skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want data sync capability and you prefer to run your own databases, Couchbase Lite is an open-source iOS and Android JSON database that syncs with Couchbase running on your servers.

http://mobile.couchbase.com

It's not a full app platform like Parse and StackMob, we are focussed on the data layer challenge.
> Do you think most people are constructing their morality on top of some fundamental beliefs?

Yes, but not necessarily consciously, and certainly not necessarily consistently.
I did quadratic equations in 7th grade in the US, in a back woods small hillbilly school in the US.

With that said, I've generally heard foreign students equate the junior year of a math degree at college to their senior year at high school. I don't dispute your general point.
I list some my failed startups in my HN profile. Chronologically:

1337Tech(2005) - a tech review blog ala AnandTech. Tear downs, detailed reviews and the like. Failed because we couldn't keep up a schedule

edgeyo(2009-2012) - a matching marketplace for investors and startups - think AngelList + SecondMarket + KickStarter. Ran into some regulatory concerns, and eventually we decided to just close shop because we couldn't put enough time and effort into working past some of those issues.

SpellTrade(2010) - a options exchange for Magic the Gathering cards. Supply problem caused a bootstrapping problem (our partner couldn't put up enough to supply the cards for bootstrapping). Closed before we even made a sale.

Strangers For Dinner(2012) - a matching market for strangers - one party will host a dinner party, and 5 other people will show up as guests. We managed to match about 50 parties in total before the number of people signing up as guests far outnumbered the people wanting to host. Also, people were not likely to host a second time. Couldn't get around this problem, plus the team had other commitments, so we shut it down.

2 out of three of the startups I had in the last 4 years or so were killed because they eventually became zombie startups. We couldn't get traction.
Poor developers who thought they can rely on them!
Calculation of 1+1 is arithmetic, proving that it is equal to 2 within a given logical framework, would be maths.
It will become, if it is not already, a practical obligation. Why should anyone in the rest of the world trust American products that enable "justified" surveillance?
There is no 'North America' when talking about education. There isn't even a 'United States'. The high school experience differs widely.

I went to public school in southeast Ohio. Quadratic equations (for me) were 8th grade. Calculus started midway through 10th, but didn't really get moving until 11th grade.
I could have been clearer with what I meant by justification. By justify I meant demonstrate/explain, e.g.

* What are the moral values/principles that create the obligation?

* How does the use of crypto foster these principles?
In that case, you try to hang out doing something they like (and hopefully you like) as soon as possible. None of this, let's hang out amorphous non-followup
Then put your money where your mouth is. There are bitcoin derivative markets that let you short it. Hell, PM me and I'll personally bet against you on a 6 mo time horizon.
There's an uncomfortable truth here. In the last 3 or 4 years, tech startups have started to become the fashionable choice for unthinking MBAs, taking the place of Investment Banking and Private Equity before it.

I was at a conference recently organised by University College, London (arguably the top science & engineering school in the UK). With no hint of irony, the organiser welcomed attendees - "we're all here because startups are the best way to get rich after college".

In the last week, I've been contacted by 3 separate people I knew from Law school asking me how they can get into startups.
To be clear (from the guy who submitted this), leveraged sellout was an incredibly popular blog that covered wall street from a junior insider's perspective for years. It was generally ironic, but as a friend of mine once asserted, irony is kind of like absolute value -- the more ironic you are about something the more seriously you take it, and it becomes difficult to distinguish the intensity of your irony from real belief at some point. A lot of people (like myself) are still subscribed to this blog, and a lot of people (unlike myself) are still subscribed to an unironic version of its world view.
I think the "point" there is not that they can use it immediately, but that the placement in the vending machines aligns perfectly with their target market.
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Jq – A command line JSON parser
Or they're simply, you know, responding to demand.
As others have pointed out, it varies widely by school and district. I went to public high school in the US, and we did Calculus and Multivariate Calculus in 11th and 12th grade. (And this is not uncommon, given that it maps to the two Advanced Placement math tests widely taken by US high school students.)
> struggle to accomplish much simpler (at least to me) tasks like proving that the product of two even integers is an even integer.

I always see articles that claim I didn't do math in high school, and then people talk about things like this. I did this in high school. In the US. In 2001.

Literally, one of our test questions was:
(a) prove the product of two even numbers is even
(b) prove the product of two odd numbers is odd
(c) prove the product of an odd and even number is even

And this wasn't regurgitating a proof we learned in class or had on homework, it was a question we had not seen before.

Blanket statements about what people see and don't see in high school are worthless.
Those things are very significant, much needed improvements, but would you agree that we need more user controlled, end to end crypto? I'm talking about things like ZRTP here. I'm not expecting solutions like that to come from Google because it has a vested interest in mining your data. Possibly even more so than NSA does.
If anyone is feeling bad for not necessarily knowing what to think about this piece, don't. I think it takes a while to realize this isn't a blog and the narrator isn't NECESSARILY the hero, but rather it's a story and there's a LOT to think about out of it.

My take is, of course, that the narrator is the villain, but that's just me.
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I'm not going to comment on the article (which has some valid points) - What I did immediately notice is that Rob didn't really consider the implied meaning people usually ascribe to that idiom. So ...

- His actress friend really meant - "I don't think I'd be happy as anything other than an actress".

- His programmer friend really meant - "Generics have made a meaningful difference in my productivity and general work happiness".

While I'm making up assumed paraphrases for people I don't know (which feels disingenuous), is it really any worse than taking this phrase literally?

I can't imagine Rob meant it!
Reminds me of the Python GIL.
A long time ago, I struggled in Calculus AB. Having just done a college visit to a school where I really wanted to go and where I sat in a college calculus class for Freshmen, I knew I wanted to place high enough on the AB test to get out of taking that with the other liberals arts majors. My teacher in a gentle manner tried to discourage me from taking the test. As I was a solid B- all year. Maybe he didn't want me to lower his average. I ended up discovering the book below - a book that explained Calculus concepts using stories set in a fantasy math magic land. I studied hard, practiced hard. And I got a 4. And placed out. And showed that teacher that I could do it.

http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Easy-Way-Douglas-Downing/prod...
I think you'd get more sign-ups if you could allow people to create a calendar without registering and then say something like "register now to save this calendar". By that time, they're more invested in the product than someone who's just arrived at your site. I could be wrong but I think @patio11 uses this tactic for Appointment Reminder or BCC.
Yes. I can not imagine any other conception of moral obligation. How would you come up with an obligation to do X or not do Y without an underlying belief structure?
Have you read the issue? The problem is that the current way things are done requires manual merge requests because of merge conflicts resulting from the updated userlist array. The github api method is 1:1 with the requirements of joining the community and leaves no room for human error (unless the person in charge of pull requests does not standardize their own process for automatic merges).
More arrests in Venezuela protests, Maduro slams "coup-seekers"
Calculus is taught in high school. However, it is not mandatory/standard - you have to be on the college track, and it is skippable. (these are all general statements, different school districts make different choices).

For example, in my high school, in a fairly small rural school, we were taught calculus in senior year. I was bored, and did it sooner, but that was the general rule. We also had things like advanced placement biology, physics, and so on. Generally speaking, at the end of those courses you can take the optional AP tests, which allow you to skip the Physics I, Calc I&II, etc., that are the normal fare for freshmen.

I can't recall anyone who had diff eq taught in high school, though we really did end up using it anyway in advanced physics. To roughly sketch the limits of what we did, I remember needing Green's theorem, and having to prove things using elliptic integrals, but nothing much beyond that.
This is actually a great idea for Facebook - don't sell Likes in absolute numbers, sell them normalized to the fraction of total Likes for the users Liking you.

So I could buy 10 "Fractional Likes" and get 20 users who each only have 2 total Likes (including this one) = 20 * 1/2 = 10

OR I get 10,000 users who each have 1,000 Likes each = 10K * 1/1000 = 10

...which seems a reasonable ballpark for resolving it in an automatable, economic way.

"Don't allow Likes over X" kind of sucks since what happens to legitimate Likers? I'm not a clickfarmer, but I've Liked way more than 5 things.

My News Feed has turned to crap (probably because of it), but that's a whole 'nother story.
curious to know how you can use http://baasbox.com and deploy it on EC2. It's open source and free, but I guess mobile developers don't like backend work.
Yeah, it's win-win - either Facebook has your data, or decides they're done running Parse and shuts it down. Win-win indeed.
Ah, so it's a daily schedule, not an hourly.

So not suitable for running a backyard camp with activities during the day.
Transfer between servers is over SMTP, which is not encrypted by default and almost always subject to degradation attacks (the MITM can claim not to support STARTTLS). In any case, the user cannot verify or demand that STARTTLS be used and many hosts don't support it at all. Meanwhile, PGP does not require any trust of intermediate entities, but relatively few people you might want to email have PGP keys and even those with keys might not have them on the device from which they intend to read your email. S/MIME is in a similar position to PGP, with a CAs trust model instead of Web of Trust.
Needing the best in the business – nyhacker (New York, NY)
Jeremy has put together some of the best graph theory educational notes, and I refer to his website a lot when I'm trying to show teachers how to infuse something abstract and meaningful into their traditional mathematics education. I highly recommend checking out his work, he really exemplifies modern mathematical education.
And the winner of Austin, TX’s gigabit service arms race is… Grande?
Why Not To Do A Startup [2008]
BOOK OF PROOF: http://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/index.html

Foundations of Higher Mathematics: http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Higher-Mathematics-Peter-F...

How to Solve It: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It

EDIT:

Mathematical Reasoning: Writing and Proof: https://sites.google.com/site/mathematicalreasoning3ed/
He puts high-quality teaching notes online for free, and it is quite callous to call his proposal an egotistical assurance or to deride his definition of math.
Oldest star in the universe discovered
If my kid asked me what I thought about this article I would say. If you want to contribute to the world as it is today then sure join a great corp that's making an impact and go for it! If you want to change tomorrow then go find a few people that feel the same as you do and go for it! The idea that an individual can not make a corp the same way that others did is not true. 'kid if that's what you want to do then go for it! I did' is the only response. Don't let the critics and the propaganda define you and tell you what to do, the future is yours. go for it !
Jeremy is a phd student at UIC right now and I'm pretty sure he taught a few classes there.

As someone who moved to the states at 13 I have to agree with him. Most teachers in America are forced to prep their students for exams instead of teaching them how to think critically. Instead of building an intuition, students are forced to memorize rules and equations so that they can finish their standardized exams in time. The problems done in class and for hw are of the same format as the exams, with the numbers used being the only difference. I've seen plenty of college students get offended when a professor puts a problem on an exam that requires some critical thinking.

I did my math degree at a school that had a special program for future math teachers and they were consistently the worst performing students in my classes. Abstract Algebra was a disaster for them, most couldn't put together even the simplest proofs. With exams approaching, they all begged the professor to tell them which proofs they were required to memorize. Somehow I got by with perfect scores by understanding the content while they had a tough time pulling off anything above 20%.
In-Game Economies in Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2
Ah, right you are, I thought I checked for that. Regardless, that's easy to control for, and yet I see lots of dupe submissions and my post has been #1 for a while now while this guy's is way behind. So my question remains.
So a Mario themed Flappy Candy Bird Saga should be gold, right?
Dear-sir-or-madam: a bookmarklet that transforms web pages into ransom notes
> very first program simply does not work

Guilty. Facepalm. Embarassed. Fixed.

> lack of strict

Not in scope (it's not a tutorial on good Perl), but I'll mention it.

> lack of warnings

Added a general disclaimer in the abstract.

> lack of my

I documented `my` in the subsection on scoping disciplines.

I _tried_ not to use features before I'd introduced them.

And, for most of the "probes," `my` wasn't necessary.

> bareword filehandles

Good point. Added scalar filehandles, as well as how to pass bare words with typeglobs.

Changed most examples to scalar filehandles too.

In doing so, I stumbled across the implicit method invocation form that happens when the first argument to a procedure is an object, so I added an example of that too.

This is exactly the kind of "semantic surprise" that led me to start digging.

> mentions &-calling of subs

Of course.

It's possible, and it can change the semantics of procedure call.

> thinks it's the same as normal calling

I had documented the differences.

Look carefully: The procedure call example includes an error case.

In the parameter passing subsection, I had included a mention of how `&proc` (no args), receives current @_.

> snowflake formatting style

Yep. Definitely not a style guide.

> mentions EXTREMELY outdated books as further reading

I added a link to Modern Perl (as suggested).

And, the new edition of Mastering Perl came out last week. It flipped through it, and it seemed updated.

> confuses capitalization of builtins in code examples

Bug. Fixed.

> fails to explain compile phase semantics properly, instead introduces "use" as magical

Guilty.

I thought about including this in the first revision, but I was nearing exhaustion. I'll add it later.

> quotes hash keys

It's legal.

> explains prototypes as something that could be used in general

I just explain what they are.

They're a part of the language, and they have important consequences for both parsing and interpretation.

> explains post-fix dereference syntax, but describes cumbersome circumfix syntaxes as default

I don't endorse either syntax as default.

> 2-arg open instead of 3-arg open

I'm not trying to document the library, or teach good use, but I added an example for 3-arg.

Thanks for your feedback!
Even if you were taught and understand the underlying theories, the end result is still applying patterns and formulas to the problem until it yields the answer. It's all good and well to able to independently derive the formula for (a + b)², but in the end the answer is still (a² + 2ab + b²), and that's all you need to apply the math.

Now, I've met my fair share of people who could not problem solve their way out of a paper bag with a pair of scissors. And I would love for generic problem solving to be a focus very early in education. But high school is likely way too late for that, and so I think all this anger with high school math is being misdirected.
I'd realized that after doing some Googling.

The lack of explanation of that acronym, however, fails the principle itself. User-centered design (or in this case, RSW -- reader-centered writing) would have expanded and defined the acronym on first use.

The failure of the author to do just that severely undermines his credibility (and the article is scattered to boot).
I think it is exciting to see mass attacks that aren't really bringing the network down. It actually builds my confidence in Bitcoin.
I am not really sure what any of your comment means and/or why you directed it to me? Is the practical obligation the same thing as financial incentive? And what does "enable 'justified' surveillance" mean? Existing in the world enables surveillance. I have no problem with just and legal surveillance, my problem is with unjust surveillance.
I have tough that education must be more integrated. Take for example, the Pythagoras theorem. Is a boring fact, with null use...

Wait!

If somebody tell me before that I can use it for get out of a jungle... I could have listen better.

The class could have started like this:

"You were traveling in plane, when suddenly, it crashed. Nobody else survived. You don't know where you are. It look like a jungle. Not civilization around, no cellphone, nothing. You will die in 1 week if not reach civilization. How can you escape?"

And if in history (at the same time that in maths) we talk about the man (Pythagoras), and about the compass. Then in social about the problems in traveling in the ancient cultures. Geography about maps. In artist class ("Art" class was more about technical diagrams for me, we never ever do oleo or similar stuff), how draw maps and in spanish build histories about it. Then all the clases related to each other. Probably the math class must be the last of it, to make this build-up effective.

In short, all the classes connected around the theme of the week or what are we doing at the moment.
We killed it. Anyone got a paste of the text?
Counting graphemes may be over-used, but needing to know their boundaries is important (and leads naturally to counting). For example, when you hit "delete" in a text editor, you'll probably want it to delete whole graphemes (and similarly for text selection); if you're doing text truncation, you may measure it by pixels, but you'll want to chop off the excess bytes at a grapheme boundary.

in the unlikely case I had to support Tamil or Korean for such a specialistic case.

Why is it "unlikely" that you would want your software to support users of other languages?
I replied above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7222232) but Facebook could basically sell Likes normalized against the users' total Likes. So a Like by someone with 10 Likes is worth 10x vs someone with 100 Likes, etc.
Great idea-- we'll try that next. We wanted to throw something out there first, and the easiest way was to just tie into our existing login system. Shipping is better than perfect right? :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law is the inability to distinguish between parody of, and sincerity in, extremism.
The Analytics Edge – from MITx
plus retentions that might eventually be used to pay other taxes (or not)
I was thinking Unicode Character Database. Or perhaps Usual Childhood Diseases.

So many concepts. 17,576 TLAs.
I was asking about the second half of the sentence.

(But to answer your question in terms of what I am getting at, you would work backwards from what you were comfortable with and then tell yourself that it was your underlying belief structure, whether that were meaningfully true or not)
I love this article. I hated "Math" in school, loved in at university. Why don't they teach real Math at school?
Thanks.

I was thinking some sort of end-point test myself, hadn't considered the specific case of APIs.
From teaching a little CS and numerical computing in college and now teaching programming, I agree with you. Too many students come out of high school without the ability to manipulate mysterious symbols without any real understanding of what they mean. Some students only know how to follow scripts to solve a problem from a template. Others need a concrete understanding before engaging with the abstraction, so they can't explore the math in order to gain an understanding. Maybe that's what he was trying to get at with "following obscure steps".

High school teachers, please make your students manipulate mysterious symbols more.
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Yeah--it's a weekly scheduler. However, if you need a management tool to run your camps--we can help you with that (it's free, go to https://www.camperoo.com/camps/join )
Sounds more like one should not use this kind of solution unless it's very temporary or one is building a quick prototype. What about businesses that relied on stackmob? welcome to the Baas area.
3 come to mind.

https://github.com/jeremydurham/persist-js
http://www.jstorage.info/
http://bzcareermongodb.blogspot.com/2013/11/introducing-stor...
S.E.C.'s Review of Stock Trading Will See Some of Its Own Work
https://www.dropbox.com/s/aq1ixtdm6ioogdo/Screen%20Shot%2020...

Check out the screenshot--dead simple. What do you think? Would love your feedback.
I've called this the Ayn Rand fallacy before. According to rumor[1], Ayn Rand believed that she lived her entire life based upon the principles of rationality, therefore if you disagreed with her you were irrational. Ayn Rand didn't like beards or Mozart, so the men in her circle learned to shave and no one expressed a fondness for Mozart in fear of being deemed irrational. But condemning a bearded man for being irrational because Ayn Rand doesn't like beards says more about Ayn Rand than the bearded man.

Likewise, feminists believe their ideology is based upon the principle of not hating women, therefore disagreement with their ideology amounts to misogyny. But they aren't revealing their interlocutors as misogynists; they're revealing themselves as Ayn Rand.

[1] There is considerable controversy about the lengths to which Ayn Rand would go to condemn people for their irrationality due to personal disagreements, but treat this story as a parable; its literal truth is beside the point.
Please ignore him/her. There are a lot of us who are very excited about the work the Go team is doing.
Here's StackMob recommending people switch from Parse after FB acquired them.

https://blog.stackmob.com/2013/04/27011/
I used md5sum mainly because it was given on the original sites from which software was downloaded

That is indeed a limitation. I'd suggest you explain what md5sum is, how to use it, and what its limitations are -- specifically that collisions are now trivial to instrument.

Developers / vendors still relying on md5sum really should be named and shamed these days.