skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that the 'sloppy programming' comment was directed at the volume of requests. Maybe a poorly chosen location poll or polling interval. Whether or not a keyboard should be polling your location at all is another question.
Gendered Language: Feature or Bug in Software Documentation?
I was quite a fan of the manual transmission, but I got an automatic car for the first time now (Mercedes A-class), and it's just so good at shifting that I never even consider it any more. I think of the transmission as another part of the driving experience to automate away now, like turning lights and parking brakes on and off.
We did as well, although it seemed to be kind of slipped in rather than purposely designed into the curriculum. What the school was judged on formally was mostly how well kids did at the standardized exams, both the state exams for regular classes, and the AP exams for advanced classes. Preparing to do well on those didn't really involve doing any science.

The main factor that I think led to some science happening anyway was that a "good" middle-class suburban school felt it had to own some fancy technology to come across as modern and well equipped. So we had computer labs decked out with Macs, and pretty decent chemistry equipment. But once you spent some money on some fancy stuff, you need to put it into the school day somehow.

The computers were mainly used as quasi-free-time, where you had some self-directed time to play on the Macs, as long as you were doing it in one of the "edutainment" applications. Some of those were designed by educators with a constructivist approach to free-form, experimentation-based education, which produces a kind of virtual-science environment (other applications, of course, were badly designed and not useful for learning anything). And then the chemistry lab had to be used for something too; that one was a bit more directed, generally going through some standard experiments.

I found both parts to be pretty disconnected from what we were tested on, which was maybe precisely why they were interesting and educational...
The official response is that location data is used for "regional dialects"... makes sense, but is IP geolocation not close enough? The screenshot there doesn't make it clear but is this coarse or fine location data? My keyboard, no matter how smart, shouldn't need to know where exactly it is on Earth to within a few meters. Within a state or town, fair enough.
I'm a Python user and I love Clojure. I guess I missed the Go bus. But there's 2 things about it I'm not too fond of.

One is due to it's declarative nature (which I love), it's quite difficult to get up to speed with unfamiliar code.

The 2nd is due to it's JVM roots. Those stacktraces, man. And when it happens on an anonymous funtion in a not so documented library, ugh. It's like hitting a brick wall.

The first, I can deal with enough practice and Schema/core.typed. Is there any hope for the stacktraces to improve? How do other JVM based languages fare in this regard?
Between this and bropages Linux is finally taking shape as a viable contender to MSDOS! :)

Curious how many man hours have been put into Betty so far. Good work pickhardt, looking forward to taking this for a spin. Hope you put in some umask command support in this, I keep screwing that up...
The crazy thing about all these rooting methods is that the code is seldom open and in either case they always distribute binaries anyways. Rooting your phone is no guarantee of anything.

Edit: think about how this would play out if you were to go on an Apple or Ubuntu forum and someone said "here, run this executable on your laptop to get extra functionality from it. I cannot give you the source because it's secret. But trust me, my name is FunkBlade3000 and I have over 2,500 karma on this forum, so you know you can trust me." Even our grandparents now know not to do this, yet I see IT professionals happily rooting their phones this way.
In fact, when activating a different input method on Android 2.3, there is a warning specific in that direction, that it does read everything you type, and therefore should only be changed if you trust the other keyboard. It is a valid warning.

In fact, I don't think that we should trust our phones at all, not specifically but only including the input method.
Just about everything I install on my phone is suspect these days with respect to privacy and permissions. Why does BBC weather need to write to my USB storage for example and why do I have to let it?

The Nokia C2 I have floating around is starting to look interesting again. It has no idea where it is.
HN loves conspiracies. Everything everyone does is due to either a nasty moneymaking scheme or NSA.
hey, are you still looking for a dev?
I'm not exactly a Rubyist, but I really like Ruby. One of the things I like about it is its orthogonality: the concepts you learn work identically or similarly in different places, for different object types (where possible) so a relatively small handful of syntax + ideas + the library docs give you a running start at any program.

The same applies to Clojure. There's laughably little syntax to learn, and once you've got that under your belt you're just composing functions.

I'm not made to feel I've wasted a lot of memory space on the esoterics unique to some particular language. Clojure works for me rather than the other way around. This no-nonsense obviousness was one of Matz' design goals for Ruby, and clearly ditto for McCarthy and Hickey.
Google announces same-day delivery service in New York and Los Angeles
LIDAR does not work in rain, on wet roads or in the snow.

Google car drives only in good weather in California for a reason. In Sweden they could drive maybe a week in a year.

... Sommaren är kort
de mesta regnar bort ..
sorry but you only need to do this ONCE
>But life itself is simply sunlight falling to earth if you think about it biochemically

Don't you think, that by same extension, car is just Gas/Fuel coming in from a Gas/Fuel station?

I am sorry, but I find most essays on the topic of 'meaning of life' escapist. Or rather answering a different question on how best to live life, with the assumption that the real meaning is unknowable.

None of these essays satisfy my need to know, what it is actually all about.

Talking about this essay, its excellent no doubt. But IMHO its misleading all the same.
All that means is that you need to sample over a longer period.

And it does not have to work 'in court as a proof' to be practically viable attack, and they are well beyond theory:

"Implementing this is non-trivial as QoS must not only be
guaranteed by the host (e.g. CPU resources), but by its network
too. Also, the impact on performance would likely be
substantial, as many connections will spend much of their
time idle. Whereas currently the idle time would be given to
other streams, now the host carrying such a stream cannot
reallocate any resources, thus opening a DoS vulnerability.
However, there may be some suitable compromise, for example
dynamic limits which change sufficiently slowly that
they leak little information.
Even if such a defence were in place, our temperature attacks
would still be effective. While changes in one network
connection will not affect any other connections, clock skew
is altered. This is because the CPU will remain idle during
the slot allocated to a connection without pending data.
Unless steps are taken to defend against our attacks, the
reduced CPU load will lower temperature and hence affect
clock skew. To stabilise temperature, computers could be
modified to use expensive oven controlled crystal oscillators
(OCXO), or always run at maximum CPU load. External
access to timing information could be restricted or jittered,
but unless all incoming connections were blocked, extensive
changes would be required to hide low level information such
as packet emission triggered by timer interrupts.

While the above experiments were on Tor, we stress that
our techniques apply to any system that hides load through
maintaining QoS guarantees. Also, there is no need for the
anonymity service to be the cause of the load."
Hi Linell,

I would be more than interested to chat with you. Contact me on leslie.kivit@booking.com.

Cheers,

Leslie
Yes, BBC Weather. That's it. They are part of this mega anti-privacy NSA conspiracy too!
I love learning, especially how to write succinct clean code. Clojure, like ruby, scratches that itch and is fun to work in. It feels written with the intent of making programmers lives easier through mastery.
The formula for quadratic equation solutions is not that hard to memorise. It is useful to remember since it makes it possible to get the solutions instantly, whether numerically or algebraically. It also exposes discriminant of the equation, another useful concept (to instantly determine the number real solutions). Of course, the derivation of these formulas should also be taught, but it is really inefficient to derive things from scratch every time.
I built a small chrome extension that provides this functionality. Next to your name, the extension adds a mail icon that lights up whenever someone replies to one of your messages. It then takes you to a 'cleaned up' threads page that only shows new messages. Doesn't work for submissions though. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notifications-for-...
Totally agreed with #1. I think it's easy to forget how deeply you need to get calculation and symbol manipulation into your fingers so you don't get stuck later on.
Hi Danvayn,

I would be more than interested to chat with you. Contact me on leslie.kivit@booking.com.

Cheers,

Leslie
Show HN: Music for Squirrels – new iOS app
There was something on HN years ago about the problems students encounter when they are missing a bit of the preparatory work for the next steps in math. Wish I could find it.
This seems like as good a place as any to bring up Great Ozymandias... I think I prefer Smith's version to Shelley's

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Comparison_of_the_tw...
The funny thing is that the reason for the similarity is that Matz "borrowed" most of those features from older lisps.
I wonder how did the submitter this time come up with a tag '/?_nospa=true' at the end of the original url. ( http://j2kun.svbtle.com/you-never-did-math-in-high-school/?_...). Is it a way to resubmit an old item to HN again?
Well, when all is said in done, the statement the author makes is pretty much incorrect in every sense. `!function(){}()` is a type of immediately-invoked function expression. Even if the `!` weren't there, `function(){}` would still be a function expression (compare to `var fun = function(){};`, a function declaration).

Second, `!` in JavaScript does not convert a function declaration into a function expression; it invokes the NOT operation on whatever immediately follows it.

Examples:

> !true;
false

> !false;
true

> !4;
false

> !undefined;
true

> !!undefined;
false

So, basically what this code is doing is creating a function, calling it (with `()`), and then running a NOT operation on it.

I personally hate this kind of code because it's hacky and works by exploiting the interpreter. If you look at the examples of the `!` operator I gave, `!undefined` returns `true`, which is exactly what the author's code will return. Granted, the chances that you'll get bitten for using `!` over just a pair of parens is slim, you're still forcing the interpreter to waste [an incredibly small amount of] time performing useless operations just because the programmer was too lazy to type parentheses.

Much better, IMO, would be `(function() {})()` or, more safely and explicitly, `(function() {}).call(this)`, which sets the function expression's context to Window even in strict mode. `foo()` is syntactic sugar for `foo.call(undefined)` in strict mode and `foo.call(window)` in non-strict mode.
Great advice, thanks for those ideas. They are now on my list of things to do.
Hi Kilotaras,

I would be more than interested to chat with you. Contact me on leslie.kivit@booking.com.

Cheers,

Leslie
I like Moves (and all the quantified self stuff), but for me, I don't seem to get much out of the data. I just looked at Moves and had 161 days of data, but…so what? I've done nothing with it besides automatically check-in to places on Foursquare, which I also don't really need or care about ("Awesome, I'm mayor of Costco!"). I went ahead and deleted my account and the app on my phone—at least I'll see a little boost in battery life.
Aren't they following the same path already? The massive dump in credit (cheap money) into the Chinese Banking system after 2008 seems to be following the same path that America/UK took after 2001. A recession causes the central bank to ease and real estate/asset bubbles begin to blow up but external factors (chinese export deflation in the 2000's, and weak global demand today) keep inflation low.

The cheap money effectively subverts large parts of the economy because they become dependent on it, but it only works while there are asset classes that can continue to rise and can be easily traded into and out of e.g. real estate.

Mr Bernanke as you quoted wrote a paper about this and yet in the end the Central Bank alone in the US could not contain the fallout when the bubble could blow no bigger. The US government had to absorb the losses by writing cheques to bailout the institutions that were failing until they reached a point where it was no longer politically feasible.

I don't see an easy solution to this, the issue is not just bad debt, it's that there won't be an asset class to bid up anymore, there won't be a practical way to get that easy credit into the system anymore.
The "hang around smart people" advice doesn't make any sense. First, you should hang around whoever you want to hang around with. Second, define smart
That is correct. Math is a language more than 'logic'/patterns'/ and any other metaphors.
And on TextSecure you get:

- a protocol based off the highly vetted and trusted Off-The-Record protocol

- perfect forward secrecy, a very important thing in cryptography as you can drastically reduce the number of possible attacks in certain scenarios

- real cryptographers doing implementation and review of the software

- a good open source implementation of this cryptography

Don't get me wrong, I have a few irks about TextSecure with regards to the way the open source project is managed (see: their conflicts with F-Droid and such), but I really have to question why anyone would use some piece of crap cranked out for publicity (such as this or Heml.is) when there are solid options available which clearly offer superior security.
Thanks, good tips for usability.
Hi Davis,

I would be more than interested to chat with you. Contact me on leslie.kivit@booking.com.

Cheers,

Leslie
I have this lamp too, and I love it! However my bulb went out a year ago and I haven't been able to find a bulb!
Myriadcoin and why you should maybe take notice
The 400m people who can't speak mandarin statistic is a bit misleading. Most of these people are likely to be old and out of the workforce. it's rare to meet someone under 40 who can't speak ok Mandarin. Also a lot more people can understand it than speak it.
I think this is poor user UI. I mean, in this day in age when so many people travel through different countries weekly on pleasure or business, their keyboard layout changes accordingly?

That doesn't make much sense.
Given the driving conditions in Sweden and the years of experience Volvo has as a car company, I would bet they will be able to deploy and all weather version before Google.
Brian Lunduke hasn't changed a bit.
>There’s one kind of student I routinely encounter, usually in a freshman calculus course, that really boils my blood: the failing student who “has always been good at math.”

I understand the larger point about the difference between high-school math and high-level mathematics, but come on, don't be so pedantic! Everyone calls whatever it is you study in High-School & Elementary school - Math.

On a related matter, physicists and other scientists have done a pretty good job of communicating to the general public what it is they do. On the other hand, very few people actually know what professional Mathematicians actually do - something I realized when I struggled to explain it to my dad the other day.
And someone in that thread replied that even with that feature disabled, they still get location requests.
Google seems to have no interest in protecting android users from this either.

There was an app called 'App Ops' that gave android users the ability to choose which permissions they wanted to grant applications. No root required.

Get too many notifications from an app, or don't need location functionality? You used to be able to turn these features off one-by-one for each app. You could also see the last time an app used location services. Android developers have a bad habit of requesting every permission under the sun, so I've gotten in the habit of disabling the permissions that don't add value for me.

Unfortunately, Google later removed this feature saying that its release was accidental. I thought it was a clean solution to a major problem.

Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/google-removes-vital-p...
I am not a part of the Docker team, but I think Docker handles this huge mess of notifications by gunsub:

https://github.com/jpetazzo/gunsub

tl;dr: automatically unsubscribe from Github issues that you are not directly involved in.

So, you can get a notification for every issue or pull request that opens in the project or organization that you are a member of, as usual, but you don't get bombarded by every notification, e-mail and status update for the duration of the life of that issue, and associated follow-up e-mails. If you want the notifications, just get involved in the conversation.

I am sure Phabricator is very good, and I'll check it out, but I don't have to sell my boss GitHub, he's already sold on it. We just need to get on feature branches and pull requests (at least if we're going to grow.)
Yeah, I think that's most of how it could generate benefit, i.e. companies often don't want to post in much the same way that applicants often don't want to pitch. It's easy to find plausible excuses.

Highly-sorted posts are almost certainly an edge case, but convolved against other factors (e.g. relative popularity of C#, how well post resonated with the subset of hiring viewers who ended up seeing it). Whoever ended up with post #70 likely got far fewer views relative to post quality & desirability factors, and thus fewer responses.

But at the same time, "uncommon yet high-demand" keywords probably got a Ctrl+F bonus. It's an SEO problem as much as a pitching problem, and more so if you're not favored by HN's comment sorting.
I find it interesting that the author states that essentially mathematics is formalized 'pattern matching', yet rails against the insidious imposition of these very patterns in the pedagogy (in the form of rote exercises).

Isn't naive pattern recognition the basis of deeper dimensional understanding (ya know, the 'theory')? Isn't this how intelligence is built?

It seems pretty easy to make rag on the lack of 'true understanding', when you've spent 25+ years recognizing the patterns.
What do you want the patches for? I wish I had fewer patches and fewer nagging notification items (Adobe, Java).

The internet drives the need for patches, because suddenly bugs are a security risk rather than a rare inconvenience.
I will definitely consider opening it up, a bit ashamed of the code at the moment.
Oddly enough I never used this, but maybe named fns might help? (http://clojure.org/special_forms#Special%20Forms--%28fn%20na...)

(fn my-name []
(throw (Exception. "boom")))

(Sorry, I don't know Clojure internals well enough to have great answers to your explicit questions.)

[Edited: thanks to jerf for pointing out the inconsistency in a term I used.]
I'm admittedly nitpicking here, but I think "(non-)imperative" is not a useful label for characterizing Lisp-ish languages. Some Lisps, like Clojure, are rather functional; others, like Common Lisp, are considered imperative.

For the distinction you're looking for, I'd like to suggest "C-like" or "Algol-family" instead for those languages which work with sequences, conditionals, loops and probably braces and semicolons.
Thread is reopened again, with the same issue.
Yep, my exact sentiments regarding the app.
What is the relationship between PEG parsers and Parser Combinators?
They both have same roots, the :keyword syntax comes from Common Lisp and others:

From Matz (creator of Ruby):

Ruby is a language designed in the following steps:

* take a simple lisp language (like one prior to CL).
* remove macros, s-expression.
* add simple object system (much simpler than CLOS).
* add blocks, inspired by higher order functions.
* add methods found in Smalltalk.
* add functionality found in Perl (in OO way).

So, Ruby was a Lisp originally, in theory.
Let's call it MatzLisp from now on. ;-)
What kind of help are you looking for? Are you a native English speaker looking to improve your general writing skills, or is English your second language and you would like help in that area?
You really never did anything worth caring about in high school, academically, at least. Math was a series of formulas to memorize and various sequential combinations of said formulas to memorize. English and writing classes were focused on forced structure (Intro has 4 sentences, ends in thesis, each body paragraph's topic sentence must relate back to thesis, if discussing multiple stories - Intro-ABAB-Conc. structure is preferred, 3 pages long, must integrate quotes from narrative, etc.) using forced literary techniques (rhetorical devices, and general "proposals" that tell you how to write and what to write) as a (forced) lens to study ancient works of narrative that no student cares about. Then the essay is assessed on how well it fits each forced mechanism, instead of well, being assessed on whether it's good writing or not. History was a series of events and dates to memorize and recall. Natural sciences varied : HS physics was a lot like HS math, HS biology a lot like HS history, HS chemistry some mixture (zing!) of both, mostly the latter. You might notice a pattern (pattern-finding being a very valuable trait NOT taught in HS courses, because who needs patterns when you can just memorize each individual event in the textbook?) : a focus on memorization over analysis, a focus on pre-set structure over creativity.

At least Computer Science was all right. But that's only because I was lucky enough that my school's CS department was large enough to afford to be taught by some seriously smart people truly dedicated to both the study of computer science and the art of pedagogy, but small enough such that the principal let the CS dept operate as it wants without interfering with the College Board's awful way of treating every subject. Part of a course (AP Comp Sci A) absolutely required you to at least dip your toes into the College Board's bullshit, and skimming over the Barron's book/taking the actual test, it seemed like the College Board had planned a lot of tedious stuff like Java/Java's standard library details, manual loop evaluations, and that infuriating GridWorld bullshit (a complicated, but still incredibly awful simulation program; the test assesses your knowledge of GridWorld's actor types and which Bug goes which way rather than assessing ... computer science, which is honestly what I fucking signed up for). The stuff in my school's course that really intrigued me and got my mind jogging (working through sorting algorithms, data structures, and big O analysis on your own after you've been taught the absolute basics) was the stuff they cut out of the AP Computer Science AB program, which was an earlier program that was deemed too difficult, I guess. As if the College Board was intentionally avoiding stuff that required analysis or actual thought.
Open source DBMS's are gaining in popularity vs. commercial systems
Richard Stallman – How I do my Computing
GigYard – My first side project