skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Math for hackers.
After the large number of posts I've seen asking about reading math, returning to study, wanting to know more about foundations, etc, I've decided to make some of my writings and masterclass material available on the web. There's a lot of it, and it needs work, so I'd appreciate some comments about what you'd like to see first.

I'm intending to create an undirected graph of topics, so you can start where you want, then go forward once you get the idea, or back if you're struggling. Then you can concentrate on the bits you're most interested in.

But what should I start with? I've read what people have advised others to read, and I'm looking for a start point.

Oddly enough, I will start with "Adding Fractions" and basic algebra (expanding, factoring and simplifying), but where then? I will eventually cover O(..) notation, basic calculus, infinities, series, convergence, combinatorics, graphs (vertices and edges) and more, but what do you want to see first?

It will also be on a wiki-like system so you can contribute later if you want, although not at first while I get it running.

Comments, thoughts, suggestions welcome.
The difference between height and those other things the government determines taxes on is that height is not a choice, it's an innate characteristic of a person. People find taxing on height repulsive because it is more or less equivalent to taxing on race which everyone would immediately see as wrong and would be prohibited by the constitution.

In order for this guys argument to hold water he should have used a case other than height which involved a component of personal choice and invoked the same feeling of injustice in people.
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It's always anecdotes and random chance when it comes to "X's hardware sucks!"

I've had lots of hardware that failed: HPs, Dells, Seagates, Western Digitals, Apples, and just about everything else. For day-to-day use I still (currently) prefer Apple and OS X... to each their own.
The Right to Walk Away
Nice idea to begin with...I guess you can creare short URL's for trips, multiple landmarks, etc...

Why do you associate this with Twitter though? Twitter is not the only site that shortners are used.
Excercises in Generated Prose
I agree with and understand this part:

>.. when I’m getting started, I never know what X and Y are.

> .. once you’re into maintenance mode,"

But, how does one know when maintenance mode starts? In the build something/release/add feature/release/add feature cycle, it is easy to rationalize that I am not in maintenance mode until it is late.

Of course, as davidw said above, no advice is better than "use your head" :)
There was an article here earlier about Inform 7 tools, this one shows how to construct interesting interactive prose using the I7 language.
This is basically the attitude of the kmail developers - html email is bad.

Who could possibly ever want to send a link or photo to someone in an email. Everyone should be forced to have green console text on a black background.

Why can't they just use the IE8 rendering engine?
obliged
An Analysis of MMORPG Player Demographics and MMORPG Player Stereotypes
I would suggest doing a design contest on 99designs.com, or geniusrocket.com (expensive but they do creative videos etc. too) - and see what newer designs you get.

1. The pink needs to go, its not a good association (someone else said this)

2. Need a 30 second video tutorial

3. Show a sample calendar (that no one can change)

Check out this UI dos/don't list that might help:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/23/10-ui-design-patt...
I like this idea. Have you seen HyperPhysics? It's a physics version of what you are suggesting.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/HFrame.html
50% faster... on selected benchmarks. Run pypy through the unladen-swallow performance benchmarks (very real-world tests) and get some more accurate numbers.
I'm a techie but I love threadless's HTML emails and newsletters (as well as Apple's, zip.ca etc.)
I work with a tech company that refers to this sort of bonus deliverable in a project as a "marshmallow." not sure why, they're Argentinian, so maybe it's a cultural thing?

It's pretty effing rad that their marshmallow for the presentation was having someone who is partially paralyzed walk.
Seriously. You can never go into public office if you've gotten publicly drunk, had an affair, smoked weed (Hi Bill Clinton)

So now we have this charade where people get their past sanitized and we live with a public/private schitzophrenia that is incredibly unhealthy.

I was born in 68 and I feel like I am stuck on both sides of this. On one hand I am self employed which insulates me and I personally believe I can do what I want. On the other I kind of freak out when a customer friends me on Facebook, because there I am with the red cup in my hand.

We as a culture need to grow up and accept our humanity and stop try to live up to impossible ideals.
How is a beta of Windows 7 expected to be as reliable as a released version of OS X?

I'm a Mac user, and I much prefer OS X to Windows (XP/Vista), but, come on, what a weak anecdote!
yep, I have a first gen iPhone. Works fine. I should expect to get at least 5 years out of it, shouldn't I?
Thanks, good point about the twitter association, I guess that's just the first use I thought of and it made the design sort of playful.
For trips and multiple landmarks I'm wondering how I can keep the UI simpler than google maps so it can still make sense to use qui.tw vs google maps + any url shortener.
Then it suddenly clicked that he couldn't get into Steve's head well enough to pull off the character

So, wait. When you were judging the writing based on the writing, you thought one thing. When you were judging it based on the guy doing the writing, you, uh, figured out that the writing was worse than you thought before you acquired some extraneous information?

FSJ was never supposed to be about what Steve Jobs would actually think about. It was always poking fun at what people said about Jobs -- and since the most prominent people saying things about Jobs are tech journalists, it's fine for a tech journalist to write it.
A better (more future-safe) link would be http://www.htc.com/www/product/hero/overview.html
Email Address Length FAQ
I find his humor "elusive." I much prefer The Register's BOFH though I haven't read it in years.
College Humor, Cracked, JPGMag. It's all about the incentives. The Citizen's just not there yet. The big shift from blogging to aggregation around new year's was in part prompted by me sending 3 writers to Grant Park on election night and having none of them send back stories "because it was crowded." As they were "citizen journalists" I had no leverage or way to hold them accountable. In retrospect this seems obvious, but it was a wakeup call. Can't run a business on volunteer writing, gotta get some central thing running consistently and without fail, i.e. the aggregator.
Linux: It doesn't get any faster
does fake rhino horn powder reduce the demand to kill more rhinos?
The Startup Entrepreneur's Guide To Risk Management
you might add the ability to export the calendar in ical format for inclusion in google calendar or any other calendar application.
Of all the math I learned in HS + college, I think basic calculus has been the most valuable. Even a conversational understanding of a derivative or an integral can be a useful mental tool in day-to-day decision making.
Almost completely useless. It didn't even touch the most important aspect: does she age at a cellular level?

Come to think of it, the whole thing is misrepresented. It's not that she doesn't age (they didn't say anything at all about this) only that she doesn't grow up.
The Iran Crisis and 4GW
Beautiful code, just beautiful. Having implemented adaptive boosting once before for a college course, I have to say it is a joy to see some vision algorithms again. I would be curious to know how he generated the .dat file he's using. Facial detection data sets aren't exactly easy to get.
Robotics Manufacturer Sarcos - Creating Real Life HALO War Suits
This would be absolutely awesome. I'm 14 and going into 9th grade. I'm taking algebra 2 / trig next year but I hate how they teach it so I use the internet to teach me. This would be a really cool idea, I'd definitely use it.
"CAP" them.

Awesome.
This bit sounds cool: a history slider that moves back and forth through the versions as fast as you drag it.
Well, I'll consider Surface (etc) relevant when I see it in use myself. Also, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, for any purpose.. :)

I'm just trying to provide a counter point to all of the apple-linux fanboyism (for the sake of fanboyism) and MS-hate that's prevalent...

Well, there's a reason why MS-hate is prevalent, but it's not prevalent enough. This seems to be a fairly good chronicle of the reasons why: http://boycottnovell.com/category/deception/

( Yes, I just saw that site today, from a link on HN )

especially when MS are are making actual attempts at real innovation coughoperaunitecough, yet people seem to just want to ignore those facts and instead provide biased opinions.

Opera's hyping of Unite really has been a new low for the company.

But I don't see how acknowledging all the evil MS has done is in any way "ignoring the facts" or "providing biased opinions". I use the word "evil", because despite possibly sounding silly, it's an appropriate word here.

It's all well and good to dislike something, but at least have a good, up to date reason for disliking something. Holding grudges for past slights is never cool.

That's just it. Microsoft's outrageously slimy and evil practises shouldn't become "history" in a week or two.

Those countless past "slights" are perfectly good reasons for disliking, or detesting Microsoft. People just keep forgetting them.
The most interesting statistic to me was the one that seems to indicate MMO playing cuts into (or replaces) TV watching time. That's actually kind of reassuring to me. I think it's healthier for people to play MMO's for hours on end, then to veg out watching sit-coms. At least with an MMO you're using your brain, right?
The video demo gives a better overview then the press release: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kshGq8COSiM
IEEE contest to showcase homegrown hackery
As a really high level overview of math, I like The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (or the ~1/4 I've made my way through so far). It's a bit too abstract though - it covers an immense amount of material so they have to be - but I still feel like something is missing.

My 'overview of math' is probably The Road to Reality (which is ostensibly about Physics, but really spends just as much time talking about math) - which is a little bit more hands on and concrete. It makes a bit tougher to get through (difficulty, and quantity), but I think it's worth it.
I'm curious if her cellular systems rejuvenate or mend themselves... if she is forever in 'repair mode' maybe she IS the fountain of youth... or maybe we're all wrong and shes vampire?
I didn't downvote you, but given that Tom is a name and profile recognized by millions of people, the fact that he's paid such a small amount to stick around is surprising. Other than that, NWS is a private company. If you think they're overpaying people, short the stock, bank your profits, and use that as proof that you know more than Rupert Murdoch about how to run a media company.
Why the little bend at the bottom? It doesn't seem very pocket friendly.
What are threadless HTML emails?
I'm very interested in this - hopefully you'll announce it on HN when it ready?
> 1. cool idea - especially for people planning kids this can point out the best days for...

As someone who was actually involved in "planning kids" I can assure you that this site solves a problem that does not exist.
Cisco: Smart Grid May Be 1,000 times larger than the Internet
I am sure all the companies who are using it have extremely important documents to mail around ;-)

Or maybe it is all about feeling important...
Technology may have changed; humanity hasn't. There's a reason why we have shades on our windows (and don't build houses entirely out of windows), and I think it's more likely that this generation is going to rediscover those reasons than to discover they weren't necessary.

As an old fogey of 30 who has been on the net for a long time (by most standards now), one thing that I personally find very lacking in Facebook is that you can only have one identity. Probably the biggest reason I don't join Facebook is that the resulting collision of high school/social etc. (which I'm not that fond of anyhow and would face the choice of either "friending" a whole bunch of people I don't want to friend or offending them by rejecting them) and my tech/blog life would be very annoying for both sides and very, very annoying for me.

In fact, I think this is the root problem. If you had two personas online, one a party animal and one a professional one, that were only poorly linked, then we wouldn't have problems like "you can't be hired because you have been pictured drinking". Old technology did this by default; every forum, every newsgroup, every email chain I can be a new person, in fact I hardly have a choice.

We do this in real life all the time, even when deciding who to hire. Until that concept catches up with the online world in a bigger way, I think there's going to be trouble. The young'uns may yet be right that it's not a problem, though, because we may yet return to this idea. (I emphasize the word "return" to highlight that this is not a new idea, so going back to my first sentence, there is some hope that we can settle on this because, again, humanity hasn't changed and what worked once can work again. Those shades are there so that behind them, we can choose our persona freely in our own living space. They are not merely there to "hide" bad things, they are persona firewalls.)
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It's more that FSJ pretty badly mischaracterized Steve, but the flaws were easier to shrug off when I couldn't easily pin down why in particular he was mischaracterized that particular way.
Flash support?! Ughh... I was hoping that widespread proliferation of numerous (and varying) mobile platforms will kill this junk and accelerate HTML/JS/CSS progress.
"IBM's Sony PlayStation 3 processor"

I am sure it used to have another name, though? Also, really the same version as in the PS3, or the "pro" version? (Ah, now I remember: "Cell" was the name).
:-( One of my pet peeves is that Civ gives a very wrong idea of history and the way cultures evolve.
Perhaps it's just me and feel free to disagree, but this is a classic example of a site that should have not existed in the first place. It solves a problem that doesn't exist and it does it in a way that is inherently more complex than it needs to be.

I cannot think of any woman I know that would even considered using this. It's like a fridge that orders a milk for you - cool, but useless.

Perhaps, maybe, if it were a part of a specialized established women's site, then it would get some traction, but only as a smaller feature of comprehensive set of services catering to, say, women trying to get pregnant.
this is probably a dumb question, but re: charging for the binaries of a program licensed under GPL -- are there any examples of a person/company doing this successfully?
I think you might be overstating this a bit: browsers definitely had gzip support back in the stone-age (I actually implemented this by hand in 2000 or so) but for slightly shorter values of "long, long ago" it's also been the case that the necessary UA checks were well-known even if your default Apache config didn't already include them.

JS/CSS, however, I agree completely on - it's a good deployment step but minification is quite the nuisance for debugging and it's less critical if you've configured your server to set proper Expires/Cache-Control headers.
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I would assume for face contour. Does seem a bit odd, but overall it's pretty thin so should still be pocketable.
What if he trademarked the artwork/themes distributed with official paid binaries? And users who compile the source on their own just get a basic white-label theme.
The amount of math resources available today online is amazing. I congratulate you on your efforts to teach yourself what you don't feel you're getting in school. When I was in high school around 1999, I found myself in situation like yours, but was unable to find quality (and free) resources available online.
I don't know bout sucessfully - haven't seen the accounts - but there are a lot of examples from SUSE/IBM down to builds of SSL libraries
During college, I must admit that I would kind of space out whenever math discussion entered a CS class, and would regain my attention once the professor said "and here's how that looks in code" because I would end up thinking of the math the same way I thought of code anyways. It would be neat if you expressed some of the concepts in source code examples in some sufficiently high-level and clean-syntax language of your choosing.
Cool! Looking forward to your website.
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One would be wise to not take the article at face-value. It is written by Daniel Lyons, famous for his parody of Apple fanaticism in the now-defunct blog Fake Steve Jobs. When Steve took ill, Daniel quit that blog and attempted to start one under his real name, and it was one of the most spectacular flameouts I've ever seen on the web.

The guy can be a great writer at times, but I wouldn't trust him to be genuine.
Not a technical term; Threadless is a t-shirt company.
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The Windows' fan club likes to point out that Windows is far more popular than Linux. The reason for that has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with monopoly.

This is pretty flawed reasoning. Sure, Linux is much faster than Windows when it comes to supercomputing and raw processing power, but that doesn't mean that it is a better operating system for everyday users.

Linux doesn't have a standardized or intuitive GUI out of the box and creating a productive desktop environment that suits the user requires time and effort. Other operating system provide much more productive human interfaces which enhances productivity far more than raw processing power ever will.
Basic linear algebra is extremely important in conjuncture with rudimentary matrix manipulation. I am always astounded by the number of college graduates who can't perform simple matrix multiplications, cross-products, dot-products, L-U factorization, etc without references.

Without these basics, it becomes increasing difficult to grasp more advanced subjects such as (non)linear optimization, calculating computation complexity, numerical methods, root finding, game theory, and so on. The importance of calculus and combinatorics, as mentioned, should not be undermined either.

EDIT: How could I have forgotten about Eigen Decompositions! I never fully understood its significance until the last two years of college when all fragmented subjects I had learned (in terms of CS, Engineering, and Control Theory) finally fell into place.
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The photo is a little misleading, as it's from when she was around 3 years old. She is in fact aging physically (albeit slowly), just maintaining an infant size.

This is her at 16:
http://a.abcnews.com/images/2020/ht_DSC_0098_090619_ssh.jpg
"After a certain age, their curiosity dies."

Dies, or is killed?
That could be, but it would still be a violation of Wikipedia's licensing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Comm...
How Smart Web Designers Screw Up Your SEO
I think it's needed, and I'd be for it. Should have quick references to algorithms, and some vector math, and intro physics for the people wanting to do game dev.

Check out http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ for some pretty good math resources (I've been really enjoying it).
Hindsight is 20/20.

I am sure Mr. Klein thought that the journalist/intern was going to practice due diligence (that would be my assumption coming from a brand like the New York Times).
>> I'm intending to create an undirected graph of topics...

Hah, awesome. <Requisite joke about network flow or something>.

The two topics I found most helpful to becoming a good computer scientist were O() notation and graph theory. Another idea, if you felt like covering it, would be the computery side of topics like linear algebra. I was forced to take linear in school and hated it, but I was getting linear for math people, not linear for CS people, so I didn't learn any of the graphics applications or neat things you can do with Markov chains and all that.
Wow, you completely missed the point. Obviously, the author knows that height is already taxed.

The real point is that some members of society are more productive than others. Apparently, tall people are more productive than short people. What we want to make equal (from a utilitarian point of view) is income per unit effort. If you're from a disadvantaged background, but put as much effort as a person from an advantaged background, then you would make the same after-tax income.

He's demonstrating that this point of view is impractical in reality.
Perhaps this doesn't show that most MMORPG players are unhealthier than the average American in terms of spending too much time on unproductive electronic media. Perhaps what this shows is that American society as a whole wastes too much time!

http://images.salon.com/16dec1995/comix/tombug.gif
Start with some of the notation that is commonly taken for granted later in pure Mathematics. That way the tools to approach everything else formally will be available.
Personally I find Civilization 4 to give striking insights into the development of world history, with diplomacy being one of the key elements. I remember playing, with the USA no-less, and sitting on a piece of land void of any oil. With time ticking on I sought the weakest opponent I could find and built a large, though somewhat outdated, fleet. I strategically planned a shock-and-awe tactic and managed to conquer the target city in a single turn. Then all the world hated me and the most powerful Civ declared war, wiping out my fleet in a single round with his well-fueled destroyers.

Such is history.

I lost that game.
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This would be awesome - I got sick of the traditional methods of teaching math. Not so much the rote repetition but the uninspired and dull methods of teaching.

At the moment I have been shoring up my math skills with a College Algebra text book, the book "Mathematics for the Non Mathematician" (highly recommended - it is the book that has re-inspired me to learn more math), and a tutor that meets with me for one hour once a week.

The tutor is an excellent resource - even though I don't remember everything I learn from him because my time is short and I can't always practice problems outside of our session; I still pick up tid-bits here and there.

Having an online resource geared specifically for hackers would be absolutely awesome - to sort of compliment everything we do for ourselves already, having a resource built by a hacker for hackers is very exciting.