skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are contradicting my unsupported opinions using actual facts? That's not fair.

Regarding "You'd be amazed": No,I wouldn't. Whatever the humble origins of a bug tracker, user pressure does push them to accrete more features and complexity, so even my own little BugTracker.NET also has evolevd to be also a ticketing system, time tracker, and a tiny bit as a project management system.

(Please let's not talk about permissions and customizable, enforcable, workflow...)

Here's my favorite way I've seen BugTracker.NET stretched: http://frap.cdf.ca.gov/projects/hazard/btnet/bugs.aspx, by the "California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection".

You're probably right about the 90% for now, but I think the Generational Change thing also affects attitudes towards hosted versus installed.

And, you have more and more big companies whose OWN business depends on THEIR customers trusting THEM to host their customers data, so I think that is a force for attitudes about hosted solutions changing too.

I work for a company that makes software for futures traders. Our customers include the trading depts of the biggest banks you can name. Presumably security conscious and with the expertise to manage the software/hardware themselves if they chose to. We offer both installable and hosted solutions. Plenty of these big banks have opted for the hosted solution.
Gilbert Strang's Linear algebra book was great for me after taking A-level as a mature student, linear algebra comes in everywhere (I think there are videos of Strang floating around as well). Make sure to work through as many exercises as you can if you're studying independently.

An approach that might work for some is to take a good undergrad textbook of something you're interested in, but that is a bit too hard (preferably not too dense, with enough explanatory text). Try to plough through it, and look up all the stuff you don't understand! Don't expect to get very far very quickly, but at least you'll get led to useful reading material for the fields you care about, and it might also motivate you more than starting from axioms.

(For me it was Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms that sparked off a lot of study: free online at http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/ ).
MIT's OpenCourseWare site provides a lot of course material - http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm

Mathematics for Computer Science is perhaps tailor made for your needs - http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...
Pelle, You give a good analysis! Here's an additional distinction between Argentina and the U.S. which (I believe) is also a factor...

In the 19th Century, both nations had vast tracts of land relatively undeveloped...

The U.S. essentially "gave" the land away to vast numbers of its citizens if they'd work it... encouraging and then creating a great class of free-spirited, industrious entrepreneurs with their own capital!

Argentina transferred its land in vast tracts to wealthy landowners and created essentially a division between the wealthy elites and the landless peasant!

The secret to capitalism FAILS when wealth becomes too concentrated... (remedying this is a focus of mine).
It's nice that you shared the reasons for using the picodollar, but I'd never buy your product because it's not blatantly obvious how much it costs. No offense intended.
Thanks, antirez, for the nice thought.

Having children is sufficient, but not necessary for part of one's essence to continue to live. There are many great "DNA-less" ways to do this. For those without biological children, you can live on through hard work and good deeds that benefit others.

RIP.
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I agree. Similar to the grid lock mentioned in the latest EconTalk http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/11/heller_on_gridl.htm...

I am also working on the same in the financial space.
Show me an instance of a modern browser running javascript that doesn't run correctly. I've written a lot of javascript and the only thing that trips me up is the css. Javascript itself works fine on almost all platforms. (Some quirkiness on IE6).
"Spinning off in style" or "Pranks to pull on your former boss" :)
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Definitely an uninformed Pythonista, but it's hard for them to be informed when Python is so easy to install and you have to roll your own REPL script for Clojure.
That book still remains one of the best books I have ever read. Completely hooked all the way through.

Nicely paced, "fun" but also well reasoned.

The fact that a theory that has stood such serious intellectual assault over the years after being invented, essentially, in the spur of an argument has always impressed me.
The latest Linux I use (Ubuntu 9.04) uses M and G prefixes.

My point is it's a mess and it's unreasonable to claim proper rules are followed.

E.g. how do you measure hosting bandwidth? A random calculator (http://www.ibdhost.com/help/bandwidth/) says:

1KB = 1024B; therefore, 500MB = 512000KB = 524288000B .. and .. 1GB = 1048576000B
it's not blatantly obvious how much it costs

The front page of the tarsnap website says

Storage:
300 picodollars / byte-month
($0.30 / GB-month)
Bandwidth:
300 picodollars / byte
($0.30 / GB)

Even if you don't know what the pico- prefix means, I'm not sure how you could be confused by the $/GB pricing...
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Because every version of FF is more standards-compliant than IE6. This is an important milestone in the adoption of web standards.
Not sure if reading a maths book will really be easier than reading those papers. In both cases, you kind of have to grind through it.

Wikipedia often helps with the notations.

I think learning useful maths is best done by reading up on the stuff you presently need. I have several maths books that I never read because while it seemed like a nice idea, in the end there just wasn't enough motivation for it.
Yes, yes. I am rather disappointed at the number of screeds which I've had chance to read which go something along the lines of, "I am so ANGRY that this HAPPENED and I won't tell you any details so just be ANGRY with me!"
First Linux version where everything worked perfectly OOB for me. No complaints here.
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XP is great, until you try to do too much with it. Installing video codecs in beta or under development? I got system freezes galore. Didn't happen to me under OS X.

YMMV
IT depts don't care about developers getting shit done, they care about covering their asses. I work at a software company that has an IT dept that seems to do anything in it's power to keep work from being done. They do on access virus scanning which increases compile times 5x (which we can't turn off). They banned IM because of "legal issues". They banned itunes because of "legal issues" and "bandwidth issues". Any streaming media is banned because of "bandwidth issues". They installed software that keeps track of everything you install. They set up our (proprietary Nortel) VPN to route everything over their network. Chatrooms like Campfire - banned. SaaS - banned.

Of course I've worked around all these issues, but it's a PITA. I don't buy the legal issue argument as companies like google and msft don't have all these restrictions.

I'd love to know the reality on these legal issues. Is there really a legal reason for a company to ban IM/Chatrooms/iTunes/etc? If so, why is it that Google doesn't?
Joel has been and seems to continue to be anti-paid advertising. I've heard him say it on the Stackoverflow podcasts, and I know it from trying to get FogCreek to advertise on my website (I tried again after having read the Inc article, thinking that maybe he was born again...).

I think he overestimates how well known FogBugz/FogCreek is. I think he unnecessarily handicaps himself with that policy.
Is this about Twitter or something else?
The internet is based around people doing things for free for the good of the larger internet community. We all benefit from the free contributions of others.

While I can't tell for sure, it seems this person is unhappy with giving out his insights for free to the public. That's fine. However, I don't know why anyone (or at least I) would give money to someone for their broad Internet insights. There are plenty of smart(er) people already doing that for free, so I don't know what makes this (or anyone's) advice so special (I'd willingly pay for real consulting, but that implies the advice will be based on a thorough understanding of my specific situation).
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I had a manager in 2001 that broke internal IT policy by buying a wireless router to use in his office and he didn't secure it. Why did he need it you ask. Because sometimes he didn't want to sit at his desk but at his conference table 10 feet away. We almost failed a PCI audit because of his stunt.

Also we bought a software application that the vendor insisted needed unrestricted access to the internet. We tried it from behind our firewall and whatever they were doing couldn't get past our proxy. We actually had to deploy this internal application in a DMZ and waste a public IP to run it. We had a tech from that company doing some upgrades and later we found that we were running an FTP warez site. The tech had started up the default IIS FTP server so he could leave some files to retrieve later and didn't bother to tell us.
It can be difficult to stay awake when trying to learn Math or especially Stats in the abstract.

Are you reading these stats-heavy comp-sci papers for a particular reason beyond mere curiosity, like for a project or for work? If so, then you will have what I consider the most crucial element needed for learning a difficult subject: motivation, real lasting motivation.

My advice: identify a concrete need to learn about a particular area of math/stats, like solving a real-world problem with software, then don't start by getting bogged down in a particular equation, but instead, find out the area of math/stats which that equation is a part of, and seek out the most interesting essay or video lecture about it. It's important that this video or essay be composed by someone with a reputation for making the complicated accessible to mere mortals.

Good luck!
It really is just a bad idea. Or at least one that is working against ideas central to the way Linux is currently used.

Universal/fat binaries made sense on the Macintosh because there is no concept of program installation on these systems. While I think that eschewing installation is generally a better design, one drawback is that if you want to be able to support multiple architectures in one application you have to do the architecture check when the program is loaded.

Central to Linux and Windows is the idea of program installation, either through packages or installer programs. No one is interested in making it so that you can drag and drop items in Program Files or /usr/bin between systems and expect them to run, which is the only thing that using fat binaries really gets you over other solutions.

Nearly all of the commercial binary-only software I have seen in Linux (and other Unixes) uses an installer program, just like windows. There is no technical reason why such an installer couldn’t determine the architecture to install.
He's 50% percent cheaper, no?
But your point stands, obviously.
Yeah, this is bad. It isn't like standing up a Linux box, or OSS CMS, or something like that, internally.

Now, if Amazon or someone were to offer a variation of EC2 that did satisfy all the various privacy/data retention laws and regs...

/me scurries off to do some idle research
I was also joking.

"Billion" suffers from the same problem as "Gigabyte". It has two mutually exclusive definitions (10^9 and 10^12) so you can't use it without the possibility of some confusion resulting.
Sometimes others find the words better than I can, so I sign a generic form letter to my member of Parliament. It's not really spam. It's heartfelt.

Edit: I just wanted to add that while generally I agree that writing letters has little to no effect, I think it's important for people to start DOING something. If it starts with writing letters, maybe the upshot will be that people are embolded to participate in bigger future actions, like taking part in demonstrations and more when the time comes. Cynicism and defeatism aren't the right starting attitudes for a fight. Just my two cents.
"looks like it is out of print"

There's a new edition out:

http://www.amazon.com/Bargaining-Advantage-Negotiation-Strat...
I agree. I really miss the books and comics.
If you are in finance or health there can be legal reasons. But I think they are just lazy. Legally, those companies are supposed to log every message or email for a specific amount of time. For you, rather than go about putting the systems in place they would rather not deal with it at all.

The bandwidth issues though I have no idea. Sounds like someone found the shittiest provider in your area and got a cheap deal, or greased palms.
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Could HN recommend any 'math for programmers' resources or suggest structured approaches...

I suggested Numerical recipes coz it contains the implementation of Various Liner Algebra algorithms which form the basics of Math for Programmers..
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sure, how are you going to link computers together?

One Big Mesh.

Mind you, getting it set up would be a, um, non-trivial exercise.
government causes this with laws that allow microsoft to sue people that create workarounds. telling people what they can do with your product after they purchase it is silly. why blame MS for simply following the incentives to make money?
And the only reason IT would give you 100Mb of space is because they hate you and want you to fail. Nothing to do with corporate policy or budgetary limitations or staff or any other kind of limitations.

Uh huh.

"The rules are there to prevent disaster, but as a consequence they ensure mediocrity" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA-zdh_bQBo

Sometimes no-disaster is all a big company wants.
Indeed thanks edw519 for adding this.
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Regarding Designer Blogs
IT guys are a different breed - paranoid, detail oriented, clever, overworked. Because they thwart us, make our jobs harder, does not make them jackasses. Ok, maybe jackass is a relative term, but don't make the mistake of imagining they don't know their business.
The world changes fast enough - IT maybe doesn't follow the latest trends. Try perhaps working with them? No mention of that in the article.
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A man that built a handhel with AVR microcontroller.
No doubt that is amazing project.
As a developer, I say not trivial. This isn't just about bug trackers, because bug trackers integrate with version control, maybe our IDE, and soon code review tools.

A bug tracker can be like email, on the screen all the time, with a lot of our communication with co-workers going thru it ( and in fact the good ones incorporate email into them very well. )

So, it's the software we are living in. Next to our text editor, it's maybe the MOST important software.

Not counting Pandora, of course.
You are absolutely correct. Covering the company's ass is half of IT's job. Providing services is only the other half. It's a tricky balancing act.

Legal problem #1 with IM is logging. In public companies, particularly in regulated industries, anything that has ever been recorded by any employee can and will be used against you, and the discovery will come at your expense. Everything that is said, but NOT logged, will be used as evidence of your malfeasance.

For this reason, E-mail systems are typically centralized, and users are prevented from pulling mail off the server, so that all e-mail can be retained for exactly six months, no more, no less.

With third-party IM services, that can't be done. This is the reason for the rise of highly restrictive internal IM - Lotus Sametime, Microsoft office communicator. With Communicator you can ban both logging AND copy-paste centrally, at the server. It's a terrible tool, but it controls the legal risk quite nicely.

--

Google doesn't worry about this because they have more money than sense. (Also, not a regulated industry.)
I've done the Ubuntu GUI-based in-place upgrade for the last three releases, if I count back correctly. Aside from the usual point issues in peripheral things that show up when you agree to use a beta (spotty sound in one old game, e.g.), the actual upgrade itself has worked correctly every time.
You really think intellectuals would be content holed up in their McMansions while a struggle for liberty was raging in this country? And our family and friends which make up the military wouldn't know which side to stand on? I'm not talking about censoring some silly media, I'm talking about if it came down to the difference between liberty and tyranny, of infringing assembly and free speech.
I normally unblock the ads on sites I use regularly

Ditto, but I had to use Vista yesterday and tried out IE8 (again) and was so suprised to find 2 popups on the dilbert website. I don't disable popup blocking for anyone. I thought IE8 had it enabled so it was a little strange ... first unwanted popups in years. Blah blah blah, ... as you were.
That's a feature, not a bug. In twitter as far as I remember you have the opportunity to revoke tokens yourself. It's definitely not a security hole.
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I've found Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/) tremendously helpful for this sort of thing - some of the puzzles I couldn't figure out the mathematical trick to do it efficiently, but after I solved it I read through the forum posts and made sure I could rewrite the full solution in the languages I'm using. (The same works well for learning algorithms or feeling out a language, if you're solid on the mathematical side.)

_Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers_ by Gullberg and Hilton (http://www.librarything.com/work/23014) is also a good overview. It starts with counting (Roman numerals, numbers in ancient Egyptian writing, etc.) and builds up from there. The writing seems quite clear, and it covers both the mathematical concepts and their history. (I like this approach quite a bit, though my background is in history. YMMV.) I haven't gotten to the chapters for math I'm completely new to yet, but it seems like it would introduce you to enough basic concepts that you could have a clearer idea where to go next.

_The Cartoon Guide to Statistics_ by Larry Gonick (http://www.librarything.com/work/12735) seems like a good statistics refresher / overview. It's not that deep, and it's rather hokey, but it's a quick read. An important part of reading math papers is not getting thrown by the dense notation, so starting with something less formal may be helpful.
Not a web developer by the sounds of it?
Doh. Double gotcha'd :)
That's definitely not the impression I got.

The internet is based around people doing things for free for the good of the larger internet community .... While I can't tell for sure, it seems this person is unhappy with giving out his insights for free to the public.

The author, Dave Winer, helped invent RSS and personally invented OPML, so he has no problem with giving out his insights for free to the public and helping the internet community. In fact he says as much in the article: "I figure if I'm not going to make any money off my work, then I'll work in an environment where no one does." This is an allusion to standards and open source work (though I guess if you're not familiar with the author, that wouldn't necessarily be clear).

What he's talking about is when businesses approach him to work for free while they're planning to make boatloads of money from that work. From the article: "People don't work for free. They don't pour out their passion in the cause of making you wealthy."
The concept or way to upgrade it is ok... it's just that it almost always causes a lot more trouble than a clean install.

My experiences so far :
6->7 : System failure, unable to boot
8.04 -> 8.10 : Alright overall, a few bugs to fix (most concerned X)
8.10 -> 9.04 : Better, still a few bugs (info tooltips, graphic card drivers)
Firefox got it's big push when the geeks forced it on their friends and family. Linux is probably nearing that point.

It's probably acceptable for the ordinary punter already, but whichever family member does their tech-support is probably happier in Windows or Mac OS X.
A while ago, I collected some references and recommendations for books and online material covering discrete mathematics. They were mainly sourced from previous discussions on Hacker News. The file's up on GitHub.

http://github.com/ionfish/notes/blob/master/discrete-maths.m...

The formatting is a little unreadable—I need to fix the Markdown line breaks—but it does have a fair few links.
I think this guy is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist in Linux. In Linux, every piece of software is compile for the architecture you want, so there is no need for a fat binary. Mac OS X needed this because they Mac users mostly run commercial software, so it is better to have a single binary for all platforms.
I can't believe this is not already a solved problem! What are your USPs?
What's your demographic though? You can mention what station it is.
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I love tarsnap. Its, by far, one of the best tools I've adopted in the last year or two. The service is simple and easy to understand. The tool works great, has great documentation, and makes sense to my unix brain. And the price is fair and straightforward. I prepaid the minimum amount, $5, and have backed up 189 GB of data and still have $2.603332060102213400 available on my account. How can that be? Well, one last reason why tarsnap rocks: it deduplicates the data automatically.

Great job, Colin. I've been recommending it to everyone I know. Keep it up.
It's stuff like this which makes me think that the release cycle for Ubuntu is just too brisk. I've just recently managed to get two 8.10 installs to the point where they're comfortably configured and stable. I'm still working out a few issues with Jaunty on a netbook. There's no way I'm going to upgrade that thing to Karmic for maybe six months or so. Granted, this makes me an LTS guy and not an early adopter, but I don't think my situation is unique.
Yeah, I assumed a trademark-ised version of Googol.
Maybe it is because English is my second language, but did he just demand that twitter pay him for using their service?
If so, does this rant do anything except reducing twitter's winer number (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer...) to one? If not, what is that post about?
Google is a single word though, and those k sounds are so harsh and interrupting, Duck Duck Go is a really bad name IMO.
I don't want to defend MS, and yes, proprietary formats are evil. But as I remember, every big company did it that way, it was just the understanding at that time.
Government causes this? Or does government allow this?

To think Microsoft was sitting on a huge pile of money without lobbying with some of it would be naive at best.