skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In some cases, you might be reading poor-quality mathematical writing.

According to my generalization of some advice from Knuth:[1] in a good math text, definitions of terms are presented as they go along, and they are explicit about what means what. Furthermore, one of the factors that determines the quality of mathematical writing is

- Did you use words, especially for logical connectives, whenever you could have used words (instead of symbols) to express something?

and

> Try to state things twice, in complementary ways, especially when giving a definition. This reinforces the reader’s understanding. [...] All variables must be defined, at least informally, when they are first introduced.

This is repeated:

> Be careful to define symbols before you use them (or at least to define them very near where you use them).

There are some cases where "the general mathematical community is expected to know what you mean," like when publishing papers in some specialized field, but if you're writing a book, these rules hold quite true. Books certainly should explain their notation, especially since the general consensus for certain notations is expected to change over the decades ...

[1] http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematica...
They will still beat you up until you produce the data you have destroyed, which is until they get tired of beating you up. You could keep some decoy data you produce in such situations, preferably before the beating starts.
Reality call: ANY and ALL services, be it local or remote, will be down for hours at some point every few years.
Good point, we would end up with different laws. Probably wholly worse laws. They'd certain pay lip service to concepts of liberty, but there'd be so many disclaimers and emergency provisos that it wouldn't mean anything.
The idea of cloud storage being down is less of an issue - I don't like it, but I understand it. What bothers me about this is:

1. I was never notified of the outage. I noticed it myself when attempting to log into one of my VMs and then started looking for status updates. Sadly, the best status updates I got were here on Hacker News.

2. When my servers did come back up, at least one of my IP addresses had changed, which meant I had to update all of the relevant DNS entries (which, as everyone here no doubt knows, can take up to 48 hours to propagate). I was never notified of this change in any way.
Charles Stross will have to stop making jokes about the secret British space program.

OR WILL HE?
Too bad the source code of that beautiful toy is nowhere to be found - I'd gladly provide a patch that teaches it about the umlauts which it unfortunately left alone in your piece of art you created here <3
Can someone provide context for this? I am not familiar with Debian and do not know the back-story.

Also, I assume this is not directly related to the recent resignation[0] of Heen. But does the resignation of two people (whose resignations were deemed worthy of being voted to near the top of the HN front page) within a few day span suggest concernening structural issues or is this just poisson statistics at work?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8617874
Google Squared Rebranded
4) Rare and are designed to last ages, whereas this thing will burn up far earlier, wasting the rare ingredients.
Businesses on the other hand have few protections, and bullshit contract terms seem fairly common, eg I saw a contract that required 6 months notice in writing or it would auto renew.
Would you really mind if I said that the Greek alphabet was credited to one Κάδμος? We know that's not true, but it doesn't change the legend (and indeed, the legend of Cadmus explicitly states that the Greek alphabet was derived from the Phoenician one...).
I was surprised teacher salaries did not come into it. From my relatively uninformed viewpoint, I would think offering more money would give you a better choice of candidates. Look at investment banks. They offer lots of money, and they get the pick of a large proportion of the top graduates.

Here's a conversation I had with a young man in Switzerland:

Me: You seem like a smart, well educated guy (Kid speaks 4 languages, and can talk about interesting stuff at age 20). So, what do you do when you're not helping out at your dad's shop?

Him: I've got an apprenticeship at Credit Suisse. So I work there a few days and study some other days.

Me: Cool. My banker is at CS, and he started at 16, just like you. He's a smart guy, been sent to NYC as well. Probably doing quite well out of it. I guess that's your path then?

Him: Nah. I like it and the pay is good. The work is interesting, but I want to get into teaching.

Me: So, no rat race I guess?

Him: Well, I know you can make good money in banking, but I figure I can help out young people make the most of themselves.

Me: Sounds like quite a paycut. I remember going into finance thinking how on earth I could ever change back out.

Him: Well, you do get paid 120K CHF a year after a few years. (That's 125K USD.)

Me: [Jaw Drops]

I don't know a whole lot about the system here, but I do feel more comfortable knowing that it's actually competitive to become a teacher.
I don't see how the video is "generic": didn't you notice that the founder has only one full-sized arm? When was the last time that Samsung or Apple put differently-abled people in their ads?
I think their ad is great for showing a refreshing diversity of people and (potential) interactions. There's a UX lesson in there too.
This is the 3rd person to resign in 10 days (Colin Watson, Russ Allbery and now Ian Jackson).
There's certainly a hierarchy; if you don't have typed data then you won't benefit from generics. If you don't have typed containers then forget about monads. If you don't have simple monads then no point worrying about how to compose them.

And yet, as someone who's been working in Scala for nearly 5 years now, more and more of these abstractions are starting to seem "worth it". My first Scala code was quite imperative, mixing random effects left and right. But eventually I started handling async calls explicitly - or perhaps I should say, I became fluent enough in the language that I could make an explicit distinction between sync and async calls without in being too cumbersome - and then I reaped the rewards, with more reliable, more performant, more maintainable code. And then I did the same thing with error handling, replacing surprise exceptions with an explicit Either (stacking this inside the Futures), and again I found my code became clearer, easier to reason about.

I've just finished factoring out database access into a Free monad based construct, and for the first time in my life I can test database access in a smarter way than just creating a (possibly in-memory) testing database and hoping it does the same things a real database would do. The monad tools are good enough to make it easy - as easy as "magic" Spring AOP, but explicit and ordinary. I've written a library for dealing with monad stacks that I'm sure would have horrified myself of three years ago (https://github.com/m50d/scalaz-transfigure), but I've come here through small incremental steps that have made sense at every stage (it helps that I'm a big believer in Agile). If I'd been dropped in it with a language like Haskell where everything has to be monadic from day 1, I think I'd've given up. I still wouldn't use monads for I/O (at least, not yet) - the advantages don't seem worth the overhead. But I'm glad I'm working in a language where these things are possible, and where I can gradually adopt them in my own time.
The curse
My Jolla phone has a Samsung Pro 64GB microSDXC card in it (Btrfs formatted, "raw" without partitions). It works well.

Samsung seems to call it "64GB microSDHC Pro" in some places though, so the problem here might be terminology and not actual lack of support.

I can't see any reason why the tablet wouldn't support such a card.
Well no. Foxconn only does manufacturing for Apple. In this case Foxconn also handles sales and distribution and even much of the actual electronics/hardware design. Think of it as Nokia is to Foxconn as Nexus is to Asus/LG/Motorola
I would say that learning a bit of assembly is still relevant. I wouldn't waste too much time working on real projects but having that base knowledge provides a lot of insight into how it all compiles down.
Show HN: We just launched Xrispi, a service for sharing bites of content
Just a data dump for the NSA. Nothing serious!
A few points

I also eat plenty of insoluble dietary fibre.

Prey animals would need to signal their non digestability to their predators.

Animals without predators would overwhelm the biome.

Disease is a predator.
So they would investigate the journalists's private lives and publish all their embarrassing details in order to cause drama and controversy to further their own goals.

You mean like the media does with every public figure, ever? Like the media is doing with this exact story right now?
and Joey Hess.
What part of "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." didn't you understand?
Apple and Others Encrypt Phones, Fueling Government Standoff
Proposal: https://lwn.net/Articles/616571/

Vote: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00891.html
And Tollef Fog Heen (partial resignation), but he and Joey were not Technical Committee members.
It seems odd to me that rural conservatives support surveillance, given that for many of them, the justification for strong gun rights is to preserve the ability to rebel against the government.
Untethered iOS 8.1.1 Jailbreak
I may be dense but it seems to me that your registrar is still the trusted entity no matter what:

- they sell you the domain name. Doesn't matter how you try to authenticate yourself to clients (cert pinning aside), the registrar can seize the domain at any point.

- they control what your authoritative name servers are. They could easily change these on you.

- they populate the whois database, which is used when you purchase your TLS certs. This means that a registrar can list joe@fbi.gov as you the contact, and have Joe get a completely valid cert.

- one important issue that the article does not mention is that you are forever locked into trusting the site operator. This means that you as a user already must trust another entity.

This, what I am proposing is that out of the current trust list: [site owner, registrar. CA] we cut out the CA. Once again, the registrar always trumps the CA in their ability to seize your domain. At the same time, the CA provides zero protection against the registrar misbehaving. This article talks about shifting trust from the CA to the registrar and how that's bad. I posit that you already trust the registrar, forever (or as long as you are willing to use their TLD) so you would be strictly reducing the amount of entities you need to trust, never adding new ones.
Why productivity systems fail?
Nitpick: The East Germany had indeed 16 million people at the reunification, but the West was far over 24 million! I don't know where you took your figures from, but Wikipedia says over 63 million:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germany#Population
Even something like 20 miles is still an incovenience and can be costly (or even troubling: imagine bad weather conditions outside, etc).
You don't have web browsers on Linux? ;-)
I have a small iPhone app that generates around 200 a month. Nothing spectacular but not bad for a bit extra.
Most org-mode documentation I see is painfully long. Can you recommend a short video or document that makes a compelling argument that org mode is worth the trouble? I currently can't get a sense of the learning curve relative to the benefits. As a matter of context, I use Markdown text files when I want something lightweight and OmniFocus for when I need more structure.
Someone else mentioned routing to divert traffic to working data centers. That might be an option for you.
Easy access to capital helps a lot. In Europe, we've plenty of good schools and universities, but capital is so much more readily available across the pond that entrepreneurs who need it readily flock to the SV or NYC in order to get it.

It also helps a great deal to have a consumer society that is on a constant lookout for the latest or greatest gadget, product or service. This helps to quickly identify the better options amongst the gazillions that see the day and die each year.
Whatever people's thoughts on the language itself, JavaScript has built itself into a juggernaut in the amount of tooling available that fit into various opinions that developers can choose from. The number of large frameworks (in terms of popularity and usage) is not really found elsewhere. The number of smaller plugins are vast.

It helps that companies like Google and Facebook have invested a significant amount of research power into designing frameworks and tooling around it. Just from there two companies alone, we have tools like React, Angular, Karma, JSX, Jest, and now Flow. Tooling that involves the browser more include Polymer and Traceur (ES6 to ES5 transpiler).

To contrast this, I have been doing development with Cordova the past week & writing Cordova plugins to fill in missing functionality - the plugin ecosystem with Cordova is horrid, and the documentation is often awful. To compound it, Android developers don't seem to believe in documenting their libraries well.

I will take the JS ecosystem any day when confronted with a choice like that.
Maybe the interface expects an 8 character password even if it's hashed on the backend. Maybe it's hashed by something that expects a certain length because it's using a silly algorithm. Maybe not all systems use hashed passwords. Hard to say from the outside, but in my experience it's usually not because the developers were stupid or ignorant.
if you can prove there are at most 42000 foo objects, the compiler could reduce 64-bit foo pointers to 16-bit indices

I think the main problem with doing this is that it requires a level of "intelligence" and insight that compilers currently are nowhere near; these types of optimisations are easy to see from the point of view of the (human) programmer, but due to their generality, compilers simply can't seem to "think" in this way. It's not quite at the level of "find an implicit O(n^2) algorithm in the code and replace it with an O(n log n) one", nor is it as simple as the common pattern-matching type of optimisation.

The other aspect is that size-optimisation has traditionally been highly downplayed in academic research despite the techniques being well-known in e.g. the demoscene and some embedded systems development. Overlapping instructions, for example, is one optimisation that I don't think compilers will be able to do any time soon. This and other types of low-level optimisation are often applied by (human) Asm programmers, however.
2. Azure does not guarantee that you keep your ip address by default. You should configure a cname if you use Azure Websites or get a reserved ip address, available with Cloud Services
That kind of study is really hard for non-experts to draw conclusions from because the process is full of confounds. Even before you look at the test content you'd want to compare across demographic profiles (i.e. parental education levels or income) to see whether that trend holds up. In the case of the PISA scores, there's 2013 paper claiming that some percentage of the differences are explained by a sampling bias over-representing low-income students: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin... That could have an effect on the top-end scores as well if it reduced the percentage of top students in the pool.

The other big problem you get is that this is a very narrow test of a single subject and Goodhart's law reigns supreme in this kind of comparison. The total difference being discussed is a 2% delta between the top US decile and Shanghai, which was the world leader. Even if that's not just random fluctuation, it could be explained entirely by something as simple as Singapore making that test a priority whereas it's largely off the radar in the US. That's not an accusation of cheating – it could be as simple as whether kids have drilled as heavily on a specific skill which is used more in one national curriculum than the other.

EDIT: To clarify: this shouldn't be read as criticism of PISA – I'm sure they've made considerable effort to address this challenges – but simply that this kind of comparison is a HARD challenge.
Follow the link to participate in the survey. Will be very helpful.
I am no where near a low-level programming expert. But learning ASM in correspondence with the x86/x64 instruction set really helped me understanding how computing works. All this with just simple stuff, for instance incrementing a counter every second.
The SLA mentions 99.9% or 99.99% for Database connectivity. Where does 99.999% come from?

Do Microsoft say this about Traffic Manager or are you suggesting you have to pay for extra services to get the advertised reliability figure?
Dockerfiles are deliberately dumb to let other tools take over as necessary, is my understanding.

My experience (over the last year) is that they're so limited as to be pretty useless. They don't even do what they're advertised to do, ie give you a reliable way to reproduce a build, and they're inflexible for my idea of real-world work with Docker. Where they're good is in giving everyone a point of reference.

I had a discussion with the maintainers last year about this:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/docker-user/3pcVXU4h...

I have a problem with most CM tools in that they're for moving target systems, not immutable ones. Ansible is the closest, but our experience has been that development on it is slow relative to the tool we use (see below). It's saved us a ton of money.

I blog on this and similar topics here:

http://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/

The "tool for building and maintaining complex Docker deployments" is here:

http://ianmiell.github.io/shutit/
https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit

I also talk about this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVUPmmUU3yY
Which amount to "whatever piques one's intellectual curiocity" and "whatever good hackers like". Apparently this piqued HN users intellectual curiosity and they like it.

Besides an intelligent person can have an intelligent discussion about any topic, even Kim Kardassian. And the post is in final analysis about policy, freedom of speech, adapting to the digital age, etc.
I am not a lawyer, but have had a similar argument with a recruiter in the past (their claim sounds like it was rather more concrete than this one). We sent them a firm letter from a lawyer, and never heard from them again. It might be worth taking advice before paying the £15k.
An investment that Microsoft cashed out as quickly as they could. If only they knew -- their shares would be worth over 100 billion dollars today.
Logical Riddle on a Programming Interview Test
Lunar Mission One
Nope, the UI got an update too. It renders at high-DPI on Windows. Chrome on a high-DPI machine looks exactly the same as on a low-DPI machine, except sharper. It used to be plagued with issues, but I'm fairly sure they're all gone now. DirectWrite isn't perfect. It still has weird hinting and kerning at high-DPI with some fonts, but it's better than GDI.

I find Chrome better than IE, actually. IE ignores my DPI settings and scales pages to 250%, so everything looks too large. Chrome renders correctly at 200%.
How HFT firms access government briefings to get the jump on market-moving data
Slush 2014 – Cybersecurity Hour – Mikko Hyppönen: R.I.P. Internet
To save to a file it's just

curl -O https://example.com/file.txt

It'll save to file.txt.
This part apparently: "Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

But forgive me, I am, unlike you, not the type of person who finds a story about a Hotel manager behaving badly particularly intellectually gratifying.
Really? A judge is actually ordering you to cough up? Can you share any more details?
Attempt to change the law: stopping hidden bank fees
Timelapse tour of UK airspace
This law refers to "A contractual term which has not been individually negotiated ... A term shall always be regarded as not individually negotiated where it has been drafted in advance and the consumer has therefore not been able to influence the substance of the term ... if an overall assessment of the contract indicates that it is nevertheless a pre-formulated standard contract. .. Where any seller or supplier claims that a standard term has been individually negotiated, the burden of proof in this respect shall be incumbent on him."

Which I think is a fair balance. If a company presents you a big long standard contract that their lawyers due up 5 years ago, then it's not really a contract between 2 equals.
Clearly neither did the developers of these apps which are now down who thought of spending as few pennies as possible and save a few other pennies with load balancing failover, and then expecting magic!
I recommend you leave HN until you grow up.
Do you having monitoring setup on your cloud vm, because you should have alerts triggering emails to notify you when this is happening.

Secondly, you are using an IP address and expecting that to be static? The recommended approach is to use a CNAME so you don't hit that issue, alternatively, you can have up to 5 Reserved-IPs per subscription and attach that Reserved-IP to your VM : New-AzureReservedIP from powershell

Edit : see http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/05/14/reserved-ip-addre...
You missed some:

https://lwn.net/Articles/621895/
https://lwn.net/Articles/621003/
https://lwn.net/Articles/620879/
https://lwn.net/Articles/620878/
https://lwn.net/Articles/619749/

They are related in the sense that are all fall-out of the struggle to integrate or block systemd in Debian and/or how it exposed some problems with the Debian constitution.

It's a shame to see that so much talent is lost and frustrated over what in my eyes seems to be a small issue. systemd and Upstart are both a large improvement over the System V init scripts. So, it's quite logical that it should be replaced at some point. Since systemd seems to have the most traction in other major distributions and upstream software, it makes sense to make that the default, while making it still possible to switch to Upstart et al. if someone wants to (at the risk of losing support for some upstream software).

If it turns out in three years that systemd is a dead-end, rip it out, and use whatever is better then. Distributions did that with devfs, the old hotplug scripts, egcs (which was merged back in mainline), etc.
Interesting point, which I partially sympathize with. The core of it, as I hear it, is that you should focus on the most important things first and not worry about the rest. In any case, I think it is nice to write those "less important" things down. If you later renegotiate your commitment to doing them, you can add a tag or note that says, more or less, "This isn't really that important" and take it off your active list.

To make a counter argument to your "methodology": There are "small" things that don't seem important relative to other things, but as you get more organized, getting those "small" things done can be very satisfying. Also the energy needed to do them may be small when you remember them in the right context.
But it almost impossible to write a polynomial in under 60 seconds without any tools, that follows the desired path.
No, we're fighting via our lawyer, but if it does end up in court, we will likely lose as contract law is pretty strong in the UK - and apparently this is a significant part of this recruiter's business model, so they're well practised at it and have test cases in which they've been victorious.