skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article is making a very important point:

Even for things as "objective" as mathematics, definitions ultimately come down to what makes it convenient to manipulate symbols like an expert would.

This comes up all the time in fields as diverse as software engineering, law, finance, business, even hard sciences like physics - things are "right" because they're convenient, and because the consequences of them being that way make it possible to build on those results with new constructs, while doing it a different, more intuitive way would result in those constructs being impossible.

What the article is saying is that your intuition for it being 0 or undefined is because you've been exposed only to exponentiation as repeated multiplication or as the limit of some series; if you consider other theorems like the binomial theorem, and figure out what is necessary for them to hold without special casing, you'll decide otherwise.
A little strong on hyperbole.

Less Flair version - Happy to see a well know and respected computer scientist trying to solve a problem faced by lots of developers and doing it in a simple and easy to understand way.
> has additional native APIs, beyond the regular HTML5 ones

I think maybe in windows you have native bindings to windows-specific api's.. but whats is shipped here is only the UI + databindings, mvc voodoo for plain HTML5.. for aditional native api's exposed to the javascript engine, you will need something like node-webkit..

This use nodejs just to compile giving a minified js + css styles.. so it's more like bootstrap or ionic framework
Now if this is true, that takes lots of balls...

I mean the whole "-I've put all my chips in." burn the boats outlook.

I quit my job to work on my startup ideas but have difficulty throwing all my savings in. Wife & kids is my excuse.
I wasn't insinuating that those example are 'refined' or anything; just that the ideas embodied in those tools might be worth knowing about.
crt0 would still get linked into static binaries in OSX, I presume.
Well, I didn't mean your comment was a case of naivete, because, TBH, the analogy with my layman physics example isn't perfect, but it reminded me, it's a similar thing: people who are or should be aware that they have only superficial info on something, act as though what they know is all there is to it. The point is, we can't possibly come up with a meaningful critique of this research based on the given article, and, I think, the most reasonable course of action in this particular case is to assume the researchers know what they're doing (considering who's involved).
Thoughts on Amazon Fire TV
Missing Q and A: But if mathematicians insist it is 1, why do high school teachers act like they know more than the mathematicians do?

A: They don't. The statement that mathematicians uniformly say it is 1 is simply false. My high school teacher had a PhD in math, I think it's fair to say she was a mathematician. And yes, she said it was undefined.
Students: Let's come up with some crazy proofs based on our individual levels of understanding.

Teachers: Let's do it by the book and come up (somehow) with conflicting answers.

Mathematicians: Yeah, sorry guys. We made it all up.

Pretty much captures most mathematicians I know.
In no way was wikipedia better, it was confusing and basically incomprehensible unless you already understood the material.

His presentation was much better because it leads you to the answer instead of dropping it on you from the sky. (The difference between learning by rote vs learning by understanding.)
Well I am showing this to my 2 girls.

They have got C++ & Unix books on their shelves but as far as I can tell, it hardly been read.

Hoping your story gets the ball rolling.
CLR apps require just in time compiling which can take a little time to first run. So this should speed up opening the apps.
If having a store inside windows that becomes popular enough, there would be potential for windows to become free to install/use.. (hey pigs could fly) Would that alleviate concerns about it?
Amazon unveils Android-based Fire TV STB and SDK
Not really - the explanation from the "mathematician" perspective gives some of the rationale, and it makes perfect sense & in line with intuition.

Defining 0^0 as anything but 1 is weird since x^0 is 1 given the other definitions we have adopted, i.e. x^n = x * x * ... * x (n times) for positive integers, (x^n)^(-1) being defined as the unique number such that x^n * (x^n)^(-1) = 1, (x^n)^(-1) * x^n = 1 for non-zero numbers x, and the simple result that (x^n)^(-1) = (x^(-1))^n from proof by induction & the uniqueness condition of the multiplicative inverse, we then get the natural formula that 1 = x^n * x^(-n) = x^(n - n) = x^0 for non-zero numbers. Defining 0^0 = 0 or undefined doesn't agree with the formula given for all non-zero real numbers, and goes against the limit of x^x as x approaches 0 (as detailed in the article), making x^x a discontinuous function at x = 0 if it is defined as another value.
I think it might be better to say it's indeterminant.
Hi Thomas,

OTF provides a form projects like ours can fill to commission this type of audit. So basically, we asked OTF to commission it for us and they accepted. TextSecure, a great encryption app that I've seen you recommend, also approached OTF and obtained an audit from iSEC via this same process. However, TextSecure decided not to publish their audit results.

You can read about OTF's reaction to these audits here: https://www.opentechfund.org/article/bringing-openness-secur...
What to do if debt collectors are trying to collect a debt you don't owe
Sure, but ngen solved that problem years ago: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6t9t5wcf(v=vs.110).a...
is it a 4 letter domain? is it a 5 letter word? Domain evaluators are often wrong. Domain Holdings is a good broker.
one day they will stop thinking about windows only.
"relishing in having squirreled away knowledge from your coworkers isn’t productive or healthy."

Did we watch the same video? In what way did you interpret the character's behavior as trying to "squirrel away knowledge?"
Yeah that seems kinda edgy, epecially for Microsoft, long one of the blandest companies in tech.

Not being familiar with the Halo games, I did an image search for "Cortana" -- and while not exactly NSFW, I did immediately close the window, haha:

https://www.google.com/search?q=cortana&client=safari&rls=en...
It seems like this is basically just the same thing that Mono has done for a long time with AOT. I'm not really sure how it differs from the Ngen tool, though.
What is the difference between this and NGEN? Anybody?
Yeah, and mono's AOT too. I wonder if this is really just ngen integration into VS and thus not really a big deal.
I've seen much, much harsher critiques of things on HN.

As have we all. It makes me cringe thinking about it!

I doubt you'll get banned.

Your intuition is better than most; that comment has been punished enough. Things go much better when the community corrects things itself without moderators intervening. My goal is never to have to do anything. Edit: My long-term goal. :)
Employee retention and helping teams get and stay gelled is the real reason to do this, but the "hours worked" argument is a useful tool for convincing skeptical execs.
Puppet and Chef do basically the same things: they let you define how a server should be configured, and the respective applications make changes to the server so that they converge upon that definition.

Fabric is a "library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks." In other words, it's shell scripting in Python that makes it easy for the author to switch contexts between local and remote commands, or run a series of tasks. It makes no attempt to converge to a known state like Puppet or Chef; it simply runs what you tell it to.

Vagrant is a bit different; it connects to VirtualBox or VMware to give you disposable VM for use as a development environment. So, if your application is deployed on Debian configured a certain way, someone on your team can make a Vagrantfile that tells your local computer to fire up a Debian VM and configure it a certain way that is similar to how it is in production. (That configuration might actually be done by Puppet or Chef - Vagrant just builds the VM and fires it off.) It prevents various cross-platform issues from being an issue during development, aka "it works on my machine!" syndrome.

Finally, Docker is a way to run a super lightweight container, like a VM, but taking advantage of various Linux kernel capabilities, preventing you from needing the overhead of yet another OS. Your Docker images might have a full VMs worth of content for libraries and such, but they'll not need to actually run as an OS. (Only the libraries needed for your app will be loaded.)

With the exception of Puppet and Chef (which are directly competing products), all are very different tools that can be used simultaneously at various parts of the product lifecycle. Does this help clear things up a bit?
Do native apps still require a preinstalled CLR?
But you will attract everyone's attention by putting it on Sedo. Rather then just parking it with a for sale sticker on it.
It gives faster startup time (due to AOT compilation rather than JIT), and doesn't require that the .NET framework be installed. Possibly better runtime performance, but I wouldn't expect huge gains there. P/Invoke should have lower overhead, which may be highly relevant for some things.

I suspect that there's things that require this which they haven't announced yet, since on its own it seems like something kinda nice but not beneficial enough to justify creating.
I acknowledge that there is positive to this reputation scheme. It lets Alice ratchet up-trust. But Bob has to be able to somehow confirm the attached accounts. Keybase assumes Bob will check this.

1. It assumes that Malory didn't copy paste all the content of Alice's bitbucket/alice account into an unclaimed github/alice.

2. It assumes a state actor cannot change the content on github, twitter, etc at the moment Bob attempts to validate the associates with Alice's keybase name.

3. Many Bob's will misplace their trust in the names on Keybase just as they do with GPG WoT (Web-of-Trust) systems because Bob doesn't really check the assumptions, caveats and things he should before trusting the key is Alice's.

This name/key anchoring will work for casual users of PGP who are not worried about malicious users clever enough to copy+paste enough content to attempt a Sybil attack. It works for people that are probably already in communication with each other for some time. But it should not be used for someone needing to retain anonymity, or anyone worried about state adversaries, or anyone worried about an "advanced persistent" adversary, or in the post-snowden world anyone wanting to communicate with a journalist.

It's point #3, how people actually use/abuse WoT's like this, that I feel outweighs the narrow positive scenarios. Keybase might be an improvement on absolutely horrific and broken existing WoT's such as http://pgp.mit.edu (I cannot believe this thing is still non-ssl only) and it explores imperfect security, which I am a big fan of. I just think WoT's in general have some other fundamental problems.
>>Cubist Pharmaceuticals, a company with about 750 employees, recently put sensors on 30 of their employees to track the tone and frequency of their lunch conversations.

Whats next? A/B Testing the food ?
A quick test to find out what media you should ignore:
Dart already happened
Don't people on windows launch apps by hitting the windows key and then typing the first few letters of the program they want to run?

They changed this around windows 7 where you don't even need to hit "r" for run, It took me about two years to retrain myself on Windows 7 that when I wanted to start cmd, that I didn't have to type [WIN]+'r'+'cmd', and could just type [WIN]+'cmd'.
ShellCheck – linting/static analysis tool for sh/bash scripts
No. Second entry in the FAQ (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/dn642499.aspx).
The NSA only kinda cares about US law when operating against US citizens inside US borders. Outside of this, the gloves are fully off and from what we've seen, pretty much everything goes. Billions of people outside of the US live in a much higher resolution panopticon than those living in it.
Definitions in mathematics are used to make the language describing abstract concepts elegant, as explained in the entry.

However, definitions aren't chosen all willy-nilly - there are good arguments why definitions are adopted, as should have been seen in the article.
The wisest words I've ever seen office administrative staff post over the FAX machine are:

Everyone's life has a purpose. Consider the possibility that yours is to serve as a warning to others.
It also plays nice with the convention of 0log 0=0, used in for example formulas for entropy.
The issue with some suburban companies is that there's wasted travel time that benefits neither the company nor the employee (unless they like traveling I guess).

Suburban office workers might easily take 30 minutes or more to get to where they want to eat lunch, regardless of how long they take to eat it. In reality the trade off is taking an hour to eat and getting it for free (because you don't travel) versus paying for it and only getting 30 minutes.
Anders is my favourite language designer, ever :)

TypeScript is something I'm still trying to get more buy-in from my team, but the issue is the lack of decent autocomplete/static analysis in anything other than Visual Studio. I'm working on that problem myself, actually.
I feel very comfortable recommending TextSecure. TextSecure might be the only secure messaging app I feel that way about.

For whatever it's worth: I have no commercial relationship with the TextSecure team, have never worked with them, have never been paid to audit their code, and am only faintly acquainted with Moxie (I've talked to him in person to know that he's extremely pleasant and surprisingly soft spoken, but not more than that).

Trevor Perrin, who worked with the TextSecure project to help design their cryptography, is someone I know a little bit better; it would be safe to say that Trevor Perrin is the only reason I know anything about cryptography, and, given a few bar napkins, I can outline a pretty convincing story that he is the root of basically every TLS vulnerability discovered after Marsh Ray found the resumption bug.

TextSecure is a great project, and if anyone was debating between it and some other cryptographic messaging application, I hope I've made that decision a little easier.
So I guess this is ngen in the cloud to skip doing it on the PC.
I understand the "math"...the numbers...the work on paper. But how does that translate to something useful in the real world? That, after all, is what useful math helps us do...solve problems for the real, tangible world. Saying that 0^0 = 1 is a cool math game; but translate 0 into something in the real world (i.e. nothing, none, etc.)...and trying to make something out of it other than 0 or "indeterminate" starts to make less sense.
NASA Can't Ethically Send Astronauts on Missions to Deep Space
I think not having your employees discussing sensitive work in public restaurants around your office (thus easily monitored by competitors) is worth something, too.
Damn, that's awesome! For the longest time that was the only thing that really bothered me about writing .NET code.
Hm, I wouldn't say normal people, but subpopulations of normal people (i.e. not individuals but groups). It's an important distinction in this case. But it depends on how CIA analysts' estimates are aggregated if at all. In fact it would be extremely interesting if CIA normally got predictions by averaging multiple analysts' estimates. That would mean normal people with open source intel are beating trained analysts with confidential intel! In that case, we could say normal people beat CIA analysts. But to me this article implies analysts' estimates are not taken as averages. Any CIA analysts here to set the record straight? :)
Whenever you try to cross-breed an apple tree with a donkey, you get nonsense.

But for convenience, whatever the offspring is, we may call it a donkapple.

That's they beauty of math.
I'd like to get your opinions on this...

I think programmers nowadays are a bit overly obsessed on getting lines of code down

Its certainly possible to write something in one line when you could use 6 if you use the more obscure and "fancy" tools available in the language you are using. One thing that randomly springs to mind is linq in .net
Reasons why more lines might be better.

1. The longer more explicit code might end up shorter and more performant after it is compiled (like in the oldskool performance increasing trick of unrolling loops)

2.When you come back to your fancy code later you may have forgotten about that particular fancy trick and now you dont understand your code.

3. Other people are less likely to understand your code.

4. By using more specialised features in a langauge your code is now less transportable to other langauges.

Personally I think the obsession with fewer lines quickly becomes counter-productive and the main reason it is done is in order to show-off your knowledge of these fancy things.

Note: I'm not talking about the guy in the article btw. Just talking a about a general trend I've noticed in modern programming.
One of the best tree editors I have used (actually a graph editor) was built into the InterLisp-D programming environment on my Xerox Lisp Machine.
asm.js is a subset of JavaScript, and to be easy to optimize, it removes most of the dynamic stuff from JS and leaves a simple, low-level dialect that is basically equivalent to LLVM IR or to C.

You can compile many things to C and LLVM IR, like C++, C#, and so forth. You can compile the VMs of dynamic languages like Python, Lua and Ruby, but compiling them directly would be inefficient - you'd need type checks all over the place. You need a custom VM to be fast on those.

asm.js can run Lua at close to the speed of the normal Lua VM running natively, so this approach is very feasible. But, for JavaScript itself, it probably doesn't make sense, the current VMs are the best that can be done.

However, a subset of TypeScript - without classes, without weird prototype things, just arrays and numbers and computation on those - could be compiled to asm.js. That might be an interesting project to try out.
Top Bitcoin questions I’ve been asked
I am huge believer in typescript. This has made me consider html5 seriously for the first time.

There are still many dark spots (hello js scope, bs standards), but with Typescript I've already built stuff I could have only done AIR in the past.

I find it ironic that MSFT tried to compete with Flash with Silverlight (and failed I think), and to me, Typescript means end of the line for Flash/AS3.

The language is dead easy to pick up, and IntelliJ has been a really good IDE with it.

Highly recommended.
I thought "most of the time" was implied in these sorts of things by now. And you will note the mathematicians don't "say it is 1"... they say they are choosing to follow the convention of defining it as 1, with reasons listed below.

I could come up with whatever crazy definitions in math I wanted to, and sometimes even get useful results. However, this view is not... convenient for teaching, so they pretend that you are learning "math", as opposed to "a particular math".
throws pen at the moon
Fur – WebGL
That doesn't work if you're RDPing from another Win8 machine, the local OS swallows the keybind. What you actually need to press is Alt + Home or Alt + Delete (good luck figuring that out without doing a web search).

I'm actually really confused why this is, it seems to be such an important use case. I would not be surprised if they didn't even test WS2012.
Top Story: Did Coinbase Just Get Gox'd?
Yeah I don't understand the need to get rid of a .NET framework dependency though. This only supports building Windows store apps, which only run on devices that have the .NET framework right now...
The weight loss buly free video tutorial
the 2014 way on how to lose belly fat fast and easy
Sort of like how we use terse symbols for everything because ink and papyrus is expensive.
We actually do have a web application we use to track the challenges (the mail is all done through Mailgun).

Two things complicate managing the challenges:

* We have to actually read the code people send us (if you get things wrong, there's a pretty good chance we'll catch it). We try hard not to move people forward a level until they've gotten the previous challenges right.

* We don't dictate any particular format for submissions. Some people paste code into their email messages; some people attach lots of little files; some people attach archives. Some languages let you stick all that code in 1 file; others, like Java and C#, have complicated directory hierarchies.
According to this ergonomic workspace planner[1] for my height of 1.75m (5'9") I want a keyboard height of 660mm when sitting, and 1080mm when standing. The StandDesk min/max is 711 to 1143mm, so the upper bound is fine, but a bit high for me when sitting.

In fact, according to [1] a keyboard height of 710mm is only suitable if you are at least 1.88m (6'2") so you have to be pretty tall.

The stroke of the StandDesk is 432mm, and I need 420mm so the range is okay for my height. However if I was 1.85m (6'1") or taller the range would be too small.

Back Designs[2] also have guidelines for adjustable work surfaces and again, the StandDesk ranges are just a bit short.

All in all, it looks like a product with great potential, but perhaps needs the specifications reassessed a bit more in order to be truly suitable to a wider user base.

[1] http://www.computingcomfort.org/create2.asp or http://www.ergotron.com/tabid/305/language/en-US/default.asp....

[2] http://www.backdesigns.com/Desk-work-surface-height-W144.asp.... towards the end of the page.
...if you don't mind having all your flesh removed and your skeletal musculature replaced by pistons and servomotors...

Ah, but have you pen-tested the pistons and servomotors to make sure they're secure against attacks?
Debate On High-Frequency Trading Causes Traders To Stop and Watch
Hi there,

The fix for the MITM bug is to offer proper notice via the user interface when a user re-keys with a different public key. There's a demonstration of the user interface element in the blog post.
Convincing people to pay attention to traffic and detailed analyses of their numbers is an uphill battle in general
We only care about their ability to inflict harm, not their ability to withstand it. :)
as a techie that doesn't know how to use ChromeCast the way it should be used (as you've mentioned) would you mind enlightening me? How, exactly do you use it if not with the tab-casting?
Gawker is the worst by far. They really are the web's tabloid. I officially dropped Gizmodo from my RSS feed when I saw them do an entire article on why you should by The Wire on Blu Ray from Amazon and they attached their affiliate Link. That was the entire content of an "article".
"A deep truth is one whose opposite is also a deep truth" -Niels Bohr
Very impressive, great job
This is very helpful. Now all we need is autoupdate so that as a developer I can confidently depend on those new features in the dashboard to be actually deployed on client machines.
Another good reminder on how math itself is arbitrary and made up by humans (often for what's simplest/easiest), and not handed down to us by God. Luckily it's an extremely useful and extendable made up system.

I see this all the time with AI/machine learning. Most algorithms are based on assumptions that make the math work out better rather than being aligned with some "fundamental truth." The world is not linear, but it's much easier to approach it as if it were!
Amusingly, Wikipedia cites this very webpage from the OP.