skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right, that "trying to distribute" seems to be an incorrect characterization of Brown's intent, which is why I have deleted the comment.

However, it's incorrect to fixate on the issue of hyperlinking per se. Whether a "link is not the documents" is just technicality. If he had intended, by hyperlinking, to actually distribute the documents, I don't believe the fact that he did so by hyperlinking as opposed to some other means would matter. However, here he has a strong case that he didn't intend to distribute the documents, but was just reporting the factual information that the documents were available. It all revolves around his intent, not the fact of hyperlinking.
I understand, and I saw his comment at the end, which makes this clear. I meant that he's adopting the voice of the sociopath to expose their reasoning.
"If you’re going to get anywhere in learning mathematics, you need to learn to be comfortable not understanding something."

This is true for all research.

And I don't mean just the physical sciences either. Historians and sociologists are also chronically "lost and confused." Otherwise it wouldn't be a topic worth of study.

This is why students who are "good at X", whether it be math, German, sports, or programming, may become frustrated when they find out that "good at researching X" is a very different matter.
I'm imagining a future where most cameras have Street View style blurring in their hardware. Where vintage digital cameras are sought after and illicit manufacturers produce unauthorised copies with the feature disabled.
> go to Southeast Asia

Trappist and Benedictine monasteries have been running retreats for many centuries, but the hip kids are christo-phobic.
Three words... Google App Engine.
How would those studies benefit you personally? I haven't researched such studies but for me they don't provide any benefit. How would it help me if a study existed that suggested that 98% of people who practice meditation are happier if I'd be in the 2%?

My point it: try it for yourself and see if _you_ get benefits from it. The rest is mostly irrelevant :)
Scientifically random would be choosing data points such that each member of the target population, Java developers, has an equal chance of being surveyed. This blog's survey has a couple biases, one is self selection (it was only posted on the blog so only people who read the blog have responded).
Lego is not over priced.

In the mid 90s, I worked for a toy design startup making plastic parts. Think "Lego + N-scale trains". (It flopped.)

At the time, there were two awesome toy makers, with two very different strategies. Lego was open about their manufacturing, but would hide their designs. PlayMobile was very guarded about their manufacturing, but would happily preview the designs.

Methinks Lego deterred competition by showing just how hard it was to compete on quality, PlayMobile competed by making plastic parts more cost effectively than anyone else.

We play tested everything we could. Made me a toy snob. Sad, I know. Little Tikes and Duplo are the best bang for the buck for their target age group. I snear at Brio, Tonka, MegaBlocks, and many others.
The Lego movie didn't strike me as hyper-consumerist, and I saw it twice. It mentioned a lot of sets but didn't promote collecting them or anything. I figure a lot of people will download the soundtrack, since it's pop electronica that also works as a hipster-ironic parody of itself.

What I got from the movie was a well-developed cynicism of authority. It wasn't nihilist, but very anarchic. The message I got was: have fun making things, but don't expect anyone else to respect or even understand them.
While impressive, I have a hard time believing this claim:

> As ARGUS floats overhead for months at a time, it dragnet tracks every moving person and vehicle and chronographs their movements, allowing forensic investigators to rewind the footage and watch the activities of anyone they select within the footage.

The amount of footage just one pod collects in a short span of time is monumental. They're storing what amounts to decades of footage for just one day's worth of operation. Maybe they have some criteria that trims unnecessary footage, but I can't imagine that saving all that much space as they don't want to miss anything.
Trading knowledge I accumulated over the last couple of years
A euphemism for casual sex.
> Why would this be considered "an outright lie"?

I think that comment was a bit exaggerated.

> Does "speak out" always have to be attributed to negative opinions?

I would say no, not always, but generally, yes. That's exactly what I thought when I read the headline and then when I went to the link I was disappointed that I wouldn't find a critique of Java 8. I am, however, still interested in a survay ;)

Note that I am enthusiastic about Java 8, so thinking there was a valid critique of it really piqued my interest.
Is this discussion any different than the one we had a couple decades ago when credit/debit cards went from occasional use to primary currency? There was huge outcry about how everyone would be tracked, how every purchase you made could be aggregated and monitored and tracked and sold and leveraged, how personal problems could arise when a spouse or lawyer saw inappropriate purchases on bank card records, etc etc. Today, we still acknowledge those problems - while using those cards, having just given in to the sheer convenience of its regardless of the data mining that occurs.

I still think the killer app for Google Glass type products is face & license-plate recognition, aggregating data and pulling it up for you a la augmented reality all the time. The devices & services would be cheap unto free by companies accumulating that data.
It's strange to hear mathematics described more as a search for art and structure than computation. Unfortunately most of my math education was on the computational/applied side. I'm only getting into number theory and the more esoteric math later in life for fun. As a parent I think we can't let the school system destroy our kids love of math through too much rote learning. We have to make it fun for them. (Same with music btw)
I don't see how they would benefit from this sort of sabotage... Switch it to Node and quickly sell it to Microsoft?
It's not so much the scanning of plates which is invading privacy. I wouldn't mind them scanning my plate just to check when a car entered or exited a parking lot. The problem is saving and matching this data to actual people. Then selling this information to corporations and PIs.
This is disgusting to me. I'll give you that there's a fine line between pain & pleasure in a game (it takes some pain to feel the pleasure), but this just feels dirty. I've said it before: it reminds me of an abusive relationship.

It starts off great: treat the girlfriend well, give her flowers, treat her like a queen. As time goes by, slowly needle away at her confidence, until she feels dependent on you. Do this so slowly that she doesn't even realize what you're doing. Eventually she is essentially dependent on you, and even if you treat her like garbage, she keeps coming back for more. In fact, she even blames herself for things going wrong.

It's terrible. I refuse to play games that do this. I get that they're incredibly successful, and rake in tons of money, but this is not something I want any part of.
Pre-installed malware turns up on new phones
"Speak out" in that context is not universally negative, but it does tend to imply criticism.
Thanks for that, was disappointed when I got to the link and wasn't going to see results directly.
I tried and failed to get into running on my own for years, until one day I went running with a colleague, who was also a seargeant in an Asian national army, and regularly ran two marathons in a day.

The first thing he said is, you are running too fast. You should run slowly enough that you can breath regularly, or you will never last. So, I slowed down, and I can do 12k an hour or so, which is pretty fair, but I only ever go for a max of two hours at a time.

I find it incredibly meditative, and use it as my creative problem-solving time.

One tip though, NEVER run on your heels. Get some barefoot shoes or just concentrate on not doing it. You lose the spring in your angle and knees, and just bang the hell out of your joints.
Postgresql security and bug fix release
The arrogance here is unfortunate. First, you start out with a remark reminiscent of a high school bully. Do you really need a co-conspirator to share in your attempt to ridicule someone?

Also, you're pretty uninformed about the history of Bitcoin. Satoshi did start with a spec, or at least a white paper (yes, the lack of a proper spec for Bitcoin has been a major problem). Satoshi presented the white paper to the cryptography e-mail list several months before releasing the software. He got some feedback at that time, and then he got significant feedback when upon his initial release, which he integrated into the protocol.

This list included many of the top cryptographers in the cryptocurrency space, including Hal Finney and Adam Back.

You can find all these discussions, and the original release at: http://nakamotoinstitute.org/

Finally, with the exception of the transaction malleability issue, the failures in exchanges have had nothing to do with cryptography, but rather with basic secure software development practices and architectures.
How to Actually Meet the Right People at SXSW
Heading to SXSW? Don’t get lost in the shuffle this year.
Arscoin ? I think they would have been better served with Technicoin or something like that ...
I sincerely hope Google will upgrade the Dalvik compiler to accept Java 8's syntax. My wishful thinking is that they did not find compelling reasons to upgrade the spec to Java 7 since it did not represent a major upgrade when it comes to the core language. It has some definite improvements over Java 6, but there was no true groundbreaking improvement over older Java versions. At least not to the same degree as generics in Java 5 or now lambdas in Java 8.

Besides, Java 8 lambdas should tickle the fancy of Google's engineers. First, it introduces a feature that is already trivially available in Javascript, Python and Go. In addition, remember that Google already develops and heavily uses the Guava library, which introduces the least painful workarounds to use some functional programming in Java, so it seems there is some motivation already.

It would be a pitiful split for the Java community if Google does not adapt Java 8. I fully expect that Java 8 lambdas will change the way Java programming is done. If Google stays with a pure imperative Java, it will likely split the ecosystem in two different languages. Java 7 did not introduce enough language features for this to happen, but Java 8 definitely will.
Img.ly free photo editor SDK for HTML5 and iOS
You can get it here: http://download.redis.io/releases/redis-2.8.7.tar.gz
I think wearables in general need a killer app.
This article would have been way better with visuals for each example.
This is such a horrible idea for so many reasons. We're seeing what really happens when drugs are legalized (enough). E-cigarettes have improved greatly over the past year and are offering a safer and more health conscious alternative to consume a drug.

Increase freedom for entrepreneurs to innovate and they'll find ways to make it safer to consume drugs like nicotine because it's beneficial for them to do so.
as the math truck barrels on ahead

I've been teaching math to at-risk high school students for the last 10 years. I have spent more time helping students understand that they are not stupid, that something just got in the way of their learning at one point, and they never understood anything after that. I'm going to use your quote in some of these conversations now.

What most of my students think: "I could never do math, I fucking hate it, and I might drop out because I will never finish my math credits. I can't do math because it's stupid and meaningless and I will never get it."

What really happened to get people off track?

- Some just didn't follow one topic in some early grade, nothing else made sense after that, and no teacher was prepared to get them back on track.

- Parents split up, student couldn't focus in school for 6 months, they got off track.

- Parent/ sibling/ significant person passed away when student was young, couldn't focus for 6 months-2 years, no way to get back on track.

Any number of other external events happen, and it is perfectly reasonable for students to get off track in math.

a systematic way to deal with the discontinuities when they strike, especially that first time

Exactly. I would like to see every elementary school have a math specialist, who knows advanced math, to help students with their overall understanding when they get off track. Helping a kid master some mechanics does a little to get them back on track, but diagnosing misunderstandings takes more math expertise than most elementary teachers have.

I could go on forever; thank you for putting some of these issues so clearly in focus.
>It'd be more realistic to just say that competent people are staying out because the regulatory environment results in an excessive cost of doing business for anyone who wants to make sure they're operating on the up-and-up

That's exactly what I meant. Apologies if I made it sound like anything else. It costs millions to start up a money transmission business in all 50 states (like an online exchange would need to), and the federal government has been explicit that they consider a Bitcoin exchange a money transmitter.
> I don’t like religion, so I didn’t like some of the buddhist stuff

I don't think of Buddhism as a religion, but as a lifestyle or philosophy instead. (I may be wrong, but I don't think the Buddha ever claimed to be a God. I also do not consider myself a Buddhist.)
"As mentioned in my paper 'How to mention my own papers as often as possible in a single article'..."
It's the same with the crypto we rely on. There are some quite complex mathematical underpinnings for the primitives, but once understand their properties all the common protocols are actually incredibly trivial. DSA and various other iconic crypto protocols are just linear algebra using these new mathematical primitives. The complexity is about the same as using hash functions to build hash tables. Making protocols secure is actually mostly an implementation challenge (as it is with hash tables), and keeping systems secure, pragmatically, is about key management and social challenges.

I was incredibly proud when I noticed, just through algebraic manipulation, without reading it anywhere first, that you should be able to extract the public key used to create an an ECDSA signature. Schnorr signatures don't have this property. This is kind of sad in a way becaue it's trivial, but you have no know how the primitive functions and the difference between a field and a group.
No, I'm correct: He set up an extreme straw man
to knock it down. I clearly agreed that his
extreme straw man is foolish. There is a common
reason students fall for his straw man: They are
concerned that if there is an exercise they can't work
they are missing something important. My advice was,
instead, for a very diligent student, to solve 90-99%
of the exercises and just let go of the last few as
illposed, stated in error, out of place, use the Internet,
etc.

To do just the "opposite" of his straw man is not good --
for solid foundational material, Halmos, Rudin, Royden,
etc., the exercises are darned important. Right the
Rudin exercises where have to consider uncountability
are not so good. The Royden exercises on upper and lower
semi-continuity are a lot of work for a little curiosity
but likely won't see again. The Fleming exercise on
every bounded linear functional on a intersection of
finitely many closed half spaces achieves a maximum
value is mis places. Etc. The abstract algebra book
I had had an exercise where the student had to reinvent
Sylow's theorem; a student wrote the author and got
back a letter that the purpose of the exercise was
to see if a student could reinvent Sylow's theorem --
bummer, misplaced exercise.

I'm correct.
Now it's up and running back. Too many visitors we didn't expect. :-)
This hits close to home for me. I was one of those kids who was 'good at math' throughout pretty much all of school. I tested out of Calc I thanks to AP classes and began university in Calc II.

It didn't go well. Somehow this thing that had seemed so natural and intuitive now just seemed totally incomprehensible, mainly because I really just didn't understand the level the abstraction was at or something. I did poorly and it really shook my confidence. I changed majors and wound up a designer instead.

It's not a surprise to me that I've worked my way back into a field with deep math roots, though I think I would have found it much sooner if it hadn't been for that initial roadblock.

It gave me a new appreciation for what many of my classmates were struggling with in the early math that I breezed through in grade school. It's very difficult to see what the concepts you're learning are building towards if you don't have a sense of the bigger picture.
Bingo. Killer app: face recognition. Add license plate recognition to that (per another current threagood money for a system that would, unintrusively, pop up an info bubble over everyone's head (name, summary of interactions, relationships, last social media posts, etc). Considering the data mining potential, I'd expect Google et al to provide the hardware & services for free or darned near it.

Add license plate recognition to that (per another current thread). Cars correlate real close with their owners.
Insurance only helped so far in the Mortgage market... Most of the monoline (Mortgage-only) insurance companies went belly up.
I'm curious, how do you know that? It sounds completely crazy to me.
I care. Vipassana meditation is about observing reality as it is and accepting it. Trying to control the breathing would defeat the purpose. Other forms of meditation are based on controlling the breathing and in those cases the purpose and outcome would probably be different but not trying to control the breathing has definitely its uses.
It may be an influence, but what about those of us who've had organic grains for most our lives? I don't think it's more than correlation at this point.
It doesn't say much. This survey will likely be picked up by Java news sources and read by Java devs, since there don't seem to be many surveys geared towards Java devs these days. Maybe some of them will check out Scala.

Why would the company most behind Scala post a very positive survey about Java? One would think that Scala's success probably relies on either replacing or supplementing Java.

The only item that would be rather newsworthy would be the plans to adopt 8, but as you mentioned the survey doesn't provide a clear answer.

My takeaway was that the most interesting new feature for people was lambdas, and Scala already offers lambdas. This could be interpreted as "Survey respondents are most excited about a Java feature that they could already have if they used Scala".
First of all, i don't know anything about my supposed speciusness (if that is not a word, then i just made it and you get it). But i would say that you are "effort vs result" matran is being a little over dramatic in this context. Setting up the workflow (grunt or gulp) would take minutes with a little "effort" from you hand, with the only cost being your time. Also we should take into account that not every "cool" people owns a MAC nor have the means to pay for the GUI tool that would like take time to get familiar with, you see what i did there didn't you?. "To each their own though..", i couldn't agree more. Cheers
One hell of a placebo though: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120314170647.ht...
How about if a hardware chain used satellite imagery to detect new structures being built, like sheds, barns, etc, and mailed targeted coupons out to the property owners?
Great story. It certainly is a plausible one that changes the culpability of the owners. (From theft to slippery slope, both still bad)
Threads like this are why I don't waste my time on sites like this.
I wish this post was around when I finished my undergraduate degree in Mathematics. I would have taken my adviser's advice to go to grad school. At the time, I remember telling him that I feel like a barely made it through the program. Apparently I wasn't alone. Amazing the difference 25 years and the internet makes.
Google Glass is basically same thing as 90s VR. Good (and obvious) idea that can't be properly done on today's tech. My expectation is a capability to process your surroundings in near-real time and have a low-latency mobile connection.
I think the first commenter on the site said it all :

"the systematic exploitation of private personal information by corporations and government is the modus operandi of a surveillance / police state.

Already this is being abused for corporate espionage, political benefit, and a host of criminal enterprises.

The manufactured pretext that all these erosions of privacy are ok because "we found bad guys" has been the same bogus justification for every single abuse known to history.

A simple extension of this illegal principle in practice means privacy and Constitutionally protected rights are null and void.

Jobs! Fraud! Crime!

"We'll keep you safe!" "We'll save insurance companies money!" "We'll catch criminals!"

They don't mention that they'll abuse this in an untold array of intrusions and privacy violations... for their commercial and political benefit."
It's ironic to read «The brain isn't built to handle "empty."» remark having «How to meditate» (that aims to empty your mind/thoughts) on HN front-page.
When drawing a survey population that you want to use to extend knowledge to the total population you need to sample in a way that doesn't introduce bias. The Simple Random Sampling method is the gold standard here: sample in a way such that each subset of the total population of a given size has equal chance of being selected. This includes, as a special case, that each individual has an equal chance of being selected.

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

More complex sampling methods can be used since SRS is usually intractable (you'd need to put every single person in your superpopulation into a lottery by magic, else you'll bias toward those who like email surveys or actually read their mail). In the event you use one of these you usually need a bias mitigation strategy. For instance, you might just state something like "we assume that receptiveness to email and dislike for Java are correlated". It's then up to the reader to decide whether they trust your assumptions.

You might also do some other support studies which help to measure the size of the bias your non-SRS sampling methodology induces and then correct for them.
I regularly explain my PhD thesis on napkins. The explanation involves twins, one with a broken nose; fish; GPS satellites; and a tractor driving in a field.

Somehow this holds a crowd better than non-linear 72-dimensional space, and isometric and rigidity matrices.
Lego, not Legos. That is all.