skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If anyone wants to visualize how a variety of basis transforms (including Fourier/DFT, Eigenvectors/PCA, Haar Wavelets, Random basis, and Identity basis) can be applied to images, I created this a few years ago which seems to have become the #2 google result for "basis transform":

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~phlosoft/transforms/

It's a bit dated by being a Java applet, but source code is all there, written in Processing. (I should probably update it now that processing.js is a thing. Years pass quickly.)
failure is a data point. As a scientist, I would say, arguably the more important data are failures. Consider it an exercise in falsification.
Besides being the two variants I'm most familiar with, MySQL and SQLite have the most variety of GUIs and, ostensibly, the most help docs...but the point of the SQL isn't for them to learn even the most basic things about database admin (I decided to skip over indexing and I just provide the SQL dumps for imports)...it's: 1) be able to handle datasets of more than a million rows (Excel and Spreadsheets top out at around 1M), 2) be able to join datasets on foreign keys (in the past, I've tried Fusion Tables, but the merging function is a bit wonky, and is pretty inflexible)...and 3) ...something that I've now since realized, it's a great way to show the difference between learning how to use software (i.e. Excel, Google Spreadsheets), and learning how to tell the computer explicitly what you are trying to find.

The most practical difference for me is that it's much easier for me to describe a data querying process through pseudo-SQL than it is to describe all the submenus and clicking and highlighting you have to do in a spreadsheet....the tradeoff being, you have to get past the wall of learning SQL syntax. But I was very surprised...the students picked it up very quickly, even a student-athlete who hasn't been able to come to a single class...(and no, I don't think someone is doing his homework for him, since I meet with him weekly and he's since been able to work on SQL and datasets on top of what I've assigned him)...

They're still a long ways from understanding SQL to the point of being able to administer a DB, but that's OK, the class is about querying and investigating data...and using SQL to the point where they can wrangle the data to analyze/visualize it in other software (such as a spreadsheet)
> the way they handle problems very early in the life of a device is very different if you bought it somewhere else versus having bought it from Apple directly

My recent experience directly contradicts that. I bought my daughter an iPhone 6 from Verizon (because of the $200 trade in offer). My daughter's screen cracked within a month. The Apple store gave her a new phone, no charge. Couldn't have been easier. The only thing the store needed to do was to remove the SIM from her old phone and pop it into her new one.

But I agree with your general assertion. Absent a strong financial incentive (in this case a much better trade in value) or other extenuating circumstance, I would always buy directly from Apple.

Edit: just wanted to add, I think that Apple is "being good" in this, the very early phase of iPhone 6. My daughter claims she didn't drop her phone (ha ha) and the crack was very similar to pictures I've seen of "bendgate" where the break occured near the weak points of the phone. So Apple doesn't want more negative publicity about this. If it were six months from now, Apple might be much less accommodating.
Also the price. $5 is expensive to ask a question. But $5 is cheap to pay an expert plumber for 10 minutes of time.
Well, yes and no.

Yes, in that the argument applies.

No, in that the size is larger. It's more reasonable to say one algorithm is 80x faster than another of the same complexity than to say one algorithm is 530x faster than another of the same complexity.
Love this...have a whole folder of these sorts of placements at home and this will make a lovely addition. Thanks for posting!
Theoretical Computer Scientist could help. The area is combinatorics.
Link to the chapter: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/rage-against-the-machine...
The problem is the one tackled by W. Edwards Deming in his Quality philosophy. He takes the same stance: the quality of a product, in any production, is a result of management and leadership, organizational psychology, effective processes, and dedication to a systems-focused approach.

Start with Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

Continue to this blog: http://blog.deming.org/

Read his dry and horribly written book if you want: http://www.amazon.com/Out-Crisis-W-Edwards-Deming/dp/0262541...

Or just head straight to something relevant and practical: http://www.amazon.com/The-Toyota-Way-Management-Manufacturer...

Moral of the story: Quality (all-encompassing quality, including everything from simple operational effectiveness, to market fit and understanding) comes from systems thinking.
All Amazon needs is something great that Apple and Google can't offer. For example, if I had an Amazon phone that paid for itself each month with, say, discounts on shopping, gas, restaurants, etc., I'd get it without hesitation. It might be a second phone or phones for my kids. If enough people did so, the Amazon market would be big enough for app developers to target and easier to target (and test, and make money with) than the far more diverse Android market. The iPhone apps I care about would soon be available, and I could then save a bundle by going Amazon only.

I'm just saying that it's still too soon to say that nothing significantly better than iPhone and its apps, or cheaper than Android and its apps, will ever be possible from a third platform.
5 things you didn’t know were possible with JavaScript
If you are expecting truly secure phones, you are kidding yourself in the first place.

Phones are inherently insecure.

http://boingboing.net/2014/09/01/fake-phone-attacking-cell-t...

http://boingboing.net/2013/11/13/your-smartphones-hidden-rad...

etc.

When you can't even trust the f'n processor running your machine, you are hosed no matter what you do.
Then replace "orangutan" with "mockingbird" if you like. There are tasks that humans are capable of that other creatures are not. Extrapolate this the other direction. I do not believe that humanity's current evolutionary state is the pinnacle of what intelligence can be.
Uhm, do you consider $1500 for a brand new tube "pricy"? I don't know what your income is like.

What you might consider, if you're just interested in the CNC part of the project, is to build a CNC router, using a Dremel or other cheap rotary tool. I don't know what you intend to use this for, but such a tool would actually be quite useful in the average hobbyist shop. If you decide you ever want to upgrade, at least you'll know you have the CNC part of the equation down.
How about a crowdsourced social graph of causality?

I made something that can answer users' questions before they even formulate them. If somebody were wondering what caused the Ebola outbreak, they could start here: http://www.causemap.org/ebola-outbreak-2014
Greenpeace deluges Amazon Fire Phone with one-star protest reviews
Yes...teaching regexes is one of my goals...since the beginning I've forced them to jump through the hoops of setting up Github and submitting Markdown files, to get used to the idea of dealing with plain text (which of course, is key for understanding CSVs)...so regexes are a natural thing to learn for finding patterns and, on a day to day basis, cleaning data...I think in terms of technical skills, it's probably the most useful thing I could teach given how much time is ultimately spent on data munging.
It's strange that Amazon thought it would be successful when it was obvious to most people from day one that it won't be. I don't think it was even controversial that it would fail.
There's no shortage of analysis explaining how being able to switch carriers with the press of a button would lead carriers to offer more competitive deals to consumers.
Show HN: Create AWS EC2 snapshots with limits and scheduled intervals
That's only true for closed source systems. You can easily debug open source ones, look at their insides and so on.

This whole article is really just telling people to use the scientific method in computing too: if you don't know how to reproduce a result it's not science. Fast computation which a human can't possibly do is something that's new from the last 30 years and most scientists still don't know how to deal with it.

It is very sad to see that statisticians have switched to R, biologists to python, computer scientists to the gnu tool chain, yet physics and maths seem to have been colonized by mathematica when you have a whole set of open source tools which are superior in every way: pari pg, gnu arbitrary precision libraries, axiom, maxima and sage is you want everything under one roof with a unified interface.
It also helps to have a shitload or two of money lying around.
Or will Apple, Google, etc form a US (or non-US?) company that's invested in by their foreign, profit-booking subsidiaries thus negating the tax situation?

It's hilarious that you could "launder" profits this way.
1/8 of the way to the height of the International Space Station's orbit, which would be 7.8mm from the surface of your globe.
The physicists have even better views then Computer Scientist's do, and it is hard to beat a research environment where this is your view: http://imgur.com/nA4gNcP.
I think this is just excellent. I'm more a tech person and not a journalist myself, so I don't expect to find something new for me there in sense of using technology, yet I surely will go through it, as I find the approach itself interesting enough to do it.

By the way, maybe there are other courses/book/sets of exercises/whatever I could use to learn more about that non-technological, "liberal" side of journalism? I was always wondering what makes person a journalist, but unfortunately never achieved it myself.
The point is that GNU has been wildly successful and has advanced technology on a species-wide basis. I'm not sure what more you think it owes you.
Entrepreneur.com:Obsessive Entrepreneur Documented His 955 Rides as Lyft Driver
A Day with the Product Scientist at Medium [video]
I built my CNC mill with my wife. She's helping me build my boat. We've been married 6 years, and we enjoy working on projects together. We also try to spend as much time with extended family as possible.
It shouldn't be. Maple is just as much of a black box as Mathematica. That it didn't screw up on this one task is no guarantee it won't screw up others when you aren't looking. Worse since you can't check the source code you will never know why it failed in any specific case without reverse engineering it.

In fact they say as much towards the end of the paper:

"Both Mathematica and Maple return zero as the
answer to this calculation. Yet this cannot be
correct, because the integrand is clearly positive
and nonzero in the indicated region."
> "Easily debug"

One of the major driving forces in the design of computer proof systems is that they (a) output proofs along with assertions that are (b) trivially verifiable. Indeed, verification is a major philosophical and practical force behind the theory of any type theory.

Ultimately, this is a major component of the design of a proof checker because while lots of its pieces can be complex and scary and potentially buggy, the proof verifier must always be tiny and easy and impeccable because it bears the entire burden of safety.

A similar argument cannot really be made for CAS, I think. Even open source ones.

(There's a catchy name for this principle, but I forget it. "Somebody's Something")
Isn't that a little like mapping sand dunes in the desert? Slums are interesting because they are spontaneous and fluid. I don't think a map would be good for very long.
There's a ridiculous number of open protocols and technologies shown in red, as if they're something terrible:

• "Web Browser / WebRTC / AJAX"

• "NNTP / IRC" (completely unrelated, but shown together)

• "X.509 / DNS & DANE / SMTP & XMPP / Federation" (again, all mostly unrelated technologies)

Bonus points to "Faceboogle". Really?
is this for fios or just wireless?
It's true, but it's also true that the Piëch and Porsche families have always been like the two guys duking it out over the island in LOST. This particular "business relationship" goes back multiple generations.

The good news for owners and fans of the cars is that Porsche's doing their best work ever under the Volkswagen AG umbrella.
>> not to mention it should only be used in controlled laboratory conditions by experienced researchers.

Worst advice ever.

First of all, I suspect most laser cutters are employed in industrial job shops--not research facilities--around the world. They're actually quite convenient tools. I've used them for a number of projects and it takes all of 15 minutes to train a reasonably intelligent person on how to use one safely and effectively. It's faster, cheaper, and more reliable than 3D printing for anything larger than a cigar box. I consider them safer than CNC mills, as I've only ever seen laser cutters catch on fire, but never catastrophically shatter and explode like a CNC mill.

But more importantly, "don't try this at home" is my least favorite phrase in the world. He's an adult. I'm sure he knows "these aren't toys". You're not the internet's nanny.
I've heard Harvard described as a hedge fund that has figured out a great way to avoid taxes.
Ask HN: How to handle over-entitled-ivy-graduate who wants work on shiny things
I have been coding for many years in big co. I got to work with a young guy who came from reputable college in CS as a peer. My management thinks he is A level player thus pretty much he is on free rein. But I am left behind with mass because I don't want to leave things in loose ends.
He asks for help for any kind of stuff and asking me to take a look at his compilation errors. His lack of team playership makes me frustrated and not so motivated because my work is not appreciated. How can I improve here? Is this common with smart guy?
I have talked to my boss but he doesn't seem interested on lecturing etc.
Sorry for grumbling.
A Visual Analysis of a Skateboarding Battle
There are millions of scientifically minded geeks that have a nerdgasm just thinking about the possibilities of an extraterrestrial visitation.

If there was any available convincing evidence pointing toward an E.T. visit, we'd be all over it. Atlas, all the "evidence" out there currently is unconvincing, at best.
Apple Pay Is Soaring While Competitors Crash and Burn
>the distances between solar systems, and the amount of time required to travel between them

With the one electron universe "theory" we could "theoretically" instantaneously materialize at a given point in space.
I just found this "old" article looking for an easy to use parser in C++ (in Visual Studio, GCC, and CLang). I think the current state of parsers in C++ is... how to say it... terrible! flex and bison doesn't look like C++, Boost Spirit too much ado, ANTLR4 doesn't support it yet and setting up ANTLR3 in Visual Studio can be explained in a few steps if it were explained in a straightforward way.

When you look at the simplicity of OMeta[1] you feel the difference. But I am not aware of any (production ready) OMeta implementation for C++.

[1] http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/
Especially when highlighting the parallels of SQL with Excel.

"Note: Alternatively, if you wanted to reduce the amount of Pivot Table work, you could've done the aggregations inside of SQL."
you know, it should be possible to generate some of these sentences from the mathematical notation directly to make concepts more understandable to the lay person (and people in general).
No.
It is very very limited.
Inducement, etc

See, e.g., http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/inducement_of_infringement
The attitude expressed by Faulks in the article seems to be precisely backwards if you genuinely believe that driving while intoxicated is a bad thing. The harm comes from the impaired reflexes and judgment, not someone punching in a command to drive home on a touch screen console. Making the two scenarios legally equivalent will only discourage responsible behavior.
This is.not.a.technology article. Even though reddit sucks this is not reddit. We come here for hacker news
Probably the largest ever in nominal dollars. If you adjust for inflation there might be some historical stuff that would beat it I guess?
I know the ISS is moving at ~27,600 km/h and is ~10 times further away than this jump, but is there a significant engineering reason to not say... double this jumps height? 5x? ...10x?
Apple did it first, and by now, they created a compelling ecosystem that many do not feel is "restricted"
How do you handle stress from asshole bosses?
I went to UCSD about 10 years ago, and have lived in the area since.

If we're talking about new faculty, who probably want to buy a house and may want to live near campus, I'd agree that UCSD's location is problematic financially. They seem to be able to attract solid faculty at least in engineering (the people I know), so they must be figuring this out somehow. Certainly some professors are living in small condos who would be living in big houses in the midwest…

However, most grad students while I was there managed well enough. If you don't have kids, and are OK with roommates, you can find places near campus or a short drive away (e.g. Pacific Beach) that are plenty affordable.

I don't really believe that any grad students avoid UCSD because of the cost of living - in a place where you'll only spend a few years and then probably leave.
Maybe I am missing something here, but I didn't even know Samsung Knox did storage encryption. As far as I understand, the use case for this technology was isolating enterprise apps from user-installed/general apps. Given that, is there any scenario in which non-Knox apps could read the password from disk and use that to mess with apps inside the Knox container? If so, then this is a serious threat to Knox as a technology, if not, it still sounds like a silly way to implement passwords, but not a deal-breaker (kinda like having a plain-text /etc/shadow in mode 600 is silly - or a sign of negligence, depending on your standards regarding defense-in-depth - but not a full attack vector in and of itself).

I always assumed Knox was something you used in addition to Android's whole-system encryption, not instead of, but I could be wrong.
The article says he didn't take any of Google's money, even though they offered.
Show HN: Replace links with text to improve readability
I think this is what he's trying to do with the Google Maps thing: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/geolocation/trip_mete...

I think he's talking about the navigator.geolocation object.
Sometimes, when I want to study a subject in Wikipedia, I end up hopping in between articles because the links are just too damn tempting.

I made a little chrome extension to replace all anchor links with plain text to increase readability and concentration.

It also has the option to restore the links, although sometimes images and such need a full reload :(

I will keep on improving it in the future, this is just a 0.0.1 which works.

Thanks for your time and I hope at least on of you will find this useful.

adios

http://github.com/elemenofi/unlink
Agreed, I've taken classes in linear algebra, analysis, and harmonic analysis...and I can't grok what "spinning a signal around a circle" is or why we would do that, but the change of basis realization was also my lightbulb moment.
Play semantic games, get attention from supposedly reputable news source?

> Actions need to be taken to start the vehicle, enter instructions regarding destination and route, and engage the self-driving function. These actions constitute driving

Shit, so taking a cab is still drunk driving? (hail cab check, tell driver destination check, shut door check). Because that is what people mean by self driving cars - a cab without a human, and most likely without even a steering column. By this guy's self-promoting definition, we've had "self driving" cars ever since cruise control.

> Moreover, there are serious issues concerning the possible situations where a driver in an autonomous vehicle needs to intervene due to an emergency or system malfunction

Or not. Such a thing would be unsafe with even a sober and completely alert driver. They would be unconnected from how the car responds, and thus unable to operate it at a moment's notice. The only workable solution is to fail safe by pulling over.
The risk (usually) isn't at high altitude but during the initial process of inflating the balloon with hydrogen. Static is especially dangerous.
...That's not how Bitcoin trading works. In order to trade, your bitcoins need to be deposited into an exchange. Trades are not recorded on bitcoin's public ledger because there isn't a transaction for every trade. Bitcoin cannot currently handle that many transactions.
Yes, that's exactly what I meant by "Unless you're talking about biking straight up." in my original comment.
Cool Sites 1
As a former physicist that used Mathematica heavily not that long ago, I have to disagree. It would be great if there were open source alternatives that were "superior in every way" but that is just not the case.

For some use cases at least, Mathematica is clearly better than anything else I have tried.

I feel like something like ipython notebooks with the right combination of libraries might eventually get there, but that is unfortunately still years away.
I know right? I would've said "yeah maybe I'll do it given the chance", but a few weeks ago, I got the chance to jump from a cliff in a river -- very safe, and everyone was doing it, but I still froze for a second. Then someone behind me went "just look ahead, don't look down!=" which is what I did! :)
I'm surprised Amazon has doubled down on the idea of screwing their customers out of a good Android experience. That's all this is: Amazon ignored what was good for users (access to the whole Android ecosystem), and instead focused on what was good for Amazon's immediate desire to extract ongoing revenue from their customers.

Instead of making a better phone for consumers, they focused on making a better phone for Amazon. And, it turns out, "Makes Amazon richer", is on nobodies feature wish list for their next phone. Obviously, most folks probably don't mind Amazon making money...but, why would anyone buy a phone for which the only major differentiation is that it sends most of the long term app revenue to Amazon, and by doing so, limits the user to far fewer apps and less freedom to do with the phone what you want?

I'm almost amused at the gall of Amazon thinking they had the marketing and product chops to pull off an Apple-scale consumer-fleecing like this.
Yeah this guy mentions having a goal to save enough to not need to work for 2 years.

That seems fairly unambitious at that salary. If I were in his shoes I'd like to think I would stick it out a few more years and be able to just retire early and work on side projects for fun.
>Anyone building //

In the UKPA Section 60(5)(a), (b) says:

An act which, apart from this subsection, would constitute an infringement of a patent for an
invention shall not do so if -
(a) it is done privately and for purposes which are not commercial;
(b) it is done for experimental purposes relating to the subject-matter of the invention;
...

There are other clauses too, for example allowing farmers to use the products of plants they've acquired lawfully.

35 USC 271 has some very limited exceptions too (research related to pharmaceuticals is one IIRC).

It's funny that in the US there is such liberty for copyright but patents seem to be locked down relative to other jurisdictions. I assume you're talking about USA, no one ever seems to note despite it being crucial in discussions of law.