skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(author here) I wanted to mention that I'm not a mathematician, or anything in particular. Any math grad should know comfortably more than me. I'm basically just a "hobbyist of everything," like a "midget polymath" who, by the way, happened to drop out of a terrible college. In fact I originally started that blog because I was having trouble finding a job (for a very broad spectrum of reasons, not least of which that I'm as bad at speaking as I am good at writing). I think most of the content on that page is approachable by high school students, since the most complicated stuff is really just basic trigonometry and complex numbers.

My intent was to wander into quote-unquote "advanced topics" but not necessarily dwell on them, so the math is intended to be casual, even though I didn't hold back on the formulas. I.e. you're not supposed to understand everything. From a larger point of view, you could think of the page as a response to the inanity of the logic-only expositional style that passes as higher math education today.

Regarding the code, to me most of the code snippets on that page are "scripts." There's maybe 2 or 3 snippets that might cross over into being "applications." The MovieMaker[1] utility is probably the most application-y. (Apologies for having to squint at the code in some cases. I felt that the visceral immediacy of the source code was critical, in the "this is not magic" kind of way, which is why it's all plaintext rather than, say, links to Mathematica notebooks.)

For better or worse, however, the source was one of those places where I had trouble holding back. I tried to make the code educational in the process, though. In particular, if you want to learn or expand on function-oriented/functional programming skills, the code may learn you some insights.

By the way everybody, thanks for the comments. It's been hilarious/endearing reading them, and I'm happy that one of my minor magnum opii is irreversibly burning such a healthy number of man-hours from the coffers of society. I should also mention that all the imagery/source/audio is public domain. Also if you want to link to a specific slide view, View Source/Inspect Element on it to find its name (the CSS class is "flipbook"). So if you see

name="game of life 2"

That becomes

http://www.oftenpaper.net/flipbook-gameoflife2.htm

Where it has its own page. Of course, my inimitable laziness is why this process isn't automated.

[1] http://www.oftenpaper.net/flipbook-fadeleafanimation.htm
The realms have different rules. An argument within/for/against a particular religious belief, such as a gut feeling or reference to a religious text, doesn't work in science. In a similar way, it doesn't make sense to use the rules of science to support/refute religion. To assert that there is no evidence for a religious belief is essentially a religious argument, not a scientific one.
Thanks. That does resonate with me actually.
Are you serious? Is there a perl implementation of python? Did I mention I am having to formally present to the executive steering committee to get permission to run perl?
I think it is comparable. We do have the fossil record, after all.
Google Now: The Tip Of A very Long Spear
Shouldn't we already know if TrueCrypt is back-doored or not considering its popularity ?
It's only recently the Catholic Church has gone so nutso right-wing - in even recent decades they were heavy on the social justice, relatively speaking.
Courses are being offered by universities like Harvard and M.I.T. and by the teenager next door making videos in his garage.

Where is the teenager next door posting these videos? Just YouTube? Or is there a platform that lets independent teachers easily create courses with videos, assignments, tests, etc.?
I wonder how many people thoroughly read these gwern articles before jumping to comment their opposing views. There is a lot of information inside. It may take me 5-6 hours to properly go through it before concluding that gwern didnt take X into account.
Idea : On HN, even if I save long articles for later and read a week after, my posted views will not be read by anyone since the discussion is already over. Maybe HN can provide a service where everyone gets update whenever a new comment is posted on such articles. I get to choose which posts I want updates from(and most will be ones having lots of words since updates will be few and far between). That way even if someone comments after a week, she atleast knows few people are getting aware of it.
I'm not sure if that's what he meant. A 'focus' on UX is always a good idea. People find encryption scary and a project that makes crypto easy and accessible is important for it's adoption. Of course security is also important, I don't think anyone is suggesting weaker crypto is a good idea.
It is not (self evidently) true that evolution correctly models the origin of adaptations.[1] That is, the menu-creation ex ante selection is a "black box" model, and that is at best problematic, from a logical/mathematical/and "scientific" perspective. The randomness hypothesis is almost surely wrong here (as the mechanism of menu selction).

[1] http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq....
The Boards Are All White: Charting Diversity Among Tech Directors
Free housing in SF for talented hackers
Hi all,
We are a group of Thiel Fellows - paid $100,000 by paypal founder peter thiel to drop out of college (http://www.thielfellowship.org/). We're working on a variety of very cool projects, and are starting an exciting program in our house. We are offering free housing for talented hackers that want to get involved with our projects, and potentially become founding team members/ lead engineers in the near future. There will be an informal application for this program. If interested, feel free to leave a comment/reply, and we can get back to you with more info.
The Shame of Our Prisons: New Evidence
Let me let you in on the little secret.

When you are backed into a corner, you accept whatever is left to explain the complexity at hand. Then you pretend that you understand it. Collect enough these "understandings" of complex stuff and you will be able make analogies between them or even offer "little secrets" for the uninitiated.
I would have been all over this 2 years ago when my drummer lived 1200 miles away.
You can buy one and just use it on Wi-Fi. To be honest, you wouldn't want it to be your daily phone yet. It's not there, but it's on the way.
> Honest question... if HIV is a virus, and virus are not living forms, how can they evolve?

The requirements for evolution are a subset of the requirements for "life", so its quite possible for things that are not alive to evolve.

> In that case wouldn't be the host cell the one that evolved?

Viruses can be a source of variation in the genetic code of living things that contributes to evolution in the living things, but that's a different effect than the evolution of the virus itself.
Thanks, that's an interesting way of illustrating it.
> how difficult would it be to detect the presence of steganography in images

I would imagine if it's a completely original image, it would have to be done through frequency analysis of the various bits and bytes - not easy at scale.

On the other hand, if it's an oft-posted image, a simple diff would show off any hidden messages very quickly.
Well how about that. I take back two or three things I said about the Canadian Government. :)

Seriously I am really happy to see this kind of thing finally happen.
Just in the city. The exurbs and suburbs are still very much the south in all the ways the south is stereotyped (poor govt services, anti govt rhetoric, tons of gun culture, overly accepting of racism if not racism itself, bevy of fundamentalists in local and state govt, etc). Also hideous commutes for suburban living. While some people would feel at home there (especially if white and Christian), many others would not find it as normal as places in other regions of the country.

Atlanta (the city, not the region) is basically the freaks and geeks vacuum for the South (and also a middle class black mecca too). The city is great. The metro area is far more questionable. Tons of affordable homes in the city, tons of trees (we're literally "The City of Trees"), and lots of little pockets of whatever you like.

Some of the close in suburbs are more like Atlanta than it's suburbs, but honestly, it's go with a home in the city or go home IMO.

(Fulton county too, not DeKalb...it's complicated but important).
Inspiring Bruce Lee quotes for entepreneurs
I may very well be the one not getting it (english is not my first language and I am sleepy at the moment).

Allow me to try to rephrase your explanation: it states that religion act as a kind of shield for the brain[1] (this is bliss) while at the same time blinding him to hard facts[2] (this is ignorance). Did I read too much in your explanation or summarized too much ?

[1] external influences

[2] the ability to freely reason about data specifically and the environment generally
isn't it still useful even if he lives close by? aren't there times when it's more convenient for you guys to each do your track at your own time / place ?

note I am not arguing against jamming side-by-side for real - which is awesome. i see it more as a complement
Ask HN: What bits of the shutdown government can we replace with software?
I saw a picture earlier today of a citizen mowing the lawn at the Lincoln Memorial. The government won't do it, so he just figured he'd take care of it, I guess. In that spirit of "let's get it done," what kind of government services do you think the populace could replace with code? Crowd-sourced disaster relief? collaborative meat inspections? Citizen-based earthquake detection?
Hundreds of prominent public companies have their investor relations (/ media relations) site served by coldfusion (including facebook, yahoo, ebay, paypal, EA, ...)

https://www.google.com/search?q=releaseDetail.cfm

Its not the sexiest of platforms out there, but it can get the job done...
I was part of the first wave of "newbies" into the reddit community, part of the very first wave of migrants from Digg to Reddit back in about 2008 (I was 14, I can't believe it).

Through time, I've pretty much kept my participation focused on one particular subreddit at a time. At first it was askreddit, then gaming, then minecraft, then buildapc then tf2. From there I dropped off, using it less and less as I've gotten more and more busy. Now I might visit it once a day, but I'm on HN much more.

It's really jarring to look at /r/all these days. I've never been a fan of image macros, so it's very disconcerting to see that pretty much all top content takes the form of image macros (though somehow the word "meme" has come to be synonymous with "image macro"). However, most of my favourite communities (/r/mechanicalkeyboards!!!) have only gotten more awesome with age.
Or make sure you get paid for every single hour you put in, and it is a 3+ figure per hour rate. Not many clients can afford a 5-6 figure monthly outlay for a programming position. Those who can, cannot afford it for very long. It is generally a self-solving situation, then: the client pay a high rate for high availability from you and what you bring to their table, then in half a year or less the contract usually ends as the situation becomes too expensive or stabilizes.
Evolution does not strictly apply to living organisms.
Natural selection, which is what I think your referring to, as a mechanism for evolution relies on Mendelian inheritance.
The only requirement for Mendelian inheritance is genetic material (DNA or RNA), which viruses obviously have.
>> "I think this has a lot of potential, and one possible use case would be for bands to engage with their audiences directly, asking them to contribute parts to their new songs."

I think that's something you'll get very strong opinions on. I personally couldn't imagine anything worse. I like the idea of bringing music creation more public (live streaming recording sessions/producing, releasing works in progress as you create something etc.) but actually crowdsourcing material doesn't make sense to me as a creator or a fan. What I mean is that when you create art a lot of the decisions you make are based on your emotions (e.g. if I'm sad I write a sad song about the thing making me sad). Bringing other people into that confuses things and as a listener I think I'd notice that in the song. I'm not saying the music created would be bad (popular songs nowadays tend to have a LOT of songwriters working on them) I'm just saying it feels wrong to me.
O noes, you have just disproven biology!
If you add to your analogy that you have no knowledge of the existing codebase, and you have no idea what you're adding or modifying, then you understand my difficulty grasping the concept. Thanks for the reply though!
Ask HN: What are the most popular startup job sites?
I'd like to compile a list of the best/ most popular startup job sites to publish on my blog with hopes to help people find and land a new job.

If you know of a job site, please list it below.

Thanks! :)
Ask HN: Are LinkedIn Company Pages Worth the Effort? 
Although my start-up has a LinkedIn company page (and I think we may even have some followers), I haven't spent a ton of time using it, especially compared to Facebook page or Twitter Page. Curious whether the ROI from spending time sprucing it up and using it to spread content is worth the effort or not. What is the best use of LinkedIn company pages?
>"I'm not sure why "not even the Catholic Church" comes into play "

Because is a religion with the same Genesis book on the bible and it's an example of at least one religion (the root of Christianity) that doesn't believe in teaching Religion as a science
Ya I was excited about the Xeon Phi too:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-...

I just don't know if anything from Intel will be cost-effective because it's going to be over-engineered to not compete with existing products.

For example caching is largely useless with something like Go that is sending copies of data around. I don't know if it's possible to use copy-on-write with so many cores.

It's just a hunch but I think multiprocessing in the future is going to use something like content addressable storage and not worry so much about a complex router or interconnect. Only the most naive algorithms will probably win out, so basically chop the screen up into a bunch of 16x16 squares and send them to each processor.

Also I think it will be really awesome to be free of middleware and be able to run physics or AI directly. I've even thought about trying to write something to emulate a bunch of cores on my computer so I can at least play with the algorithms until affordable hardware arrives.
Actually a lot of enterprise applications are built with Java.
True. But generally the cost of guessing and doing something wrong is much higher than saying "I don't know" and asking someone else or Googling the result. School, through homeworks and especially exams, trains us to do our best without outside help. I would argue that this behavior is maladaptive to engineering in the real world.
I don't think one can increase that.
The fact that you used the word "sold" already implies to me its a matter of faith.

Climate change is a highly politicized and potentially corrupt push of an agenda. As Im not working on climate change or related sciences, all I can do is believe on what an alleged aggregate of scientist tell me, its pure faith.

Scientists and engineers are the new priests.
No, that is sort of what I meant to say, except that I would never use the word bliss for describing the state of a host brain. You could argue about the meaning of ignorance, but I really don't think this catch phrase fits well with the statement I tried to make. Competitive inhibition is a more apt term for what's actually going on.
Right, and I can see why that's a problem in accounting, but why does it matter for scientific computing? I do a fair amount of stuff that could be called scientific computing, and I just use doubles. If I need to keep track of uncertainty or propagate errors, I normally use Gaussians as the representation (not "significant figures" as would be implied by using decimal).
Depends on how old you are, really. For a young guy like me it's no issue, i just didn't get much rest, since during the night my blood oxygen level was like that of an 80 year old. Once you're elderly though it can easily lead to an untimely demise.
Interestingly, and contrary to the stereotype of most prison rape being perpetrated by proverbial "bunkmates":

The new studies confirm previous findings that most of those committing sexual abuse in detention are corrections staff, not inmates. That is true in all types of detention facilities, but especially in juvenile facilities.
That is one of my favourite things about HN by far. It was a very surreal moment to realize that I'd had a very public conversation/discussion with Paul Graham. That's something I've never seen or experienced on other sites before.
Say Yes
Milky Pin-Ups Are Traditional-40's Pinup Photos Made With High-Speed Milk [NSFW]
Furloughed Office Products
Now if they would just fix the "update/reboot/update/reboot" endless cycle on the software that came on the ZTE Open... It wants to repeatedly reapply the same update over and over.
Hmm. All of this sounds a lot more like things he knows he should say, than things someone would actually think.
Thanks, I'll check out that book.
Ex-NSA? Are they sure about that one?
"Help us find Stephen Martin's killer - Bay to Breakers assault"

Is the link not stable or something?
Gold Price is currently at its mining cost. The asset you can buy at its production cost is a bubble? Where are you talking your investment advise from? CNBC?

US Treasuries at the most expensive price point for the past 300 years. That's for you, if you're looking for bubbles.
Another voice asking for Linux support.
>"in even recent decades they were heavy on the social justice"

They are still very active in social justice activity. At least that is very true in poor zones of Latin America
Reason rests on fictions, too. For example objects/things don't exist. But without believing in them it's impossible to function. Religion also has to be evaluated functionally.
You can start with ? (which works in IE and Chrome too to force a search), but then you first have to remove the www. that Firefox helpfully adds ;)

And agreed that Chrome is a little unhelpful there too; I always have to remember prefixing a non-domain hostname in our network with http://. Although by now I resorted to a bookmark.
I am very confident that the human brain is responsible for all human behavior. That's the simplest explanation by far.

You'd have to explain a completely new and different set of physics that no one has observed before, and explain how and why evolution found it and took advantage of it (and yet no one has ever observed it before), and how it interacts with the body, etc.

It just makes absolutely no sense.
Given the stated assumptions, yes. Is there a flaw in that logic?

To arrive at another outcome, you'd need to weigh the suffering and somehow decide that a single person's life, who is actively trying to hurt others (that is, they aren't an innocent bystander), is somehow worth more. In some scenarios this can be a philosophical debate (how much small annoyance to millions of people is one other person's life worth?), but with an active adversary and no other course of action, it seems like the only rational decision.

You seem to be indicating that in this scenario you'd always value a single person's life (despite their actions) above many others' suffering. Is it because you view LE as morally superior, or do you have another set of priors that shape your reasoning?
No, because the host cell is generally used to produce more viruses and is then lysed to release them. HIV and other retroviruses use RNA to inject DNA strands into the host cell's nucleus where those new genes instruct the cell to produce more viruses. Even if the host cell splits, the genetic machinery is still there for the virus to reproduce.

Either way the end result is a bunch of new viruses each with their own genetic code that could have mutated.

AFAIK whether or not viruses are living organisms is the equivalent of programming language religions in biology and is quite controversial. I personally look at viruses as living organisms and consider "viral reproduction" amongst sexual and asexual reproduction.
The "theory of evolution via natural selection" is itself another (very common) misconception about evolution. Don't equate evolution with natural selection; they are far from synonymous. In fact, we have good reason to think that most evolution is non-adaptive.
> Imagine if Github forced you to do all coding with a custom IDE.

That's a great analogy. Github is a great model: I'd rather do as much as I could in-browser and then only the stuff that requires local access to be done from my tools of choice.
Feel free to scratch Nazis and insert any other example of extreme injustice perpetrated by organizations that considered themselves to be apart of some sort of law enforcement or judicial system.

Change the setting to the Underground Railroad and try that on for size: As far as the law was concerned, the people who were transported by the Underground Railroad were property. The law enforcement did not necessarily consider themselves to be apart of some sort of atrocity (although we can of course all agree that they were). They were, undeniably, law enforcement. There is no question in either of our minds that they were acting in a reprehensible manner, but they were nevertheless law enforcement.

It would be, unambiguously (in my not so humble opinion, although I can't believe there's anyone on HN who would disagree), justifiable to kill anybody that threatened to bring law enforcement down on the 'operators' or 'passengers' of the Underground Railroad.

Note that I am not saying that DPR putting out a hit is justifiable (and to continue to head off the annoyingly standard complaint others here like to throw out: No, I am not saying the Underground Railroad and the Silk Road are comparable in importance, severity, morality, etc).

What I am saying is that it sits in a gray area that requires some consideration. I am not willing to write it off carelessly.
Screensharing through WebRTC?
Grive: an open source Linux client for Google Drive
I just finished building Boot2Gecko's emulator-x86 after reading about the ZTE Open on HN a few weeks ago. I'm really excited by Firefox OS - so much that I can't wait to ditch my iPhone for one of the B2G dev kits.
that's interesting

after you make a first crack at your song wouldn't you like to have awesome session musicians play parts?
It sounds like you feel there is an inherent conflict between science and religion (or am I misreading). I see no reason why this needs to be the case. Once you move beyond explanations for things that can make testable predictions, then you are out outside of science you have moved in to philosophy. At that point all explanations that don't contradict what is observed become equally valid/invalid.

Take for example the question more general question of whether or not there is a creator behind the universe. There is no real way to prove, or at least no one has come up with a way to do so, whether or not this is the case. As a result, either answer is equally valid/invalid.
That's actually what appears to have happened in actuality.
As Pontes de Salford Meadows
Better yet - if you sign up for the beta, we have a working product for you to try out.
Maybe https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/... will help you?