skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have already offered my opinion in the parent post but here goes again:

> There is no risk in being thrown in jail because of data mining

Not now. What about in 20 years when the concept of thoughtcrime finds its way into the legal system? Some countries already/still (whichever you like) already have that and people there routinely die because of accessing "illegal" information online.

> There is simply nothing of interest to the government that can be learned about you by mining that they can't learn through direct means already deployed.

False. Let's imagine someone likes to play out their wildest fantasies in a VR world using a device like Rift. For the sake of discussion, let's assume that person has fantasies about gay unicorns. It just so happens that the state has reverted to fundamentalist ways and such fantasies are now punishable by death. With all this data mining in place, what prevents law enforcement agencies from subpoenaing FB and tapping directly into that data feed and making arrests based on that? I know it's a far fetched scenario, but the principle applies to almost anything. Replace gay unicorns with whatever you like. People have murdered other people over more inane things.

Also, if you haven't heard about law enforcement agencies doing parallel construction based on tip offs from SIGINT programs, you should read up on that.

> Your concerns about data mining are misplaced and overblown.

No, my concerns are well placed. Just because there is no abuse happening now (and there likely is), doesn't mean there won't be any in the future - with the data that's being mined as we speak. Better to be safe than sorry and stop this nonsense dead in its tracks, don't you think?

And even if there was zero danger of getting harassed by the system based on the information you consume online, I don't want anyone to know what I think based purely on principle.
I much prefer standard mignon types. They are an ubiquity.
Sounds very promising. If MS has cracked this problem, this could be a serious value proposition for Windows Phone, especially for the enterprise market they are finally going after. The new CEO, while certainly not responsible for starting these developments, seems to be focusing the company at pushing out the right kind of innovation.
You'd think so, but in practice it's the other way around. The decision to pay a dividend is effectively made by the voting shareholders, and the voting shareholders see paying a dividend as giving money away to the non-voting shareholders.
Take a look at how Code Club runs in the UK: http://www.codeclub.org.uk. It started about a couple of years ago.
Then they probably spent so much to acquire the user base.
Most significant announcement IMHO:

> Today, we're announcing that we will begin taking pull requests for the TypeScript compiler and language service.

A relatively-flagshippy MS project becomes truly open source. This is awesome!
> This does not break algebra any more than, say, restricting the domain of the square root (when working in the reals) to non-negative numbers.

Sure it does, because if that is the case, you restrict your domain when you divide by a variable expression. If you divide both sides by x-1, then you effectively rule out 1 from the domain.

That's the problem.

Now this is not the same as 0/0. The point is that 0/0 is only undefined when it persists after simplification and only because you can't define a relationship between the two zeros.

I.e. 0/0 is undefined because 2x/x, 52x/x, and x^2/x give you three different answers as x->0. That doesn't mean that every function which has not been reduced and can transiently evauate to 0/0 is treated as non-continuous.

Regarding derivatives, this highlights the problem because to solve the first derivative of a variable to a simple exponent, you multiply by the exponent and divide by the variable (x^2 becomes 2x, 2x becomes 2, and so forth). What this means is that you may be dealing with a limit but the limit defines a function, which is something like 2x^2/x for the derivative of x^2 and 2x/x for the second derivative.

Unless you allow simplification before determining whether the function is continuous, these things don't make sense. If you allow reduction first, then x/x^2 is undefined where x = 0, but x/x is not, because you can reduce it to 1 before applying any further logic. Both may appear to evaluate to 0/0 however.

There are a huge number of things that seem to break in algebra and calculus if one treats x/x as non-continuous and undefined. The simpler solution is to allow reduction to 1 before determining that it is undefined. (of course 52x/x would reduce to 52 instead, again showing why 0/0 is oversimplifying the problem).
Hong Kong's fish farms in the sky
Google is a media company, like TV or publishing.

It's not like deriving income from advertising is a strange way to do business.

At least Google is a bit more diverse with how they spend their money.
I'm on Chrome 33 (latest stable) @ Windows 8.1 and it doesn't work.
You are conflating the limiting behavior of a function with the value of a function. In (standard) analysis, there is no actual value called infinity - it's just used to describe how a function behaves arbitrarily close to a given value.

When you have a 0^0 limiting form (or 0/0, or 0 * infinity), the function's behavior is indeterminate. The "0" and "infinity" you're looking at aren't precisely 0 or infinity, but only arbitrarily close. The actual behavior of the function depends on the expressions that approach 0 and infinity, hence `x/(x+1)` and `x/e^x` having different limiting behaviors as x increases without bound.

But if you are literally considering the function at a specific point which produces a so-called indeterminate form, the answer is simpler. In some cases, the function is undefined (e.g. 1/x where x=0). In the case of 0^0, there is a precise value we can assign: 1. And this doesn't conflict with the 0^0 limiting form: the limit of a function at a point can be different from the actual value of the function at said point.

A quote of Knuth, taken from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponentiation#Zero_to_the_powe...):

> Knuth (1992) contends strongly that 0^0 "has to be 1", drawing a distinction between the value 0^0, which should equal 1 as advocated by Libri, and the limiting form 0^0 (an abbreviation for a limit of f(x)^g(x) where f(x), g(x) -> 0), which is necessarily an indeterminate form as listed by Cauchy: "Both Cauchy and Libri were right, but Libri and his defenders did not understand why truth was on their side."
Ask HN: Where do I go from here?
Over the past 7 years I've been building a SAAS. It's good. I have 20 customers all from referral. They think it's good. It has the potential to be huge. Currently, it earns me a low income - bootstrapping it's development.

I'd like to raise VC to grow it. But the last time I did that, it swallowed a year and brought down a 25-man company.
I tried hiring a developer but didn't have the cashflow to cover the time recruiting, finding offices and managing.
I've tried raising cash from friends / family / clients. That might happen yet, but it's an incredibly slow and time-consuming process.

Can HN help suggest the best route forward?
>Not having to constantly keep adding types all over

You don't have to if you don't want to.

>not having to constantly refactor things because I now accept object instead of an int etc is refreshing

Again this is your choice, you can omit types if you want

TS gives you the option to add typing if you want it. And that is huge in my book, try refactoring a large enterprise app written in JS vs. written in TS.
Oh please, the companies are being bought out not because of some engineering masterpiece, but for already checked and working idea + loyal userbase.
Packer really belongs in that list, or will soon be a bigger part of it, imo. Packer is another HashiCorp (vagrant) product and in the same way vagrant lets you use your config mgmt to launch and provision a vm, packer lets you use your config mgmt to build an image for various target platforms (ami, vbox, docker, etc.).
> Would you believe those 999,999 non-voting shares are worthless?

If the owner of the company had shown no indication of ever wanting to pay a dividend, and if there was no reason to assume the company would ever be liquidated, then yeah -- there is no reason for those shares to have any non-zero value. Future cash flows are only relevant insofar as shareholders can receive or influence them.

If those 99999 shares have any value it's because they're the official baseball cards of the company, and baseball cards' values increase when the player on the front performs well.
Exactly.

I don't see MS as humble here at all. They are backtracking because they are forced to backtrack as it is evident that their idea of an OS does not work. But do they backtrack in the right fashion? No. "As little as possible" seems to be the mission statement.

People want the old start menue back. They voice their opinions as "Where is the start button?" To anyone with half a brain it should be clear that they didn't just mean the UI element of that button but the functionality behind it. And as much as I hate Microsoft's shortcomings as of late, I doubt that they really believed "Well, if they just want that button, give them the button but once clicked it'll still do the same shift to metro it did before. That should give people what they want" I doubt anybody could be that dense.

And even this "return of the old start menue" is not what people want. As they still keep on with the Metro part of things.

A simple choice during install. Is all that is needed. "Do you want touch or desktop?" Touch meaning Metro and desktop meaning, well, desktop. Without any metro tile nonsense what-so-ever. Done. All of the issues with Win8 and I mean all of them would be gone. But that doesn't fit with Microsoft's vision of having tiles everywhere. So, by the way they are "fixing" win8 and refusing to acknowledge that metro needs to die, at least on the desktop, I really doubt that "Win9" would be any better.

We finally get off the "every other version of windows is usable" because now, every version of windows will be worse than its predecessor.
They'll need a lot of people at .02€ to kickstarter[1] their way to pay $10bn[2].

[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge
[2] http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2323882/dropbox-valued-at-usd...
Crazy little thing called Science
Better article:

http://business.financialpost.com/2014/04/02/google-inc-stoc...
A crypto currency network that requires constant hash thrashing is not one I'd call well designed. It appears to be a trade-off for the decentralisation of initial currency issuing, not something everyone considers important.
But if you're unlucky, you pick a set of axioms that makes the whole system inconsistent, which means that you can prove anything, which means that the whole system is useless. To say that it is purely arbitrary is in a sense right, but it seems to undermine the care that you have to go through in order to be reasonably sure that the system is not set up to fail.
"Senior" means that they're also old, and possibly straight, not counting ableism.
Thanks for the heads up, might have to make that my next work/travel destination!
It depends on where you are coming from. If your context are ordinal numbers then you are right and a typical definition of 0 is {} and of s(x) is x∪{x}. But if you working with finite fields for example then you only have an addition operation. "Successor" does not make much sense there, since 1+1+…+1=0 for the right amount of additions (you are calculating modulo a prime). Since 0+1:=1 is trivial you usually start with 1 and define 2 as 1+1, 3 as 1+1+1…
Ask HN: Contributors for open courseware on web development
I always wanted a structured free course on web development which covers every aspect of web development, so I am going to create a project for it. What I want is some guidance and contributors from web development industry so that together we can create some great free and open-sourced course. I don't know where to start, I am just a beginner in this industry. Still I created a github repo with some catalogue from my point of view. The link is https://github.com/hiteshtr/open-courseware-web-development

Any one wants to contribute or join me in can mail me:
hiteshtr_at_gmail_dot_com
Being a user of both Linux and PostrgreSQL, I'm very interested in this issue, but I only understand some of the words...

Could everybody wiser than me tell me if I should be concerned and the possible implications of these decisions? Should I invest in alternative platforms?
LinkedIn Co-Founder Guericke Goes Full-time at German VC firm Earlybird
Ah, but the Libertarian Party by definition represents those Libertarians who see a role for the state.
ah, ok. i understand what you mean now.

i would not say that it is already won, though. only a minority of US states recognizes gay marriage, and over 70 countries (if i remember correctly) worldwide criminalize homosexuality. and even when it is won, it will still take time for the people affected by the discrimination to simply relax and transcend it all. i would certainly not expect, not even today, that a black person be all reconciliatory with someone supporting an interracial marriage ban... it just doesn't work that way.

and, no offense, but try to consider what it would like to be to walk in my shoes. it is very easy to give advice to other people about how they should handle such problems, but it can easily come across as condescending. all of us in the LGBT community think about and discuss these things A LOT. and what we won so far, we fought for it our way, in a way that we found to work.
Interns can Run your Business
Will Living on Mars Drive Us Crazy?
You can find ads online.

Basically, get a degree in a related field (international politics, security, languages, demographics, economics, etc), and have decent marks. Apply. Don't tell anyone (until they have briefed you on what you can say). Don't have any skeletons in your closet.

It's basically like getting a USAID job, but probably not as competitive (lots of funding = lots of positions, and most people doing these kinds of degrees tend to not be very pro-defence) and with slightly higher security requirements.
They killed the DNT header to generate some cheap PR.
You're right, it doesn't work on my Desktop either. It's very weird that it works fine on Chrome for Android.
"It appears to be a trade-off for the decentralisation of initial currency issuing, not something everyone considers important."

Mining isn't (primarily) for currency issuance - it's decentralization of secure transaction processing. Which still isn't something everyone considers important, of course.
Those names are consistent with each other.
This is simply wrong. 1+1=2 is the same kind of statement as 2^1=2 - it follows from the definition of the operation and from a general rule (it would be absurd here to say that 2^1 is the definition of 2, or that 2^1=2 is part of the definition of ^). 0^0 is just a meaningless symbol unless given explicit definition. There is no popular set of axioms where 1+1=2 is taken as an axiom - it is always proven. The symbol 2 is not defined as 1+1.

Conceptually this reflects the fact that knowing what 2 means is different from knowing what 1 means and what addition means. In principle a computer can correctly recognize 2 apples as being 2 apples without knowing anything about addition and without being able to recognize 1 apple.
I'm seeing an increasing gap between what I need and what most people need. I haven't used a start menu for months since switching to i3wm and its dmenu, which is also making the mouse seem redundant for most tasks.
That article could be interesting in a number of different ways like -What software did he choose when switching from osx to windows. (I use both OSs, and there is always some cryptic obscure tool that I didn't know about).

Instead, it reads like a bunch of diary entries from a guy who worked for Apple 10 years ago (this is why he claims to know Apple "inside out"), about some of his past jobs and what OS was used.

Sorry for the negativity, maybe someone else can extract something useful from the article.
Venezuela: A Call for Peace
Six good reasons why you need to make a switch from Eclipse to Android Studio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_for_Supermarkets

69,000 French Francs in 1983.
I make software - I don't think it really matters what you call yourself, and I've certainly never seen anyone not get hired because they were looking for a software engineer and someone had "backend programmer" on their resume.
(Disclosure: I am the Product Manager of Zoho Books) I invite you to try Zoho Books. It is a complete double entry accounting package that handles invoicing, online payments via Paypal, Stripe and others, Payables, Automatic bank feeds, sales and purchase orders and lots more. Furthermore, when you sign up for Zoho Books, you get instant access to over 25+ applications from Zoho.com

We recently launched a new version of Zoho Books with lot of enhancements. If all you need is an invoicing tool, we have Zoho Invoice. That lets you to invoice your clients, record expenses and include them in your invoices and get paid online.

Please give it a spin and let me know your feedback. You can reach me at prashant at zohocorp dot com
Jean Michel Jarre did this in 1983, I highly doubt that they were not aware of that when doing this. Musique Pour Supermarche is definitely not he best he made but the mechanism was exactly identical.
Addiction to connection
Indian state drops Windows, switches to Linux
+1 for seeing this code!
Well sure, it does both. There are (theoretical) systems that allow cryptographically secure transactions to take place without so much thrashing though. Even verifiable offline transactions.

Of course bitcoin's major advantage is that it's already here and working.
What it’s like to be an engineer in a sales meeting
The quiet pivot
> Though presumably this will be arbitraged away quickly

Only if the market believes they have the same fundamental value.

Edit: well, if differences in price stabilise then you might "arb" unequal price movements away, but it's still risky. The best you can probably do is bet generally on corellated movements, not fine-grained one-to-one matching.
Reading some (probably hard technical) books is the hardest way there is to start this thing. Especially with C++ where it’s hard enough just to see your results. If you want something to be done, give them something where they can see their results ASAP. You can of course achieve this with C++, but then you should get them a working IDE, debugger and maybe some easy graphical library to play around with.
Dai/Nakamoto emails
0^2 and 0^1 may be zero, but 0^-1 and 0^-2 are infinite. So I don't think that intuition leads to 0^0=0. If anything 0^0=1 preserves the symmetry.
How does it stack with dart?
+1 I'd love to see a FreeBSD kernel hacker chime in here.

ZFS enables some interesting things for pgsql:

* http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Performance_tuning#PostgreSQL - it seems like the primarycache setting prevents the double buffering problem that Linux' page cache has

* http://citusdata.com/blog/64-zfs-compression

I run pgsql on FreeBSD/ZFS and have no complaints but am not taxing the system.
"For most of the united States growth and prosperity, it was on the gold standard."

Like the Great Depression, yes.
Someone else commented what I also suspected. It is not that MS didn't do any usability studies or analysis what is better. It is just that they suits had a pre established vision on how to do things and then they tossed the studies that didn't support that vision and kept the ones that did.

It is like wanting a nice feedback about Star Trek, so you go to a Star Trek convention and stay the hell away from any Star Wars Convention. There, you will have massive data that support your pre established notion that Trek is the best thing since sliced bread.
The most important thing is to run the webgl conformance test (online https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-confo... github https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGL) every day on a variety of machines with different configurations (I assume you have an automated test farm).

Another measure that's also very useful is to run the webgl performance regression test suite every day to see if performance got worse or better with the changes.

Unfortunately there isn't a comprehensive GLSL syntax test suite, but GLSL has been much of a sore point in IE where some syntax that's valid GLSL would work except in IE (such as uniforms separated by a comma).

I've submitted some tickets to IE (and added more conformance tests to cover them) for some of the gaps (gl.SAMPLES, gl.STENCIL_BITS, gl.SUBPIXEL_BITS).

A thing that's also a sore point is IEs lack of support for very common extensions such as OES_texture_float_linear, WEBGL_compressed_texture_s3tc, WEBGL_depth_texture, OES_standard_derivatives, OES_vertex_array_object, ANGLE_instanced_arrays, OES_element_index_uint, WEBGL_lose_context. You can get an overview of the state of support on http://webglstats.com/

A note on floating point texture extensions. If you implement one extension (for instance OES_texture_float) you should really implement the companion extensions as well for texture_float_linear and color_buffer_float. Only the triplet of extensions provides comprehensive overview of support.

Personally I'd like to see these run in IE of course: http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/feb/15/soft-shadow-mapping/ http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/feb/04/high-performance-js-... http://codeflow.org/webgl/deferred-irradiance-volumes/www/ http://codeflow.org/webgl/trails/www/ http://codeflow.org/webgl/barycentric-wireframe/www/ http://codeflow.org/webgl/ssao/

I think the demos above are fairly good usecases for gaps that you might have, because they exercise a lot of functionality, they're not bound to some specific framework (like three.js) but they are WebGL conformant.
I find the new task manager much more informative and it often saves me from starting the resource monitor. The new file transfer log is also very fancy and useful, although that doesn't really count as a productivity enhancement.
>> Pressing the power button on the computer did not turn it off, but put the machine into a "suspend" mode. <<

Wow, another piece of technology which is older than I thought.
At a very high level, sure.
Show HN: Rails 4 Landing
Github: https://github.com/GAFuller/rails-4-landing
Emacs has `M-x ispell-comments-and-strings`, via ispell, which is all I've used in the past.
To me the matter looks similar to taking the conjunction of the empty set, which is defined to be TRUE. This, however, starts to make sense when you see that the taking the conjunction of a set X can be interpreted as "forall x in X, x is TRUE". If X is empty then this statement is trivially true.
> It sounds arrogant

Well, yes and no. You're probably right that you have some unique skills. But the curse of the founder is that you can't separate yourself, and how you do things, from the job. There are probably other ways to run that company, which you can't see, which are perfectly fine. Maybe the next person won't take as many risks but that's what you (and your employees) probably want at this stage.

And even if you are that unique, are you saying that you in a burnt-out state is still better than anybody else at their best?
LIFE IS SHORT, PROUST IS LONG
People thought the same about YouTube, but that turned out to be a brilliant (and very profitable) move.

Then again, they also thought the same about AOL/TimeWarner, and they were absolutely right then.

It's usually pretty futile to try to predict the future. I can see Zuck's reasoning with the Whatsapp purchase, though, and I don't think he's insane. He and Larry probably understand the structure of the tech industry a lot better than most people.
FreeBSD has something like

SHMMAXPGS, SHMMAX in postgresql.conf

in the

sysctl.conf
kern.ipc.shmall
kern.ipc.shmall