skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just to give an example of what speeder means by "students here don't know jack shit":
Over the years I have told friends and peers that, in a perfect vacuum and without taking into account the curvature of the earth, a bullet fired from a gun that's completely level and another bullet dropped from the same height, at the same time, will hit the ground at the same time. Everyone disagrees, says that of course the bullet from the gun will take much longer to fall etc, etc. Now, this is all people who went to private schools and had three (yes, three) years of physics (because if you go to high school here and your school is not a shitty public one, you will have physics for 3 years. You can't choose). I even argued with a friend of mine who is a geologist and works at Brazil's huge oil company Petrobras. You might say "oh, a couple of people, that's anecdote". Yes, it is, but it is just a couple of people because after the fifth I just said "screw it", no one learns physics here.
read python requests module.
Thank you - please never stop posting because of comments like epo's
This is good. I really liked it.

But just to continue the mind-games, yes there are an infinity more indescribable numbers than there are describable ones, but should there be?

Given the balloon example, he makes the case that as an imaginary god: "...stare imploringly into the siren call of the final ellipsis, for you know that no matter how often you expand it, I will always smile when giving you more and more digits, because you and I will both know that the final wisdom of The Number will always be mine and never yours..."

But we know that, given any exact point in time, only a certain number of atoms are inside the balloon. Therefore, whatever the number is to answer the equation, it is one with a finite number of digits. (One imagines the experiment being done in such a manner that quantum tunneling is minimized)

So while yes, using symbols you can certainly construct numbers which are indescribable (given either an infinite series of symbols or a self-recursive way of generating more), does the real world actually work that way?

In other words, is mathematics truly isomorphic with reality as we observe it? Or is it somehow a superset of logic sitting above an infinite number of possible realities? In a universe full of discrete things (perhaps at the sub-quark level), do we need a system of mathematics that works over continuities? Is such a model always helpful? If not, where might it be tripping us up?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy...
Cantor's diagonal argument. I learned it all in high-school!
No - an apartment usually costs more per sq metre than a house.
App That Gets You A "Flood" Of Users
That book looks great, thanks! I've been reading:

High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic by Johnson and Graham:

http://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/...

and RTL Hardware Design using VHDL by Chu:

http://www.amazon.com/RTL-Hardware-Design-Using-VHDL/dp/0471...

(the latter for designing for FPGAs)
"All programs have been written, and that program is Lisp. With perfection already attained, implementation is left to the ignorant who do not already know the truth of this."

and, of course,

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp".

Robert Morris's addendum: "Including Common Lisp."

... except if you use a well-written Lisp interpreter library :) - Scheme
Some of the heat will also radiate out the window as infrared.
I am in Vegas right now, and I can tell you: most nerds I know would die in this heat. Turn your oven on and stick your head into it: that's what it feels like.

I remember when I first visited San Francisco: I felt like it was home. Right then I decided that I'd move there some day. But Vegas doesn't feel that way. The entire city seems like a mirage: from the fake Eiffel Tower to the fake Statue of Liberty, it all seems so superficial.
For the locals' sake I hope Hsieh can pull it off, but I'm skeptical.
I'm not an expert. Here's a few resources I've collected:

http://www.restapitutorial.com/

http://www.restapitutorial.com/media/RESTful_Best_Practices-...

REST API Design Rulebook: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920021575.do

RESTful Web Services: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529260.do

http://restcookbook.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfe...
A simple ruby plugin system
Would it be possible to create a sharefest tracker? I.e. A piratebay with no magnet link or torrent file needed. Just a simple download button.
Google has nothing to do with this project - it's just on a PR push to associate it's name with futuristic projects.

[edit: like a cigarette company sponsoring sports events]
Great, this is absolutely what I needed. Especially http://www.restapitutorial.com/media/RESTful_Best_Practices-...
CHP - Clojure Web Framework
> What "MS stuff" have you used?

I used Visual Basic from version 2 to 6 (I was the first VB MCP certified in Brazil), VBScript (and ASP) for several significant web applications (mostly e-commerce), VC/C++ 6 (for the Windows CE-based electronic voting system, in 2002) and Visual Basic .NET and C# for some desktop and ASP.NET applications.

I haven't played with ASP.NET MVC and other recent Microsoft technologies.
Same here with Firefox 22.0. With 2560x1440 resolution you get three columns for the code blocks. It looks fine in IE 10. IE renders the page with only one column independent of window width.
As an MIT alum who (1) has run experiments, (2) has had experiments performed on me by MIT researchers and (3) has actually studied this particular case in a Scientific Ethics class at MIT, I know a lot of things. Plus my brother is developmentally disabled.

The "scientists" in question didn't think anyone would consent so they chose to experiment on people without seeking consent. They knew that normal adults would ask too many questions so they used cognitively impaired children. They did this because they didn't think of developmentally disabled people as fully human.

Look, MIT has already decided that this was a horribly unethical thing to do. Its professors practically scream that in classes. And it paid off the victims with $2million. MIT thinks this is unethical. So why are you disagreeing?
The traditional big three auto companies hire young MIT EECS graduates for EE work and fire them fairly young.
The particular person that you're responding to has a well known anti-Microsoft bias. It even says so in his profile.

So, I wouldn't believe a word of it.
It's funny you should mention this, because I was just in the middle of a really hot day in Baltimore, and - well, I should mention, I have a heat sensitivity problem. I was getting overheated and I walked by the grates of an above-ground garage. There was cool air blowing out like there was no tomorrow. Honestly I haven't really met too many hot garages.
Wall Street Journal says Egypt needs a Pinochet – can it get away with that?
It is pretty hard to automatically test cryptography. (I do agree however, that C is a rather bad language for implementing cryptography.)
Hmm, isn't that sharefest.me already?
you just put the link for a file and bam...you're in a p2p network e.g: http://www.sharefest.me/d09118ed
This guy tried it with his takehome final, didn't go so well

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/256816/if-n-the-orde...
Giving away isn't dickish. However, changing the terms to a license with more expensive terms of conditions is. Because of the requirement of providing source with "modified" versions, you have to now provide a source download with your software, even if you make the most subtle of changes. Furthermore, as most OS distributors patch their version, even using the provided version becomes legally suspect. All of this makes lawyers nervous, and more apt to just throw money at Oracle instead of having to do a ton of auditing at the risk of expensive court action.
> So, people can't work for a bank or insurance company and still make a difference?

Of course they can, but if your focus is on earning a paycheck, it'll be much harder to make a difference because you may be unwilling to take the necessary risks.

If there is one thing I miss from my youth (apart from hair, perfect eyesight and the ability to fall without breaking bones) is my ability to throw everything up and start from scratch. I wouldn't trade that for my family, of course, and that is the whole point.
Golang seems to fit that bill for me. I'm using it more every day now.
Same here. Just record the damn thing and upload to youtube.
XORing multiple sources throws away lots of useful entropy. There are better approaches available, and they are used.

Edit: nhaehnle, I can't reply to your comment (yet) because it's too deeply nested. I don't know the direct answer, but if you want to do some research yourself, you could do worse then reading this relevant Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_extractor) and following the links. They don't talk about provable extractors in the article itself, but you can probably identify at least the right terms you need to search for on arxive or so.
Key money is often not returned too.
I'll keep using Google Drive.
I, too, like GPL and free software, but I'd like to stress that this change hardly closes any loopholes. The previous BDB license was simply too vague and open to competing interpretations. The AGPL does not require web software using BDB to distribute its source code, only software actually modifying BDB.

The gist of AGPL is this:

* If you redistribute BDB with your software, then you must provide your software's source code (even if you haven't modified BDB).

* If you use BDB on your web server, then you must provide the source for your software only if BDB is modified.

Since hardly anyone modifies BDB (I would assume), this affects almost no one. It simply makes the license clear.
> You can't print your way out of a crisis
> without harming savers (retired) and
> young people (lower skilled, less experienced).

As a youngster I am tired of hearing shit like this.
Do you have any historical example to show?

Because from what I've seen, post WWII countries came out of their crises riding protectionist policies rather than sacrificing their last generation or robbing their population. Like Korea.
storage space and bandwidth are not really limiting factors on today's internet. i have over 100gig of online storage and 25mbps internet, for example. (corrected 1gig to 100gig).
Oh, I realize the problems with proprietary software, you're preaching to the choir ;) But I still don't see the point in comparing the two situations.
And the Apache licensed Subversion is still compatible with AGPL licensed BDB. What am I missing here?
"Design of Computer Programs" contains lots of advanced concepts and programming puzzles...
The AGPL requires no such thing. If you use BDB in the backend you don't have to open anything; only if you actually modify the BDB source code.
Sharefest and google drive are made for different purposes.
Sharefest is a file sharing/transfer platform.
When Drive is, well as its name infers...a drive.
If you're a Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire fan, the GoT Ascent game for it is pretty fun, particularly if you're only playing <= 15 minutes each day. I burnt out after blowing through most of the chapters they had ready as soon as they launched, and before the PvP and other features were further developed.

http://gota.disruptorbeam.com/users/login
Sky’s Talking Windows – How to ruin a great technology
Oh come on now. Microsoft didn't take away one single kit that they ever released.

Stuff from 15 years ago is still usable on Windows 8! Visual Basic 4, 5, 6, COM/DCOM, etc.

You can still use and get documentation for all of those, including Silverlight.

> The same attitude is visible with how the Metro UI is being shoved down my visual pathways with Win 8.

So what? Ignore it and keep using all the stuff that you want to because it all still works. If enough people share your opinion, the stuff you don't like will go away and you'll be happy again when they shove something better down your visual pathway.
This isn't a throwaway account. I am not sure why you accuse me of that and why you're so sure of it.

Context is important as you read through the comments. Read your parent post of the post I was replying to.

Someone has to do the boring jobs so the world turns.
Snowden is not a persecuted person. He's someone who deliberately lied in order to gain access a government spy agency and then stole state secrets which he is selling to the press.

No government would consider that to be acceptable.

Note: This is no defense of the NSA. However it is dishonest to claim that people who criticize the US government are persecuted and need to flee.

The US is not chasing Snowden because he criticized them. They are chasing him because of the stolen documents.
I would take it one step further and say that the charges against Snowden are not laws of the land, they are simplistic, maybe even mechanistic laws with no real moral authority while the bill of rights is the supreme law of the land with significant moral basis.
The other thing is, as with almost all web-based solutions, you're being tracked by various scripts in the background (Google API/JS, etc.). So, if you're paranoid, you're better off with a client solution.
No, I don't think it amounts to persecution by the standards of what happened within the eastern bloc during the Cold War.
Easily invite a person to pair with you in tmux
I don't like Microsoft, but that doesn't make me wrong or willing to misrepresent facts.

As you can see from my answer, I've used Microsoft technology extensively in the 90's. My move to Unix environments happened in the mid-00's (until then, I still used Windows on my desktop)
It's better to switch to something else to benefit mankind for awhile.
Improve Performance by caching and compression
Well... Then, sorry and welcome to HN.

user:	rwhite
created:	1 hour ago
A few things. What is a sine function doing in a physics question? I'm pretty sure air resistance isn't cyclical, is it? Feels like a square root might be a better choice if you want to complexify a number.

Also, do -any- numbers really exist? They are really just concepts we use to describe the world. Right before me, there are 3 conglomerations of molecules that we would describe as apples, but what does it mean to say the number '3' exists? It only really exists in our minds. Pi only describes perfect circles - which don't exist. So yes, infinite strings of digits which can't be described can still be thought about, but that doesn't bring much to the table.
>(Consider the turnout for the briefings on this nonsense a couple of weeks ago--most skipped out to catch flights home.)

Attending those briefings is a poison pill. Before being briefed, members must swear not to reveal any of the content of the briefing.
Snowden is not being persecuted for his views or criticism of the government.

He is being chased because of his intentional theft of classified government documents. Can you name a country in which that would be legal?
Meet the gaming headset that "overclocks" your brain by electrocuting it
> Everything the NSA has done is completely legal and vetted.

Isn't Snowden's whole point that it really just looks like that on paper? Really, nothing prevents determined insiders from doing what they want.
Anyone else thinks this look somewhat dangerous?
>I think the interface solution would require setters and getters for every single field

not if you use struct tags. e.g.,

type MyController struct {
Id int `revel.q="id,required=true,min=0,max=200"`
}

or something like that. Then the framework just fills the controllers field on an incoming request, based on what it finds in the struct tags. Then you have an interface that allows you to override that behavior, similar to how the json package will use the methods defined in `json.Unmarshaler` if you define them, but will fall back to controlling things by itself with reflection if you don't.
Whilst I can understand your sentiment, I think a better solution would be that American cities had decent-sized cheap accommodation that was also well served by public amenities.

Many cities do, just not the ones most people would probably rush off too first… and it doesn't help with the increase in housing costs in "popular cities".
Japanese government should provide cheap housing indeed. Giving out money does not help much as inflation may occur.
You are absolutely right about the license, but I think you're confusing Oracle with Google. Oracle aren't evil, they just want your money. It's Google that wants to know everything about your life so that it can give you an IV line of ads. Google - evil, Oracle - just greedy :)
Quite possibly not. If the revelation of such secrets allowed china or russia to rise to power we would be worse off.

Remember China is a country in which a policeman can send you to jail without trial for criticizing the government.
"Thousands of protesters in over 100 US cities opted out of traditional July 4th celebrations on Thursday, instead choosing to march in nationwide protests against the US government’s NSA spying program.

"...Major US cities taking part in the protests included New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Memphis and Miami. London and Munich also hosted demonstrations.

Seattle: I was the only one.

Discarding other festive options, I took the $8.75 ferry over and hiked in a hurry from the terminal up to Westlake Center and made it about 12:15. The only others in the square were grim indigents and pedestrians quickly passing through.

What saved this 4th for me, was concurrently red blazer Kenny Wayne Gunner busking in front of Bon Marche's SE corner intersection overlooking Westlake Center on his turquoise Stratocaster, standing on top of his homemade amp powered by heavy wheelchair batteries, performing his awe inspiring 9 minutes National Anthem at least crankier and beautiful as Hendrix at Woodstock. The sun had also broken thru and Saved the 4th, here in Seattle.
"Wouldn't this concern be on par with consuming things that contain deadly things but in ppb or ppt quantities?"

It's not going to be enough to be toxic to humans. The issue is whether it's either introducing antifungal resistant fungi into your body, or causing fungi already in your body to become antifungal resistant.
You learned it, but the author worked it out for himself.

Good for him - kudos.
/ignore epo
I switched from Astrid to Due Today (Android) synced with ToodleDo.com a long while back. It's solid and has great widget selections. It's much more powerful than Astrid, Wunderlist, Any.do, etc and lets you do a full GTD setup if you want. You can also just ignore the more advanced bits if they don't interest you. It may be overkill for some folks, but it works well for me.
A Brief History of the Internet (1999)
Which part did you disagree with and what evidence do you have that it's not true?

Have ya not heard of any of the hundreds of open source projects that Microsoft has released? Typescript? ASP.NET MVC? Entity Framework? Reactive Extensions for .NET and Javascript?

Oh, did you expect them to just open source every single one of their products or something? Apple and Google don't even do that and I bet you love them, don't you?
I don't work for a game company, but yeah, I agree that the crunch time doesn't work well. I've read articles about the correlation between that kind of crunch time programming, and the general maturity of the artform. That is, the guys (I remember the industry being dominated by males) who raise a family and enter that stage of their life end up dropping out of the gaming industry. Thus, games tend to be made by guys who haven't had that life experience, willing to go into crunch mode, etc.

I brought it up though as an example of pacing. I'm trying to discern whether it is the pacing itself, or whether it is the programming jobs you have tried have been with organizations that have a lot of red tape, or whether it is simply the engineering discipline that you prefer not to participate in.

As for the Internet-era companies, the fast iteration is something you tend to see more in startups rather than startups that have matured into big business. Iteration for the sake of iteration itself doesn't work very well either (John Boyd "fighter pilot agility" vs. Agile Manifesto). It's also where devops is coming out from, and proliferating back into mainstream IT.
Hiring for your culture - an analytical approach
http://stackoverflow.com/tags/python/info has a huge list of free books or extended tutorials
That comment isn't well worded, but I've made similar ones.

It's a counterpoint to people saying that Snowden is being 'persecuted' and that the USA is now a place that freedom loving people flee from.

Whilst I agree with the view that we should not have mass surveillance and it would be horrifying if someone were persecuted for expressing that view, that is not why the US is chasing him.

He is being chased for intentionally stealing classified documents. Can you name a government that wouldn't pursue someone who did this?
@embolism: Apartment costs more than a house in the same spot?

If 1000 people share ownership of multistorey building also the land the building stands on, also the land tax, also roof, walls, infrastructure, it's bound to be far cheaper than 5 houses with 20 people at most occupying same space.
Yes. The Foo Fighters once did a concert for a group of them, in fact.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/02/foo-fighters-hiv...
I'm working on a project right now that started pretty much the way you described. We took Freescale's SABRE SD schematics and DNIed the stuff that wasn't necessary.

I will say that I like working with Freescale's reference material better than, say, TI's OMAP and AM series. Of course I work for a larger company that has easy access to their FAEs, but at least they have an online forum where you can get answers...sometimes.

You've sniffed out one big problem with the Cadence Orcad layout. Freescale recommends you just cut-and-paste the DDR3 lines directly from their layout. Partially because the timing is so hard to get right and partially because they don't have the bandwidth to help you debug your board layout. So that's probably the biggest hurdle in layout. TI went a different way with package-on-package RAM mounting, but that's another set of headaches when it's time to build boards.

Another nice part is that you can get working boards today if you want them. I'm a big fan of Boundary Devices (http://www.boundarydevices.com), you can get a SABRE-based board for $99. Pick up the kernel patches from FSL and you can have your own system building and running in an afternoon.

The i.MX6 is also a nice evolution of their SoC family, especially now that you can opt out of their power-management IC. But that means a bit more schematic and layout work if you choose to go that route. I'd leave the PMIC in, you also get some nice additional features if you use it.
There's hacking, and then there's polish. You can't make a product out of a hack. Though some companies offer Hack Days to get things going.
Fair enough.

What do you think about Anderseen's "Software Eating the World?" Wouldn't it make sense that at some point in the future, "running a smooth environment" gets eaten by software too?
Then your opinion is severely outdated and coupled with your obvious bias, I would trust it even less.
New work order: From Google and Pixar to Innocent... the future of the office
1 gig is nothing (for many people needs).
anyway I don't see sharefest as a replacement, but rather another tool.
Seconded for Twilio, it's great!
I'm not sure HN would really fit; he expressed considerable dissatisfaction with message boards, which HN seems to be an instance of (both culturally and technologically).

Here are a few of his thoughts on what would be better:

http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/oad-2221.html

http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-133186.html