skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it is true that rigour is eventually needed, but the principia, laplace's celestial mechanics and countless other works (heard of euler?) were all published before cauchy and weirstrass. all of the wonderful work in elliptic functions by gauss, abel and jacobi was done before rigour was en vogue. euclidean and non-euclidean geometries both flourished wonderfully w/o modern rigour (when was hilbert's book on geometry published?)

Now any hard-working student of university calculus can without problems understand and reproduce the results of those treatises. I think this would not be possible without the modern systematic methods, including the epsilon-delta approach.

you're also wrong about your examples. it wasn't nowhere differentiable functions, but fourier series that motivated lebesgue. that's what the author is referring to regarding analytical traps ie, monotone convergence.

I mentioned fourier in another comments. Those weird functions were postulated in the discussion that arised somewhere in the same time period. I don't know what the author is referring to, because he is irritatingly vague, especially for a mathematician.

it is also quite a leap to assert the arithmetical definition of limits solves the zeno paradox!!! i few of my colleague's might disagree with you.

If you are familiar with the concept of a limit, you can notice that Zeno considers a limiting process of two related quantities, time and the difference in the position of Achilles and the Tortoise. Since in this limiting process time get arbitrarly close to some definite value (the meeting time of Achilles and Tortoise), but never gets equal to it, it stops being so surprising that the distance between them never reaches zero, though it gets arbitrarly close. The formalism clarifies what seems parodoxical when described in natural language. I find this quite convincing, and I never found a better explanation, altough I know philosophers still dispute this.

I never said rigour takes precedence over intuition. I just think it's the inherent difficulty of calculus that stops students from understanding it, and not the epsilon-delta stuff.
It kind of happens like that. You have to occasionally keep your mouth shut because if you voice every product idea you have, then your staff may think that is what you want them to do. It may just be some idle random concept that comes to mind, but if you say it and find out later that your people have worked on it, you may be sad.

So if you say, wouldn't it be cool if we made (product x) out loud, and it is related to something your company might do, don't be too shocked if someone in your company hears you and then does it. If you weren't serious, and that person has spent 20 hours working hard on it, you will now come to two conclusions. 1. You have wasted their time and your money 2. You now have to disappoint a hard working, dedicated employee. You can't do that too often or they get frustrated and leave.

So in my experience, when you have only ad hoc, verbal only meetings about product, you will get bad results. I have made this error myself in the past. If I want a good result from my staff, I have to give them clear, written direction so that they can follow it and not need to continually check with me.

You may once in a great while get a product you make a profit on, but it is the exception and not the rule. It shouldn't take you so long to write out the new idea that you should try to save time by blurting it out. Simply tell your people what the idea is, and how it fits in with their previous priorities. Toyota uses a sheet of A3 to propose ideas. The constraint helps produce clearer direction. http://a3thinking.com/faq.html
HorseConnect, The Social Network For Horses, Bought For $1 Billion
You beat me to it! (For those who don't know, the PPACA is sometimes called "Obamacare" although it should be noted that the name is more a result of political maneuvering than the result of particularly close affiliation with Obama.)

I still think we should go all the way to single-payer. Other countries have had such success with this model that it's becoming very difficult to argue that it's inherently flawed (rather than the other way around). If the US health industry had to compete directly with any of these systems, it would go out of business tomorrow, since they offer similar care (in terms of outcome rates) at half the price per person. That doesn't even include the effects on entrepreneurship and employment!

While the ACA did little to fix the "US health care costs twice as much and doesn't deliver better outcomes" problem, it does have a good shot at fixing the preexisting condition and individual insurance debacles.
What isn't authorized?
The larger the employer, the better the deal they can work out with the insurance provider for their employees. This is definitely one of the reasons why jobs with IBM or UBS, say, are more desirable to most folks than the assured struggle called entrepreneurship.
To me, a teacher's proper role isn't having knowledge and dumping it into someone's brain. It's knowing where to find that knowledge. My three Rs are "reading, research, and reflection": a teacher's job is to (1) provide useful material to consume, via lecture or homework or whatnot, (2) point towards larger resources for further exploration, and (3) guide thought processes to make useful conclusions.

A teacher's job is not to teach. It's to provide a space in which a student can learn. A focus is useful for this, but the focus doesn't need to be an abstract subject. It's a MacGuffin; it can be anything.
I have GERD (hiatal hernia) and I stayed away from Caffeine for years because I was told it would trigger it. They also said to avoid spicy foods and exercise regularly. I started taking Prilosac and exercising regularly about 5 years ago. Now I can pretty much eat what I want (I go through a bottle of Sriracha every 3 months, it goes on everything :D). I think the key to managing GERD is the exercise and medicine. When I don't exercise I have more reflux. If you are not exercising regularly (which means exercising long enough to get super hungry), then you might want to try it to see if it improves your symptoms. Anecdotally, I think the GERD diet is total bullshit, I've tried it (with out meds) and I still experienced enough discomfort to convince me to take medication.

Edit: I forgot to mention I drink coffee every morning.
>not a big deal

Browser still has more users than Firefox had some years ago when we started talking about supporting all browsers. Unfortunately.
Well technically the center tag is deprecated so any browser could simply drop support for it (as they did with <blink> in a future version and break the site.
Dude, not cool! Slightly trollish.

I was in love with the passion of the American people for civil rights. I visited in 2004 and read Archibald Cox "The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government" and "Freedom of Expression" in the Boston Public Library after some college student left it on a table, and then went and annoyed other Australians about it for years.

I came here because I wanted to create a better life (the same as any other immigrant), not because I had any axes to grind. Can you blame me for being disillusioned? Again, not cool.
Since beginning to see the value of purity, I write imperative code in a different way. I don't care much about local manipulation of state for algorithms and such, but I write a lot more pure functions.

It's not only that purity is safe and beautiful. It's also in many cases much easier to understand, because it's about writing functions that express transformations. These transformations should make sense in a conceptual way.

When you distill your domain concepts (see "Domain-Driven Design") and write pure functions on domain data, the result is remarkably clear, testable, and debuggable, no matter which language.

Previously I would have been (prematurely) concerned with the efficiency of in-place updates, but since I'm not writing high-performance CPU-bound software, I don't care about that anymore until the profiler tells me to.
If you use any decent known hashing algorithm, the probability of collision is astronomically small.
In some states, it is illegal for you to record a conversation without the other party's consent. If you are hauled into court, your recording may be (1) used to chain another charge on you, or (2) be inadmissible as exonerating evidence. Some courts have ruled that LEOs can be recorded while performing official duties, but I don't think there is a definitive SCOTUS decision on this subject, and I wouldn't bet my freedom on this.
I think that this move by Bloomberg shows that Bitcoin (and other similar currencies) are becoming legitimate commodities. It may be the case that become they new gold.
I rock emacs 24/7 for all code outside of xcode or android studio (php, phantomjs scripts... anything not java or objectiveCMethodWithAnIncrediblyDescriptiveButEffingLongName), and I've found "calm forest" in the color themes package to be a wonderful general theme. It's a great place to start for building in custom syntax settings for "less supported" languages.

Godspeed on the project, and perhaps if I can get some time to force myself into ob-c in emacs at work, I can help.

How does storyboarding work out, or are you just writing the markup directly?
Why is everyone calling it the "bible of psychiatry" now? I had never, ever heard that name until this year when the media ran a bunch of slam articles on the DSM V.
You should distinguish between whether the syntax and general principles of the language are horribly designed or whether the current language features are lacking. They're very different critiques. The former results in people saying we need to completely scrap CSS and find a new way to layout pages. The latter results in people putting more pressure on and getting more involved in the CSS working groups and browser implementations to get new features pushed to consumers.
I am interested in regexp implementation (high level overview). As far as I understand, it is not possible to come up with state-machine for regex containing "extensions" such as backreference (\1 or \2), it just doesn't fit into "regular languages". At least this is what I learnt from [0].

Does anyone know more details about new regex matcher? (I don't think I will be able to read the code).

[0]: http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/
It's funny how so many web devs just ignore older browsers out of a sense of superiority towards users of those browsers. I've even heard some of these guys say "they're not my target audience, so why should I care?" They are, of course, inevitably, Apple fanbois. Fortunately, they are not usually in charge of making business decisions at any significant companies.
This is the most sensible post in this thread. A good example is the user rayiner being down voted for an opposing opinion down further in the thread. He has not trolled, he has just made an argument that people disagreed with and he is being down voted. The political discussions on HN have become a pretty one sided affair (even though it is a side I for the most part agree with) and a net negative as a whole.
Or they're creating new rules.
Almost any calculus course goes over accelaration being the derivative of speed and so forth. It doesn't make students suddenly understand calculus.
I haven't done any front end web work so I'm confused by this. Can someone please explain why it is noteworthy? It seems strange to me that something as simple as centring a box should require special attention. Why aren't such tasks trivial beginner stuff?
The NSA's changes to the DES s-boxes made them stronger against differential cryptanalysis, an observation that betrayed the NSA's prior knowledge of differential cryptanalysis long before it reached the academic literature.

It's been awhile since I've studied DES, but I'm not aware of any sense in which the s-box changes weakened it.
Zimmermann on the shut-down and elimination of Silent Circle email: "It’s not obstruction of justice if you do it before justice comes calling."

I'm sure he and his lawyers aware, but we've got this cool new thing called Anticipatory Obstruction. It'd probably be a pretty far reach, but stranger things have happened. See http://www.perkinscoie.com/files/upload/LIT_11_06FunkFeature....
> "What we're finding is power diminishes all varieties of empathy"

Another reason to stop the decline of the middle class and to begin to reverse this trend.
> I just rebuilt my dev machine and I'm using one SSD drive for the OS, one SDD for data (database, Cassandra stuff), and then a regular drive to hold code and builds ...

So instead of one large storage pool, you have three. This means your chance to have your system grind to a halt with a disk-full condition is three times greater than it would otherwise be.

I've never understood this logic, but I certainly see it implemented a lot. It's a new version of disk hard-partitioning in *nix systems -- a scheme that stopped making sense once drives because large enough to contain all the resources on one unit.

With one drive containing all stored resources and no hard partitions, there's exactly one disk-full failure mode -- when the disk is full.

When Charles Lindbergh was asked why he wanted only one engine on his historic Atlantic-crossing plane, he replied that, since the multi-engine planes of his day couldn't stay airborne on one engine, his design was actually safer.
I regret I have but one upvote to give this feature. Can't wait to play around with this.

edit: I actually was thinking about this feature on tty.js rather than showterm.io. I might see how hard it would be to implement it.
"...the amount of hackery that goes into making webpages look the way web designers want them to is astounding."

I totally agree. For example, the CSS box model sounds so simple and elegant at first, but when you add dozens of styles and elements to your page, the interaction between different styles can quickly become horribly messy no matter how disciplined you are with your CSS code. Beyond a certain number of styles, CSS inheritance turns into a black art.

CSS simply doesn't scale well for anything beyond relatively simple pages. A huge part of designing web pages is layout and spacing and yet positioning and spacing elements remains ridiculously messy and convoluted (even with CSS3).

You could also argue that tools like SASS and LESS are in effect sticking-plasters for inadequacies in CSS.

I know hindsight is a wonderful thing, but if we were designing CSS today from scratch, I think it would be designed very differently.
I'm currently only interested in native code auto completion as good as in XCode where it understands the complete class hierachy and types half the boilerplate for you. For Storyboards or Xibs you'd still need XCode. I've long thought about a nice compiler from a simple text format to xib in order to have better version management capabilities, and it may be reasonable now with layout constraints to implement something like that, but I think storyboards would be best done in XCode.

I'll comment on this thread again once I've shared the objective-c emacs code.
Agree. Decaf allows you to get the taste without the caffeine. Although I read a study said that the taste of beer alone can release a bunch of dopamine because of the memory of what's about to come next (alcohol). I think the same thing happens with taste of coffee and caffeine because when I started drinking decaf I noticed my appreciation of the taste of coffee went down a little.
Infosec analysts back away from 'Feds attacked Tor' theory
and that's why gun ownership is bad for society.
Maybe just maybe I could accept than mentality on a casual encounter.

If a cop or FBI agent is seeking to talk to you, specifically by looking for you in the first place, you have far bigger problems than you can possibly talk your way out of, regardless of how innocent you actually are.
The author is criticizing calculus courses. The level of formalism in calculus courses is relatively low, and none of it has anything to do with quantum mechanics or contradictions far down. It is only enough formalism to give a definition of derivative and integral that actually makes sense, that's all.
I have been using Emacs for a long time and I can't remember the last time it got the wrong key.

If you're using a graphical Emacs (for OSX or X or Windows) I think it hardly ever happens? Doesn't happen to me and I use all 3 of those.
> We're not a party to the ICC and we have veto power over any enforcement decision of the ICJ.

We're getting a bit into the woods here, but veto power over the enforcement of UN rulings _does_ _not_ change international law. You can say that it is irrelevant because it is unenforceable, but _it_ _is_ _not_ legal for the U.S. to violate international treaties which it has signed. This is "legally binding". This is what that means.

The U.S. can overrule any enforcement decision, as you said. It cannot determine the ruling in any ICJ case.

See: Nicaragua v. United States.
Do you think you're more likely to encourage an FBI officer to decide you are "agitated" if you insist they come back with a warrant and slam the door on them, or politely and cautiously answer basic, non-incriminatory questions on the assumption you're probably not guilty of whatever they're investigating? You can always pull the "if I'm being implicated in a crime, perhaps we should go down the police station and have a recorded conversation with a lawyer present" tack later if the questions start going uncomfortable places.
Me too, had the 80GB model which failed after 2 years in 2011, got a Crucial M4 since then which starts to get some occasional freezes and write errors.

I also got 2 Supertalent MLC Drives in 2009 for my brother and a friend, both died after ~2 years as well. Now we are all running the Crucial M4 which are fine, for now ;) I love SSDs, have been an evangelist since 2009 but i dont trust their reliability :)
I agree it's not really a proper solution. My move from the U.S. to Denmark has been smooth when it comes to healthcare; I've been very impressed at the lack of paperwork and lack of stress over my coverage. But nonetheless I grudgingly supported PPACA, despite it seeming like a mess, because I can't see another way to solve the tied-to-employers issue that's politically feasible, at least for now.
I feel that CSS is pretty well designed. The problem is that it has so many ways to do the same thing, and the fact that vertical and horizontal layout don't work the same way.
* IFP and DLP crypto do appear to be related; we're just not sure how.

* There are well-respected cryptographers who do think the Joux/Barbalescu results are worth considering. Example: Dan Boneh.

* A 10-year margin for RSA would still be a huge industry fire drill; the media doesn't have a good feel for what "imminent" means.

* You should think of RSA the way you do about 3DES --- a compat hack that works today, and may work indefinitely, but something we have better alternatives for.

Disclaimer: if 'pbsd disagrees with anything I've said here, he's right and I'm not.
When ruby hit the mainstream we would see these kind of 'getting started' atricles once in a while but very very rarely. Would it be safe to assume that since functional thinking is such a departure from traditional OO that it warrants more 'getting started' ?
Because it's much shorter than "standard diagnostic manual" and means about the same thing.

To say "the media ran a bunch of slam articles" gives the wrong impression, in my view. There is a wide and serious critique. When one of the loudest critics of DSM V is the chairman of DSM IV, that's more than a smear campaign.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances
Not only assuming this will be possible, but that in the future capitalism will be somehow suspended and they will start digging heads out of the morgue to resurrect for no reason.
There are no more vendor prefixes.
Your argument relies on two distinctions that seem dubious to me: civilian versus military, and domestic versus foreign. Why do these things matter? Aren't all sentient beings equal? Shouldn't we apply the golden rule to all other such beings? The moral concerns around using force, whether at home or abroad, trump any political, diplomatic, military, or legal concerns. I suspect that distinctions such as civilian versus military and domestic versus foreign are just ways to ease our conscience about hurting and killing other people far away, who aren't quite real to most of us anyway.
If you can compute discrete logarithms modulo composite n, you can actually factor n.

Suppose that n = p * q. The order of the multiplicative group of the integers modulo n is (p-1) * (q-1). Suppose that, given a randomly generated a, we can find a nontrivial x such that a^x = 1 (mod n). Then x divides the order of n, i.e. (p-1)*(q-1), and we can quickly extract p and q from there.

Edit: Terminology correction. Thanks xyzzyz!
Nobody in academia likes ECC because the NSA recommends it; ECC's virtues over simple finite field IFP/DLP crypto are obvious. There's no sane conclusion you can reach by letting NSA's approval or disapproval of technology head-fake you; what you're basically saying is that there's a series of stimuli NSA could issue that'd get you to use FEAL and knapsack algorithms.
Well, there's nothing inherently wrong with the syntax or structure of CSS (and things like LESS make it even nicer).

I'm talking about things like the way "floats" transformed from a way of wrapping text around pictures (good) to a general-purpose layout mechanism (disaster).

About how there's no way to put a footer at the bottom of your page that stays at the bottom if your content is short, but gets pushed down if your content is long (the normal desired use case).

About how the only way to get two columns of equal height, but that expand to fit the text, is to use a <table>, but that this is supposedly disallowed because it's "unsemantic".

About the complete disaster that float-clearing is, yet how it's central to almost all modern CSS layouts, and fixed only by bizarre byzantine hacks like "clearfix", overflow:hidden (which breaks other things), or the classic "<div style="clear:both;"></div>" which needs to be peppered throughout HTML, negating the whole supposed distinction between HTML and CSS.

And finally, the fact that the width of an element doesn't include its border and padding, making for nesting div's that include border and padding much more difficult than it should be. (Although this is, of course, fixed in newer versions of CSS.)

In the end, it's not really "current language features", but mainly the disastrous decision to adopt floats as a basic layout concept, instead of grids/columns/etc. (Which is, of course, why so many people wind up using <table> in the end, which has its own problems...)
According to stats, only 0.8% of users are using IE6-7. Is there any logical reason to spend quite a lot of time to adjust your css to work properly for 0.8% of your users? And if you are building a premium product - I don't really think this 0.8% are the one who are going to purchase it...
Hmm, that at least sounds plausible.

Usually when institutions appear to behave stupidly, the reasons are not so much stupid as non-obvious.
I may not be the best example because i try to quit every now and then... But i feel rthat quitting in steps does absolutely nothing. I would keep reducing and not noting any change in body behavior. Until i go past some threshold (2 espressos) them i get the same as fully quitting
[1]

> In some unusual cases, Emacs gets the wrong information from the system, and <Backspace> ends up deleting forwards instead of backwards.

[2]

That's not the case with the GUI version because it works like any other application (File->Quit or the [x] button). In terminal it's a bit different but it's not like vim is any easier here.
Better make it illegal so only criminals can feel the power.
This is a surprise. I've never been fingerprinted at a US port. Perhaps it's because I have a biometric passport. Still, such a practice can't be universal.