skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds, with all due respect, like libertarian mantra. How on earth do you propose to enable the poor to bring themselves above the poverty line without a centralised system to manage it?

You're completely correct that US government is wasteful, spends mindlessly on military, war aid and the appeasement of dubious lobbyists - that is not a problem with governance in general though! Furthermore, unless a redistribution of wealth and a welfare state is mandated through taxation and social programs there seems little hope of helping those at the very bottom who have been failed (or failed themselves) thanks to the incredibly tough odds they face compared to healthy, well-off, decently educated folk from stable backgrounds.

Sure, the rich aren't some distinct subspecies with little regard to humanity and philanthropy is not a forgotten art, but when stuff like this gets voted through you can see how broken the entire system is. A media which programs the poor to turn on itself, a rule of law which actively discriminates against the poor, a wage barrier that condemns those in low-level work to a life of constant stress and fear.

They are things that the people need to fix through their government. 'Shutting down everything' only really serves to help those who already are without the need of it.

->Potentially meandering off-topic and probably not that much of a direct reply to yhckrfan - apologies. I've not had coffee yet!
No, consoles were always like that.

Fixed set of hardware, that the developers could easily target and build their skills.

For the gamers, just put the cartridge or disc, and start playing.

No need for driver updates, or whatever else might be required.
Have you used it about 20 years ago? I think what we have now is way better than that.

Of course, what was there 20 years ago, language wise, still is there, but IMO that does not make it a legacy language. A language with legacy, yes, but it still is very much alive.
RC is much more deterministic than GC. Garbage collectors commonly defer object deallocation until some threshold is reached, and then do it all at once. This means that two iterations of the same loop, that do the exact same thing, may take dramatically different amounts of time.

Reference counting is more stable and predictable, because the deallocation behavior depends only on the object graph in question, and not on some global state.
You clearly are very isolated from the world. Even if the author had a good math experience, polynomials do not appear in everyday problems.

As for the start time, likely she is involved in extra-curricular activities, like cheerleading or sports.

I wouldn't judge so harshly.
I think a good part of the problem is that we learn to multiply and divide backwards. The standard US algorithm involves starting at the least significant digit and working your way up. It is much easier to do in your head if you do it from the most significant digit down. Or learn to convert hard multiplications into easy ones, for instance:

9x27 = 10x27-27 = 243

The other way to do this would be to multiply 9x7 to get 63, and then hold that in your head while you multiply 9x2 to get 18, add a zero to get 180, and then recall the 63 to add to 180.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgw9Ik5ZGaY

Basically, to do MSB multiplication it looks like:

27x16 = 27x10 + 20x6 + 7x6 = 270+120+42 = 432

We can do accumulators much more easily from big numbers and then adjusting with small corrections than we can the reverse.
Wow. Everyone in the thread seems to have gotten lots of homework in their youth. In my case, I went to both a private and a public school (in Spain) and the homework load was probably like half an hour a day, in both cases. In high school it was a bit more, maybe 45 minutes, the main difference was that in high school studying the day before the exam was usually not enough.

I remember that my mother used to be worried that I would have problems at university, because there I would have to work a lot of hours per day, and I wasn't getting used to that at school. Well, I did have to work a lot of hours per day at university, but I did perfectly fine. And I'm grateful that I had time during my school and high school years to write stories, make drawings, learn C and C++, write games, compose some music, etc... unlike the poor girl in the article!
TouchID: risk and reward at the touch of a button
A bit of both. It's a massive redesign, not all of it is well executed, and there's substantial performance degradation in some parts. There are also a larger than usual number of major bugs that shipped with the final.

None of it is the-sky-is-falling material though. There are some bugs that will drive devs up the wall (especially when they end up getting fixed later and break the workarounds), and the lack of optimization in some components will put limits on their use, but nothing particularly game-ending.

In summary: not a disaster, but less polished in general than previous iOS releases at this stage.

Side note: I noticed this time that there was a lot less Apple engineer engagement on the dev forums. Couple that with the number of polish bugs (see: the Sloppy UI blog from yesterday) and you'd get the impression that the iOS team was stretched severely to get this out the door. Hope they're all getting some much-needed downtime.
Apple found to be using advanced Multipath TCP networking in iOS 7
Date/time pickers seem to be hard to get right. Android's had its own problems [1].

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/december-conspicuousl...
iPhones aren't being used for anything more than trivial tasks, they are used for phone calls, reading email and light web browsing. Any smartphone can do that, and if we see convergence then probably all the new converged devices will be fine for that purpose too.

It is going to be a lot harder for iPhones to become capable of taking over the job of a Windows PC than for a small Wintel phone to fill in the job of an iPhone.

If convergence devices do appear in the enterprise I think its more likely that the popular ones will be Windows, Android or at an outside chance Ubuntu - and the devices more likely to disappear are the ones not best suited to the desktop work.
I once asked a vice principal (way back, 10 yrs ago) why schools started so early when lack of sleep was known to be bad. He said it was so there was time for sports in the evening. If you started at 10 or 11 school would run until 6 and it would start getting dark.

Sports are why kids sleep is ruined.
Cygnus 1 Mission Viewer (3D visualization of its first flight to ISS)
Growth has been around 15% this year, but it's expected to get up to 20% as various new marketing and internationalization strategies take place.
What happens if the estate licenses another writer to pen a few more Sherlock stories (kinda like how Eric Van Lustbader is writing newer Bourne novels - http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourne_Trilogy)?

In essence, wouldn't the character still continue to get more "complex" even after the original author was long dead?
I was homeschooled K-12. My days consisted largely of 1-2 hours of bible study with my 3 brothers followed by a few hours on my own working through a set number of pages in math, science, literature, etc textbooks. I'd usually get done by 2 and then play Nintendo until friends got home from school.

I was never tested in homeschool. There were no grades or report cards. The only accountability was mom checking that the assignments were done. My first real test was the PSAT. As part of applying to college, my mom had to make up high school grades for the transcript.

I scored decently on the SAT and got accepted into a university. College was relatively a breeze since I had spent all my grade school years teaching things to myself - college was just an extension of this method of learning.

While there are plenty of good arguments against homeschooling, I feel lucky to have been brought up in an environment where education did not have a competitive aspect requiring 8-12 hours of work a day.
Snowden disclosures prompt warning on widely used computer security formula
I find the phrase "Memorisation not rationalisation" deeply sinister.
I still have no idea why they went with this C thing. Why would you not just release a 5 and a 5S at the same time? It would have the same effect without all the negative connotations. Nobody wants to be cheap - but everybody wants a deal. If they really just need a new second gen letter they could have just gone with almost any other letter. "i" perhaps..
You're forgetting transportation to and from school in your daily calculation, which could take up to an hour and a half total. And socialization which is non-negotiable. At least an hour for that? Oh and some people might need 9 hours of sleep, and another HN comment actually cited that this is recommended for a 13 year old. You see the problem with cutting it so close that homework just, just barely fits in the remaining hours of the day after all survival necessities have been taken care of? It's either complete the homework assignments or get enough sleep, not both. Is it really supposed to be that childhood is about nothing but school and homework? That seems atrocious to me. Basically you are advocating for a situation in which children trudge through the mechanical needs of the day simply to produce homework output, to be repeated ad nauseum day after day for most of their childhood. This is extremely unhealthy long term. This system eliminates any possibility of these kids exploring their interests and having fun, but that supposedly is not meaningful and too hand-wavy for some people. The author said of parents like that: "I tend not to get along with that type of parent."
This is ridiculous. You can't learn when sleep-deprived.

And god forbid you have hobbies. I was on the tennis team in high school, and often didn't get home until 8pm, much less have dinner. If I had 3 hours of homework after dinner, I'm up until midnight and had to catch the bus to school waking up at 5:45am.

Yes, that means I am in school from effectively 5:45am until 8pm in the US. Yes, that is a 14 hour work day. If you asked kids to only be at school 8 hours maximum, including "fitness" and "leadership building" and "enrichment" exercises like athletics and clubs, 3-5 hours of homework might be reasonable. 8 hours actively in school, 5 hours of homework, 2 hours for dinner and relaxing, and you still get 9 hours of sleep.

That is not sustainable. The only reason kids can manage it is that they have way more stamina than I do now. If I was asked now to repeat high school, I wouldn't be willing to put up with it.
"This is Walt Mossberg. Shut up!"

I miss Walt Mosspuppet. The videos were very funny. I wish the guy would do more.
> ...how could mere humans have created such an enormously complex technological edifice on top of such shaky foundations?

Mere humans have split the atom, mapped the human genome, walked on the surface of the moon, transplanted organs, achieved flight, cloned a sheep, and invented apple pie. I'd say next to these accomplishments, the act of writing good software using tools that make some aspects of the process difficult is hardly an achievement.

I agree that hysterics claiming we are a hair away from a total imperative meltdown are ridiculous. However, I think that "make some aspects of the process difficult" is a reasonable assessment of imperative, low-level programming. Can you tell me you've never been bitten by an unexpected null? Or, that you've never tired of having to write a class that's essentially a wrapper around a List/Map because the interface is not convenient or fluent?

I'm not suggesting we get a mob together and overthrow the tyrannical imperative government, leaving corpses dangling from the gallows as a warning to the next person who wants to mutate an input parameter. I just want the discussion to move away from "C++ is fine, quit your bitching" - this is totally unproductive.

If medical doctors thought like this, laproscopic surgery would never have been taken seriously since conventional surgery was totally adequate. "I mean, what's the problem? Yeah, being sliced open creates very long recovery times for people and is more likely to lead to infection, but that's just something we have to deal with. An incalculable number of lives have been saved through conventional surgery, so I really don't think we need to consider new methods."
You are right, if you go to a hospital in Austria with certain wounds, police has to come and question you.

They wont force you to report, but they will definitely try to convince you to tell them where you got the wound from.
>However, the funding of political campaigns through lobbying is an above board bribery that effectively debt the government official to their sposors... which are increasingly large corporations with wealthy owners.

Agreed there are problems with the political environment in regards to funding and lobbying. However if we continue to fail over to the concept that this is all about rich people being the boogeyman in these situations then we will always continue to deflect responsibility from the government.

Blame or focus on the rich, diverts responsibility from the government to fulfil it's duties. In fact it continues to allow a government to do such, because people are looking the other way.

What I am suggesting is the money is probably there to allow such programs to continue, if you divert funding from other non-critical areas.
Alan Turing’s story could be rebooted by calls to pardon late computer legend
Developers running a modified Linux kernel does not a deployment of a technology make.
True, this is why I prefer old tried and true languages and tools, as much as I'd love to live on the bleeding edge. The day is just too short to use CoffeeScript/Dart/Haxe when there's JavaScript. Completing projects that seem "easy" is hard enough to begin with.
I can't believe I'm reading someone on hacker news saying 'polynomials don't appear in everyday problems.'

As for the start time, likely she is involved in extra-curricular activities, like cheerleading or sports.

5 nights a week? Not buying it. I don't think I'm isolated from the world at all; I managed to deal with a heavy homework load and still have plenty of fun and get into various sorts of trouble (often at the same time) as a teenager.
Am I correct in assuming that MPTCP could potentially make snooping on in-transit data somewhat more troublesome? All potential pathways would need to be monitored simultaneously in order to reconstruct the application-layer stream.

On the other hand, all cross-Atlantic traffic is likely to pass through the same few undersea cables, regardless of the "first 50 miles" are covered (3G/WiFi), so the net effect on snoop-ability is probably null.
One comment: there's a difference between mental arithmetic, which is as useful as ever to be able to perform quickly/effectively, and the pen-and-paper variant (which I assume the cited assignment required), which is not. Everyone should, of course, know how to do the latter, but doing long pen-and-paper operations usually doesn't save time over reaching for a calculator, and is error-prone. Unfortunately, schools (at least here) seem to endlessly practice pen-and-paper while giving essentially zero attention to mental arithmetic.
Great idea.
Possible improvement: Only show the effect if the user uses the tab key. IMHO the effect is distracting if you use the mouse and are already looking at the focused object.
https://github.com/JohnMcLear/ep_markdown
Amazon EC2 Cloud Comparison Performance Benchmarks
Get 10GB extra space on Google Drive for linking with Quickoffice
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I believe the Date Picker is something Apple will fix for sure. It's just not their style and culture to do things difficult for the user.

However, there's one major pain I got with the new UI I'd like to share. The new passcode lock screen is also much different than before, and this for me was a BIG problem at the beginning.

Surprisingly when I saw the passcode screen for the first time in iOS7 I absolutely forgot which was my code and therefore I could not unlock the phone. Try after try the phone puts it more difficult for you to enter new code combinations by not letting you try again after failed attempts. So I had an unusable phone for many hours in a row. I was in anger, how could I have forgot a that?

I discovered that the passcode code was something I had buried in my subconscious. Before the upgrade, I could type the code even when I was completely asleep at 3AM in the morning without even thinking, never failed in all this years.

Typing the code was a sort of reflex action for me. But the different lock screen UI made me absolutely impossible to perform it again. The code was not in my memory.

After several tries, and several hours, I met with my wife and she told me my own code so I could finally regain access to my phone.

Now the pin code is back to my memory and not my subconscious.

Anyone else had this sort of problem?
I did an experiment in college where I tried to see just how much work I could take on and stay sane. I'm very successfully academically (PhD at 26 from a very respected institution), and I found that if I did not have at least eight hours of unscheduled, unplanned time to just do nothing useful it severely impacted my ability to perform on any task.

And I'm an extreme outlier in terms of innate skill, I say without intending it as pride. It's just reality.

Without time to decompress and be mindless, you are constantly building up stress and pressure until you lose overall performance capacity.
I had plenty of hobbies a teenager. Maybe what people need is fewer resume-stuffing directed extracurricular activities, more free time, and starting school an hour later. We used to do 7 hours of school (9-4), 3-4 hours of homework, and had 1-2 evenings a week of structured extracurricular activities. And, no, you're not in school from the moment you wake up, although I do think American schools start stupidly early and then keep the kids in stupidly late.
We're actually fixing up an old, old building. So the project is really the biggest repair we've ever attempted. And we're doing everything we can to leave infrastructure exposed so it's easily repairable.

But the cabinets will be nailed to the wall.
Video Background Videos - Dailymotion
When I was a kid the situation was clear for me: Homework made me struggle for hours while the drill sergeant act next day would last for mere seconds. So I did the bare minimum that would keep me from getting in serious trouble and accepted punishment for the rest as a good deal.

My own kids are now growing and should show up with homework quite soon. I dread the day.
How about highlighting the current element with an "active" color border, and the next element with a different color for "this one comes next" (e.g. blue and dark gray, or dark and light blue, with the inactive elements being a light gray)? I think this would emphasize the element that comes next, as opposed to making you guess whether focus will move down, to the right, back to the top, etc. The animation is nice, but it doesn't really give you information until after the tab.
> the inner circle the parent poster mentions only appears if you use 24-hour time.

Which is only the vast majority of the world (about half a dozen countries use 12h clocks as a standard in written form).

(as it turns out, that means the vast majority of the world won't give a fig about the AM/PM selector being broken, the touch targets are a much bigger issue)
I seriously doubt that they'll win this, although I have to grant them Moriarty-like ambition.
The issue here is that it's a serious step back, the previous picker worked extremely well, and had worked extremely well since iOS1 IIRC.
Ugh no. The whole point of the animation is that it's responsive to the tab action, which binds content to context.
Maybe, but when I was a teenager, at least, starting at 8 or 10 would make no difference to me - I would just tend to fall asleep 2 hours later. At least in some cases, the real issue is the number of waking hours in a day demanded of a student.
I can't believe I'm reading someone on hacker news saying 'polynomials don't appear in everyday problems.'

Name a situation where solving a polynomial is something the average person has to do? The only one I can think of is compound interest.
Medium Editor
It's a well-known fact here that mathematicians can't do calculations. I've had professors in class ask the class to do very simple calculations for their complex examples for them. (Or they get it wrong. A lot.)
Do calculators even routinely work with infinite precision (like (sqrt(2) x sqrt(2) = 2)? I guess you could achieve some results with Mathematia or something like that, but I have my doubts about the average calculator.

Sometimes it is still useful to do calculations by hand, also to understand what is going on.

(Edit: just tested the OS X calculator, sqrt(2) x sqrt(2) works out by chance, but sqrt(200) x sqrt(200) fails).
This jumped out at me too. I don’t think this point was carefully considered.

For example, the Linux kernel uses reference counting - see https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/kref.txt . Does anyone doubt that this mechanism is better than attempting to garbage collect the kernel?
In my head, what I do in the end is 9x27 = 3^2 * 3^3 = 3^5 = 243 ('everybody' knows that, because of 7^3 = 343)

And 27 x 16 ends up being (32 - 5) x 16 = 512 - 80 = 432.

And yes, I could be way faster at mental arithmetic if I just did the calculations instead of switching to cuter approaches halfway through all the time.
Even purely from a practical perspective of "I have to get into college", if you are not very active in extracurricular activities you are screwed on your applications.

If you're doing athletics, you're spending five days a week for three hours after school every day during the sports season.

Even not during the sports season I was spending a minimum of two hours every day on extracurriculars including Boy Scouts, Academic Superbowl, Chess Club, and Science Olympiad. Those I all did because I had honest enthusiasm and got a lot out of all of those things (contributed more to my engineering and general life education than many classes for sure). But this kind of load is not and should not be unusual in children trying to find out what they enjoy in life.

Perhaps the problem is that there has been a shift from unstructured extracurricular activities to structured ones. I've seen this both in high schools and in universities. Writing poetry used to be something you did in an unstructured fun way, now it's a poetry club at school. So perhaps the difference is that what you define as "fun and trouble" is now a formal extracurricular activity.
The House, not the Senate. This won't get past the Senate, and even if it did, it wouldn't survive a veto, so there's no chance of it actually becoming law.
Same here. I think there is a massive overload of homework. School should focus on important bits but also don't leave general knowledge out of scope and going for full specialisation.
Yes, it could have been a line right out of 1984. Highly Orwellian.