skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"You never did math in high school"

Yes I did. The claim is false.

"I was always good at math."

From the ninth grade on, yes. The main means of measurement were standardized tests of math ability and/or knowledge.

I'll compare 'math' aptitude, knowledge, and accomplishments with you any time, any day, for money, marbles, or chalk. I'll give you a head start and big odds, and I will totally blow you away.

F'get about my opinion. Instead, (1) in the ninth grade I was sent to a math tournament, (2) twice I was sent to NSF summer programs in math, (3) I was a math major in college and got 'Honors in Math' with a paper on group representation theory, (4) my MATH SAT score was over 750 both times (strong evidence of being "good at math"), (5) my CEEB math score was over 650, (6) I never took freshman calculus, taught it to myself, alone, started in college with sophomore calculus and made As, (7) got 800 on my Math GRE knowledge test (means I knew some math), (8) used the differential equation

y' = k y (b - y)

to save FedEx (a viral growth equation for revenue projections that pleased the Board and saved the company), i.e., an original application of math, (9) used the statistics of power spectral estimation of stochastic processes to 'educate' some customers and win a competitive software development contract, (10) did some original work in stochastic processes to answer a question for the US Navy on global nuclear war limited to sea, (11) studied solid geometry in high school and later used it, the law of cosines for spherical triangles, to find great circle distances in a program, I designed and wrote, to schedule the fleet at FedEx, a program that pleased the Board, enabled funding, and saved the company, (12) my Ph.D. research was in stochastic optimal control, complete with measurable selection, that is, 'math'.

The claim is false, badly false.

Finally, as you hint, we will end with original work done, and I will pull out two of my peer-reviewed published papers and my Ph.D. dissertation, and with what you wrote you won't have the prerequisites to read any of them. Then, you lose the bet.

I feel sorry for your students. Go back to teaching the quadratic equation and binomial coefficients and f'get about your broad views of 'math'.
No country for young men | chrisbarra.me
On a related note, I find myself frequently adding something to my cart with the intention to possibly buy it later on. Why don't I use Amazon's wishlist for this? I can and do, but I find that because Amazon's cart is so reliable, sticky and frankly .. good, I can effectively use it as a wishlist.

Other sites you have no idea if something you added to your cart will be there later, but with Amazon it's almost a guarantee.
Smartsheet raises $35M at triple the valuation of previous round
Thanks! Never had seen it, really interesting.
World War 1 in photos
That of course depends on the number of deps that you have, but you have to have a _lot_ to reach into the second range.
Watch out mate, I've been voted down into oblivion for saying the same (and adding that with London it's okayish to say "global").

Obviously the idea is to attract European and Middle East attendance in the London event and I think it is a good choice. Pretty much any airport in Europe flies to London and there are plenty of low cost flights (Ryanair, Wizzair, Vueling, Norwegian, Easyjet, etc) as opposed to e.g. Berlin.
>What is the price point of the product?

Much like shoes the price of the Widgets vary dramatically. But best estimate trades generally being valued at $50-$200 with the shipping at $20-$30.

>How difficult is it to connect with another to trade it?
Most of the current trading I am aware of is done on craigslist locally or on Instagram, so search is involved, but as you suggest matching trades could be automated. Though the way the community is, traders probably want to limit the number of users they trade with and build trusted relationships.

>How frequently are these trades made by individuals?
Much more frequently than shoes, people I know trade 1 or 2 times per month, but they will not hesitate to do more trades for a Widget they really want.
That's interesting. I generally add whatever I would like to buy later to my cart instead of wishlist. I never visit the wishlist and by adding to cart, it reminds everytime I checkout something else.
I have no idea -- this is just a thought. Perhaps it's because Tumblr as a platform controls its entire user base while WordPress has an OSS variant that allows anyone to work with their code beyond Automattic's control.

When you value Tumblr, it's everything. When you value Automattic/WordPress you're valuing their hosting and paid packages but perhaps aren't putting a figure to their OSS offerings?

I agree that it doesn't seem to make much sense.
They are Wordpress, and wordpress.org. Also Akismet, Gravitar and Polldaddy.
It's totally unconcerned with things like "reality".

If you're believing this, you've probably never done physics.
Yes exactly. I want it monitoring when I sleep, not just when I listen to music. Fitbit isn't sweating this one.
Google brings Play Music streaming to Canada
I love this post, especially this:

"The secret is that any of these can be right answer, and you should make your decision based on the specific circumstances of each option."

My general advice to ambitious young people - go do something fun, interesting, and challenging that your unique age allows. Generally, this means it is something made possible by the combination of an abundance of free time and absence of major life responsibilities (like bills and children). So long as it meets all 3 of those characteristics, if you think you'd want to do it someday, just do it now. Leave the US and travel. Go to college and have fun (but remember that challenging is one of your key characteristics, and don't forget to challenge yourself). Start a company. You are 19. If you fail, no one will hold it against you, and you'll never regret it if you actually did something fun, challenging, and interesting.

The one piece of (slightly depressing) advice I would add this: student loans can be great for ambitious 19 year olds. Just know that you have to start repaying them 6 months after you quit going to school (if you can, only take subsidized loans and do your best to pay at least the interest+at least $1 towards principal of the rest while in school. Had one friend who did this, and I was shocked at the difference it made, perhaps naively), and if what you do after that doesn't allow to rapidly pay them off, you'll lose a lot of the freedom you had at 19 before you expected (coming from someone who has a small enough loan burden to have some freedom as a 25 year old, but large enough to prevent me from simply not having a steady income).
Well? What do you do?
You need to be looking at the sites serving the video ( r4---sn-nx57yn7k.googlevideo.com ) not the player itself.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/793efa92b17c8f727a1f

I used https://github.com/DinoTools/sslscan instead of the one that ships with homebrew.

My favorite preferred cipher is

SSLv2 0 bits (NONE)

I try and use that whenever I can.
How common are usability bugs in the dev channel?
Thank you!

Yes, definitely have — Audrey and Danny are friends of mine. :) Their book is perfect for after my book - I'm hoping to teach the basics and get people started, and Two Scoops would hammer in the best practices and more of the intermediate concepts like class-based views.
If you build it… they may not come
None I believe (unless its an affiliate links). But the focus is on the person reading that tweet.
That tweet wouldn't work. You have to reply to someone else's link with #AmazonCart.

I think the goal here is to benefit brand name Twitter handles. They could feasibly see their exact reach if Amazon made that data available to them.
Modular Cargo Cycles
Tucson, Arizona, Remote | local within Arizona, Full Time

Stack: Javascript (Angular, Knockout, Node), CSS (Sass,Less,Stylus), (C# / ASP.NET MVC but a bit rusty not 100% white sheet developer).

Resume: http://cdn.omerwazir.com/docs/omer_wazir_resume.pdf

contact: see in my resume

I've worked on health insurance claims systems and defense projects but really want something that is public facing, needs to scale, uses open web technology and isn't drowning in bureaucracy. I want to be surrounded by people much smarter than me. I'm looking for a front end role or something that allows me to work in Node and the front end, although I'm perfectly comfortable learning up on a language/stack. I also have Secret Clearance access.
[Ask HN] Teach me how to unit test
Unit testing... Everyone knows what it is. However, when ever I try, I feel like I ended up wasting a lot of time and feel that my tests do nothing. Even worst, I feel like I cannot write tests for many things that I feel are important.

How can one learn to do proper unit testing? I see bunch of examples but none that really help me. I almost feel like a unit testing needs to be taught and hard to learn on your own.
I live in a city with a Target. I think. No one has ever mentioned it. I have no idea if it's actually opened yet. Never seen an ad, billboard. Still in stealth mode I guess!
I've still never seen anything that can compete with recursive descent (with pratt parsing for expressions [0]) on error handling, simplicity of implementation, and performance.

The article claims recursive descent is tedious and error prone, but I've not found that to be the case. In fact, combinators like match, many, and opt map easily to either if/while or higher order functions.

I also think people tend to focus too much on LL vs LR vs whatever. Clang parses the entire family of C languages with a hand-written recursive descent parser + pratt parsing and it's well-known for its error messages, speed, and memory usage. I would also say it's very readable and pleasant to work with (for a C++ parser of course ;)

[0] http://javascript.crockford.com/tdop/tdop.html
Ask HN: “Coinbase just sent you 0.002329 BTC”
So I just got this email from Coinbase:

------

Hi xxx,

Coinbase just sent you 0.002329 BTC (worth $0.99 USD) using Coinbase.

Attached message:

Thank you for applying to YC in the most recent batch! We're sending $1 of bitcoin to everyone who applied.
Click here to sign in and view this transaction

Kind regards,

The Coinbase Team

------

It is very nice that they plan to give $1 to every applicant of the most recent YC batch, but I certainly did not applied for YC. I just sent them an email asking them if it is a mistake. In the mean time, I am curious if anyone else here got a similar message. Did you actually have applied to YC's last batch?

P.S.: someone asks question about whether this email is from Coinbase.

screenshot of email content:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2qx0SXGdTVZNzBUWGYxVGZzaWs

transactional detail on Coinbase:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2qx0SXGdTVZci1KTUZMVVVsTFU

P.P.S.: aspHax0 below mentioned "I got this as well. However, I applied to be placed as an intern at a YC company over the summer.". I applied, too. That is certainly interesting.
You are generally right. The vast majority of our customers don't need help and hence our homepage is basically just a text box to enter a URL and get started.

That said, there are other folks who do need a little extra help so we built them an academy.
> 99% of kids who were "always good at math"
> will continue to be good at math in college.

As someone who works as a part-time teaching fellow at a UK University, this does not match my experience. I find that many who do well at school do not, in truth, understand what they're doing. Some do, but many have become adept at magically divining the right process to follow, and then following it without mistakes.

So your claim that this is "a rant against a straw man" does not match my experience. As a result, I'd be interested to know what leads you to make the claim I quote. Do you have figures, or personal experience? And are you talking about math as in Analysis, Number Theory, Logic, Topology, and similar, or are you talking about "Math Methods" such as are required in subjects such as Physics and Engineering?

For reference, this:

> The much bigger and real tragedy of math education
> in the US is the very large percentage of kids who
> have been labeled as "not good at math". Those kids
> 99% of the time are actually plenty good at math but
> have fallen out of the system because of frustration
> and a poor fit for their learning style.

That is absolutely true., and is why I give some 150 talks every year to school age kids, trying to encourage them to engage (continue, return, or start) with math.
Two Labs Get the Lead Out of Promising Perovskite Solar Cells
With haskell's type system most precedence errors are caught quickly. Precedence generally follows intuition: PEMDAS of course, and then the idea that control-flow operators like >>=, <|>, etc should be lower precedence, while operators that tend to group expressions together like (.) should be high-precedence. Of course a lot of the time it's somewhat arbitrary, but this is because a lot of the time it just doesn't matter. In cases where things aren't clear, you can always choose to use parentheses.
500K isn't that much money if you're not supplementing it with revenues. 11 salaries burn cash fast if you're paying market rates, even if paying 5k per month per employee then just on salary costs you only have 10 months of runway. Thats nothing. This team should have been leaner and product focused with that 500k and their goal should have been a product that they could spin into a second round of funding.
Living in Austin, I've been closely following news related to Google Fiber's rollout throughout the city. The two big providers here, TWC and AT&T, are still doing business as usual. TWC has promised increased speeds by summer 2014, but as a TWC customer myself I cannot help but view their announcement with a fair bit of skepticism [1].

Interestingly enough, Grande Communications has actually beat Google with regards to being the first company to actually start offering/installing fiber services within the city limits [2]. Granted, their fiber offerings are limited to a small subset of people living in downtown/west Austin, but it's progress nonetheless.

Google has been incredibly tight-lipped about their fiber rollout. To this day, there have not been any official announcements since their initial unveiling 1 year ago. But from small news pieces I can find online, it seems their service launch has been delayed to 'later this year' (compared to the summer 2014 date they originally gave) [3]. Last, performing a search of permits files by Google for fiber construction reveals that their initial rollout/offering will be exclusively to south Austin residents (south of Lake Austin) [4].

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2099908/aha-time-warner-cable...

[2] http://mygrande.com/austin/1-gig-fiber-internet/

[3] https://gigaom.com/2014/04/08/google-delays-austin-fiber-lau...

[4] https://mapsengine.google.com/map/u/0/edit?mid=zKGIh6VixM7Q....
It's useful in "shoot a ball out of a cannon at 50 m/s at a 27' angle, how far does it go?" problems.
What about London....?
It was also only a year ago I said “Automattic is healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly — we’re not capital constrained.”

I was wrong, but I didn’t realize it until I took on the CEO role in January.

Find this to be really odd.

And it leads into this, which is at odds with the previous statement that they were growing as fast as they can. Did they discover any new avenues for growth that required a whole new raft of capital?

..and we realized we could invest more into WordPress and our products to grow faster

I love the company and Matt. Met him briefly in India many moons ago when he was attending a Wordcamp here.
Early/mid 20's.
"Startup School is a free, one-day event where you'll hear stories and practical advice from founders and investors."

Not being a fan of rah rah one day type seminars [1] I'd like to know the percentage of people who attend these types of 1 day events and actually go away with something tangible that allows them to create something as opposed to just feeling good or pumped up for a short period.

Separately, the act of actually traveling somewhere to attend is a bit different [2] than not traveling or not being able to (for reasons other than money). I wonder how that will change the benefits of the material presented.

[1] Forgetting the quality level, which I'm sure is high, it reminds me of real estate or investment seminars that go from town to town. (Of course those also have another ulterior purpose (to sell books or dvd's)).

Edit [2] I mean the level of commitment would seem to be higher for someone who actually decides to make a journey and attend to better their future vs. someone who doesn't (not that people who attend locally wouldn't travel of course..)
Read "Lockhart's Lament." It's written much better than this rip-off: http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pdf

His point is that you're not doing "math" in Algebra class because "math" (as practiced by mathematicians) is actually a highly creative process, and there's nothing creative about, e.g., word problems.
Is the name McAfee supposed to be a plus ? Isn't he kinda crazy these days ? That's a red flag in my book.
Excellent read. This is not for a general audience, but helped me get a nicer grasp on the fundamentals technology than I had before without getting too particular in the under the hood stuff.

The "blocks are never final" idea is what I believe has led to some of the proposed 51% attacks on the bitcoin network.

Question: Does proof of work have to be a near 'lottery' system? Obviously it needs to be asymmetric, but are there other good options than hash collision?
> Having kids early means, you can see duties through by the time you reach 50.

That doesn't necessarily follow if you have several kids or you have lots of space between them. It seems you'd be better of just "not having" kids if you're simply trying to "get it over with."
> I'm suggesting NOT trying to gain unauthorized access

In what way is accessing WSJ via Google's search results unauthorized?
Lots of kids see the answer directly for the simple problems, and so don't see the point of showing their work.

The point of showing the work is to learn the mechanics of solving the problem. If you do not learn the mechanics of solving for simple problems, you will not be able to apply the mechanics to more complex problems where one can no longer intuitively see the answer.
A properly engineered tape format will have, for lack of a better name, an "index" or synchronisation bit or signal recorded alongside the data tracks. Back in the days of videotape there was something called "control track" that served a similar purpose. In the video case it was used mostly to ensure the video being read off tape ran as close as possible to the required video standard frequency. Smaller mechanical variations where then removed electronically using a FIFO often called "time base corrector". Similar approaches can (and should) be used for data tapes in order to ensure data integrity in the face of tape stretch, etc. The other approach is to encode the data using a self clocking encoder, in which case data recovery is pretty much guaranteed at any speed so long as the data read frequency is within the read circuitry VCO's capture range. These approaches are not mutually exclusive. I think there have been hybrid optical/magnetic approches also but I am not familiar with them.
Thanks for the link!

In the months since [the hack was found], Target adopted a faster timeline for switching to more secure chip-based credit and debit cards, and the payment terminals that accept them. As part of the $100 million effort, Target announced last week that it all of its store-branded cards would be reissued as MasterCard chip-and-pin cards in 2015.

This will only help customers who have such cards, which is... visitors from Europe? Anyone else? A more valuable feature for the new terminals would be code signing for firmware updates.
Awesome. Just checked. https://github.com/sanbeg/flashlight
That's better...
That doesn't seem terribly unreasonable. Square needs location data because the Square Wallet auto-pay magic is geofenced with respect to the register.
A founder's only job is to prove it.
They didn't intentionally start a rumor. They didn't even try to make it sound realistic. Shouldn't we blame the press instead, for lending credibility an unsubstantiated rumor by an anonymous source?
Its also incredibly buggy. I've had it drain my battery randomly.

On top of that, I noticed my maps application on my new N5 wasn't working correctly. It seemed to update once and then never again. I went into the location services and there was a EULA waiting for me to say yes to. Once I said yes, it worked, but wow, that's not how to do business. I should get that prompt in the maps app or when the phone boots up the first time. Digging through the menu system in settings is the only way I discovered this.
Could be very very good for drug users. Being able to find out 'what pills are these' would dramatically change the nature of that marketplace, I think.
There was a time in the Super K era where the stores were pretty well done. The grocery store side was even pretty nice. It did pretty well in some areas, but they just couldn't change their reputation and Target kept the high end and Walmart kept the low end, leaving Kmart in this bad middle ground.
The Magic of A/B Testing
They do, and generally it's a difficult place to have a car:

* Severe congestion pricing

* Expensive due to severe taxes (generally over 100k USD)

* Licensing for a car is time-limited. I think this is about 10 years or so.

The last point in particular makes it feasible to cycle out the entire country's cars in a relatively short time.

EDIT: Add more newlines between bullets
DIYers etch comic on human hair to show possibilities of microfabrication
Suitably advanced technology is magic and so most people (who don't really know what blood pressure is, nor how it's measured) will be happy to believe that some widget you can plug into your smart phone will do all kinds of stuff.

Also, UK papers are happy to fill their pages with nonsense. They are not saying it's true. They are reporting someone else saying it's true.
Hackathon Project Data Injector Adds Public Data To Anyone’s Facebook Page
"Om is an immutable data structure library"

The immutable data structures come from clojurescript, all the default data structures in clojure/clojurescript are immutable.

Om is react.js bindings for clojurescript and some state management functionality.

You can't blame me for disregarding everything after that mistake can you? It casts quite a bit of doubt on "I investigated this claim deeply".