skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What Fourier proved is that every function could be written as a sum of sines and cosines. However his proof worked for "functions" like step functions, which were not at the time accepted as functions, and which could not be sensibly analyzed with the infinitesmal techniques of the day.

It is hard to overstate the shock that came from a sum of nicely behaved functions turning into the pathological step function. If that was possible, what else could go wrong? And if infinitesmals could not be trusted, how could Calculus be put on a rigorous footing?

The question of how to put mathematics on a secure footing were central to 19th century mathematics, and the issues lead directly to set theory, and the unavoidable dead end discovered by Goedel. (Ironically the work in logic that came out of that eventually lead to nonstandard analysis, which in turn justified the infinitesmal approach and most of the infinitesmal arguments. But by then mathematics didn't much care.)
I agree at first glance you could see how it would seem to be a waste of time, but I think you underestimate how big of a foothold PHP has for building websites and applications. There are A LOT of php developers.

Ease of deployment with PHP, and the run anywhere on any shred hosting service really is a game changer for people learning how to code on the web.

I think this project has the ability to build a language that could hide allot of the things developers do not enjoy about PHP while still keeping the huge platform already existing for cheap hosting and integrating with existing code bases.
I feel like the biggest problem with this, aside from questions of how much it actually improves things, is that it's written in js. It's a bit of a smell issue that you need to install a whole other runtime environment to use it. It suggests a lack of faith in the engine of the language itself, and that's not a good thing.
A device that actually works for most explosives, the Syft (1) Voice 200, is the size of a fridge, weighs significantly more and retails at several hundred thousand dollars. It will detect volatile organic compounds in air, and in microscopic amounts, but as far as I know does not seem to have been used for bomb detection. It seems that you need to be better at selling snake oil than at actually solving the problem to win in this space. They do operate out of the back of vans, and I can imagine them at checkpoints constantly scanning the air around cars. But I guess they are focussing on other markets.

(1): Http://syft.com/
I am a small shareholder
Or it could make the php bugs and corner cases impossible to access, and produce far more reliable PHP code.

Edit: As child post asked: That is the purpose on making something like this or coffeescript. We may all know the edge cases and bugs and know how to write pure php that gets around this, but why should we? Shouldn't our tools serve us and not the other way around? Something like mammoth might actually bring me productivity and enjoyment - which I think in the end is what drives developers.
Exactly. Wifi tracking is built into enterprise wifi systems like meraki or aerohive. It's basically already there, so it's going to be way cheaper to implement than having dedicated people eyeballing every store constantly.
Or better still, incarcerate everyone, there'd be no more crime at all ("it's for your own good!").
What were the values and priorities of someone like J. Edgar Hoover? His secret dossiers fit neatly inside a standard office cabinet, just think what he could have done with PRISM data.
I'm no experienced software or hardware hacker but I would have to guess that the best way to hear about "interesting hacks" (whatever those are) is to start doing some. Whether it be NERF guns or C, I can only imagine that one would get in tune with the community fastest if you actually have interest in learning the subject rather than just in the novelty of a Neat Trick.
Odd, it doesn't do that for me on ff22windows. I originally messed with word spacing because it looked too sparse, but I'm going to switch it back to something safer. Thanksforthefeedback;)
Checks and balances were designed to keep political leaders from running amok in our nation.

The idea, of course, being that the political leaders would keep the military leaders and governmental policy makers from running amok.

That was the IDEA anyway.
As somebody who is also learning electronics, I can also confirm that it is extremely satisfying to pull apart cheap RC cars and connect them to an Arduino.

For anybody who is interested (including the OP), there is plenty of good tutorials around. The one at [1] explains a similar process as discussed in this article, except it doesn't rely on a test point on the circuit. Instead, it just talks directly to the relevant pins on the transmitters chip. Apparently most toy cars use the same sending/receiving chip - the TX2/RX2 [2]. Indeed the one I took apart had this chip, and I can confirm that it is relatively straightforward to wire up the Arduino as in [1].

If you search around, there are also tutorials on doing similar things to the circuit on the car itself, rather than the transmitter. My goal is to create a real-life Mario Kart setup by doing the following:

* Hook Arduino up to the car.

* Allow regular control of the car from the transmitter, but let the Arduino override these and control the car directly too.

* Connect IR LED and IR Receiver to Arduino on the car.

* Allow cars to shoot each other (there is an additional "turbo" input/output on the RX2/TX2 chips which is rarely used, so should be able to make that an auxiliary input which means "fire".

* If the car gets shot by another, then the Arduino will brake the car for a period of time.

This is all coming along nicely so far, I have the Arduino's firing at each other using IR and detecting who hit them. I also have the transmitter being controlled by an Arduino and receiving input via the serial port from my laptop, so that you drive the car from a computer. The next step is to get the Arduino to control the car directly, and then to let the Arduino and the transmitter both control the car, with the Arduino taking priority if it chooses to.

If anybody is interested, I'll do a writeup when (if) it gets completed (enough).

[1] - http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-controls-cheap-RC-ca...

[2 (pdf)] - http://www.instructables.com/files/orig/FWW/CD13/GV525G0X/FW...
well that does sound pretty good -- Also, I (as well as you, judging from your response), could be completely wrong, and the idea fills some immense niche that no one knew existed, or that didn't exist until you made the thing. That's kind of how the world works sometimes.

Also, you should do a thorough check to see whether it exists yet, before building something like this of course.

I Google & DDG'd "screencasts" and found some thing similar, but not quite this idea (startup-iest ones I saw near the top of the list, older near bottom):
http://tekpub.com/
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts
http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/programmers
http://screencasts.org/
http://www.screencast.com/
https://peepcode.com/
http://www.screenr.com/
But, as with Coffeescript/JS, wouldn't the better alternative be to learn those bugs and edge cases and code it up properly in the original language to begin with?
Ketchup Bottle Design Squeezes Profits Out of Kida
First of all, systemd does not depend on anything relating to how /usr is mounted. Other components don't work properly with it; it simply detects the case and sends a warning. systemd itself will continue to work fine, but components that systemd launches will not. It's just a messenger.

I also want to note that cgroups is not the only Linux-specific interface that's necessary for systemd. There's lots of them, and if you stub all of them out, then you've achieved portability with none of the benefits, and have potentially introduced a lot of bugs. You simply make systemd runnable, but unusable.

I think you have the wrong impression of cgroups entirely, though. It does not do "process monitoring". Think of it more like a hierarchical processes tree. With a traditional hierarchical filesystem, to recursively delete everything in a folder, you use a combination of readdir and unlink. In cgroups, it's similar: you put processes in a "cgroup", and to kill everything inside a "cgroup", you iterate over everything and call kill.

And much like in some filesystems you can say "make sure this subtree doesn't go above 1GB of storage", you can apply similar resource limits to cgroups: "make sure this subtree doesn't go over 2GB of memory and 25% CPU time", etc.

A stub interface that doesn't iterate over any of the processes won't really do you much, and thus when you try to stop a service, it won't get shut down.
We (rsync.net) are supporting git-annex by offering all git-annex users a heavily discounted rsync.net account.

This was announced a few days ago, but not on HN in any way:

http://rsync.net/products/git-annex-pricing.html

We've been explicitly supporting git-annex on our platform since our friend Jason Scott first showed it to us[1] and we will be contributing to the new campaign.

[1] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3625
That's part of what the systemd journal provides, yes.
I love BV!

fwiw I considered using the Strogatz paper as an example for consistency (maybe it could become something of a standard for reimagining paper layouts), and use tangle or knockout, but I decided to get feedback sooner rather than later after reading a line in pg's essay today re: procrastination.
The homemade device I liked most was a little resistor ladder AD convertor, used with No$GB emulator.

I had nice resistors and sleeving and managed to fit it all into a D25 connector shell with a bit of cable coming out the back to connect to audio.

I don't know what the equivalent project would be on RPi or arduino today.
Exactly! Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I feel like an Asgardian.
Honest question: do your in laws genuinely believe there have been dozens of planned terrorist attacks in recent history, and all but one (the marathon bombers) of them have been thwarted by the NSA/CIA/etc?
I'm just going to shamelessly plug my project which previously featured on HN, where I did something similar and then added a camera on a smartphone to make the cheap RC car drive itself :-)

http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/
What about it? If my CGI scripts are Python scripts, how do I kill the CGI processes that Apache launched without killing any that lighttpd launched, or some silly script I wrote to monitor something else?
Thanks! I was thinking about doing the same with bib refs since I don't like being sent to the bottom of the page like a footnote. I really like the idea of doing the same thing with theorems, defs, etc.

I'm a bit worried about what to do with column overload, though, if I add a col for X, a col for Y, etc. Perhaps a hover-text is better but that would obscure the content ...
Great, I'm trying to do similar stuff and implement a Wi-Vi like system for tracking the car.

Wi-Vi: http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/index.html
I think this is pretty perceptive. I wish that there were more active development for the portage tree community, but the truth is, there is just so much _there_, and as I see it, gentoo hasn't been commodified by an enterprise (canonical, red hat, etc), which is both a blessing and a curse. Also, I think nobody really runs "stable" gentoo, because stable things on single systems are naive. This is part of the reason for the explosion of distributed systems (cassandra, hadoop, hbase, etc). I think most people who run gentoo (correctly) don't actually rely on one single system being stable.
Step one: get out of your environment. Your brain has become addicted to responding certain ways based on your surroundings. There are some lines of thought you physically can't have when you're stuck like that.

Step two: be in places where you feel you are wasting your time. Get stuck in traffic for hours. Go to some family event where everything is trivial and people talk for hours about how obamacare is destroying america. Get your brain to start wishing, "I don't want to be here wasting my life on trivial bullcrap -- I want to be doing something important with my time."

Step three: when you get back into your brain-stuck environment, DO NOT START doing what you did before. DO NOT open reddit (block it in your hosts file or run dnsmasq and block (asterisk)reddit(asterisk) hosts and (asterisk)ycomb(asterisk)). DO NOT turn on a tv show or a movie. Once you start your old habit, you lose. You won't have a chance to stop yourself until you go through another sleep/wake cycle. You are allowed to turn on music.

Step four: start something new. you wanna be starting something. Find something you can't do, and figure out why. Do you know how a webpage is delivered from server to browser? When was the last time you wrote a BST? Just start doing something that requires thought and potentially creativity on your part. Things will fall into place after that.

But, for the love of Tony Robbins, DO NOT START your old habits. DO NOT open reddit. DO NOT watch a tv show or movie at your computer. Once you _start_ you become unable to stop until your brain resets.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

-- Pablo Picasso
> What I want to know, is why this asshole still has a job?

Have you considered the possibility that the people in a position to decide whether or not he has a job have more relevant information than you do, and are better qualified to evaluate it, and so that when they come to a different conclusion than you it could be that you are the one who is wrong?

A lot of smart people inexplicably overlook this possibility.
Daniel Robbins also left, he has since set up a Gentoo meta-distribution called Funtoo http://www.funtoo.org/
Completely off topic but you just made my day, I had no idea 'say' existed. I now plan to have much fun working that into some workflow scripts.
100% Agreed.
I am 78% sure polygraph tests are no longer admissible as evidence in court.
Linner, a full-featured HTML5 application assembler
lobste.rs seems like what I'm looking for too. I don't suppose you have an invite handy?
I could take public transportation and save a whole lot of money (gas, payments, insurance, etc.) but I find that having the flexibility to go wherever I want whenever I want is a good reason to keep my SUV.

In addition, I could save a helluva lot more money by not owning a motorcycle and driving the SUV. To me, though, it's worth every penny.
The fact that these people actually believe that they need this access to catch terrorists is scarier than if they were just doing it to grab portions of a budget.

I tend to agree that it would be easier to persuade people if we used words like "cognitive bias" (with examples of how this affects everyone, even us) instead of inflammatory combative words like "morally bankrupt".
I don't remember the quote verbatim but I read something in "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins - which really felt like a jolt. The book says that an evolutionary stable strategy is one that is immune to treachery from within and needn't be the one that is the most beneficial to the group. Once I digested this, it seemed obvious but when I read that the first time, it really caught me off guard.

Also, Lewis Carroll's quote:

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'

still makes me think about how we use language.
I've read hackaday.com on and off over the past while and it's generally interesting. More of a hardware bent than software, but still interesting.
Fantastic marketing tool.
systemd has one purpose: to be about system and service management. It will replace everything that deals with services: starting them (whether based on traditional init, scheduling, socket activation, or from a desktop user session), logging the stdout/stderr in a consistent and well-defined location, and about giving you flexible tools to manage, debug, and inspect system services.

Besides that, yes, it does have a few things (hostnamed, timedated), which are mostly about some POSIX infrastructure that wasn't there already: notification when the system hostname or timedate changes (yes, it happens quite often on desktop systems, due to NTP, user setting, and VPN). They're just utilities they needed along the way, and systemd can be built without them.

If the system or service fails to start, instead of hunting around in /var/log/, syslog, dmesg, etc. for anything that looks relevant, you simply use the journal which aggregates most everything. It's already a very good breakthrough.

I've debugged countless bad Debian service scripts (which usually comes down to bash's terrible whitespace and quote management), and inserted echo statements into my Arch Linux to debug why it wouldn't boot when I upgraded, hacking out clear statements here and there designed to make the boot pretty. Shell scripts aren't a good solution for robust system and service management.
I'm basically writing in agreement with bigiain. I want to specifically look at this quote:

> Either something is okay, in which case it's okay to do with a machine, or it's not, in which case it's not okay to do at all.

Let's reflect that it's fairly easy, in the grand scheme of things, to bring explosives on board an airplane and take it down. The reason that doesn't happen more often isn't because screening procedures are so effective -- it's because very few people want to do that.

Now, people generally don't like the idea that the government, or stores, or unfriendly neighbors, or their daughter's boyfriend, might track their every movement day and night without end. And if you proposed that it should be allowed, you'd poll a lot of "it's not okay to do at all". The reason it's happening now is because it was "okay" before, which led people to do it as soon as it became possible. But, and this is where the cost structure becomes relevant, the reason it was "okay" before is not that society made a considered judgment that this sort of thing should probably be allowed. The issue was never considered at all, because the practice was impossible and therefore considering the issue was pointless. All kinds of things are legal right now only because they can't actually be done, but that's not a compelling argument for letting people do them even if they could be done.

http://archive.boasas.com/?c=59
Yes, but anyone who's been to shitredditsays ought to be loaded onto the FEMA trains right now.
One of the downsides to the formats (including PDF) currently used in academia is that their layout and typography is fixed by the author, and optimized for printing. You can't reflow the text for the screen unless you have the original source document.

For example, most papers use multiple columns. This optimizes for readability when printed in A4/Letter, but on a computer screen it's much harder to scan and read pages this way, compared to a strictly linear layout -- especially when the text is interspersed with graphs and tables.

Another example: Paragraphs are usually signaled with a line break and an indent. Papers seldom use any spacing between paragraphs. I think indented paragraphs work well for fiction, less so for academic texts.

The papers mentioned in this thread by dfc are good examples of those two problems.
Let's see. In my system of morals, different people are allowed to have different morals. In your system of morals they are not. You are not okay with my morals. I am okay with your morals, as long as they don't infringe too badly on my own. I certainly understand that you have them. I suspect that absolute anything is going to be a problem eventually. I know that I'm very unlikely to be able to change your morality, so why pressure you?

By the way, I don't think it's moral to call another person's morality horseshit. Your system of morals says this is okay. We have a small conflict there. No amount of science will convince me otherwise.

Basically I believe it's legitimate for morals to be defined by individuals on the basis of their experiences in life. Yes, we know most of them intuitively.
Your criticisms are of the submission's design, not the idea. I don't think that this submission fully emphasizes the advantages of a dynamic, interactive document as a medium for conveying ideas. I think this does it much, much better:

http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099595

see also: Khan Academy
Fascinating! I know about that story from the point at which the search for rigorous foundations had already begun (i.e. late 19th century), but no awareness of the connection to Fourier. Thanks.
38.
Why white people? Do you think members of other races are incapable of wasting taxpayer money?
Email me for an beta invite at ken@understudyapp.com. This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve!

With our iPad app, you pick a material (e.g. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) and work through it, talking once a week to someone who has already been through it. As you progress, you begin to mentor someone else who is less far along in the same way that you were helped. The collaboration environment in the app is live video (ala Skype) plus a whiteboard - the main surface of the iPad.

The problem in learning isn’t information access: it’s determination. It’s dead easy to put down a book or stop watching a lecture. If you’re talking to someone, you cannot just stop, and when a human asks "what have you done since last time?" you don’t want to have to say "nothing". Think of single founder vs two founder startups - someone else who cares is huge.

On the mentoring side, explaining a concept to someone else is a forcing function for getting things clear and organized for yourself. Also, it's fun to talk about stuff you chose to spend time working on and understanding, and it's fun to help someone else follow in your footsteps.
How much more f%!#ng "relevant information" do we need?!??? We KNOW these fucknuts are shitting on the Constitution, lying to the American people and/or Congress, and running a rogue agency whose regard for the law is limited to it's own byzantine (and secret, I might add) interpretations of said law. I fail to see what other "information" is going to change that in the slightest.

Sure, in some hypothetical alternate universe ,these guys might be "in the right", but we don't live in a hypothetical, alternate universe as far as I can tell.

I'll also offer this up: If you or I were called to testify before a Congressional committee and we perjured ourselves with blatant lies, then later admitted it, don't you think there would be some repercussions?
Years ago, I once tried to rescue a disk with this and the CD would not boot the computer... apparently because it needed to access a hard disk to boot. Perhaps I am not well schooled in the arts of systemrescuecd, but that just made me laugh. They may have fixed this in the years since, but I lost any confidence in systemrescuecd.

Instead, I booted with a BSD kernel having an embedded root filesystem and proceeded to rescue the disk.

This is why I often can't take Gentoo users seriously. Some certainly know what they're doing (Google built their systems from Gentoo, didn't they?). But too many others only think they do.
That's interesting. I dread arguing with any non-portage (that is, non-Gentoo) package manager. Maybe that's just 'cause I'm used to portage though.