skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree! TextSecure is an excellent project. We're actually very lucky to be able to bring in Trevor Perrin this month to contribute to Cryptocat.
This actually isn't original, its a copycat tactic (Jay-Z did it first)#. The "record" in record lable being short for "recording". Here, they are giving away the reproduction rights under the expectation that the owner will (trivially) reproduce and distribute the "records" for token economics. The new "middleman" will be happy to do this <on their own dime> and basically give the recordings away. This will make sense because the promotional value of the giveaways will exceed the trivial reproduction costs. That is a pretty effective demonstration. Lastly, lets say they get 5 million dollars. That would be the equivalent of doing a 5x (million) platinum record sales, but with still better economics (less rip offs) on the production costs. So in this model, 1 sale to an "art market" is better than 5 million sales through a record label for the artist. And the consumers get basically free product (as swag). That seems like a win/win. That was the model upon which this structure was originally premised.

[For the downvoters: Read the Forbes article from 6 days ago, below]

# http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2014/03/26/...]
This is very true! But that doesn't make it right.

Life usually has objective victory conditions. Even if you're playing by your own rules, the rules tend to be objective, because humans tend to care about the real world, not what we can convince ourselves.

If your startup fails, you are not going to wave a wand in your mind and say "I've won!" If you do, you will not feel fulfilled. You will not feel happy. Even if your startup was viciously heaving its death throes for years and you finally, finally pulled the plug, you will not feel "victory" in the sense you would if you were bought by Oracle and made a millionaire, because of your stock options.

Your employees will not sit around a table clapping, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nObH1R9ONw

It's very true that people try to convince themselves, following a loss, that they in fact won. They try to convince themselves that now they're free to start the next company, which will surely be a success, or that the person who left them wasn't right for them anyways, and that they'll meet someone new.

But in reality, the next company is sometimes also a failure, and the person who left you sometimes was your only soulmate, driven away by your workaholism or your nagging or whatever else you did.

We can lie to ourselves, but it's hard to truly deceive yourself. Think back to the times in your life when you've lost; you know what they are, and you know how they feel. When you lose again, and you will lose again, you'll know that you've lost then too.
NGEN caches native code on the machine. You're still running from the CIL executable and you still need to have the framework installed, it just loads the machine code from the cache instead of JITing it. This appears to generate a native executable.
Proper nutrition is extremely important for productivity, so that probably wouldn't be a terrible idea...
See "The Simpsons" episode CABF01, "Lisa the Tree Hugger", for some good examples of stereotypical comedic Asian immigrant speak:

--------------

Bart: Man, I need a job.

[passes the You Thai Now restaurant]

Thai Man: [comes out of restaurant] You need job? I have job for you.

[they both enter the restaurant]

You take these.

[hands Bart a stack of doorknob signs]

You hang Thai menu on door. I get more business. Send daughters to small liberal arts college. Swarthmore, maybe Sarah Lawrence. Call professors by first name. Ha -- dynamite!

Bart: Hang 'em on the door. Got it.

...Bart finds the job too hard, and tosses then menus in dumpster. The restaurant owner finds him...

Thai Man: You quitter! [sing-song:] Quitter boy! Quitter boy!

Bart: I'm sorry.

Thai Man: Now restaurant fail. Children go to state college. Serious students powerless against drunken jockocracy. Baseball hats everywhere.

Bart: Hey, man, this job is too dangerous.

Thai Man: Menu boy no be coward, like shrimp; menu boy be brave, like prawn.

...montage of Bart training...

Thai Man: Menu boy must move silently, like ghost. Leave no footprint, only lunch specials.

[hands Bart some menus]

Bart: Hai! [Bart flips around, covering a wing chun dummy with menus]

--------------

The text quoted by Edmond does have the same kind of speech patterns.
0 ^ any positive power = 0

0 ^ any negative power = 1/0 = undefined = +- inf

So strictly only the right limit as n --> 0 of 0^n = 0. Not the limit.
Middle of the night, middle of the ocean, no ATC responsible for it at that moment and likely both controllers were busy with the planes that they were responsible for... don't think its that mysterious.
No MDIL. NGEN can still JIT for things like cross domain generics and because it loads non-native code, still needs to optimize at run time.

Project N compiles to fully native code, so there can be no JIT, and significantly smarter optimizations can happen since they don't impact performance at runtime.
Hi Jolo!

It's part manual, part automated now. I queue up popular stories and pick them by hand - so there's a diverse range of news.
Seems fine to me. My dad started programming in the late 60s. I've been doing it for money for 25 years. He says "coding" as a catchall term, and so do I. At some point words get new meanings.
Yahoo Bolsters Encryption Between Data Centers, Promises Encrypted Messenger
How to build a Bitcoin client from scratch with Go
Introducing Calibre
Very inspiring! Did you compile a list of the resources you used while learning each of the languages/libraries or was it pretty random?
So, uh, can I compile my C# app to an bare x64 .exe file, statically linked with no runtime dependency on the .NET Framework, that will run on Windows 7 and 8? Or not?

Edit: This is a much better link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/dn642499.aspx
Still not sure though, as they say "only Windows Store apps can be created" which sounds suspiciously like "no".
To those snarky people how say something equivalent to "just use a box", if your desk setup includes three 24" monitors, that is not a practical solution. Even if you only changed between sitting and standing once a day it would not be practical.

[Edit: Some are pointing out cheaper and alternative ways without any snark or smugness, which is great. I wasn't aiming at them and appreciate their input.]

With one trifling exception, the universe consists entirely of other people. A box may not solve their use case just because it solves yours. For them an affordable motorised desk may be the perfect solution.

So stop being a dick.
I feel like in discrete mathematics (especially combinatorics), since we don't use continuous functions, it's useful to say 0^0 is 1, along with 0! = 1, and so on. Makes a lot of things around Binomial theorem and the like easier. I'm not so sure if it's safe to use that when doing and calculus proofs or anything along those lines, but there, you have more useful tools for dealing with limits that might approach 0^0.
Bitcoin Day 2
Status Update: Encryption at Yahoo
Only for Windows store? So who thinks walled gardens and feudalization are coming to all desktop OSes in the next 5 years?

In the future, a store / certificate authority will be able to arbitrarily revoke your right to run anything on your computer that isn't approved.
Ad-Removal Extension Youtube Options to Charge Monthly Subscription
>but look at how difficult it is for autocratic regimes of the world today to suppress human curiosity.

Westerners say that, as if the Reganesque march of progress will destroy any and all nation-states not ideologically subservient to the US of A, but in reality, China is never going to fall; Iran is never going to have free elections; not even Myanmar or even North Korea are going to shift.

The greatest and most heralded revolt of the 21st century replaced an autocratic president with a military dictatorship. But we pretend that Twitter can solve the dire social problems we face; that autocratic regimes can never suppress human curiosity; that one day, maybe not this day, maybe not the next day, but one day, freedom will ring.

But again, life is not a movie; you are not Mel Gibson; you live in reality, and in reality sometimes you lose.
Amazon Data Centers Flunk Greenpeace Report
I would say it was an april fool's joke, but they announced it on the second and it still hasn't been removed.
> But how does that translate to something useful in the real world?

I think this is a by-product of the way we are taught maths at the very start; that it must somehow relate to real things. We start our understanding of maths by using real world objects like apples and we show how addition works and subtraction. I think perhaps it sticks in our head that everything must somehow relate to real objects and the real world.

We somehow get past that when we are introduced to things like square roots and integrals and higher mathematical concepts, but even with those we often try and relate them back to the real world.

I wonder of there are other ways to start teaching maths that doesn't start by using balls or apples? How would that work?
Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
Dear Google: I'm not a spammer selling things - I'm a buyer
Google seems to think that I'm a spammer. But really they're keeping a bunch of designers (5 or 6 now) from possibly getting my business.

I'm trying to get in touch with a couple design studios about a web design project.

I'm emailing them via the addresses they provide on their sites, and Google is rejecting my message:

"Message rejected by Google Groups. Please visit http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188131 to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines."

Is this a spam message?

"[Dear Designer] -- I came across your site recently and was impressed with the work
you've done.

[My company] is looking to re-do our website and build a small portfolio of
illustrations/icons that we can use in marketing (and potentially within
our product). We've already started a "branding/logo" exercise internally
so we're mainly looking for a partner to help design our web experience and
generate some high-quality illustrations/graphics that help tell the story
of our business/product.

So, I'm interested in learning more about your work with [tech B2B/enterprise] design projects.

About us: [50 word summary of our company]

You can imagine that we're looking for a design partner that understands our product and its value and how to communicate it. Can you share some examples of stuff you've done that might make sense
given all the above?

Thanks"
This looks quite useful. Wondering how it plays with custom commands.
I'll just leave this here: http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html
Oh, don't worry about that at all. These things are not always obvious, and we're all learning how to make HN better.
I don't think math is arbitrary at all.
This is a lesson Apple is going to learn the hard way.
One admittedly crazy theory is that this is laying the groundwork for building iOS apps and therefore would compete with Xamarin. Any kind of JIT would not be allowed on the iOS app store.
The math is off. Employers PAY the average employee $35/hour, but they get > $35/hour value out of the employee---or else they would go out of business. The employer's margin varies widely, but is often at least 2x.

However, I feel that when I had a free lunch I wasn't that much more productive. I need breaks during the day. I'm going to take them whether or not you give me a free lunch.
I disagree with your vision of the next 25 years. Enterprises waste money creating new html templates for each web solution (as well as said developers). Imagine if all web pages had minimal layout design (with little or NO usage of images/css). That way developers can spend 100% of their time on the backend (business logic) - not on the front-end. Thus development time could decrease and features can increase. This is because front-end is a waste of time and if only we can culturally accept functional (think Google.com) not creative design, then no developers will rule the web.
What is "^ 0" in general, that it "makes" 1 "out of" 2, 3, 4, etc?
A word from Knuth on the matter (warning: PDF):

http://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9205211v1.pdf

See page 6.
One of the professors I had didn't like paperwork as much as we did, so he shared a little [paraphrased] advice-story:

"Hey, I know you don't like this paperwork. I don't either, but I get asked to do it all the time. My strategy? Give them as much paperwork as I can. These forms, those memos, CCs on emails... eventually, sometimes, they ask me to stop. 'You're giving us too much paperwork', they say. 'You don't want me to give you paperwork? Works for me.'. So fill these out, and I'll take care of the rest. Now, for today's class..."
I have fond memories of red/black binary trees. About 15 years ago I wrote a reusable library for R/B trees in C. I had a series of programs I had to write that were collating a lot of data in memory into several buckets.

(The nice thing about virtual memory is you can make a really big RAM disk.)
I'm not sure people are being snarky - more pointing out that there are much cheaper ways to create an alternative. Plus, it's often a whole lot easier to add a DIY platform to an existing desk than to get your company to shell out for a mechanised adjustable height desk.

FWIW, I have a 27" and 2 24"s.
iSEC also audited TextSecure, but TextSecure chose not to publish the audit.
I wonder how much this is driven by true user feedback and by pack mentality by mass media. I use it, and for the life of me, can't see all the fuss.
And? What does this have to do with the parent comment?
I don't know that I accept this argument. You're saying that because there are slight inconsistencies that we have to reconcile, math can't possibly given to us from God? Has God never handed anything to humans that had slight inconsistencies in it?
The traditional windows UI is perfectly capable of accommodating all of your use cases. You want to code full screen? Put your editor into full screen mode and auto-hide all the panels. You want multiple windows? Just drag windows around and resize them to your heart's satisfaction. You want neat tiles? Use the snapping feature that virtually all modern desktop environments provide, or if you're really serious about tiles, use a tiling window manager.

All the alternatives I've seen so far, on the other hand, are excellent at one or two of these use cases but not all of them. So it's understandable that each and every one of them has a sizable group of vocal opponents (though not necessarily the same group of people) whose needs are being ignored.
He's not griping about banks, but rather private equity firms.
I love Wikipedia. It's amazing. It makes the world a better place. I'm a pretty decent programmer. I do video games so I do lots of 3d math. I'd say I'm decent at that as well.

I hate Wikipedia for math. Absolutely hate it. Unless you are a mathematician by trade Wikipedia is damn near useless for learning new math concepts. I don't even bother checking it anymore.
20 years ago people were still using Program Manager instead of a start menu to launch applications... which was typically maximised to full screen, with spatially grouped apps in child windows.

The more things change, eh?
And further, more people in the average means less variance. Do they compare sub-populations of equal size?
I do think there is some "fundamental truth" (whether it was "handed down to us by God" or not. Sure, maybe our math system is not able to fully express that truth (and in fact, we are pretty sure it is incomplete--that is unable to proof certain truths), but that doesn't mean it's arbitrary..
The article is light on 'What is Typescript'. Can someone explain what TypeScript is?
But doesn't anyone with the Windows Store already have the CLR?
What about when it's a machine for which hardware doesn't actually exist... like a virtual one? How is that less unnecessary?
Mozilla Chief Tries to Separate Views on Gay Marriage and Business
None of the things listed as "not currently planned" are big surprises, though seeing WebRTC there is very disappointing. I've never seen "Object RTC" before, is it a competing effort, or a restandardization effort?
I pulled lots of bits and pieces from all over the place but some of the big helpers have been Stack Overflow, MDN, HTML5 Canvas Tutorials, Rails Tutorial, GitHub, jQuery docs, and the Rails docs. I read tons of blogs and demos as well.
In any case, zero is a different animal than any other number. It can't actually exist in the physical world like other numbers; it's definition is non-existence. Zero is merely conceptual. Therefore, it can't easily fit into the picture of mathematics; at least not without requiring the definition of special cases.
"I just reviewed all open and closed bugs in TextSecure's Issues page and didn't see a single crypto protocol bug. Admittedly, I looked quickly and casually. Could you point us to one?"

You could not have reviewed all open and closed bugs in 8 minutes ;)

Issue 1073:
https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/1073

Another one: Just sent an encrypted photo to someone? The photo is stored unencrypted on your phone.

Edit: group messages were also sent unencrypted, but this was fixed. https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/32

Edit2: ok, I see your point. Maybe they do crypto well as you say, but they don't seem to do software engineering well, or UI design for secure text messaging well. Sending messages unencrypted, and leaving messages unencrypted on the phone is a big fail in overall security of the app. It's meant to encrypt things, and it doesn't. That it doesn't put in tests for these things, and that it did not publish the independent security audit should cause everyone to reconsider using the TextSecure app for its stated purpose.
From the article's example the simplicity of the binomial formula is extremely useful compared to a formula that would have to account for the case where k=0. Another commenter pointed out the useful elegance of 0log0=0 for physicists. These are the real world applications for mathematicians choosing definitions directly. Saying that an idea may be defined in many ways is correct, but choosing a working definition for the system helps to apply the definition to appropriate concepts. This is what mathematicians are doing when choosing a specific definition instead of saying that any definition will work.

One could argue the entire field of Real Analysis was formed because Calculus showed the world that we didn't really have those definitions, but they were needed. There are cases where the integral of the derivative does not equal the derivative of the integral (violation of the fundamental theorem of calculus) without having a specific epsilon-delta definition of limit.

Also, zero is not always the same as nothing or none. Zero is an abstract number that some have decided is useful to represent nothing or an empty set, but really comes from an abstract idea that you can count nothing and have a number. This goes back to the fact that numbers are pretty useful ideas regardless if you may consider one of them a function or not.
Some are pointing out cheaper and alternative ways without any snark or smugness, which is great. I wasn't aiming at them and appreciate their input.
Bookmarklet to save web articles on Evernote from iOS
Best Comment? Brendan's house and my nightclub thank us for selling out early and often.
> In your blog post there seems to be little context that can excuse such a mistake

This is a recurring theme with cryptocat. Stay away for 5-10 years until they get their act together.
Would be nice to know if they plan on implementing special handling for asm.js. This info is nowhere on this chart.
Huh? It just transpiles into JS...
> It's very unfortunate that this audit is being taken out of context like this and used to attack our effort.

No, what's unfortunate is your continued and repeated claims that cryptocat should be used today by people who expect privacy, when it is not yet safe or secure for private messaging.

You're going to get people killed. You don't seem to care.
FWIW, my startup failed, and I ended up taking a job at Google.

I didn't exactly say "I've won!", but I did feel happy, and I did feel fulfilled for what I'd accomplished. Yes, I would've liked to have been bought (not by Oracle though, ick) and left a millionaire. However, I was hired by the best company to work for (according to Forbes) in the worst economy since the great depression (it was Oct 2008 when I applied). I know plenty of people who work their whole lives to do that. When I moved out to California, my friends and roommates were like "Well, I still have a job. I haven't been laid off yet." That puts getting hired in a somewhat different light.

I've had plenty of losses since - I've had projects canceled, projects succeed but been kicked off out of my leadership position, projects that succeed within the organization but fail in the marketplace - and a few genuine successes too. Ironically, it's often the successes that feel like more of a let-down, because suddenly this big ambitious goal that I thought was just a dream is now a reality, and...what next?

The key is to remember that the goals themselves are artificial. I set them because I like having a sense of purpose and ambition to my life, but then I remember that I set them, and they wouldn't even be valid if somebody else set them. And so if I don't reach the goal, one interpretation is that I'm a failure and a loser. But another, equally valid interpretation is that the goal was wrong in the first place - it was infeasible, or something I didn't actually want enough to trade away other things in my life, or too dependent upon external events. And then I've learned something too.
My experience has usually been that Wikipedia is an abysmally bad tool for learning mathematics. The articles seem to be written by someone who has zero clue how to teach the concepts and merely is trying to wow the reader with their proof-writing skills.
This will probably get buried, but I've been saying for months: I want Metro to be the default wallpaper on my desktop!

(Anyone wish to turn Conky into a Metro app?)

Add the usual wishlist item of allowing Metro apps to open in their own windows (perhaps only when you're in desktop mode), and that's as close to perfect integration as it gets between the two UI paradigms.
Microsoft has decided to gather all Halo fans with Cortana! Pretty neat
The start menu should never have been removed. Microsoft lost their way temporarily with Windows 8, in their minds everyone was using Windows 8 on Surface tablets and Windows Phone's, not on the desktop where 95% of their market probably is using Windows with a keyboard and mouse.

My first purchase after buying Windows 8 was Stardock's Star8 which gave you back the start menu in Windows 8 and it only cost like $5. The fact I had to buy a separate application to bring back crucial functionality did irk we for a while, but it's good to see it's coming back eventually in its original form.

Don't get me start on the atrocious context switching. There is nothing more annoying then downloading a video, double clicking to play it only to have it load in the full-screen Metro Windows Media Player, then once you're done to be dumped back at the Metro tile interface again where you have to click on the Desktop tile to get back to point A.

I hope Windows 9 doesn't try and force new conventions that don't work on non-touch-screen devices again. Something tells me after the less than ideal Windows 8 sales figures, they won't make that same mistake twice.