skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To continue the author's music analogy, what do you think music class would be like if it were taught by teachers who have never listened to an orchestra in their life, are barely aware of the existence of different music styles, and cannot play any instrument? That's right, it would consist of drawing treble clefs, memorizing note positions, and transposing music.

Many high school math teachers actually have no idea what math is about. It is illogical to expect them to teach what they don't know.

There is no incentive for people who would make great math teachers to go into teaching in America. No social recognition. Ridiculously low salaries. Internal pressure to conform and avoid making bad teachers look bad. Who in their right mind would willingly do that, when they could be doing mathematics?
Lhm: Online MySQL schema migrations
This quote from a long New York Times article on Google is highly relevant:

"The self-driving algorithms do not work because there has been some breakthrough in artificial intelligence; they run on maps. Every road that Google’s robo-cars drive on was first surveyed by a human-driven pilot car outfitted with sensors accurate enough to measure the thickness of the painted lines in the middle of the road. Every detail of the road has been mapped beforehand. According to Peter Norvig, Google’s head of research, it’s a hard problem for computer vision and artificial intelligence to pick a traffic light out of a scene and determine if it is red, yellow or green. But it is trivially easy to recognize the color of a traffic light that you already know is there."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/googles-plan-for-...
GDP includes government (mis) spending.

During this period, Japan borrowed heavily and spent the proceeds, boosting the GDP.

You need to look at different measures to see if per-capita productivity and output have grown to make a real decision.
Why Jeffrey Katzenberg Thinks You Should Stop Following Your Passion
While not rap, St. Vincent[1] may want to have some words with you.

Ambiguity can definitely be used in art.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whxF0KhBR84
>it is really inefficient to derive things from scratch every time.

Well yeah, it would be really inefficient to derive the formula and then plug numbers into it, but you don't have to do that, you can just teach people to complete the square instead. It's pretty much as fast as using the formula (since it's the same operations), but it builds on your existing equation manipulation skills and so you understand every single step. And if you ever need to actually know the equation for whatever reason, you can derive it easily.
> It seems that "solving algebra problems and doing two-column geometry proofs" is a necessary step on the road to "generating your own questions about whatever interests you and trying to answer them". That is, an understanding of the concepts and established mechanisms for dealing with abstract reasoning and patterns is required in order to have any hope of moving further in mathematics.

---

I'd agree with you, if what we taught was an understanding of the concepts and established mechanisms. However, it seems to me that, most of what I saw in schools was just symbol manipulation.

For example, people didn't actually seem to understand that to get the area of a circle you took the radius, multiplied it by the ratio of the diameter to the circumference and squared it. They understood that you took the radius, multiplied it by a magic number, and for unknown reasons squared that.

The mapping of the symbols onto reality was often missing. It wasn't problem solving beyond the level of having a lookup table in your head that said 'When calculating an area do this, then this, then this.'

All that said, there are things it makes sense to memorise after you understand them - low level components where the speed gained in doing so allows you to use them in higher level abstractions. My point isn't that it doesn't make sense to teach people tools. But that to just give them the tools without the understanding of how they function seems harmful to their ability to create and adapt their own tools down the line.
Geoffrey Hinton uses this same "picture a 3D picture, but in 11 dimensions" quote in his Neural Networks Coursera class. Honestly I think it's the only way to imagine >3 dimensional objects.
This has been my sideproject for the past couple weeks. The project started because I missed the ability to follow up on my OmniFocus tasks from my phone.

The Omni Group does not have an API but they were kind enough to show me some documentation on their webdav/xml based sync format.

The current feature set is rather limited but it's enough to allow 2 way syncing. I plan to add some more features (notes and attachments) in the coming weeks.
Pardon my unawareness, but why would Swype get my location again?
Sense: Data Science Platform of the Future
Could part of this be that "Privacy Guard" blocked the request, so Swype reissued requests?
Check out JRebel [1] which works with a plugin to your favorite IDE if you want to make it really easy.

[1] http://zeroturnaround.com/software/jrebel/
April 1, 2001.
Sharing Economy or Franchise redux?
So I have an application which can attach location information to posts made from it. It requests access to location data (as is necessary) when installed, then lets you turn that feature on or off from an internal setting.

The request for location data implies the usage of the location feature, so the Android package manager won't let you install it on devices without a coarse location provider.

Therefore, like most Android apps which lookup location information, it just assumed that it could do location lookups. No point testing for a feature which will always be present, right?

Now guess what would happen if you used AppOps to turn location off? That's right, it would crash.

Not exactly acceptable user experience.

Now, what Google should do is probably:
* For apps targetting Android 4.5+, certain features with privacy implications will default to OPTIONAL rather than REQUIRED when implied by a permission request.
* AppOps is then able to toggle access to features which are declared optional, which apps must handle the absence of anyway.
(Original blogpost author here.)

They're pretty much orthogonal.

PEG is a particular parsing technique. Combinators are a technique for implementing parsers.

You can write a parser combinator library which uses PEG or packrat algorithms underneath.

In this blog post, the library that I'm using is basically building LL parse generators, not PEG. But you could easily implement a PEG-based combinator system.

I didn't do that, because I didn't want to get bogged down with explaining too much about parsing algorithms. The LL/recursive descent approach is pretty easy to understand when you see the grammar code. For PEG, I would have needed to spend more time explaining the algorithms, and the post was already too long!
There is one difference - you need an external tool to properly obfuscate Python source code. :)
You'd still have to hand over root permissions to a random binary just the way grandparent described... Even in the play store, 80% of my apps have no authorship that go beyond a Gmail address.
That's true, but a lot of new Chromebooks these days ship with "lifetime" 3g or 4g, right?
I would agree with you except for the part where they force you to see them before you're allowed to even install an app. It's hard to get much less hidden than that.
Or, rather, it could be because the feature was unfinished and tended to crash applications when they don't get the stuff that's called for (and the user authorized) on the permission manifest.

http://pocketnow.com/2013/12/17/app-ops

Something something malice stupidity. But no, let's bring out the torches and pitchforks...
That's the neat thing about Lisp-style macros. You have to sacrifice a little bit of the syntactical sugar that you are used to in most languages, but in return you have the ability to add almost any possible construct to the language natively. It makes it much easier to extend the language as you don't need to hack an interpreter written in C or Java. Half of the core language is already written in macros.
+1 for Brother Ali, love his back story too.
He's not, because you forgot: "WHAAAAAT?", "SKIT", "SKIT" and "SKIT!".
Is your point that we should have more informative pseudocode or that readers should not have to think?
Nice. So its kind of like zaarly? How do you plan on getting service providers on the site?
It's because of the lack of creative destruction blowing through the country. An ossified political strata is resistant to new ideas. A lack of new ideas and lack of dynamism creates a self-reinforcing negative spiral.

China has been down this path before- once a technological leader of the world - it turned inwards and lost ground to the dynamic, open and inclusive societies forming in Europe during the medieval period.
Target CEO Stepping Down In Wake Of Devastating Cyber Attack
I would bet money it has to do with business decisions that relate to carrier demands to support Android. People forget that Android is not in the same position as iOS to impose its will on carriers. Rather, the power dynamics are rather significantly the opposite, Android has to do far more negotiation and accommodating to assuage carriers.

Unfortunately, with the waning and sobering infatuation with iPhones and iOS, I have a sense that iOS will start and maybe even has made concessions that it otherwise would not be willing to. We have to realize that as long as network carriers are not what they should be, dumb pipes for data who make their money simply on competitive network performance, we are all subject to a protection racket type dynamic.
I'd use different terminology.

Arithmetic, two column geometry proofs, and even transposing a sheet of music to another key, are all math.

I think the author is talking about education, not really math. Jeremy wants kids learning math to think about, be interested in, and search for meaning in math. He's right that teaching rote mechanics doesn't lead to curiosity for most people. But there are no high school classes that reliably lead to curiosity.
A scam doesn't require everyone involved at all levels to be complicit, or even to fail to do due diligence.

(This whole thing strikes me as "too good to be true." Note how they put media claims above their own claims.)
This strategy makes sense when we are talking about actual commodities that are interchangeable, like gasoline, but the effects are a lot more ambiguous when we are talking about unique inputs to a business like technology.

As an example, consider the current topic of broadband. In theory net neutrality is beneficial in terms of keeping costs down. This is beneficial for web companies. However, consider that without net neutrality, broadband providers have additional business models available that increase overall revenue. This additional revenue can help drive broadband R&D, which in turn could actually benefit web companies in the long run.

Making technology cheaper is good in the short run, but in the long run it may interfere with innovation, which benefits from things not being cheap, but actually profitable to produce.
If you're on Android and rooted, use App Ops X. It allows the revocation of individual permissions, like location, wake lock (a battery waster), and others.

Every time I install a new app, I look at Ap Ops X and see what perms it's using and revoke the ones I don't want it to have.
The work done at Xerox PARC with Smalltalk and Interlisp was great.

Imagine having a REPL to your complete OS, not the just the basic CLI that most systems have.

There are a few videos of those days showing up the systems.
The reason I end up with Python, CoffeeScript or Ruby and not a Lisp is the prefix notation and the parentheses.

The parentheses can decrease readability and the prefix math expressions can make the order in which you think up a solution awkward.

http://sourceforge.net/p/readable/wiki/Problem/

http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mfk-va...
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Verizon's fiber rollout was disingenous. Installer's were told to disconnect the old copper connections to the house. The old copper connections in many states had open access requirements. The new fibre connections meant you were now locked into Verizon's fibre with no open access requirement.

Disclosure: I was a Verizon vendor and worked closely with several of their staff. At an individual level they were nice folks. But, their corporate culture only understood competing as a monopoly and didn't know how to play on a level playing field.
Betty looks pretty interesting. Adding tab completion would certainly cut down on the amount of typing with the length of the commands. Do the commands also accept short variants? Such as i for iTunes?
Google Shopping Express Same Day Free delivery for 6 months
I'd love to have this. Just like I'd love to have 3 layer bluray discs but that's a pipe dream. Consumer back up mediums are still in the stone age besides hard drives.
I remember struggling greatly in algebra because it was like a boatload of recipes to remember. There was never much discussion on what these actions meant or why you do them.

There is this awful commercial in the states for an online tutoring project where the student asks "how do I find the area if a triangle?" The response is "well, Cindy, the formula for the area of a triangle is 1/2 b*h, so you take half the base and multiply by the height and that's how you find the area of a triangle."

Non of that is false, but all the poor girl in the commercial learned was yet another reasonless recipe.
Libertarians Trail Meter Readers, Telling Town: Live Free or Else
"However, if you're still using proprietary applications then you haven't accomplished too much."

Wrong. You can revoke the permission to request the location with apps like App Ops X (needs root).
In other words...we all agree that price fixing leads to either shortages or surpluses..but we all agree that fixing the price of money in a central bank is the right way to go. And we are not able to see the contradiction therein.
Take a look at the Shunting Yard algorithm -- this will go from standard (infix) to Postfix notation. And Postfix (RPN) is actually easier to interpret than Prefix (the main loop is about a half dozen lines or so).
I don't think the keyboard changes UI - from the description it sounds like they augment the dictionary with words that other people near you are using in their vocabulary.

Still, it doesn't make a lot of sense that they need to do that many location requests. Why should where I'm standing right now affect what words are in my dictionary? It's a poor proxy at best, the words that I use in my language are a product of both where I grew up and where I spend my time. Where I happen to be standing does not always matter that much.

I wonder if bucketing users into "these people use the same words" would give better results?
Every kid should do calculus in high school. period

If not going into the nitty gritty detail, but an overview of how derivatives/integrals are so applicable in the real world.
I assume it's for caching data/images. Way back when, many Android devices were handicapped by their tiny internal storage
Ah, that's a great improvement. Thanks for clarifying, and thanks for working on the project!
Yes, I understand the concept that you quoted. Theoretically, it's more sound.

However, I want to point out that the purpose of the 'magic mirror' method is to ease mental math. It frees your brain from having to spend time / space on the extra step of applying the same operation to both sides.

Putting this in the context of 'showing your work':

Normal: x / 3 = 4 => 3 * x / 3 = 4 * 3 => x = 12

Mirror: x / 3 = 4 => x = 4 * 3 = 12

It's a bit complex to describe - I feel how you do basic math such as this is hardwired into your brain at a very young age.
I found this section on the Fiddlewax about page very interesting:

>A Small Caveat:
For now, the word “we” is used lightly since Fiddlewax is currently just a team of one. This is meant to disambiguate personal opinions/experiences from the company’s perspective. We appologize if that causes any confusion.
How realistic are these 21 coders from movies and TV shows?
This to me, is not a sideproject which belongs on HN. This is a landingpage with a mailinglist. I see it says "Copyright © GigYard 2013. All Rights Reserved" on the bottom. In four(++) months a sideproject should be more than this, at least when posting it as a "Show HN".

I totally understand that a sideproject entales a lot of work in regards to creating a business plan, doing market research etc. The thing is, we who click your link don't really see that. We see the product. Which in this case, is not there.

I hope you appreciate direct criticism, please don't take it personally.

edit: clarification & typo
There are people working on improving stack traces[1][2], but there is no standard solution yet.

[1] https://github.com/AvisoNovate/pretty

[2] https://github.com/mmcgrana/clj-stacktrace
Is there any technical reason tape backup is so expensive and out of reach for consumers?
If I understand that project correctly, the assumption is that they think they can write assembly by hand that is more optimized than by using a compiler to optimize?
It remains something that people living on a strict OOP+procedural+Algol-like-syntax only are willing to swallow.

...otherwise they'll just go "yuuuck!" or "wtf?" or "this is weird" and walk back away to their cubicles. Ruby is great because it changed the culture by letting the kinds of people that wouldn't have dabbled in functional-ish programming or DSLs put their toes in the meta-water ...now hopefully, some of them will start to take swimming lessons :) (and a few will drown themselves and their friends, of course, but there are prices to pay for enlightenment)
They allow you to use recursion without the need for a Y-combinator.
That is not inconsistent at all. They were planning it and part of that plan was to hold out extorting and defrauding America as long as they could before initiating the roll-out plan when a threat to their monopoly and collusion is detected. That was the whole plan.

This is also very consistent with America in general, we say we like competition, but our businesses don't like competition beyond the lip service of uttering the word. We have virtually zero competition in so many aspects of our economy and society, especially in those that matter in the current type of world.

What we are not realizing is that our corporations are actually strangling America like a psychopath strangling a hooker, repeating "I love you, mommy!"
My favorite command-line parser was in the (now-defunct) Ubiquity [edit: not unity] project from Mozilla. It had internationalized parsing, extendable verbs and noun types.

http://mitcho.com/blog/projects/a-demonstration-of-ubiquity-...

edit2: another link https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Parser_2
You're right about that, I'm just putting it out there that they're not a scam in the sense of "a fake company that's built just to fleece people on Kickstarter without having anything real behind it", which is what some people mean. That's also the kind of "scam" I heard when people discussed other projects like this.
I feel the same way. After the whole flashlight app data harvesting debacle on Android, I haven't been able to find a flashlight app for my phone that doesn't give me privacy goosebumps.
Mobile and the Travel Industry
Show HN: Get Happier with this simple app
Database Backup as a Service
Isn't it the case that 99% of the population just needs to know it exists, and, in the very, very, very rare case they ever need it again, they would simply look it up?

I'd rather spend our children's time letting them know that these formulas exist, making sure they can perform them as needed, and then have them move onto something new. No need to drill / memorize trivial (as opposed to fundamental and foundation) stuff that is 2 seconds a way with google.

The worst kind of math education was that endless dribble associated with memorizing useless patterns that could easily be looked up in a book. At one point I had (painfully, oh my god, so painfully) memorized about 20 different patterns so I could chunk up integrals into products of u(x)v(x)only to spit them back on exam day, and never again look back on any kind of calculus. That was not a pleasant day week in high school. Would have been much better spent learning Geometry, Prob/Stats, Discrete Math, Linear Algebra, or any other host of mathematically oriented topics.
Yes, it is clear that the Google system needs quite a lot of data about the roads it is driving on. But given those roads with a high amount of detail, the Google system can (from my understanding) support keying in an arbitrary destination.

I may be reading too much into this, but when I read "test route" in the article, it gave me the impression that the Volvo approach is sort of like a train without the tracks -- only able to follow a pre-programmed route from point A to point B.
Any programmer worth their salt should, whenever doing any sort of IO (regardless of hardware, cloud, or otherwise) should be making sure they get a sane result/object back. Purely anecdotal here, but I run XPrivacy and have the vast majority of my apps blocked from location. You'd think my phone would barely work, but it actually works fine. I don't think I've ever had an application crash from lack of GPS.

Part of why they don't crash is the multi-threaded nature of how the location API works in Android. High level: you basically of instantiate the location object at the start of your thread, and give it a call back function to call once it has a location for you. You don't know when/if you will ever get a callback, so you have to put some checks in.
I'll try to dispel some of the concerns about Clojure.

1) Stacktraces in JVM may be ugly, but the amount of insight into runtime issues that the JVM offers you is generally way higher than in runtimes like cpython or MRI.

2) Clojure gives you a rather elegant way to work with the different JVM number types as it offers literals for those. I think Java Longs (the integer default) should be long enough as it's a 64 bit value. And on the floating point side the default is a double, which also seems nice to me. See: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/nutsandbolts/dat...

Above this Clojure offers BigDecimal literals and native ratios.

3) The startup time is gigantic. However, while developing you usually should not have to restart the JVM as you can update the JVM with new bytecode through the REPL. This should also dispel the concern about unit tests (although I'm not sure you can reach the necessary speed, if you talk about < 0.5 second unit tests, because the code needs to be compiled to JVM bytecode 1st. There's definitely still potential there.
This is great news for us in Europe. Thank you!!!
Zaarly is new to me, but yes it seems similar. Probably the biggest difference between the two is that GigYard's service providers are individual people, not businesses.
While inflammatory and not related to the article, your feedback is appreciated.

Docker obviously has some work to do, but, I think you do it a disservice by ignoring the rest of the cool stuff the ecosystem brings with it.
This would make sense to me (despite how distasteful it is to kickstart a closed-data project). Back in school, I remember what what essentially an encyclopedia set that was just X-Ray diffraction peaks for various (all?!) materials and substances. There was also peak detection software, but the libraries were not as easy to trace and look up, so we resorted to the books often (at least for a second opinion).

That they may treat the sensor fingerprints as a Trade Secret of some sort makes sense, considering the current cost and value of such data.
The Oculus vs. Zenimax Battle Is Heating Up