skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I write software that runs on various jet engines. There is a lot of software that goes onto a modern commercial engine, but the general theme of the software I focus on is the modeling of the underlying engine dynamics using sensor data. It's very math- and physics-based. A thorough knowledge of linear algebra, signal processing, regressions, and clustering/neural network algorithms is essential, among other things.

> I've made numerous rebuttals (many right here on HN) to claims that software development is not engineering, citing aerospace examples to the contrary.

I don't get this pattern of argument. If the question is "is programming math" or "is programming engineering," it is not an answer to point out that some programming tasks require engineering or math skills. Doesn't this simply establish that certain problem domains require those skills while others don't? The same pattern of argument could be used, I would think, to "demonstrate" that writing is math or engineering: after all, if you're writing a textbook on engineering you sure need to know something math and engineering. But surely nobody would accept that writing, therefore, IS either of those things. Or pick another social science: knowledge of math sure does help if you want to perform a quantitative sociological study, but I don't think that this makes sociology math.

One might make a somewhat stronger claim about programming: math and engineering skills will make anyone a better programmer. I think this is probably true, to some extent, and this is what is at issue in the articles' debate over the usefulness of mathematical measures of complexity. But this also does not establish that programming "is" either a branch of math or engineering.

Then again, I really have no idea what turns on any of these distinctions or, therefore, why we would be debating them for any reason beyond philosophical curiosity. Isn't it enough to say "no, programming isn't math [or engineering], but like many other disciplines, programming bears some conceptual similarities to math, and a grasp of mathematics [or engineering] will make you a better programmer"?
> You’re right, programming isn’t math. But when someone says this, chances are it’s a programmer misunderstanding mathematics

Or a mathematician misunderstanding what's generally known as "programming" in the real world. The vast majority of programmers write webpages in something like PHP or Rails. 10 years ago it was Excel macros and VB. These are often customer interaction tasks where programming is incidental, but the workers doing these jobs quickly called themselves Software Developers or Javascript Engineers.

> Sure, you don’t need to know how to build a car to drive it

Just as car building/repair and car driving have evolved into 2 separate tasks, so have math-based programming and non-math programming. The separation occurred because there were many people who wanted to program things but didn't want to learn math. The non-math programmers vastly outnumber the math-based ones.
The management of OS updates also falls between resposibilities. Probably, the shop/chain owners will be responsible for OS and virus scanner updates, and because of lack of knowledge on their part, have been cause of critical disruptions in the past.

I have some hands-on experience with POS-systems from the vendor side of things, and it has happened multiple times that a customer led security patch carnival has led to major issues (windows needing to reboot 3 times before it became stable enough to make a print again, seriously?).
"Please explain how the activities of this organization differ from a commercial software development company beside distributing the software for free."

Please explain how the activities of your soup kitchen serving meals to the homeless differ from a commercial restaurant serving meals to the rich and famous of Beverly Hills beside distributing the food for free.
it's an interesting article, and I'd love to understand some of the science behind it. However, this article didn't tell me much of it.

> "This is why when someone suffocates another person they are dead within minutes. You have stopped the supply of oxygen, so the electrons can no longer flow." - Kenneth Nealson at the University of Southern California

Chemical oxidation is not, by any sensible analogy, current flow. It is the exchange of electrons, sure, but the tiny amount of charge flowing anywhere, and the huge masking that occurs in aqueous systems, would reliably prevent any normal consequences of current flow (like a B field) from occurring.

Even what happens in neurons isn't really current flow in any real sense, it is the sympathetic diffusion of ions sideways (in and out of the cell all the way along its length, if the medic who explained this to me was talking any sense) which results in charge at one end of the cell "talking to" charge at the other. Obviously if it were actual "flow", i.e. diffusion, of ions your reaction times would be a lot slower.
On how they are harvested (my favorite line from the article):

"Basically, the idea is to take sediment, stick electrodes inside and then ask 'OK, who likes this?'
while IANAL, i think open source can potentially be with patent restrictions formally stated. The issue i think would be to enforce these restrictions in court, specifically to show damages from patent violation - if you're a non-commercial non-profit open source software organization what damage you can show if another open source non-commercial organization violate your patent ?

As another commenter mentioned the patent holder may be commercial parent organization who granted the patent rights to the open-source non-commercial "daughter", yet even in this case i think [or may be just hope :) ] that they would have tougher time in court trying to show the damage caused by the patent violation by another open-source.
The point is not that you can't outweigh all the 'bad indicators' by 'good indicators' that you, personally, weight more highly. If you want to make that argument, great. He said 'by nearly all indicators', which to me, frankly, is dishonest propaganda.
Just look for it on Google - http://goo.gl/zKuX4S

I am too skeptic about this whole new IT/Finance bubble. If I am wrong please correct me.
I remember a few years ago, before Apple launched the iPad, I thought this is the "twist" Apple would do for its tablet. I knew the technology must be years away, but I thought if Apple was working on it, perhaps they could've done it years before.

Today, after seeing all the 3D movies, parallax screens, and dynamic perspective stuff, I think I'll pass. It will just be a gimmick.
Then again, I really have no idea ... why we would be debating them for any reason beyond philosophical curiosity.

Indeed. I am not aware of any other field that seems so obsessed with making up comparisons about what it is, is not, or intersects with.
Ahh yeah, at the tools level, but Swift is actually fine, after sometimes with it :p
I like the product and you are clearly targeting regular gym-goers that care about measuring improvement.

You have the customer segment nailed down and that allows you to build a marketing strategy around the target audience their behaviours.

I am close enough to your target audience to comment, I do not measure my gym performance though.
I can see the value to optimise for ease of data-entry and it is a clear differentiator.

Observations from my gym experience:
- the guys who do free weights seem to know each other and some only train in groups
- lots of couples go together to the gym
- personal trainers know a lot of gym members but they also market themselves to them
- I know of several running apps because friends of mine shared their highs on Facebook
- many apps use "races" or compare yourself with others as a way to get through to your users' friends.
- my gym holds "challenges" where you can grab one of the trainers to time you on e.g. plank and then they have a public board.
There are often 20+ participants per challenge but I don't think there's a reward for it so I have not participated so far.
--> people are curious to see how they compare to others in the same gym.

Suggestions:
1. How did you find out about the other fitness apps you know of?
-> I think I only know apps of Facebook and Apple store search
2. leverage the competitive aspect, e.g. allow people to become the king of leg press for their gym and brag about it on social media.
There are several ways you can slice who they compare themselves with
- people in their gym
- their friends
- everybody else in the world
3. find a way to reach active gym members (aka, define which channel you want to work with)
I can think of three obvious channels
- gyms themselves (B2B sales)
- personal trainers
- social media (sharing)
4. ranking good on the apple store search is dependent on a lot of good reviews I think, you can look up what the ranking factors are for the app store (if they are known)
5. mobile advertising to get more installs targeting keywords that your target market would use

Other observations:
1. your business model requires a lot of volume to work, why not build something for personal trainers and charge a monthly fee?
2. Gyms can use some relationship management tools actually, the only time I talked to employees of my current gym was when I joined or when I forgot something.
The difference between discrete and continuous for 3D is the same as for 2D. Traditional holograms are just like analog images with photographic film. Yes they're both continuous, but they both have serious problems with usability. Discrete techniques, like lenticular displays and LCD screens, are much more robust and become effectively continuous when the resolution gets high enough (retina displays).

Calling this a hologram is as semantically accurate as calling a digital movie a "film".
>The pricing is left fluid precisely to avoid this. The price can change over time. 1 Filecoin / N time today. 0.1 / N tomorrow.

That makes sense from an economic perspective but how does that work from a customer service perspective? Is the price pegged to a different currency? How would a user be able to predict the cost of the service if the price is not pegged to anything?
I meant bitcoins stolen by hackers - in digital world where is practically no anonymity..

..and what about that idea, where you buy HW with graphics card and you can earn bitcoins? It sounds so simple and unbelievable imho. That's why I am curious.
You're right, its not a great analogy to think about it in terms of current flows, but on the flip side, it totally is about the flow of electrons. When you get right down to the bottom of it, nearly everything boils down to that electron transport chain.
This is the first thing I thought of. For those that haven't read the book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingd...
How about this: instead of flat out accusing the author of causing technical debt (essentially an ad-hominem attack), why not disagree with the substance of her argument. That is: that one does not truly need to be passionate about this industry to be both successful and good at your job, and that the assumption that one does is keeping qualified people out of our industry. That way you don't need to worry about whether or not we are great. It's truly immaterial.
It depends on what you want. Ghost is great, and my go-to choice if I don't want to do any backend work. On the other hand, building it from scratch makes it an addition to your portfolio.
Why education will not get digitally disrupted
Scientists use wireless Oculus Rift to create real life holodeck
Here's a good example of it so far[1]. That address was chosen to have a hash that comes out as the bluray aacs key, forever preserving it in the blockchain. There's some other ways it could be done but this is one really simple way to start.

[1] http://blockexplorer.com/address/1ujTAfEQh2obwdt72GrmXonakx2...
Sure, chemistry is ultimately just quantum mechanics. Oxidation was always explained as an electron exchange in chemistry. It's just not electron flow.
What Does 'Poetic Computation' Look Like?
I've yet to be so scammed by a company I purchased products from since they inherently have MUCH more to lose by being dishonest. Obviously that's anecdotal but I'm still 100% convinced the chances of being scammed by a reputable merchant is absolutely miniscule.

Looking at the other side of the equation- I've had TONS of customers attempt to cheat me in one way or another. Buyers have very little to lose and are much more likely to be irrational/outright thieves than someone who took the time to build up a business.

As a buyer I'll happily take a discount equal to the cost of CC transaction fees over the "buyer protections" any day of the week.
Hard to get over just how behind automation is. The big scada platform we use is 'disruptive' (ie cheaper and better than the entrenched players) yet they think we should be happy that the brand new version finally supports half-assed, internal version control.
It's only $15 if you have a VPN provider with decent terms. If you're streaming HD video over your VPN all month, you might have to pay for going over a monthly cap.
Who is Arno Candel and why should we pay attention to his tips on training neural networks? Anyone who suggests grid search for metaparameter tuning is out of touch with the consensus among experts in deep learning. A lot of people are coming out of the woodwork and presenting themselves as experts in this exciting area because it has had so much success recently, but most of them seem to be beginners. Having lots of beginners learning is fine and healthy, but a lot of these people act as if they are experts.
Wow, that looks really neat too! ZFS is another one (Merkle tree on block-level checksums, and kind of "distributed" if you squint at zfs send | netcat just right). Not sure if they published about it beyond the code, but some of the ex-Sun blog posts about it are great.

I just read through your Data Package Manager post, and I have to say 1) bravo and 2) I need that - yesterday.

I hope Dropbox doesn't acqui-quash you before these things get out of hand :)
Boy, this makes me feel old because I first read this when I was a wee undergrad.

Great advice and it applies to a lot of things in life besides your career. I would say even happiness and satisfaction in life are much more dependent on the d/dt of your current situation than on the absolute values. In other words, one way to get out of a rut is to work on making each day slightly better than the previous one. Do this 7 days in a row, and you'll marvel at what a great week you had.
This analogy really isn't useful at all. You aren't ever going to use 100% of every tool your site is built on, and there's no shame in that. If you don't end up using everything that Django does, no big deal.

There are some incredibly large sites with rich APIs that run Django very successfully, so I'm thinking that this is all some pretty subjective generalization that is of limited use.
> We're a broad and varying bunch

You might not want to self-identify too much with those who "couldn't care less about how exactly things work under the hood". When you've spend the best part of a day carefully explaining how NOT (a OR b) is the same as (NOT a) AND (NOT b) to the "programmer" at the next desk who got his job because someone else of the same gender and ethnicity filled in for him at the aptitude test, you'll quickly curse how HR people turn a blind eye to closely checking such stuff so they can meet their hiring quotas.

It's not even inconceivable that someone like this has conned their way into running open source software projects, perhaps even project managing a "Top 50" programming language!
Hey Qasar, how do you recommend someone become a better product manager?
So, people are wrong to say that programming isn't math, because in some cases, the task is to implement math?
Yes. Filecoin uses proof-of-retrievability i.e. you prove that you can access arbitrary parts of a file without needing to always provide the whole file.
I agree with you. Perhaps the IRS could have guidelines and a list of acceptable licenses to use, so that IBM won't come up with their own open-source-but-not-really license.

Edit: hah, I wanted to reply to parent, but must have misclicked. The comment applies here too, though :)
Yes and no. Yes, violent stranger rape is a tiny percentage of rapes, but the communication thing is (according to a study by Lisak) largely a post-hoc rationalisation; at the time communication is actually quite clear, but because of this myth, pretending to misunderstand etc proves an effective form of plausible deniability. Alcohol, yes, definitely, as again it's just another cloak of plausible deniability and 'social license'.
The American Poker Frat of Playa del Carmen
This whole comment is pretty silly and trollbaity, so I'll only bother addressing what I think was your primary snark.

> wait wait wait. you JUST said you were willing to shell out for a quality game upfront. After downloading it free and playing it is not in fact upfront.

Sure it is:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/2844909?hl=en

If I don't ask for a refund after the first 15 minutes, it's a done deal. Most app authors would probably prefer that I get a refund instead of buying their app and leaving a negative rating.
I legitimately don't understand why a machine like this would ever need to know an employee's SSN. I can understand why the employer might need to know it for tax reasons or similar, but why does the POS terminal?
Dell will accept any currency at all as long as Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc will convert it to USD first.
Does this mean that if I currently work at a non-profit developing open source software--not our primary goal, just sharing tools we make--that I'm jeopardizing our 501(c)(3) status?
Unfortunately there's no guarantee that the files will stay around forever. While cheap and useful, I don't think it will be "robust".

Freenet offers P2P file sharing as well, but much like this project there's no guarantee the data will survive for long.
For me, debugging or perhaps more appropriately anti-bugging a program is so much like proving a theorem that the difference is one of terminology and notation rather than essence.
The biggest difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually ends up costing a lot less.

I didn't come up with that but I do feel comfortable quoting it.
Sure holding your arms out to type on a 'virtual' keyboard probably wouldn't give you gigantic arms, but most people would find waving your arms around to interface with holograms in the air tiring if they were doing it for 8 hours. I don't wave my arms around in the air when using a smartphone most of the time. :P

Also, there are downsides to standing all day, just as there are to sitting.
Python, Pelican, Bootstrap Theme
How can you predict the value of a dollar? It's not pegged to anything either.

Although in fact the decline of the value of the dollar is relatively predictable because of the Federal Reserve's policy goal of keeping inflation relatively low and the law of large numbers as applied to the generation of the real rate of inflation.

At my local deli a dollar used to buy a bagel with the works; and now buys less than half of a plain bagel. That's over the course of 20 years. Any unit of exchange is valued anew in each transaction; the persistence and trends in value exist mostly due to social pressure and the cost of bargaining. I don't make offers and counter offers on each bagel I buy; I just look at the sign and accept the price or leave without a bagel.
I agree, this would be the best action for both the user and host. I'd add a check on the host to make sure the data looks random as well to protect against rouge or malfunctioning clients that attempts to store plain text. Encryption must be mandatory and enforced, this will prevent so much pain for all parties.
Real-time Analytics for Social Media Marketing
That link goes to a blank HN page.
would certainly be a lot less confusing if the api was actually hosted on the same domain.

as-in: news.ycombinator.com/api

or something...

When I search for "news.ycombinator api" I get a bunch of irrelevant or very outdated links...

https://www.google.com/#q=news.ycombinator+api
I don't mean don't blog. I mean keep blogging but don't bother submitting to HN, because even the few seconds that it takes are wasted.
No, but given the ballpark for a next day first class fare SFO to Tokyo is in the $10-20,000 one way range, that's not really true in this case.
I've worked with aloha in the past. These are usually installed in their own physical switch by the server. They think that makes them secure... It's a joke. Squirrel POS is just as bad. I try to push these kinds of folks onto cloud based systems these days.
I think this is sufficient as long as it's convincing to people in the immediate vicinity, they don't need to be able to see it across the room. But you're right, I let my imagination run away with me on the videoconferencing example.
iPhone 5s in the Microwave
Playing devil's advocate: playing chess involves logical thinking, would you call it math?
I have seen studies as well. And written two college papers on the subject. And was raped -- by someone whom I am quite confident thought he had my permission...until I began screaming and crying. At which point, he got up and left, without ejaculating. I am confident he did not intend to hurt me. So my first-hand experience, as the victim, indicates that, at least some of the time, no, honest, it was a really terrible misunderstanding.
I think that when most people hear hologram, they think something reminiscent of Star Wars. These are not 3D volumetric projectors, so I would say that from the layman's point-of-view this is not a hologram.
This is such an excellent point, I hope this comment bubbles up higher.
While the soup kitchen's meals are available to all, they specifically target the disadvantaged.
Situation #1: Person A and Person B have consensual sex together. Person A gets paid by Person C, who films this sex and sells the video. (it is called porn) Legal

Situation #2: Person A and Person B have consensual sex together. Person A gets paid by Person B. (it is called prostitution) Illegal

I don't understand how adding a camera crew and having the money come from someone not involved in the actual sex some how makes it legal.
Corey Csuhta filed an issue for this four months ago, but no one has responded to it: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71211
“A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
I've been working on a similar hobby project for a bit--does anybody know of a good QR or similar tag tracking library? At my old lab we used April tags, but I'd prefer something better maintained and easier to set up. ARToolkit doesn't seem to be well maintained right now either. :(
Build A Business, Don't Buy It
one problem i have with foreign languages is how its taught. a child spends years to just get to 'i hitted the dog' and still mispronounces most of the words and its like 'yay great job. despite the kid having the synapse advantages over an adult.

an adult spends a few months learning an entire language and its like 'what? you have to learn how to spell it correctly, say all the right tenses, pronounce it correctly, etc etc or else you're not learning!'.

i feel like we're forced to focus on so much detail and our minds just quits on us.
As long as a node you control has the data and can retrieve the file, I don't think there's a problem. If you could proxy the "proof of retrieval" than you could surely proxy the retrieval itself. Pooling resources shouldn't break anything.
Glassdoor protip: The mobile site doesn't have a login-wall for salary information. I always set Chrome to a mobile emulation in an incognito window when browsing Glassdoor salaries.