skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I assume there's some technical reason recommendations from Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu aren't shown here? Is this localized for the UK or something?
Tools like Zendesk and Desk.com [1] are really overkill for an early stage startup. They're pricey and the ramp up time is a little killer. They are really built for people who spend the majority of day doing Customer Support.

If you're pre-launch, there really isn't a strong reason to do anything but email-based support. HelpScout is a good alternative to automate some of that.

Jira, on the other hand, can be very useful for internal task management. Exporting from your support platform to Jira automatically is useful in this case, but again, only if you have someone doing full time support. Otherwise just open your own tickets after you gather customer feedback and can write a coherent ticket that someone can use to write code against.

[1] I currently work at Desk.com, where we use Jira on the engineering team, but our own customer support team uses Desk.
Logic > Math

This is false.
I'll never understand how it makes good economic sense to keep buildings barren. Somebody is paying carrying costs for this thing and extracting zero value.
I work in computer graphics software development. Math is an absolute necessity in this field. But only up to a degree, you do not have to be able to do multivariable calculus, but you need to generally understand matrices and vectors.
Was he ever that critical? From the article:

> Mr. Obama was a sponsor of a bill in 2005 to raise the standard required for federal agents using ... national security letters ... He joined other Democrats fighting the renewal of the Patriot Act until it was amended to address civil liberties concerns, then voted for its extension in 2006 after a compromise, breaking with Mr. Wyden who voted no.

> “The rhetoric was probably sharper than his votes.” By summer 2008, with the Democratic nomination secured and the White House now a real possibility, Mr. Obama voted for legislation essentially ratifying Mr. Bush’s surveillance programs.
I'm logged in but get "Looks like you are not enrolled in this course!".
Good point. What, more specifically, is the purpose of the Citrix encoding system? Is it to map an arbitrary byte string onto a limited range of bytes (ASCII A to P)? If so, any reason base 64 was unsuitable for these applications?
California woman faces trial for wearing Google Glass while driving
Yes, right now we focus on UK providers
F# is very un-functional in many ways. Immutable variables are the default but mutable variables are made with just the "mutable" keyword. There are also lots of imperative control structures, like while, and for. Those two combined means that imperative algorithims typically have two distinct translations into F#.

First you can translate it literally, where F# looks like a slightly more verbose version of Python. Second you can exploit all the functional features of F#, and using immutable variables, recursion and pattern matching.

F# also has extensive support for OOP, and uses it where OCaml-ers might use modules or functors.

In that way, F# can be a sort-of stepping stone between the imperative, OOP C# to more functional features of F#.
Maths is fun anyway ;)
Nothing is needed in terms of academic training - a good mind can work around lots of things.

If you're a poor communicator, you can still develop software, it's just harder. Same with knowing low level languages, and what goes on in Operating Systems. And math too. We all bring toolsets. The more tools, the better.

Also - logic is very much a part of math. Good geometry classes involve a lot of proving. In the end, the lesson from Geometry is proving things as much as it is the sum of angles of triangles between parallel lines.
It's in the post.

wget http://lelf.lu/files/MAGF.py if you absolutely don't want to spoil it
Being apparently mildly overweight when you're an 11 year old girl is probably not a health problem, because, again, puberty.
The best programmers I've met have consistently had very strong math backgrounds or a deep respect for the clarity of thinking associated with higher math. People need to stop confusing math with arithmetic.
Anyone ever tried giving monthly allowance of something like (allowance + $500) and then charging your kids $500/month in rent? In some sense it's silly to give them money that they'll give right back, but on the other hand going from rent-free with the parents to suddenly having to manage rent, utilities, etc. is a big jump.
What is honestly the point of even concerning ones self with politics anymore? There has been nobody I've talked to in real life that has their head in the game completely, who knows what they are talking about, myself included.

Nothing is going to change, it's a big boys club, debating it, writing about it, all fruitless.
I've been there. It was beautifully designed and perfectly suited to its job as headquarters for a telecom monopoly. With everything good and bad that implies. It's sad to see it fall into the hands of suburban mall developers.
I think this is about providing positive vs. negative incentives. My parents have never really given me any kind of regular allowance through my childhood, and very little irregular allowance (less than $50 a year) -- probably because they were poor when I was young. They got better during my teens, but that didn't improve my financial situation. They did require doing lots of house chores, though, and I would have been yelled at and punished if I didn't do them, with no reward for good behaviour.

When you was positively incentivized to do more work, I only grew up a barrier around me, and learned to totally ignore their rules, punishments, screams and their authority as a whole. Also, now I really detest the chores I was tasked with most often (vacuuming, surface cleaning, dish washing), while have no problem with ones I never had to do, like laundry or ironing.
How A Single Email Made Customers 350% More Likely To Convert
Technology doesn't live in a bubble - this social event directly affects technology.
I might be weird but really I do not understand giving your child money. I never got money as a child, ever. I just got things on birthdays and Christmas, that was it. We went without a LOT mostly because we didn't have a lot of money. This taught me to really value the things I do have, and not to expect anything. I also never got into the consumer culture.
A disproportionate amount of tech CEOs (and I suspect older HN readers) also played D&D. Correlation or causality?
> As I understand it, fare evasion was a criminal offense until a few years ago, when they decriminalized it in favor of the new citation system, in order to save money on court costs.

It also changes the requirement from "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" to "the preponderance of the evidence", a much lower standard.
I disagree. Software development uses many of the same processes as mathematics, with the requirement for rigor often relaxed severely.
Edge.org asks scientists what concept to throw out & they say statistics
Talking about "majority of power holders agree" is so disingenuous. See: http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/05/poll-public-supports-nsa-sp... ("As we’ve written about before, the American public has widely supported the NSA’s activities before and after the scandal. I’m no fan of the secretive spying, but if the government appears to be acting slowly on surveillance reform, it could be because they’re responding to constituents.").

And this is a poll of people. If you polled likely voters, who skew older (i.e. more who lived through the cold war), you'd see even healthier margins in support of the NSA.

Also, it's a bit of historical revisionism to paint Obama as extremely anti-surveillance. Yes, he opposed certain of Bush's programs, but look at the whole picture. He's answer to "what would you have done instead of going into Iraq?" was "I would have hit Afghanistan harder!" He was a candidate who was self-conscious about the perception of Democrats as being "weak on security" and campaigned to avoid that label. And on his second go, he campaigned as "the guy that killed Osama." He's been quite consistent as someone who wants to project a lot of U.S. military power abroad, and in the grand scheme of things the NSA is part and parcel of that.
Yup. And to be honest, the surveillance was not even the worst part, the guy was just generally a shitbag.
But yeah, considering all the scandals and such involving corporations spying on employees, it's probably safe to say that it's mostly the most vulnerable people who have to put up with it.
But IT freelancing is probably too much of a niche for there to be any public outrage about stuff like spying on contractors.
Try a WebRTC Video Conference in one click :
http://blog.bistri.com/webrtc-demo

You have ideas with WebRTC, try the Bistri APIs :
http://developers.bistri.com
Ask HN: Which platform do you prefer and why, Ghost or Pelican?
I am going to move my blog and want to start with something more fresh. If you had made that choice before I want to hear your story.
The author seems to confuse "what [he] would call math" with calculus or counting.

As pointed out, logic is a big part of software. But calculation skills (eg understanding that x is actually a number, not a letter) are also mandatory for a full comprehension of the abstraction going on in programming languages. Not to mention arithmetic — modular operations, index of an array...

Finally, if you wish to get a grasp of functional programming, lambda-calculus or curryfication, you will need a basic intuition of set theory.

Also, concerning logic and math: mathematics are built with logic (4 rules of demonstration). You can consider logic as pre-dating math, but not the other way around.
The idea is that it is a functional first programming language, but allows you to use imperative or OO styles when the problem suits it.
I'm not intending to be snide or rude, but it's been so many years since I've heard it mentioned that I assumed it was dead.
While growing up, my dad took me and my two sisters on a family vacation. At the beginning of the trip he handed us each $100 and told us we were free to spend the money as desired, but first we had to treat the family to a single meal.

I went first with a pizza lunch. When the waiter asked what we all wanted to drink, those $2 pops suddenly had a very real impact on my bottom line. Water would be fine for everyone!

My youngest sister opted for bagels the next morning, but it took a bit of convincing to get her to spring for cream cheese!

The other sister, being the sweetheart she is, sprang for a real meal and didn't give us too much grief.

Now we all look back and laugh at the experience, but it certainly had a very real impact in the value we place on a dollar.
"A campaign is a marketing effort intended to install a team of people in power."

You've just described the current crisis of representational democracy.
I fail to see how giving his boy a budget for what he wants is different from an allowance and the "entitlement" that the wanted to avoid.
This might be true for the low-hanging fruit of CRUD apps, but ask the engineers working on self-driving cars, or the fringes of aerospace technology how important math is.
Scarcity.
When you are the head of (one branch of) the government and you know that people will blame you foremost for any attacks or intelligence failures, I think almost anyone would tend to see these types of powers and programs differently than when they were merely one of 100 senators.
As others have said, logic and basic algebra are integral to programming, but I understand the sentiment that "hard math" isn't necessary. And I sort of agree. As a front-end developer, I don't really need to be an expert in algorithm design to do my job competently, and I don't need to know statistical analysis or any other branch of higher math. That being said, learning some higher math on my own has made me a much better programmer, and allows me to write code that is far more efficient than I could otherwise.

As for the article, I don't think literacy and math knowledge are mutually exclusive. It's not a zero sum game. A great programmer should be able to break down problems logically, improvise and expand on algorithms, and explain what he (or she) is doing to non-technical people. All of those are important.
A Few Arguments for the Standard Deviation Should Be Retired
Guess Who Owns The Patent to RSA's Backdoor Algorithm? Blackberry
Smartphones get more sophisticated, but their owners do not
The State of Hy
Show HN: Woodspotting - A Hacker News For Woodworking
This seems like a really sad and poor way to concern yourself with how our society governs itself.
Mozdev.org down
Wait, that website lest me search for a title and find out where it's available on Netflix?

Oooooh - combined with my proxy service's ability to pick what country I'm from, I think I've got some movie catch-up to do.
I remember as a child the first time understanding the gravitas of significant amounts of money. My parents had helped me save up with chores, birthday money, etc. to the point where I could now afford the thing I always wanted: a Nintendo 64.

I remember going to Toys R Us to buy it and when I got there, for the first time in my life, I wasn't so sure about spending the money. There was so much effort tied to it that, even as a child, it struck me that I was trading all of this time and effort for this one product. My mom made me count out each $20 bill, teaching me that money was not some nebulous idea (looking at you credit cards). Every $20 bill I counted made me think more about what I was doing.

I eventually bought it, but because all of the time spent saving up for it, I took good care of it and found it to be the most beloved console I ever owned. I feel that this experience definitely helped me understand the value of money relative to my efforts.

Oh, and my mother bought me Starfox 64 specifically to nail the point home. If you are reading this, mom, I love you.
Same way I was taught. You don't get shit unless you do something for it.

When I was a kid, my dad hired me to do jobs on the clock around the house for $10 an hour, or whatever minimum wage was at the time. We had a set schedule, we had a fake tax schedule. We wrote everything out, calculated it, pretended to invest it into things like real estate etc.

When I was younger I used the money I saved up, around $15,000, to buy the shack outside our house. My first "investment". Rules were it was completely mine and my parents couldn't touch it. Insulated, spacious, my own little lofty apartment type. It was great, during high school I basically turned it into a smoke shack.

I kept it until college, at which point my dad pulled out the original $15k I gave him for it and used it for my college fund and said "you now know how to value money". He wasn't a man of many words, so when he says something like that it really means a lot.

I was taught this from a super young age, I didn't even bother to beg or throw a fit about anything because I knew my dad would just stare at me until it was over, and if I didn't have the cash, I didn't get the cookies.
Indeed, what I am saying is that you can have the deterministic universe, or the random universe, and still have free-will, properly understood.

Note that from the outside, free-will is by definition apparently "random". It is a black box not determined by any variables in the greater world.
What matters is that the free-will is mine or yours-- that the entity known as to me as myself or to you as yourself should also possess this power of determination which to the outside world appears random.

To witness to the lack of a logical incompatibility with determinism, you can posit a model wherein the will does something like project itself in both time directions in such a way as to keep up the "illusion of determinism". Not that I think such a mechanism is actually in place; this model is just to show there is no logical contradiction, and there could be other models that do the same.
Teaching kids about personal finance is important, but making your kids pay for large expenses isn't a good thing. I've seen so many kids start out life having to pay for their own car, insurance, and college. Most of them drop out of school before graduating (no degree and student loans). There's nothing wrong with helping your children get started in life by paying for the things that will financially cripple them.
>> They then have to decide, do they want the $80 jeans or the $20 jeans? If they buy the $20 jeans then they can make more trips to the skatepark.

What seems important is the willingness to let your kids make mistakes. When I was a kid, my parents had a set budget for each of us for clothes. My sister was super interested in clothes from an early age so they just gave up and handed her the money. She'd shop sales and make extra money to get everything she wanted. On the other hand, my parents basically dictated the clothing I would buy. (Every fall I got three pairs of Levi's jeans, four new shirts, two pairs of dress pants, two dress shirts, one pair of shoes.)

I never got the chance to buy one pair of $100 jeans instead of three pairs of $35 jeans and then have to figure out how to get through the week with one pair of jeans that fit. I learned to handle money in other ways, but I think my parents missed an teachable moment.
I don't see the point. Do lawyers need to know such things to perform well in their careers? Specialization is prevalent for a reason - it has given us modern civilization and all the fancy technology that comes with it - but there is such a thing as hubris, and I don't think condescension towards those not well versed in the tools of one's craft can be considered a good thing.
I thought it wasn't irony, but rather the actual message.
Most Americans learn about the issue from media stories created by firms owned by powerful interests, so public opinion is not surprising.

If you look back at the early coverage of the Snowden leaks in the NY Times, the story was reported but the paper dutifully prepped a character assassination attack on Snowden himself, while intentionally suppressing the story of James Clapper's perjury and while also avoiding suggesting that Obama owed the public an explanation.
I think it's pretty bad that something run by YCombinator, a company trying to build billion dollar companies, has outages - and where they don't have immediate redundancy.
Yes. Taking on the government is the wrong fight when they are (at least broadly) representative of public opinion. The fight should be educating people on the dangers of NSA spying, something that I haven't really seen anyone try to do. All commentary comes from the perspective that "NSA = bad" is already a given.
Idiots Abound: NEST Edition
You know we get Netflix in the UK?
The descriptions behind this worry does not echo strongly in me.

I grew up in a family without much money. I decided that the best solution to reduce expenses was to not ask for things. I didn't tell my parents about this because telling them might lead to them having more stress about money.

To give you some idea, everyone month or so we went out to dinner at a restaurant. That was so exciting for my sister and me. The restaurant? Burger King. Compare to the essay, where it says "we ate at McDonalds three times in two days" Jim Anthony's 6 year old is in a very different demographic than I was.

As an older kid, I might sometimes get a few quarters to play a video game (this was the 1980s), and I would spend 30 minutes watching others play, to make sure the quarter was worth it. I got my entertainment also by watching the screens and thinking about how it might be played.

I did get an allowance. It wasn't much. I didn't often ask for my allowance, since that would have been less money for the family. I recall I could get extra money for taking out the garbage or mowing the lawn. Perhaps not coincidentally, those are the two household tasks I now dread.

When I went off to college (full scholarship in a state school, including room and board, for doing well in school and on the PSAT - doing homework is free), I kept track of every single expense, down to a nickle used to make a photocopy. If any activity cost money, I avoided doing it.

I'm lead to believe that my viewpoint is not uncommon among those growing up without much money. It's not a fun feeling. My response still, when money is tight, is to shut down and do nothing.

Mind you, that's not the same as budgeting. Budgeting is spending for things that are worth it, and affordable. What I learned was to not spend.

Except for the parents mentioned in #11, I don't empathize with the comments.

Take #13. "It suggested an allowance of sorts, but it also required the children to cover the costs of some everyday necessary items, not just snacks, McDonalds or video games…more like clothes, shoes, haircuts, etc."

That wouldn't have worked for me. I didn't have the spending money for snacks, etc., and I would wear clothes and shoes until they had holes in them, and basically had to be ordered to get a haircut and new clothes. (See above, under "not spend money.") Actually, more like my mother had to drag me.

The essay starts with a strange observation about "blue collar", based on physical types. The entire essay can be seen as expressing a decades-old class-based upper-middle class anxiety.
> Rarely in math are you coming up with a new way to solve a problem, but in software development you do that all the time!

False. This guy is making a case against a subject in which he clearly lacks experience.
RAVN Systems Releases RAVN Manage 3.1
"There are some hitches. No parties are allowed. She needs permission to go on vacation. There is a hole in the kitchen ceiling. She had to paint over a swath of graffiti. The four-week notice to move out can come any time."

So, apart from the vacation part, pretty much the same as renting privately in the UK then.
The hairiness of a hobbit's foot, his lack of shoes, the bright colors he wears and the pipe-weed he smokes are not very relevant to the War of the Ring. But mentioning it in the very beginning certainly helps to set the scene.
Free screencasts to learn AngularDart
I used http://www.hckrnews.com/ for that :-) But I actually usually prefer reading the comments more than the links ^_^
Adobe goes 3D
What is with these misleading titles. It seems like the author is more pointing out that computer science, software development and mathematics shouldn't be lumped together in the same category of jobs.
Same story with Netflix. Costs more here than in the US, but the content is waaay worse.

Use the US version of Netflix instead. Try https://unlocator.com (currently free because it's in beta - works like a charm) or http://unotelly.com/.

Here in Denmark it's completely legal to use the US Netflix. I don't know about Norwegian laws, though.
I really wish you wouldn't disable pinch to zoom on your website. The text on the info graphic was far too small to read.
I like the Mood option. I asked for something "Funny and Feelgood", it offered me The Act of Killing.
Small interruption. Looks like scaling to 2 servers on Azure to handle extra traffic crashed the original one.