skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are right, the demonstration is only partially constructive. The functions are well defined: they are the canonical projectors of the Hamel basis. The trick is, the basis itself is not constructible.
Robots test their own world wide web, dubbed RoboEarth
> the storage pointed to by the argument will be modified, and the string literal that is passed is not guaranteed to be placed in a modifiable data region. I’m surprised this worked in Version 7 Unix.

PDP-11 had only 8 8kB "pages" (segments really) available for a program. Pages could be marked read-only, but making one read-only was a huge expense. A common trick was to smash code and data that were only used when initialising the program.
Another fun (and seemingly nonsensical) thing you can prove if you use the Axiom of Choice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach-Tarski_paradox
What is a neat characteristics of N^2 where N is integer is that its value is the sum of the first N odd integers.

1^2 = 1
2^2 = 1 + 3 = 4
3^2 = 1 + 3 + 5 = 9
4^2 = 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16
...

I am wondering if there is a relation of this to the article.
>Add a little speaker and advertise right into the living room.

And to think people are paying monthly for cable television!
I want to be a software developer. Where do I begin?
i would really like to learn how to program and develop production-ready software. i would like to begin with PHP and either concurrently, or subsequently, learn python. how do i begin? the purpose of my learning is firstly to be able to personally work on developing features and apps for my e-commerce site which is based on joomla (it was developed by professional developers).. the second purpose is that i want to be able to apply for software/web developer jobs eventually because i'd like to work in that field.

i don't know if it's relevant but i'm currently using a windows machine, and i've often heard from people that windows is a terrible environment to learn programming and to program in. is it necessary for me to get a mac or linux machine?

and to reiterate: where do i begin to learn how to develop production-ready software, i.e software that is ready to be shipped? i've done codecademy and similar stuff before which seems really simple and easy, but i can't figure out how to translate that "knowledge" from those sites into actually writing something useful and "shippable".
That's true. It would start being worthwhile at around 70$ (maximum price was iirc ~48$ recently). It may be very well possible to get an return especially if you believe in litecoin (328 times increase in 2013 [1])

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/01/13/a-100-wor...
pebkac error
Is it impossible that people can have conversations that both: 1) are real and interesting conversations; but 2) are also improved by accurate facts? Some kind of "in the moment" banter where accuracy is irrelevant is fun sometimes, sure, but it's not the only mode of conversation, or to my mind the most interesting.

I have plenty of conversations that are both excellent conversations and come into necessary contact with facts. Sometimes the facts are purely from memory, but sometimes it's useful to look them up, if one or both of us aren't sure we remember them properly, or recognize a gap in our knowledge. A few topics in only the past week that benefited from looking up some facts: 1) talking with my parents about the circumstances under which my great-grandparents emigrated from Sweden; 2) discussing my uncle's MS treatment/management with family; 3) having a friendly argument with a friend about promising directions in artificial intelligence; and 4) discussing similarities and differences between some aspects of Danish and American culture.

It's not really a particularly new addition to conversation, either. Nowadays when you look something up it's probably on the internet, but when I was younger, conversations would sometimes involve pulling a reference book off the shelf to add some context or a point of reference to the discussion (atlases especially, but occasionally an encyclopedia or almanac).
> forced

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I'm using Gnome Ubuntu at work, and its a great experience, even on my multi monitor setup.
Except that the author is referring to the entire domain (where a polynomial cannot be represented as a countably infinite sum of periodic functions), while a Fourier transform of a function has to be taken over a finite region like [a,b].
Yes, but only on a finite open interval, that is (a, b) with a, b real numbers.

In the post the sum of periodic functions is equal to x^2 on the whole real line. This is impossible with sums of continuous periodic functions, such as Fourier series, because continuous periodic functions are bounded, while x^2 is unbounded.
Secretive Apple Squirms in Gaze of U.S. Monitor
The problem is that nobody wants to be syndicated by one blogging app. They will want people to download their own app so everyone can see how creative they are and they can maximize their ad revenue.
It depends on how much you care about energy efficiency.

I, for instance, run 3 separate computers 24/7 when I could probably get away with combining them into 1 or 2 if I wanted. I could also turn them off when I'm not home. I just don't really care.
Sinatra and postgresql perform on a heroku stage tutorial
I documented a tutorial that acts as a primer to Rails. It covers building a web blog using Sinatra, sqlite database, git and the twitter bootstrap locally on a MAC and then deploying to heroku and migrating to a postgreSQL database.

I could not find a concise detailed tutorial so I combined several from around the web.
Our two Burmese cats are eight years old and are still as playful, energetic and affectionate as when we got them as kittens - even though they are now quite a bit larger and heavier.

This appears to be a characteristic of the breed:

"Burmese maintain kitten-like interests and energy throughout their adulthood."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_%28cat%29

[Should be noted that they are also utterly gorgeous as well]
> If it's false then you can have infinitely many non-empty sets with a non-empty Cartesian product.

with an empty Cartesian product, I think?
Modern PHP Development tools
Koumbit releases a Tor Relay live CD
I totally agree with your statements. The only thing I pirate nowadays are basically movies because there is no easy way to purchase them. I don't really pay for music though as I use mostly Grooveshark/Soundcloud and/or listen to online radio.

And it's fucking ridiculous that you have to a saloon to watch a new movie and pay a ridiculous amount of money per person to watch a single movie.

I pirate all movies I can out of basic principal, they are not getting a dime extra from me since they continue with their harassment.

I am actually very pleased with Steam as it's an excellent service. But if I would want to play a game on let's say Origin I would definately pirate that game if it doesn't exist on Steam.
There are no practical examples. The solutions are unbounded, discontinuous functions (that wont have nice equations) and since the proof uses the axiom of choice it is fundamentally non constructive (meaning you would need a totally different proof technique to be able to build a concrete solution)
I hesitate to say this, but ...

If you think this belongs on the front page of HN then you need to up-vote it. Any moment now it will trigger the flame-war detector, get a penalty in the ranking score, and disappear without trace. Anything with 40 comments and fewer points than comments gets such a penalty, and while it's a good proxy for flame-war detection, is does get quite a lot of false positives.

If you want this to avoid that fate, you need to up-vote it. If you don't really care, then that's fine. I think it's interesting, but not everyone does.

Added in edit - something has giving this item a penalty[0] - maybe there are people who've flagged it as inappropriate. Certainly it doesn't seem to have tripped the "flame-war" detector, but who can tell.

[0] http://hnrankings.info/7056295/
2x 40 min of train everyday. Best way to spend them?
Hi HN community,

I'm a 22 years old developer. For the next 2 months I have to do 2x 40 min of train travel everyday to move between my home and my workplace.

What are your advices to spend this time in the more productive way?

How do you spend your time travel?
That's so cool! Actually, it also highlights one of the things that concerns me about the proliferation of build tools, frameworks, and transpilers etc in the web sphere at the moment. The other day I was able to run and start modifying a "DHTML" side-scrolling shooter game I wrote in 2004 by double clicking the index.html file.

To run games I'm making now, I have to have the correct versions of Grunt, and all the related dependencies - working CoffeeScript converters etc. In 2024 it's going to be tough to set up a working environment to modify and run 10-year-old code: certainly a lot harder than just double-clicking an html file.
Look, there's no reason to take this personally. Here's the original claim I took issue with:

> Google does this stuff for completely altruistic reasons.

You are not Google, are you? I'm saying that Google is not an altruistic company, as evidenced by their helping the NSA spy on everyone all over the world. It's highly unlikely that Google would do anything related to elections for "purely altruistic reasons".

You personally may well be working for Google without any evil intentions, but that's not something I've argued against. OK?
Google's now got two of their own OS'es (one of which has 85% of the worldwide market on the fastest growing segment of personal computing...) and a leading browser in the desktop space. Whatever caring about an Open Web they had before (when they were at the whims of Microsoft, Apple, other browser makers, etc) is long gone.
Wouldn't the rodata and text segments be shared across instances of the same program though?

That would seem like a straightforward optimisation, but then the code presented in the article would break subtly if you were to invoke ed twice at the same time since both instances would try to modify and use the /tmp/eXXXXX string at the same time.
I am deactivated since long time, do I need to worry ?
My Menu Bar: 16 Apps That Made the Cut
They forgot "everything will be teal".
One comment on OA asks why fully free distros left out; Trisquel, Parabola and I'd add gNewSense 3.0. Unless of course the OA thinks these get enough love already!
Great post, thanks for reminding me to look at the bigger picture and the sustainability of projects.
Well, if that politician had feared anything - public outcry, mob action, loss of reputation, consequences of his fraudulent action - he might not have done what he did.

Not to say that politicians should go to work daily with trembling anxiety. But it would really help if they dreaded letting their constituents down (on the negative emotion side) and aspired to serve their constituents honorably (on the positive emotion side).
I can't quite follow your thinking here?

> If I'm not mistaken TFA demonstrates that these functions exist, not how to find them.

Completely correct.

> why isn't there any practical example?

You answer this yourself... the article demonstrates that the functions exist. It can't demonstrate the functions themselves; no one can do that.
500 pigs a year is not industrial scale it's small scale batch production if that.
I'm glad no one I know plays this childish game, speaking as someone who is occasionally on call, lives under the conscious commitment to always pick up the phone when my wife calls, or maybe just likes to check the time every so often.
Sad that Bedrock Linux is not on that list. Also, why bother with Sabayon over Gentoo? If configuring gentoo is too time-consuming just stick to arch or ubuntu/ubuntu derivative.
"I just want it to stop growing at one year"

This is called Paedomorphism (thanks Wikipedia) through Neoteny. Humans are a very good example of it.

Or cats (though I'm not sure about this one). See how Tiger/Lion cubs behave like regular cats? Moderate aggressiveness, meowing, etc?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pypy
Startup Advice from Patrick McKenzie
I am not familiar with clientside JavaScript. Could anyone explain what famo.us is doing and whether it has merit? Their demo looked less impressive than WebGL ones.
Let's assume I invest on this. What will happen if, after accumulating a nice amount of coins, one day the URL ceases to exist, and no one is to be found? What provisions do the Indian government have in place to help me recover my investment?

I know the workings on the countries I have some type of investment (Europe and North America). They are mature, known to work well for ages. Nothing I know about India, or Africa, or former Soviet Republics, or Middle East, or some countries un South America and Asia. I simply don't trust, because if I lose, I lose most of what I own. I have lots to lose, because what I would lose is all I have. I require confidence.
Finnish Angels Gather and Prepare to Swoop
It is not inserting fake search results nor is it logging any of your keys! Look a the source code at http://ionut-botizan.net/window-resizer

It is just proxying clicks on real results through Ecosia's servers instead of Google's.
Great Tip!

Regarding OSX Terminal, I'm an heavy user since Leopard but it's a shame that after upgrading to Mountain Lion (an now Mavericks) I discovered that they broke VIM vertical selection since control-shift does not generate a keycode anymore [1].

Anyone with the same problem? I tried iTerm recently and I don't like it! :-(

[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4694342?start=0&tstart=...
I agree completely, that's why I used the word "inconclusive." Still, it's the only real data we have on static vs dynamic typing. Until we get better data, everything is just opinion and preference. Well informed opinions, in the case of those familiar with type theory (which I am not), but opinion nonetheless.
My claim was not that I could have sold your passwords, it was that I could have sold the extension! Last time I checked, the extension itself was my property and I could sell it to whoever I want. What the buyer does with it shouldn't be any of my concerns. I was just pointing out that, if I would have sold it, the buyer might have been the kind of person that would do those terrible things.

Read more carefully next time, ok?!
"While the Court will likely hear the remaining cases, which deal with finer points of patent law, its dismissal of Soverain speaks to the potential frivolousness of its claims."

I don't think this is accurate. The standard that the Supreme Court uses to decide whether to take cases is not "is this frivolous." Soverain v. Newegg would have to meet a pretty high standard in order to be granted appeal.

I think the author of this piece is reading into this denial way too much. The norm is for appeals to be denied. To be more precise, less than 5% of appeals were granted over a recent one year period. http://dailywrit.com/2013/01/likelihood-of-a-petition-being-...
Cold weather takes its toll on everything including your cell phone
statupclarity has posted a digest in easy to read format:

Startup Advice from Patrick McKenzie:

http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/startup-advice-patrick-mc...
Listen to podcasts or audiobooks. Or just think.
Great hack!

Amusingly, version 7 Unix didn't even have a header file that declared malloc().

I noticed something similar with the old f2c code. It is about a decade older than Version 7, and came with its own malloc implementation. [1] Apparently some Unix still didn't provide a good implementation.

[1] http://www.netlib.org/f2c/src/malloc.c
Apple IP infringement policy woes (aka where is osustream?)
An Open Letter to Fleur Pellerin
Want to quit your job? New app does it for you via text message
I'm encouraged that patent trolls are getting knocked. But my fear is that patent law will hit such a state that only large corporations can wield them. If I'm a small patent holder, and I'm liable for court costs if I lose a suit, then it becomes far too risky to defend my patent against a corporation that violates it.
2 Red Hats, a Debian, an Arch and a Gentoo.
Project Euler. That's what I used to do while commuting to London.

https://projecteuler.net/problems
Knowing little about Arch Linux, I dismissed it entirely, even though a good sysadmin friend uses it exclusively on his laptop.

In my personal life, I first installed Slackware in 1995 but had converted to Debian by 1997 and I've used that almost exclusively until the last two years or so (I have one RHEL6 and one FreeBSD server). I have, of course, used RHEL and Ubuntu previously in my professional life.

About six months ago, I installed Arch Linux on a new Thinkpad W530. I didn't intend to really use it, I just wanted to see what the fuss was about. It's stuck around and I'm still running it and I haven't had the first problem with it.

I'm not gonna be converting everything over to it, obviously, but it works for me on this laptop (which I do almost 100% of my work on).

YMMV but IWFM.
Apple makes acquisitions to improve their existing products. If the people at Nest wanted to improve Apple products, they wouldn't have left Apple and formed Nest in the first place.
I've never really understood why the well-ordering theorem is the version of the axiom of choice that's supposed to be "obviously false". It's pretty trivial to see how you get it from the AC, and since the AC is "obviously true" I've always felt the well-ordering theorem is intuitive as well. (Actually, my mental model of the process generally leads me to want to think "all sets are countable"... c'est la vie :/ )

The Banach-Tarski theorem, on the other hand, is much more robustly "obviously false".
I think you just did :-)
Yes. But first they have to promote and vote for politicians who support basic income. Or yell "they took our jobs" a lot till politicians figure out for themselves that basic income might be good and less violent way to make them shut up.
Only for games that require Steam. A game bought through Steam does not necessarily require Steam. Europa Universalis III can be run without Steam running. Europa Universalis IV only requires Steam to be run once (and once for every DLC you buy, in order to activate it).

These settings are up to the game developer themselves. You are right about the offline mode, but it does not apply to all games.
I purchase whatever I like on Steam and still hate DRM. They make it worth while with the sales and convenience.

My theory is that if Steam goes belly up, I can do a backup of my games, and use the same avenues pirates use to circumvent Steam. Hopefully they would release control of their games though if they went belly up.

As far as poor customer service, I suppose I have been lucky so far.
satan is your enemy and the enemy of all humanity.
Standards matter only as much as the implementations adhere to them. Making HTML living standard thas the right thing to do, because only this really reflects the reality: browser vendors implementing differnt bits of the functionality described.
Feel free to start from the scrach.
Related is Evolution in Action The Silver Fox Experiment: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b30_1372049732
Windows is fine for development. Tons of people do it, it's just not hip & trendy on hacker news. Don't waste time on learning a new OS if what you really want to learn is code. Both PHP and Python have first-class support for Windows, and so do most other tools (databases, webservers, etc).

Best way to learn is just by beginning. Set yourself a relatively modest goal. It can be useful even if it's modest. Something you need, maybe for yourself, or for some community you're in.
Perhaps they edited or omitted details of what the guy did so as not to tip off people who would like to emulate him.
"I should go re-read some Kurzweil"

I would recommend some Iain M. Banks or Vernor Vinge - both authors cover the very good and very bad things that could happen once us chunks of meat start co-existing with much more powerful artificial intelligences.

Edit: I'd add Charlie Stross to that list as well - his book Accelerando does a splendid job of showing how profoundly weird our medium term future might be:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando

Edit2: Personally, I'd be jolly pleased if our future looks anything at all like the Culture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
Heh, after I read your first two sentences and was ready to downvote you (having had "bad experiences" with "responsible disclosure").

After I read the last sentence, I imagined 10-year-old me playing Super Mario Brothers and suddenly freaking out because all my coins were just hacked and stolen.

"MOOOOOOOM!"
Now tell me, how adding DRM disables all the open web bits.
This easily follows from the fact that R itself is uncountable. Otherwise it's trivial to enumerate all real numbers based on their decomposition.
Me too. 30 mins minimum, unless I'm very, very tired. The comments below seem to indicate this can be trained though. I hope it's true and I hope I'll have the discipline to train myself. Falling asleep fast would be great. Usually I listen to some boring audio lecture at night and it helps.
One of the most important things I look for in a Linux distribution or any software project I may rely on for a long time is it's organisational structure. Is there a committee, Benevolent Dictator for Life, sponsoring company etc. It's not exciting stuff but any project wanting people to spend time and effort on it should make sure they have thought about that stuff and let people know what to expect.

It would be nice if short reviews like this made some mention of that aspect of the different distributions.
The problem comes when you start factoring electricity and so on. In my calculation the difference is just too little. Plus you have the advantage of not investing time into it.
Given that Unix was primarily a multiuser system in those days, that would be a rarely useful optimisation. Especially if you expected most people to run ed at all times, since it was, after all, the standard editor.
UTest/Applause Announces a $43M Series E
Three options in front of you:
1. Get into a class.
2. Books.
3. Online classes / screencasts (the best have you do exercices too.)
What have you tried so far? If the answer is "nothing", then you need to start YOURSELF.

Being a "self-starter" is CRUCIAL to becoming a good programmer. You'll only discover your favourite languages/techniques/etc yourself by trying them out. No one is going to lay down the pathway for you (ie. Do X, Y & Z).

Windows is fine for development. I find OS X easier to configure but thats probably because I only switched to Mac after having several years experience.

There's nothing different than "production-ready software" and any regular old software. Production ready suggests that it has been tested - that's about it. Tons (in fact far too much) "production" undergoes no or very little testing so I wouldn't get hung up on labelling.

Make something, anything.
The text segment was shared, the data segment was not shared. There was a single data segment containing both the initialised and uninitialised data, there was no rodata. Rodata came with ELF, it was never in a.out.
A careful reading of that timeline and its sources shows that all the "emancipations" listed before the 18th century are highly localized and/or short-lived, so I would agree that the widespread concept of freedom from slavery as an inalienable right is fairly modern.
Actually the comment quality on the videos I watch seems to have improved markedly since the G+ integration...

Coincidence? No clue... Still, all the "OMG G+ will destroy youtube!1!" whining is looking pretty stupid...