitting your time like that can has its drawbacks. Having three weeks to focus 100% on product was an enormous help in allowing us to ship a working product as fast as we did.

I understand sometimes this just isn't possible though.
A live map of the intergalactic internet
The future should be a 'cloud' that is basically just storage with a bunch of specially handling for specific instances (e.g. DropBox is online storage, but you can use it to share your photos). Hopefully this will be standardized in a way that doesn't funnel everyone to a specific provider.
I dont know, its not broken for me: I cant tell you how many times ive compared prices for something im looking at to Amazon and placed an order right there if the price difference was significant enough.

Where does Rockerbox source the products it sells? Is it simply a mobile facade for a shopping.com API or amazon referrals?
My team and I also tried this same approach for my mobile education startup - but differently.

The issue with working one week on, and three weeks off is that the client is willing to accommodate you flying off the radar for three weeks, and that makes it hard for them to plan their product according to your timing.

What we tried at App Ninja was to work a normal six day week, 12 hours a day. We would work on our product for the first 8 hours of the day, and the remaining 4 hours, we will work on our client projects.

I am an iOS developer and am fluent with web backends. So I was doing everything from iOS development to Ruby on Rails web apps. We charged by the project instead of hourly, and at one point in time, I actually earned USD $2,000 in 4 hours by completing a project in that time span.

If you work fast, charging by the project, instead of hourly can actually be beneficial.

We did this for almost 5 months to get our product off the ground, and other than being absolutely physically exhausting, it worked pretty well. Our clients were none the wiser, as we still delivered projects on time and on schedule.
I am always amazed by what people do when they're given anonymity and collaborative text editors - rarely positively. But this seems particularly bad.

Is HN really so many twelve year olds (behaviorally, if not in calendar years)?
Does anybody have opinions on using Edge Reflow?
For embedding on my site. I'm a web developer, it just looks cool to have the document visible on the page.

There's plenty of limitations, I got rid of it eventually.
"Play in our sea and we can sink you"
It looks weird that the battleship is moving backwards.
It's an easter egg. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I thought this thread might be a good place to write about a little project I've been working on for the past few months (in the shadows so far):

I've written an experimental abstract database loosely based on redis (or its base concepts) that is entirely based on a plugin system; and it's written in Go.

I love redis to bits, but it always bothered me that it doesn't have and doesn't seem like it will ever have a proper plugin system. So what I did was take the redis protocol (you use it via redis-cli or any client) and a few of its basic ideas: key=><data struct>, snapshot persistence, the overall command syntax idioms, master/slave replication, pubsub - and stripped everything but the very basic system commands. Oh, and also the concept of single threadedness seemed to be wasted on Go.

The rest is implemented inside isolated plugins that do not need to know about network or disk, and are just responsible for managing creation, serialization and manipulation of data structs. PubSub and such are achieved via Go channels, and locking is done on a key level, with reader/writer locks. The rest is pretty straight forward.

Besides some basic commands (strings, hashes, pubsub, monitor), I've added prefix search and json storage with sub node manipulation, with (relatively) very few lines of code. Although Go doesn't support dynamic loading of libraries, the idea is that you compile the database with the plugins you want, since Go's compiler is amazingly fast.

I haven't opened it yet, and pressure at work prevents me from progressing lately, but if anyone is interested in collaborating on this, I'd be glad to write about it in more detail and/or put it out there.
SEEKING WORK:

I've got past full-stack experience in Django. My most recent experience was being cofounder in a bootstrapped startup where I put together the entire platform (including frontend, consumable API backend, and browser extension) from scratch. I'm strongest doing backend work in Python (especially for Django) -- anything from message passing middleware to RESTful API services to test suites to data modeling to data ingestion and sanitization. However, I can handle frontend if needed as well, and can design a page that looks pretty (though I would not consider myself a full designer or information architect).

SKILLS:

Backend: Python, Django, South, PostgreSQL, Couchbase, Celery, TastyPie, django-unittest

Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript/CoffeeScript using jQuery, bootstrap, underscore.js

Deployment: Fabric, Boto, nginx, AWS, EC2, ELB, EBS

Design: Illustrator, Bootstrap, CSS, HTML

Email: statokinetics at gmail dot com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rabialam
Do you need a keychain maybe? Perhaps a plastic cup that is cheaply screenprinted?
This is not how it works. The next release name is announced approximately when the freeze starts. When a release happens, oldstable is archived, stable become the new oldstable, and the current state of testing becomes the new stable.

For a moment of time (we're talking hours), testing and stable have the same set of packages. Britney, the software
which migrates packages from unstable to testing, runs four times a day. During a freeze, it is configured to need "unblock exceptions" to migrate packages. When this is option is disabled, the following britney run will make the first difference between testing and stable.
> During that period (I can guarantee!) both Win and OSX were ALSO -miserable- experiences.

Really? Because Windows XP has been out for 12 years, and that was far from a "miserable experience".
I think Linux is kinda about choice (as a base building block for your own OS). And distros are out there to make those choices so that I don't have to.
>A big part of megaupload's business was infringing property rights granted under U.S. law to Americans.

No, perhaps that's what MU's users were up to, but not MU. What if this case were about banking? Would you also argue that Swiss banks should ignore Swiss banking laws and rat out Americans who lie about their assets to avoid taxes?

>If your actions are going to effect people in the U.S., obviously you should have to follow U.S. law.

No, it isn't obvious at all, and it implies that we should all behave in ways that do not affect people in other countries lest we be extradited for prosecution in some foreign jurisdiction if we break some foreign law.
You got lucky with your hardware; nothing more. Sound in Linux has been a living nightmare.
They actually made one of the easiest parts. Far more difficult, if not impossible today would be the barrel. A trigger that worked more than once would also be extremely challenging. Not to mention that it would melt in short order.
It is interesting, but certainly not finished software.
It's $30 without an annual commitment.
Why do NPR reporters have such great names?
It's worked for centuries. It does require some amount of large-scale violence and/or business domination, that's kind of the missing ??? step you forget in your algo.
I wouldn't be concerned that they're missing anything with gestural UIs.
So, who's going to start the petition to make this open source?
It'd be great if you could give some more details around finding and arranging work with this ideal client. It doesn't seem likely that this was your first interaction with the client. What was your relationship before you guys quit your job? How did you initially get in touch with them?
Lose 20-30 Pounds In 5 Days: Extreme Weight Cutting Secrets of UFC Fighters
Pop this in your URL with the tanker on screen: javascript:void(document.getElementsByClassName("tanker")[0].className += " sink")

Or, for those of a more surrealist bent: javascript:void(document.getElementsByClassName("fortmason")[0].className += " sink")
I draw the line on what a real error - 4xx doesn't seem to fit the bill. If you want information then a 2xx code and/or a JSON body would be ideal (for me).

I think this is the crux of the debate is where do you draw the line?
I agree, Amazon has put together a great product for mobile when you know what you are looking to buy, similar to the use case described by andy andyjsong. However, I would argue that this use case does not capture all shopping experiences. Many shoppers are preference oriented and need a way to browse through products while making a decision (e.g, apparel, travel)
I agree. I'm sure Dreamweaver has its set of dedicated, erm, beginner users, but the Edge family was essentially created to replace Dreamweaver.
While I agree with the sentiment, the current "competitors" that have shown up are either equally twitchy about TOS violations [1], have abysmally poor performance in many areas of the world (again I'm referring to ustream.tv), or are basically scams[2].

They've also been pretty good about talking to people about their TOS violations and reverting bans if necessary [3].

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/04/tech/web/hugo-awards-gaiman-us...
[2] http://www.destiny.gg/n/own3d-tv-a-beginners-guide-to-being-...
[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1bqum7/just... *

* Random link I found by looking for twitch.tv restoring accounts. I know there have ones where it wasn't twitch.tv's fault including recently a DOTA 2/SC2 caster, I just can't remember where he posted his stuff.
Look into caseless ammunition. It has been around for at least 20 years. Then ask how far off we are.
I understand that view, but I don't think it's commonly understood that way. There are a lot of prestigious "Graphic Design" programs at colleges, but I've not seen many "Visual Design" ones. I do manage a team of 2 UX designers and 2 GD'ers. The UX team makes our apps work well and the GD team gives them their polish, but there is a lot of overlap between the two.

Great article, BTW, very interesting thought experiment.
Government lab reveals it has operated quantum Internet for over two years
Heh. JavaScript was famously invented in a week.
Former VentureBeat Writer Launches Tech Journalist PR List
Sounds like a classic case-study for Lean Startup methodologies.

Why did you sink 6 months into this without knowing if people actually wanted it?

Stop coding. Now. Go out and talk to your potential customers. What problem are you solving? How are people solving it now?

Best of luck, and hopefully this can be salvaged, or else it is a learning experience for next time.
Show HN: I made this simple YouTube playlist maker. What do you think?
Question for moderators...

I made a mistake by linking directly to an editor. A mod should change the URL to just yugentext.com without the /0a9617.

Would save this post from the spammers.
Forget the MVP - Create the The Minimum Lovable Product
Neither is flash.
> JavaScript is the fastest interpreted language and plans are out to make it even speedier.

Citation needed
Comic Sans :(
Working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week sounds hard. How did you manage?
Objection. Bullshit, your Honor.

Better?
Why would Adobe make Fireworks open source when they plan to continue selling and updating the last version?

"While we are not planning further feature development for Fireworks, we will continue to sell Fireworks CS6 as well as make it available as part of the Creative Cloud. We will provide security updates as necessary and may provide bug fixes. We plan to update Fireworks to support the next major releases of both Mac OS X and Windows."
Yes, totally agree with this. Consulting kinda softens the blow of your product taking time to gain traction. For startups, there is calendar time and labor time. Certain things, like SEO, marketing, email lists and credibility take time to build up, no matter how hard and fast you work.

Having a consulting business to take the edge off and still have income coming in really does help.
Some time ago, Dropbox offered me up to 3GB more free storage if I just turned on "auto uploading" for photos from my Android phone to my Dropbox folder. "Hey, free storage? OK."

I don't use Dropbox consciously - not daily, not weekly, not monthly - but I upload my photos to it automatically in exchange for more storage in case I one day need it. Like a backup service I don't actually have to visit except in emergency.

Not sure there is a lot of value in me for Dropbox, but they do get to make outrageous claims about 1B daily uploads, which includes every photo I've ever taken with my cell phone.

I wonder how many files are uploaded where people consciously uploaded to Dropbox.
China-business-directory-database
Does anyone know of an alternative that works as well with PNGs as Fireworks does? And runs under Windows.
You should wrap your JS in an anonymous function. People can just emit sockets from the console.

e.g.

socket.emit('msg', "text here");
You have to either get comfortable living in someone elses reality or accept the burden/freedom of creating your own reality.
Is there a term which distinguishes between a robot like a dishwasher or laundry machine, vs. robotic lawn mowers or vacuum, vs. the type of robot discussed here?

Otherwise, the answer to the above question is "yes", in so far as my life is already robot-assisted.
The story of comint mode
Anything in that vein would certainly help more than just: "Come spend $400 watching something you can read online ten minutes after it happens"
This looks very cool, sadly someone's already changed the admin creds on the live demo...

As someone who's spent a few hours reskinning things and trying to change out some stuff in the admin panel, this is a breath of fresh air.
Digital Sabbatical: What I Learned
Dropbox are in an interesting position- they're practically a "cloud utility". Like if ConEd invited me to "discover the possibilities when you use electricity", I don't really know what I'd get out of a Dropbox conference. It does file syncing. They have an API that allows you to sync files. Right. Either the topics would be so specific that they'd all repeat each other, or they'd be so broad that they would only tangentially touch on what Dropbox does.

That said, there isn't an agenda so i can't find out.
Not true. I'm visiting with Chrome 26.0.1410.65 and clicking outside the box does close it.

However, clicking on 'request an invitation' without completing the form does make it do a nice little dance :)
lol u so old
Thanks.

Obviously, I'd prefer they mean the same thing ;)
No, I wasn't saying it would actually work ;)
It's not uncommon for services that are growing fast to be overloaded. Twitter is a famous recent example. Empirically it seems to be a predictor of success. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one startup (Friendster) that died because it couldn't handle its own popularity, and that was a pretty extreme case.
I don't think the "general liberal-arts undergrad education" is as effective if students still live at home. Living in very new environment helps students be more open to new ideas. I think this especially true where the students home environment is anti-science or bigoted.
Complete United Arab Emirates Business directory
Unfortunately, I'm not seeing how this is better or different from the millions of other "online marketing" programs I've seen advertised on Warrior Forum or similar. Except this one is an actual "bootcamp" style workshop that costs $11,000. OK.

But I am still not in any way assured how this would be different from other content courses.

What is your unfair advantage? Unfortunately, I don't recognize those names you mentioned, so that doesn't really sell me on it. If I'm going to plunk down $11K, I need to know why I am getting a return on my investment.

Best of luck

EDIT: I just saw that the top 4 students will be guaranteed market-rate job placement. That goes a long way to assuage my fears, but still, I'm not quite sure I'd pay $11K for this.
This sounds fantastic. I've been going through SICP, and this is a great outlet to try my hand a real project in Scheme.
Hiring an excellent team of interns
$20 to try it out?

Its $30 without the annual commitment.
I can't recommend Antetype enough as not so much a Fireworks replacement but rather a much better and different tool that makes screen design much more efficient and easy: http://antetype.com/
Over 250M people using SkyDrive
Part of the problem is that linux isn't linux the way windows is windows, and people expect it to be.
That is over 3 yrs of Dropbox Pro for one user, so I am curious what they will offer on that single day.
Three Examples of Real-Time Marketing Done Right (Besides Oreo)
JavaScript Developers—Look Fly, Be Cool
Around the world: A week's worth of food for a family
Sounds interesting, to say the least. Bill (llimllib above) was actually considering writing a Redis implementation in Go as a learning exercise right after we finished with the interval tree stuff.

I personally would be interested in the progression of the project. But yes, finding time for yet another project is always fun...