skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My answer would be that there are existence proofs for things that we cannot produce examples of. (There are actually many such proofs, but at some point I stopped being shocked.) And furthermore there exist existence proofs for classes of things, at least some of the examples of which we can NEVER verify without adding new axioms to our axiom system!

Let me give a concrete example. A minor of a graph is any graph that you can get from the first by deleting points, deleting edges, or contracting points and joining edges. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertson%E2%80%93Seymour_theo... for a theorem which says that any family of graphs that is closed under taking minors (ie if G is in the family, then every minor of G is as well) can be characterized by a finite set of forbidden minors. Any graph without a minor in the forbidden set, is in the family.

The best known example of such a family is planar graphs. Those are graphs that you can draw in the plane without crossings. The forbidden minors are K_5 (5 points, all connected to each other) and K_3_3 (2 groups of 3 points, every point in each group connects to the every point in the other). Any graph without either of those as minors, is planar.

So, given any family of graphs that is closed under taking minors, we must have a concrete set of forbidden minors. Furthermore it turns out that given a finite set of forbidden minors, we can use them create a polynomial-time algorithm for recognizing whether a given graph is in the family.

Here is where it gets strange.

Given a family of graphs, we do not have a procedure to produce the forbidden minors. Such a procedure would be wonderful - it would let us do interesting things like solve the Halting problem! That is, of course, an impossible thing to do. This proves that there is, in fact, no such procedure. So we have proved existence of finite, concrete lists, yet proved that in general it is impossible to construct said lists.

It gets worse. There are many interesting families of graphs which are closed under minors, many of which we do not have any decision procedure for at all! (For example graphs embeddable in 3-dimensions without anywhere embedding a knot.)

So we've proven the existence of finite answers to concrete mathematical problems. Yet cannot produce those answers. In general we can NEVER produce those answers. Yet we know that they exist.

Now for the philosophy question: in what sense do those unfindable, unverifiable answers actually exist?
no result found for cape town, south africa.
:S
Interesting, the negative connotation might have been a legacy of prohibition.

It's unfortunate that people don't feel the same about the war on drugs, simply because it mostly effects minorities.
No he's not, he is a traitor and belongs in jail.
Btw, is fabsie.com supposed to display a blank page? I was about to bookmark it.
"Will everyone have to be on encrypted VPN's?"

A VPN only protects data in transit. While everyone should practice good network security, it's not a complete solution. We need a government that will reliably respect our rights, including the right to privacy. Revolutions don't have a very good track record at producing such. I have more hope for the political process, but haven't entirely figured out what that should look like either.
The sharpened version looks over-sharp to me. You may find that a level or curves adjustment is more what this image needs to pop a little.
The script on the linked page deals with filenames with spaces while that for loop does not.

Neither of them deal with filenames with \n in them, eg 'pretty

sunset.jpg'

For that, you'll want to run find:

find . -name '*.jpg' -exec convert '{}' -resize "900x" -unsharp 2x0.5+0.5+0 -quality 98 `basename '{}' .jpg`_s.jpg \;
Kenneth Reitz's python-guide definitely is a great resource for project structures, workflows etc. http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/
Material implication and the fact that logic based on it is considered OK.

E.g. "if the moon was made of cheese, then P=NP" is considered true. This would have been funny if this kind of proofs wasn't used in proofs of basic facts of set theory, e.g. the theorem about empty set being a subset of any set.

I am glad there are people trying to address these issues with a new logic, such as relevance logic, though almost every mathematician I know is fully reconciled with the former type of logic without questioning it.
No results for Manila, Kuala Lumpur, or Singapore either
It really is the most wonderful irony that the US's apparent heavy-handed actions over Morales' plane ended up biting them in the ass.

As an American, I really do want to know, though -- who are the ham-fisted officials in charge of overseeing Snowden's prosecution? Who was the actual official who made the decision to tell France and Spain not to let Morales land? And who are the officials in France and Spain who decided to obey? (And are they still denying it?)

I mean, regardless of what you think about Snowden, the level of American incompetence here, the way our officials are simply disrespecting other governments and peoples of the world, is really astounding. It's shameful, and I wish I knew who the bumbling officials actually are.
It looks like it works if you write it 'Tromso'. But you have to write Copenhagen as 'Koebenhavn', so it seems inconsistent in handling the ø.
This looks interesting, do you have any sample images for comparison?
Sounds like an useful board for uses other than a laptop (e.g. robotics, DSP).
As a programming analogy: imagine mathematics is a big codebase and "prime" is a commonly-used function defined within that codebase.

You could refactor "prime" to allow 1, provided you refactor all the call sites to work with that new definition too. Consensus seems to be that this refactoring would add LOC and reduce code readability, probably leading to someone submitting a patch soon after with a "prime-but-not-one" function and using that everywhere.
My favorite surprising result in mathematics is that you can create chaos in the mathematical sense [1] with a bi-infinite binary sequence and the bitshift operation. Essentially, "multiplying by two" is chaotic in the right circumstances.

The technical description can be found starting at page 567 of [0], though the Google Books preview has some important pages missing.

[0] Stephen Wiggins - Introduction to Applied Nonlinear Dynamical Systems and Chaos http://books.google.com/books?id=GYcOfuZDOKMC&lpg=PA565&ots=...

[1] The key attributes of chaos are described in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory#Chaotic_dynamics
The limitations bunnie was talking about in terms of sales aren't about technical elitism, but rather a practical decision of not wanting to be pulled into a huge support nightmare when it is almost literally just two guys in a garage working on this as a side project.

This is something he is right to be concerned about. No matter how many warnings you slap on something that it is currently only suitable for advanced users, you will always get a bunch of people who want some shiny new thing and buy it and then bitch and moan that it doesn't have Apple-style end-user polish.

It is all being developed in the open (in all senses of the word), so if some other entity who does want to get into the mass manufacturing and support side thinks doing so is worth it, that can always happen.
Tokyo is pretty expensive, and transportation is also really expensive. I'm paying about $550 for rent at the moment (11m^2, shared restroom/shower) "inside" of Tokyo. I got really lucky finding my place though, most equivalent places around here go for at least $100 more a month. If I were working in Shinjuku, it would probably cost me $100 a month for a commuter pass. Internet is pretty cheap though (you can get a home line for about $30 a month).

Still seems to be a bit of a losing proposition, though.
What you've shown is that that particular number (0.0178.../the length of the pencil in metres) is describable. This isn't the same as showing every real number is describable. There are some numbers which are not the length of anything (in metres), or the mass of anything (in kilograms), or the square root or sin of anything. You could try to capture more numbers by using descriptions like "the length of this pencil in feet" and other made-up units of measurement, but you'll never describe them all.
You are oversimplifying more than you know.

In a number theory course around 1990, I remember reading papers from the 60s which would explicitly note whether the counts of primes that they were using were starting from 1 or 2. You can define them as not notable mathematicians, but working mathematicians in number theory still had not completely standardized 50 years ago.

Now for more fun, sit down with a group of mathematicians and ask whether they consider 0 to be a natural number. :-)

(The answer you get will vary by field. But none will consider it a particularly important question.)
A year is a long time to suffer from invasive fungi, and if the toxicity of your air is, in any way, threatening your health, then you can build a very effective air purifier, which is better and cheaper than the store bought kind, using simple parts.

The key is a MERV 13+ filter (MERV Rating System [0]), because it's 90% effective for collecting particles 1-10 microns. TTBOMK, this is the size of most spores and the arthroconidia that cause this coccidioidomycosis [1].

Take a a 20" box fan (like this Lasko one [2], or available at the hardware store) and these 20x20x4 MERV 13 filters [3], $48, then either tape or bungee cord the filters to the back of the fan. Run it on an elevated surface so that it's not wasting the filter on cleaning up particles that have fallen from the air and can be swept and mopped up. Assemble 1 unit per room.

This works really well. If you're looking for other methods to improve your air quality, search for a UV A/C attachment (e.g. Calutech Blue-Ray), diffused oils (e.g. "Thieve's Oil" in a cold-air diffuser), and ventilation practices. For a wide rang of cases, these nasal screens [4] offer a great solution.

[0] http://www.ontimeairfilters.com/air-filter-merv-rating
[1] http://ci.vbi.vt.edu/pathinfo/pathogens/Coccidioides.html
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Lasko-3723-20-Inch-Premium-3-SPEED/dp/...
[3] http://www.ushomefilter.com/products/air-filters/SC80-20X20X...
[4] http://www.filteryourlife.com/
Seems like a weak article intended to try to placate people who are concerned about what the leaks revealed. The scope and scale of mass surveillance systems today is in no way comparable to the government systems one or more centuries ago. Even if Lincoln spied on the telegraphs, back then most people didn't use telegraphs for personal communications.
My 3 favorites:

2^(2^(2^...-1)-1)-1 seems prime for all nestings, but the numbers get enormous fast

John Conway's "surreal numbers" create all math from an empty set

Fractals ('nuf said)
The most incredible thing in this article is the assertion that there exists at least one math professor that is unaware of this theorem - I was taught all of this in the first algebra course at university...
The FAQ link goes to the Github bugtracker. Can we have a proper FAQ page, please?
“I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” - Abraham Lincoln

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/mar/29/what-di...
100% agreed on the bit about holomorphic functions. Once I forget the derivation, the result surprises me all over again.
I think the author is making this sound a lot easier than it really is. From my experience, which didn't do so well, I came to the realization that these projects are more of a popularity contest than a discoverability (if that's a word) one, i.e., it's all about who you know.

Even trying to get the media to cover it was nearly impossible because they won't even reply back to your email unless you have a huge following and social network.

Not to sound like a negative nancy, but at least from my own personal experience, it did feel like having a great idea, even a game-changing idea, won't take off unless you know the right people.
No results for Prague and Dublin. For Vienna, if found Vienna, VA, USA, not Vienna, Austria.
A mid range oscilloscope can easily cost $5000. If you look at the whole range of oscilloscopes, $5000 is on the very low end. If you want bespoke, as in custom tailored to your exact specifications, that's easily another order of magnitude in price, possibly two.

Heck, there are oscilloscope probes that cost $5000.

But test equipment isn't exactly high volume stuff.
O(n) Sorting Algorithm: Quantum Bogosort
Show HN: I wrote a script to generate startup names & funding stories on Twitter
I don't know why many assume the U.S. was behind this. France and Italy have their own spy programs and the less said the better, so blocking him could have forced Snowden back to Russia to accept Putin's terms (stop talking) or cause his capture.
Tangential to the point being made, 98 as quality seems way too high for an image to be shown on the web. 85 seems to be a decent tradeoff. Doing so might actually increase the image size.
The difference is between a PRNG and encryption. Encryption's design is to obscure the data stream; thus, if there is a failure in an encryption it is masked by another encryption. Personally, I do not think this is a particularly useful activity. Public vetted encryption rarely spontaneously falls over. A modern encryption, like AES256, is well beyond the far future in computing requirements to brute force. It's better to be aware of changes over time and switch to a current crypto if things change, like how 3DES died. PRNG, on the other hand, is a string of numbers. They don't obscure anything. Either A) you don't try to obscure, and part of your numbers are weak anyways and need to be replaced or B) you're attempting to write your own crypto and you're going to do it badly. Using PRNG to obscure another one is a sin, you're trying to write encryption. (Sin being "to miss the mark" or point.)
Interesting. While "informant" on its own has negative connotations to me (rat, disloyalty, etc.), "public informant" actually sounds nice, because it's understood to be in the public's interest.

For me, Snowden's actions are beyond mere whistleblowing, and the term sounds restrictive, almost trivial to me. He hasn't revealed a few broken laws or certain instances of corruption. Instead, he's revealing to the public the kinds of fundamental information we should have had all along, in a properly functioning democracy -- and this is far more important.

I like the idea of having an additional term for the likes of Snowden, or those who revealed the Pentagon Papers, and so on.
Ask HN: How much experience with JavaScript MV* for front-end jobs?
I am a front-end developer but I don't know any JavaScript mv* frameworks. It seems like most front-end job positions are now requiring experience with Backbone Ember etc. etc.<p>I've started learning Ember but I am curious, what would be an acceptable level of knowledge to have before I apply for a mid-level developer position?
Apple is also mostly older people (and at least from my informal sampling, a larger-than-normal-even-for-silicon-valley number of non-heterosexual people).
This reminded me of http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox
Maybe you could show a popup, only once after the addon is activated, with a list of the most popular websites and a check-box that could be checked if you want to keep current and future cookies for any selected one? and maybe a search box to add non-common ones
Those don't sound entirely unviable, but neither do they sound like they'd stop spying at all. Personally, I feel that the best option is to break national borders so that it's a lot more nebulous who is spying on who: decentralization of power by globalization. Not that that's particularly viable.
Coding Tasks - FreedomBox Foundation
The "GWoT" isn't a war in the legal sense. It isn't a war under the definition of war as it is word is used in the US federal constitution. And yet, I suspect we will find that these "secret interpretations" of laws are based in some secret declaration of emergency powers that, in effect, edit our rights and selectively suspend the constitution.
The origins of Google Docs
> I have found that unsharp mask is best applied before you scale the image. Shrinking the image first will eliminate some of the details that you wanted to enhance in the first place.

Unsharp mask doesn't work that way: you get the same results applying it before or after scaling, as long as you adjust the radius accordingly.

The reason I suggested applying it after scaling is because aesthetically pleasing settings don't change much as the image size changes.
Paradigm Paralysis
If you are interested in the early history of the Internet, and would like a lot more detail than provided by this paper, I cannot recommend the following book enough: "Where Wizards Stay Up Late - The Origins Of The Internet": http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848326...
imagemagick/graphicsmagick comes with a batch tool called mogrify. no need for scripting.
When I type "København" it responds with an empty page. It seems like any non-ascii character makes the page crash.

It doesn't have "Copenhagen", only "Koebenhavn" which nobody uses.
Is this tool doing anything other than a deconvolution?
Ants: TCP, Optimization & parallels
Reduce the quality quotient (severely, like .98 -> .3) and don't cut the resolution as far, e.g. Keep 2x the pixels.

Much better appearance for the same file size.
This is fine if you have a limited set of images that you handpick and optimize.

Do you have any suggestions when there are thousands of images and all this needs to be automated?
Typo:

function(scope, element, attars)

Should be attrs.
Self Control Predicts Success Even More Than IQ
The OP talks about an order which circumvented the press and even called for the arrest of newsmen. Even if you were right about the use of telegraphs for personal communications, the freedom of press is actually enshrined in the First Amendment and the public was much more reliant on the news wires than they are today. Why is it so hard to accept that the government has frequently used war as a pretext for violating civil liberties, unless you insist on keeping to the narrative that America was a flawless beacon of freedom until the NSA showed up?

What's that saying about those who fail to remember history are doomed to something something?
Not really a result, more of a discovery but the Mandelbrot set still amazes me to this day :)

Not really mathematics but close enough: The fact that a Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing complete really fascinates me as well.
This is actually an information theory problem which follows directly from the existence of incompressible numbers.

The simple explanation for incompressibility goes something like this: Compression means reversibly mapping longer bitstrings to shorter bitstrings. For each bit you add to the length of a string, you multiply the number of values it can represent by two. That means you cannot uniquely (i.e. reversibly) represent each bitstring having n bits with a bitstring having m bits where n > m, because you run out of unique values of the shorter bitstrings before you have a representation for each of the longer bitstrings. QED.

Now you just apply that to numbers with infinite precision. The number "exactly 4.5" is really 4.5000000… meaning "4.5" followed by an infinite number of zeros. That number, despite having infinite precision, is one we compress into less than infinite storage. Various other numbers (like four and one third) are likewise. But as we just proved, there have to exist some numbers with infinite precision that we don't represent with anything less than an infinite number of symbols.

The interesting thing about this is that you can never say that any specific number is incompressible and thus indescribable. You can take any bitstring (but not all bitstrings) of any length, including infinite, and assign a specific shorter (and finite) bitstring to represent it. You then have a finite encoding for that specific infinite sequence of symbols which can henceforth be used to describe it. You just can't do it for every infinite bitstring because you have insufficiently many finite bitstrings with which to represent them.
Perhaps. I think it's a naive point of view, though.

Search is terrible still, the other day I searched for "cheap mechanical keyboard" and the first two results were basically pure spam. Even then, only the first 5 results get any decent traffic and results on the 2nd page get almost none.

Social recommendations work only if your product is either really damn good or you play unfair and game the system. People are designed to not care about things they haven't heard of before.

There's a saying in selling that says a person needs to see your brand/product 7 times before they're ready to buy. As a new person on the capitalist market I don't see how I'd do that while playing fair and without going bankrupt in the mean time.
The money printing we see in much of the west is implemented differently to how it was implemented in, for example, Zimbabwe. It's also not what I'd call large scale, but it's certainly larger than normal.

It takes a much longer route to the hands of the ordinary man (and indeed, often never does - it gets printed and the same day locked away again), and on the way seems to get locked inside ridiculous house price inflation, and stock markets doing far better than they should. I complain about this, but should state that I dumped as much as I could into stocks when interest rates went to near zero and the printing presses started up, and I've done very well out of listed companies that really aren't doing much better than they were before.

It all has to go somewhere - it's just not going into bread.
Venezuela, however, can actually protect
him once he is inside the country. Bolivia
probably can't.

Why do you think Venezuela can protect him better than Bolivia?
I think before and after shots would have been helpful.
You can check some docu from apigee as well: http://info.apigee.com/Portals/62317/docs/web%20api.pdf
Fortunately for those not keen on the new licensing scheme, it seems like there are some other solid options on the market now for on-disk embedded key-value storage, under a variety of licenses: LevelDB, Kyoto Cabinet, and the new LSM library from sqlite4.
One problem I recently encountered is that some images refused to load on IE8. Turns out that the IE does not support CYMK color spaced images and the image appeared significantly differently on chrome and firefox. Was quite surprising since I had assumed that jpeg was a standard format and would be supported by all.
really who time to do all this, image by image.I use aperture which is ok.
Eh. SpaceX is very conservative in many ways. Part of the reason they've been so successful is that they've taken tried-and-tested rocket designs and just refined them to be more efficient, rather than trying something brand new and exotic, so I wouldn't say it's a bad thing they haven't had any "spectacular failures." It just means the core technology is finally getting mature enough to be reliable and cost-effective, which is a good thing.
The HN header has never spooked me.
You spelled Forth wrong :>
Exactly! The rhetoric is there, of course. Actions are somewhat different.
So at the end is marketing what we should hack instead of code.

I always ask me how many projects in the long tail deserve to move to the head? Surely many if we hack the search economy.
> Now for the philosophy question: in what sense do those unfindable, unverifiable answers actually exist?

I don't really see anything philosophically interesting here. Such a feeling probably arises from a misinterpretation of the halting problem here:

> it would let us do interesting things like solve the Halting problem! That is, of course, an impossible thing to do. This proves that there is, in fact, no such procedure.

No such procedure to do it generally.