skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always felt like I was supposed to like maths, but I learned (basic) programming before I learned algebra, and I couldn't figure out how I would be using it.

After years of being a programmer, I still can't.
Python: How can I use ggplot with a simple 2 column array?
Depends on your definition of rich and poor.
Sugar reduction is the key.... Block sugar with F21
I don't agree with that either. It starts as a hobby, sure. But if it's doing well, I could definitely keep working and expanding it out. Start small and ship fast.
Why does Windows have terrible battery life? Most likely for the same general reason Microsoft is losing slowly but steadily in all areas: it takes more effort and manpower to get Windows OS to perform in a particular area than it does to get a Linux-variant OS to perform. That's the fundamental implication of better design.
MIT is just the same - all their researchers and students are starting companies on the side while making use of MIT resources and networks.
Don't be so dismissive. This could very easily transition into a business.

The only real difference is that the author won't feel too much pain if it doesn't make a lot of money.
Bummer, but not too surprising. I was puzzled by some of the decisions they made back in the Inprise years.
THE DARK SIGHTS - Famous Filming Locations
> Microsoft can't build a consumer OS with great power-management because the kernel also needs to work on high throughput servers?

Not only servers but they need the same kernel design to work well across a ton of different hardware/firmware combinations, form factors (Phone, Tablets, Laptops) and they do an OK job. But to excel they need to put in a lot more effort (working with OEMs, working with SoC makers is another challenge - everyone optimizes for Android now a days including Qualcomm and Nvidia). So yes, they can do it but it is exponentially more challenging for them due to their legacy and current market position.
After reading the OP I immediately thought of your standard hiring advice and wondered if the folks asking math questions aren't on the right track after all. (Thank you for your persistence posting it, btw.) At least half of my daily work requires learning new things on-the-fly, and I bet in 5 years most of my technical knowledge is turned over anyway--except the math and CS fundamentals. In programming aptitude matters way more than current knowledge. I think IBM discovered the same thing in the 60s when they were hiring chess players and crossworders. So if math puzzles serve as a legal(ish) proxy for an IQ test, aren't they just what interviewers should ask? Of course I'd rather have someone who knows Ajax and 3NF if I can get it, and not lose any time to up-front training, but that may not be realistic, and those things can be learned if the person is smart. Particularly for an entry-level hire, I'd rather hire someone who can solve graph theory problems than knows the command-line options for git.
I'm taking Coursera lectures on A History of the World since 1300! by Jeremy Adelman. Not taking them for any credit, just wanted to understand the world history better.
Well that's awkward.
Pogue had a LOT of ethical issues while at the Times—issues where he'd be more likely be hit simply because of his employer. This move has the effect of simultaneously giving him a bigger platform and getting him out of the eye of the watchdogs. I can see why he went to Yahoo.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/27/will-th...

http://valleywag.gawker.com/nyt-tech-columnist-david-pogue-m...

http://www.nytpick.com/2010/01/david-pogue-breaks-nyts-ethic...
haha fair question. I'll post in on HN as soon as it's done (maybe it will make it to the front page, who knows!), and I'll reply to this comment and let you know - promise : )
From the first result:

“Yahoo ranks as the most-visited website in the U.S., according to the latest report from ComScore” (So: ‘US’, not ‘the world’)

and: “Traffic to Tumblr [...] did not contribute to Yahoo's overall traffic number[...] Tumblr ranked as the 28th most popular U.S. property” (Again, just the US, and not even that popular)

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/yaho...
You know what's cool? 1 billion lines of code.
Isn't Windows RT as close as it gets to a OS from scratch nowadays? (honest question)
>New Zealand.

Hahahaha. NZ bent over backwards to let the US decimate mega. Let's be honest, we have/had basically each of those countries be complicit in extraordinary rendition, extradition, or compliance with US IP-law.

What do you honestly think will happen when we, in the name of international security and terrorism prevention, ask them to hand over a few computers instead of, well, people?

Advertised cryptography/anonymizing services really can't exist in a climate where all rules are thrown out the window because terrorists.
The Surface's hinge problem (and an idea to fix it)
Informative article as usual.
Great post for you because the honest introspection will lead you to more success.

Great post for us because even though these lessons have been written about before, it seems to take lots of repetition for them to sink in all the way.
all structures depreciate, eventually it will fall down. It requires maintenance to keep the same value. This is one reason most people will tell you to never buy a condo. Land is finite and does not depreciate.
You can move your sights after they are aimed. Let's start at $5/month then see how it goes : )
If I had a penny for every time I heard that claim... 30 years ago they used to use the same scare sentence over and over. Please get over with it.
To be fair, the NYT did hire, among many other technical talents, both Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone/CoffeeScript) and Mike Bostock (D3), who may not be engineers by training, but are at the forefront of web and interaction technology.

But the problem isn't just number and/or quality of engineers. It's about top-down leadership and mindsets that encourage and cultivate engineer-led innovation. Sure, some of Google's early employees invented some huge projects with their 20% time, but that's because that was an engineering company that geared itself towards such projects. Media companies were huge money makers in the 90s and early 2000s. The money that spawns massive startups today would've been pocket change for them back then.
That is where I would love to take this. I think thats a bit more of a leap for the user as it forces them to think in the flow diagram way from the very beginning. I'd really like to see how users react to building a spreadsheet from scratch in this way.
It has to do with power management driver optimization. Linux and Hackintoshes see equally poor performance on the same hardware. People far smarter than me can explain all the different ways the OS can talk to the hardware.
This is a rant we came across in the early design of Rust and eventually decided was pretty misguided. Very few languages actually address these complaints.

The biggest complaint here is that, in Java, when you perform arithmetic on 32-bit floats you perform 32-bit arithmetic with 32-bit intermediate results. Java's behavior is, in other words, what you'd expect. In C, though, if you perform arithmetic on 32-bit floats you're actually performing 64-bit arithmetic on 64-bit intermediate results (at least most of the time; it's been a while since I consulted the rules). Java's behavior (which basically amounts to doing what you asked to do) infuriated the author, so he gave a bunch of examples of scientific calculations that need 64 bits of precision. But that's totally unconvincing to me: if you want 64-bit floating point precision, use doubles. C's implicit conversions in general have caused more harm than good and what the author is complaining about is having to tell the compiler to do 64-bit arithmetic on 32-bit values instead of having it follow complex promotion rules that few programmers even know about.
> Jason Cohen's statement is based on the idea that all software is written with profit in mind, and there are a good number of years in Open Source that prove that to not be true.

Usually in most cases the code is not the direct source of income for the developers.
> try to look at the prezi thing

> id: 1100 the reason is: Event [Event type="fontLoadError" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2]
"At Gumroad, we’ll stop just shy of letting you charge tenths of cents (come on, gas stations, that’s cheating) or allowing the font on your change to be smaller on-screen."

Does that mean they won't allow it in the future?
Perhaps you missed the intentionally vague part of the criminal complaint against Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road fame. The FBI managed to get a foreign country to seize servers for it. How much due process do you think was involved in that unnamed foreign country? Abandoning the US isn't the solution to your problems. Fixing the law is, and you have a better chance of doing that in the US than elsewhere.
Ask HN: Which is the best laptop for a programmer in the market today?
"We don't send our kids to college simply for their own good, we do it also for the good of society, which is why, in the past, people saw fit for society to cover most of the cost."

When was that?
Aren't they targeting native Android, IoS, Mac and Windows now?
> If they softened the edges on the tablet portion it would be on my list of greatest pieces of tech hardware ever made.

I actually like Surface's edges quite a lot, I think it looks brilliant and stands out from the army of cheap looking iPad clones most of which look exactly the same. And the magnesium casing is also a great choice by MS, it makes it look expensive and well built (which it really is)
it's actually serious, one of the guys got published in the Canard Enchaîné and for example revealed some FBI files on US citizens 8 years before the Washington Post did.
Noticed the same thing.

I hope they're more careful with their software design and monetization plan than they were with that announcement. And at some point they should probably address that it's still an advertisement–for their services.
Ask HN: Please review my (relaunched) MVP: magicshop.io
I'd love your feedback on Magic Shop - the idea is to make adding an online store to any existing website super simple.

Once you drop in my third party JS it adds store functionality, right now that only includes adding products and selling them via PayPal.

Future features include other payment methods, a full blown cart and way, way more.

Any feedback you have is greatly appreciated, also feel free to email me at kevinkhandjian@gmail.com
This was discussed in this thread :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6557516
Show HN: Wanaplan - WebGL application to create 2D/3D floor plans
I’m not sure - I’ve coded several "micro-businesses". They make small amounts of money, and cost small amounts of money to run, and take almost no time.

One for example makes about $500 revenue with $200 expenses and 2 hours a year. It’s profitable, I’m not doing it because I like spending time on it - or I’d spend more time on it.

These aren’t traditional businesses, but they sure aren’t hobbies. They are services I think need to exist, and that I can create, without "wasting my time".
> In my case, even the most expensive plan for our family in the State of Maine, where we live, is half the cost of what we are currently paying, exclusive of any subsidies.

The elephant in the room is that this is not the typical case - http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/25/double-...
Ask HN: Would you guys be interested in crowdfunding your problems?
Why the best startups look like bad ideas
I found that Facebook was really bad for this. I'm a math undergrad, and I applied for a bunch of data analysis positions with them.

I was asked, as part of my application, to take a programming quiz. The quiz consisted of a graph theory problem. I did pretty poorly on it, given that I have no real knowledge of graph theory.

Had they asked me a question about statistics (or something similarly related to data analysis), I think I would have actually been able to answer, or at least been at a point where my programming knowledge- not my math knowledge- was what was holding me back.
Link: http://magicshop.io
Adding Vorbis in hardware is not hard. The reason it's not usually added is because of Apple precisely, since they are one of the major manufacturers of hardware players. I.e. if they'd add support for Vorbis, it will become widespread pretty soon. So your argument is reversed. And, in mobile SoCs it is gaining traction now, because of Google and WebM. Hardware players are a bigger problem.

1) There is nothing confusing about codecs support. Just specify what's supported. Sansa players list supported codecs which include Vorbis and FLAC for example.

2) So what? Keep it as much as you want. What's the problem with that?

3) Barring newer and better codecs from adoption because of "debugging burden" is just ridiculous.

> Free codecs are a niche concern, almost all users get them free from their OS provider

So, how do OS X or iOS users get it from Apple? They don't. And that's the reason why HTML5 audio and video is such a mess. Apple know perfectly that they cause it, and they don't care, because they are jerks.
How is that a review? I don't follow the Times or Pogue, but this was not anything I'd expect from a "hands-on review."
"You can multitask? Fine. Then read a book and write one at the same time." -David Weinberger, 1999

Obviously (the excellent) William James predates this by some time, but within the context of the modern era, this sort of thing has been discussed long before the Hallowells and Ferrisses of the world made their careers by repackaging old notions.
I just recently had to replace my external hard drive I use for TM backups and whenever it would start to backup it would bring the computer to a grinding halt (2013? MBPr, it's from work). I ended up disconnecting it and taking it home on the weekend to do the initial backup.
A better way to work with exceptions in Visual Studio
"My Ph.D. advisor rewrote himself in bash."
My EeePC is still doing quite well. Everything else I have ever bought has been a massive lie on the order of "* battery tested by doing nothing with the wireless and screen turned off."
Ironically, I struggled to stay focused on reading this article through to the end as notifications from Sparrow and HipChat kept appearing in my periphery vision.
Is this for software or any problem in general?
I think the point is that Apple has many, many more years of designing their software for a very specific list of hardware. MS software engineers are probably just starting to think about a closer relationship between code and hardware, and even then I'm sure there's a fair bit of distrust within MS as to how the market will respond. Will their OEM partners call foul on MS leveraging their position? It wouldn't be the first time.
I'm currently building a platform for students to learn programming where you can join a "classroom" and watch the other students (or teachers) editors. My first idea was also to post the code to the server and then compile,run it and send the output back. The problem with this method is that there can't be any interactivity in your code, like it is with CodeCube. I think of such things like in C scanf(). So for now every user that joins gets a ubuntu linux box which is provided by docker. So I'm using term.js and pty.js which spawns this minimalistic box and connects /bin/bash via websocket to the client. The code the client writes in his editor can now have scanfs and other interactive functions and is compiled and executed in his own little shell.
This is surely true, but most countries weren't making movies like America was. It's just that America's racism is preserved in these various time-capsules.

There's shades of this that persist to this day, like Black Peter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet), rituals from a time when that sort of thing was considered normal.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/meet

Search in a page with plenty of marketing blurb for "mobile". Zero results.

So since they aren't marketing it as how you perceive perhaps you should cut them some slack.
Gorillas like Samsung, Google, Apple, and Microsoft, you mean.

All of them are guilty. Moving away from Apple simply means intentionally creating a Samsung/Google duopoly, which is insane.
There probably isn't any one "platform/framework" they used. This beast touches too many systems, many of which are 'legacy' for the phrase "platform/framework" to really apply.

If it's anything like what I saw at the one (and only) government contractor I ever worked for, the site is a frankensteinian nightmare of COTS
('Commercial Off The Shelf') crap (which federal contracts encourage, when they don't outright require it) and sweatshop-style integration development run by contractors who hire anybody with a heartbeat and a handful of competent people, and pay them all peanuts while billing $200/hr in labor to the government.
Infographics: Contradictions in the Bible
Pogue is an okay journalist, but great at building a personal brand, which now extends to books and the conference circuit as well as writing.

I spent seven years as an editor at top NYC magazines, and saw time and again that great journalists - even great brand-builders - aren't usually great at creating and managing new ventures. There are exceptions, though, and I hope Pogue is one of them.
"This is a project where some very visible, loud people have a vested interest in it looking bad even if it were flawless."

Are any of the managers in the White House, HHS and CMMS in that category? Certainly not loud (nobody is speaking on the record: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6586119), but perhaps anti-Obamacare moles?

Because the people running this show every sign of being true believers, and I seriously doubt they're playing much attention to the "waco birds" who are totally against it.
I can finally stop using that darn Flex panel...
The story behind the McDonalds coffee suit
I'll look into it, thanks
Ironic, then, that it's that word that gets excised and replaced with a very divisive term.
I'm at 8 times
The post could apply to any path you wish to undertake, not just the the ones that seem obvious to us.
Don't be to hard on the Spanish. I lived there for some time and can attest to that most Spaniards really would like to improve their English but find it incredibly difficult to do so. This is especially true for the spoken language.

My personal theory is that Spanish Spanish (i.e., from Spain) has a range of spoken sounds that is to a large part complimentary to that of English, thus making the transition between these two languages particularly difficult. (Note that there is significantly less of a difference between the sounds of American Spanish and English).
Can they elaborate on what actually did happen? If I were your friends I would be trying to contact news agencies with corrections if at all possible because this is shaping up to be the highest profile government IT failure in US history.
Crowdfunded iMirror Wants to Change Your Mornings Forever
> I'm simply arguing that no endeavor should be exempt from cost/benefit analysis.

Why? Is there evidence that cost-benefit analyses actually work?
Mossberg leaving the Journal, Pogue leaving the Times.

Tech coverage on traditional media must be a dwindling business.
I Got Kicked Out of America for Having a Guitar
Proprietary information
We do more. The we just don't have enough user base to get good caching. probably you are the first person to do most of your searches and that slows us down, where as DDG and Google likely have seen a query like yours before.

I like to think that the summaries vs. the snippets make up for some of that, we get you more info in one go.

We also lose a bit because we return about 50 results at a go instead of 10.
I think lisp is a really good example for how I feel with haskell, and one I'm more familiar with.

When I first started learning lisp, the syntax was foreign, and while lisp syntax is arguably really really simple, composition with that syntax is a little weird if you're not used to it. Yet, at the same time, the syntax is a fundamental part of the language, especially with respect to homoiconicity, simplicity and macros. It was a time-sink to get used to it, but totally worth it.
And that would be?
UGA researcher develops new medicine that attacks HIV
A bootstrapper’s survival guide
Proprietary "safer" web browser. Yeah right.
I think we can assume that the developers/fans of launchpad don't care about UI/UX. :)
Former teacher here. I can sum up the reasons why I quit below:

* Dealing with kids has hard. Really, really hard. Computers sit down and shut up when you tell them to; kids don't.

* Rules. Rules rules rules. It's easier to list what you're allowed to do than list what you're not allowed to do.

* I was a 25 year-old male teaching high school. Lots of teenage girls flirting with me => lots of risk for sexual harassment lawsuits. It's not enough to just write them up or ignore them. You have to document everything. If even once it might be implied that you're encouraging it, game over.

* For a vast majority of my kids over the course of 2 years teaching at two different schools, their parents simply did not care. One phone call ended with "I can't control my kid." With all due respect, ma'am, if you can't control your kid, why do you think I can?

Money wasn't really on the list. $41K/year in Alabama (Masters) is more than enough for a single 25 year-old bachelor. Although I will admit the way they pay teachers is fucked. It's based on years of work and degree level. The crazy part is that 1 degree level = 5-ish years of work. I started off making $41k salary, but that's just because I started teaching with a Master's degree. To get to $41k salary with a Bachelor's, you'd have to work 5+ years in the field. Are you telling me that a rookie kid out of college with a Master's is worth more than an experienced teacher with 5 years under her belt? C'mon.

I loved teaching. It's one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. But I just couldn't do it any more after the second year. It's not teaching that sucks -- it's everything else. It's the paperwork. It's the threat of sexual harassment. It's the pressure from administration. It's the parents who don't care. It's the kids who don't want to be there.

Frankly, I'd rather code for a living and tutor on the side.
> Authority is presumed to be benevolent (or, at least, extra-moral).

It's subtler than that, though with our current standard of civics education it's not apparent.

It's that we presume that we ourselves is correct, and since we ourselves are a source of authority, then the authority we contribute to must therefore be correct. Benevolence has nothing to do with it; it's just egocentrism. We don't think of ourselves as nice; we think of ourselves as right.
What kind of math questions do you ask? Are then relevant to the job? Is it knowledge that the employee will need to have for their day-to-day tasks?

Asking math questions that are unrelated to the employee's tasks has strong bias for recent graduates. Ask a 40 year old a question about an equation they haven't used since they were 19 and they won't remember.

I was once asked to do binary math on a phone interview. I hadn't had to do binary math since I was in school 10 years prior. I was pretty much guaranteed to fail. This was not a good test. If I needed it I could easily relearn binary math in a few hours at most.
Anecdotal evidence but yes - whomever I have shown cool things with virualization likes them a lot and has no problem with the whole windows inside windows thing.
I don't know how there's any real way to get around this, because if you don't let a journalist write about any company where they might receive a job offer, you'll end up with a significant gap in reporting. I think that's better than the current scenario.