skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't make any blanket statements. I simply didn't encounter any proofs in high school math courses, other than "geometric proofs" which weren't formal proofs.
This is what my exact thoughts were. That's why I struggled with Calculus, while I blew through Physics and high school 'math' with no real problems. I didn't need to care about the pedantry because it all just made sense to me. Once it stopped making sense, and it veered off into the abstract, I had to actually study to do well.

It's funny because when that article started I was totally on board with him, then we got there and I just laughed.
How Not To Make Decisions
> I know. That's the trouble with talking about growing up or being highly intelligent, you end up sounding like a narcissistic prick.

You've framed this incorrectly. The reason you ended up sounding like a narcissistic prick is because you were being a narcissistic prick. Perhaps you were just reducing his point to something a little too trivially simple.

There's nothing wrong with saying things like "I've tested in the top 1-2% of dozens of aptitude and intelligence tests". That doesn't sound narcissistic. Making the unsubstantiated claim that you are so smart that the problems of 'normal' people are trivially simple to solve and shall be disregarded is narcissistic. Especially when, once called out on that claim, you respond with an example fit perfectly to your honestly very narrow solution and cover every other scenario with an aloof "well, some problems do get complex".

Honestly, it sounds like jakobe was dead on. If the world seems so simple to you, you're probably not looking close enough. If you really are so good at coming up with solutions to the problems of the world, I hope you're spending your time improving it for yourself and those around you in truly substantial ways.
I'm very encouraged by this post, and I hope everyone reading it will donate.
"I work at a startup for the small team size, for the massive impact you make as an individual, for the team building experience, the hard times and the good."

I have that at a large company. My team owns a project, we have 3 devs, an architect, a QA, and a team lead.

We even get to meet our customers, though as it's an internal project, for another business unit, 'people signing up' isn't quite as meaningful. But you get to see people whose jobs suddenly become much easier and the excitement that can cause.
So me it is all truth...

I mean, your 2) point is critical: I am in Brazil, I am in a startup because I had no choice, and although I am getting paid with someone else money, if the startup crashes, I will go down with it, and go down I mean, get in worse situation than I already am... currently I am struggling to pay my rent and food, if my startup fails, I won't be able to pay rent and food, at all, considering my parents are having money issues too, this mean most likely I would experience real starvation, something that I am not much keen on experiencing.
Rankings do decay. Top Grossing rankings are consistent because the top apps have a large user base, from which a small fraction will purchase the iAPs. Those apps do make the most amount of money in the days before.

Free/Paid charts change all the time -- the apps that show up there get the most amount of downloads.
Actually, you are one of the few people that got the article 100%

That IS the intention of the author (make you feel a bad taste for BOTH industries)
Analyzing a claim in the 2014 Gates Annual Letter
I have to disagree with this.

For example, he attacks geometric proofs. Obviously, geometric proofs are useless and pointless, except that they represent a very simple and intuitive sandbox for learning proofs. Which is fantastic. How better would you teach kids to understand what math means beyond arithmetic? You give them a bunch of simple rules that make obvious sense, and then show them how you can use those to prove non-obvious things.

Our curriculum has all but dropped geometric proofs and the kids are poorer for it.

I think our curriculum here in North America (I'm in Ontario, but I imagine Americans have very similar classes) is fine - the problem is that people are afraid to make the problems really hard and force the students to really stretch their skills beyond just "same as the example but change the numbers". That's what's missing, not some esoteric subject matter, just taking the existing tools in the existing toolbox and pushing the kids to build higher instead of more.
HTC Dipping Its Toe Into the Wearable Market Waters
Mentioned in the article, here is the direct link to Professor Lustig's talk "Sugar: The Bitter Truth". I can personally attest to its high quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Steam Dev Days on Youtube
My US public high school did not offer calculus at all during my tenure. Resulted in very interesting conversations with university admissions departments.
They can prise my sugar... from my cold, dead hands.
If it's really "simple" (not dynamic, or doesn't change often), you should throw the whole site behind a CDN. Then you can support tens of thousands of users very in expensively.
> I resolve to recognize that a complaint reveals more about the complainer than the complained-about

That's pretty patronizing. It seems obvious that the programmer meant "I can't imagine programming in a language without generics again."
Parents really need to stop giving this poison to their children. All birthday parties & events geared towards kids has this poison as the main attraction. And don't get me started on breakfast cereals....
This smells fishy. First off, the poster makes basic grammar errors. Next, misspelling. I'm willing to read their post, but without proof, I'm guessing this is the ol' PICNIC.

Problem In Chair Not In Computer.
The problem is that the news was delivered via tweet and blog by Darren Herman - a marketing/ad guy. He's a VP responsible for diversifying revenue. The source and messaging indicate more "user-enhancing" programs are also on the way.

If Mozilla did not intend for this to be ad related, they picked a horrible way to deliver the message IMO.

Mozilla would also be fully aware that there would be concerns about this "ad-like" product but did not nip it in the bud with any clarifications - yet.

The community is concerned for a very valid reason.
I'm pretty sure it was option 1. In general, it was pretty scathing and precise in its take-down approach. And any lingering doubt about where he was aiming was removed by his closing comment.
i used to read the site. he was an outsider observing finance (the roomate of a bunch of bankers) who launched a popular website instead of following "the path". high point was the book, which came out in 2008 - worst possible timing - and did not sell. bad luck. the same site in 2012 would have been funded for millions ... get some guest authors ... maybe sell to gawker media / huff post / etc ... no book required.

with regards to the content - if you take away the "irony" as cover for a legitimate argument, it's still an interesting question to contemplate. for the average econ major (but not CS major), with no edge in technology, compared to the safe average payouts available on wall street, it is probably a bad decision to pursue a tech startup ... which is what makes the parody work.
> No, price controls are setting the price relative to a standard that's backed up by guns (guns = "control", as in, if you don't do what I say I can shoot you, or point a gun at you and take you to jail). Dollars are already backed up by guns, so the notion of 'price controlling' dollars makes no sense.

On the contrary, with a fixed-ratio gold standard currency it is still the state who said that a dollar was by definition equivalent with, say, 1/35th of an ounce of gold (as it was just before the U.S. finally abandoned the standard for good). But the only reason the government would give you $35/troy ounce was because of the men with the guns, and the government could change their minds.

In fact, the U.S. did arbitrarily change their mind several times throughout their history about "what gold was worth". This didn't change the market value of gold of course, but this didn't stop the politicians from abusing fiscal policy for their own interests.

The interesting thing is more that there was a market value of gold which was different from the "official" government price of gold, which should illustrate by itself the issue.

Rather there was never anything special about gold except that people thought it was special. The U.S. started off on a gold and silver standard after all, which led to problems fairly soon after since the difference between gold and silver value that Congress decreed was not always the difference the markets created.

While I'll agree it's possible to have gold-backed fiat currency (like the Civil War-era greenbacks), there's no reason why it's "more responsible". It's still just as susceptible to government intervention and it unnecessarily conflates non-orthogonal concepts for the sake of... what?

Gold was only valuable because people thought it was valuable. If you went to a desert island you could form an economy on water bottles. Prisoners actually did form economies on cigarettes, and when cigarettes were banned the currency shifted to cans of mackerel.

As far as I'm concerned gold-backed dollars make as much sense as dollars backed by sardine cans. At least true fiat currencies (and Bitcoin) finally gave up the middle-man and acknowledge that their currencies are worth what people think they're worth. It may be too spooky, but it's the truth.
Exactly. You have to remember who the loudest complainers in a school are - not the nerds, not the losers, but the keeners. The kids who play the game of earning marks instead of learning to think.

That's who the current system panders to, because they're the ones who scream loudest when it doesn't. And they find it morally offensive if you ever ask them to solve a problem that isn't extremely similar to an example they've already seen.

And they're the ones who think they're "good at math". That's who highschool caters to because that's what standardized testing caters to and that's what the noisiest parents and students want... and teachers that have higher ideals are swimming up-stream if they want to actually challenge the kids.
GetJar, an early app store maker has been acquired
I know that Business Insider is practically detested in these parts, but the piece linked here neatly summarizes - with line charts - the misguided dietary trends in the U.S., that have led to the high prevalence of chronic conditions like obesity and diabetes and the general state of poor health and thereby, soaring medical costs.

http://www.businessinsider.com/whats-wrong-with-the-modern-d...
Codebase Velocity
These are less JavaScript problems than utf-16 problems. The whole one character is not a code point problem. It's common to Java, .net, basically all of windows, and anything else that uses utf-16 strings. The solution is easy. If you need a one to one mapping of code points to characters convert to utf32 first. Utf8 has the same problems, the only difference is people know characters and code points don't match up. Whereas with utf16 there's a bunch of people who are either new or should never have been programmers to begin with that are clueless about it. Sadly this number is so large that just about any program that uses utf-16 strings is broken for inputs where code points != characters. This is partly the fault of the languages and libraries which give you functions like substring, reverse, etc on utf-16 strings, where they basically have no consistent meaning. It should have been a storage format not a manipulation format.
Ask HN: Do you see a therapist?
With such common occurrences of mental illness, depression and anxiety disorders in the startup community, do founders (and non-founders) regularly seek psychological therapy to better handle stress?
Show HN: Centering a Div with Physics, Instead of CSS
http://jared314.github.io/physics-based-page-layout/ (Javascript Required)

After the last CSS centering article, I thought there had to be another way. So, I put together a basic Physics-based Page Layout system using an existing Javascript physics library, for springs, and an existing Javascript CSS parser library, for CSS Selectors and a custom CSS-like DSL. The end goal is to layout DOM elements with springs, and eventually collisions, instead of floats, margins, or padding.
You're correct. The latter.
This is one of the applications I'm interested in exploring with the Technical Illusions CastAR system: http://technicalillusions.com/castar/
You need to be connected to send them but not receive them.
Oh c'mon, lighten up. Sure, kids shouldn't be eating frosted flakes and garbage like that on a regular basis, but you're not going to give your kid a birthday cake? No occasional ice cream cones? Must be fun to be your kid. Everything in moderation.
I think it is a really clever way to do advertising because it allows large companies to give them a bunch of money and at least get something for it that they can show investors while not annoying users much at all. This is most likely aimed at companies like Facebook and Google and Yahoo that have no real need for advertising as such but are willing to spend money to make their services seem even more identical to the intenet itself (for less tech savy users). The company would most likely already recognize that Firefox is important for people being able to actually use their services but the extra bonus of a link to their company could help convince anyone who is doubtful that they should spend money on open source browsers (and gives them an extra spot in the budget they could put such a contribution). Overall a good move on Mozilla's part IMO.
Their button group doesn't look right when you click the button. The border glow gets covered.
"who of your friends also starred this repo?"

I hope you know that feature came out this week...
I didn't say every problem was simple, just that most problems most people struggle with are. I also didn't say every problem has a simple solution. You read too much into it.

> If the world seems so simple to you, you're probably not looking close enough.

Funny, the closer I look, the more locally simple everything seems. It's how we learn, how we work and how we simply do things. Take things that are too big to do and break them down until they're simple enough to do. You can't move a mountain all at once, but you can move it if you blow it up into truck sized pieces.

There's nothing in the world that a person does that's more complex than what a person can do.

If the world seems complex too you, maybe you should just look more closely?

> If you really are so good at coming up with solutions to the problems of the world, I hope you're spending your time improving it for yourself and those around you in truly substantial ways.

I hope I am too. With great power comes great responsibility, no? I'm definitely not working on the next photo sharing app if that's your implication.
There Are 177,147 Ways To Tie A Tie
Fair enough but what do you think about folks like Heroku that have stuck around for years post acquisition?
You already have a secret weapon against cyber crime – want to know what it is?
Two Years of Nissan Leaf Mileage Data
I just connected the dots and realised that I went to high school with al3x in the DC area. I never realised the programmer I knew in high school went on to work with twitter, et all. What a brilliant surprise!

Anyway, really glad to see he's doing so well, especially after reading his blog entry a few months ago about his personal troubles. It's refreshing to see a fellow human being making great use of their time and fortune to the betterment of others. Good luck in the new role, al3x.
The problem isn't prepping for exams, the problem is that the exams cover only mechanical transformation.

Put real problem solving on the exam and this goes away. Of course, then teachers who can't problem solve (most of them) will be up in arms...
I don't think it should be called a bug. Peter Todd (well-known Bitcoin developer), said[1]:

> [...]I'm a bit hesitant to bake in assumptions about malleability when we have no solid idea if ECC signatures are or are not malleable on a fundemental level; if "whack-a-mole" anti-malleability is all we've got it could be ugly if a break is found.

I understand this to mean, there may be unknown ways to transform signatures, like the s sign flip you quoted. In that case there would be no way to know which representation is "canonical." Thus, malleability is either a fundamental, fatal flaw in Bitcoin, or just something Bitcoin developers need to work around.

Now, it seems even the reference implementation isn't perfect about malleability, and perhaps people could have been better about making the issue known. So there is work to be done, but it is not a "bug" that can be "fixed", at least not without upgrading the entire network, and/or risking it popping up in the future when someone applies more ECDSA signature mutation tricks. The real solution, if you want to safely fingerprint transactions, is to make your own transaction hash that is immune to malleability, like [2].

[1] http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=319546...

[2] https://github.com/sipa/bitcoin/commit/e7853a91cf646a6a47011...
Interesting follow-up, this stuck out for me:

"To start with and as usual, social problems are the real problems."

This really resonates with me. Once any organization gets to a certain size, getting change to happen is more "social problem" and less "technical problem." When you don't select for people at that stage who can move an entire organization over to a new way of doing things, your organization will stagnate and die. It used to really annoy me at Google when technical evaluators who dismiss those "soft qualities" in candidates. I had a fairly famous Googler tell me point blank that anyone could change the organization by shouting loudly enough. Which I tried to explain was just as false as saying anyone can solve a problem if they write enough code. But alas, they were not ready to hear that at the time.

The author makes an excellent point that much of the root of the "disagreement" can be summed up with a strong sense of "I wouldn't have done it that way." Which is no doubt true, but it has to be combined with "I would do it like this, and I'm willing to spend the next 3 - 5 years listening to the community and addressing their concerns." I certainly see that is a much bigger commitment.
I was bored so I found the public key and your blog and sent you an email :) So that Zero can be a One now.

By the way, the public key on your blog is not very copy and paste friendly - I had to redo the armoring.

But yeah, it is no where near as easy at it should be.
a former molecular bio major,

Be careful folks.. the sugar they are referring to is corn syrup which was used as fat taste replacement..sucrose

fructose in small doses is still fine..although do not use it a diet plan as its a hunger enhancer as it blocks a body released chemical that tells are body to stop eating.
It's not as simple as "sugar is poison". Some form of "sugar" is in virtually everything we eat. It is unavoidable. Just stick to the rule of "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" and quit screaming about sugar.
Was that all a parable? The specific problem was getting more groceries home than you could comfortably carry, and needing them sooner than they could be reliably delivered. Wheels are a huge help in doing this.

Perhaps the more general problem is having things appear in your home at more or less the instant you decide you want them. Since instant delivery is unavailable (is this the problem?), this will require you to outsource your planning to some other person, like a servant, or to some sort of AI, or the closest that Amazon or Google can do.
It is so exciting to know that a script kiddie can knock double-digit percentages off the value of the currency while causing the community to fragment into infighting and calling each other "full of shit". That really builds my confidence in Bitcoin.
Ada was first standardized in 1983. It's one of the youngest mainstream languages. It's target market isn't the technobabble du jour, so you probably wouldn't make it your first choice for your Pinterest clone startup. However, if you're interested in building industrial strength applications (thinks like the targeting computer in a cruse missle), with lots of programmers, that has an application lifespan of years or decades instead of months, it's very well supported by libraries at all levels. It does interface with C, and does have good debuggers.
This must be what it feels like when people started accepting that smoking or drunk driving is bad for you. I mean I didn't even think to consider that sugar is essentially a drug...
What about a kilt?
Do you feel that way about all acquisitions? About Parse? About Facebook? We've invested a ton of resources into Parse post-acquisition and continue to do so.
Whats needed is the reduction of added sugars on everyday food..mostly processed food. I dont think we should go to the extent of not having cakes or ice cream on special occasions, that is not the problem.
It's the way geometry is taught, not the content, that is the problem. This is essentially the argument for all types of math; they aren't "math" because they're taught in a way that removes all the math and leaves... what exactly?
And yet we still keep thinking the government has the answers to health care. The FDA promoted most of these trends.
Interesting to see this, having just finished one of Gary Taubes' books and reading another. Especially "Good Calories, Bad Calories" is an extremely well-researched work talking exactly about the issues discussed in this article, presenting countless researches and scientific facts related to it.
nice lib. thanks
If they were expressing a concern about a legitimate risk in the system wouldn't something like the security list been the right avenue, and not an accusatory press release?

You'll note that mtgox had funds taken from it, none of these other sites are. They're just being flooded with junk that screws up their transaction processing. It's not really the same thing at all.
Giving More Accurate Estimates on Web Apps
5-part process for working through Machine Learning Problems
Looking Down From 600 km Above The Earth's Surface (HD) (video)
I'm sort of surprised that the developer tools have only recently become an attack vector (via social engineering). I'm not sure what can even really be done about it without seriously inconveniencing developers. Maybe making them disabled by default with an extra option to enable them would be enough to deter all but the most gullible of users?
How Math Helped Me Write Less Code and Made Our App Faster
As they say: "The dose makes the poison". Stating that sugar is toxic, as Lustig and others do, (see his talk on YouTube or http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.htm...) to me does not make much sense in fighting against the super high levels of consumption: When you argue a position that's too far removed from most people's accepted positions, they tend to tune you out. Note that high-fructose corn syrup (water+glucose+fructose) is included in this generalized definition of "sugar", which, of course nobody would add to their coffee or tea (that would be sucrose or table sugar), but is now used ubiquitously in the food industry (http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/edible-innovatio...). A better option would be to single HFCS out and fight against its use.

While reading this the following question came to mind: If Yudkin's results were so groundbreaking and well backed up, why was he kind of shut off from the academic community. Stating that the "sugar lobby" ended his career sounds a bit too far fetched.