skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The great thing about math research, or really research in any field, is that it's highly parallelizeable. There are a few geniuses like Terry Tao exploring specific directions of thought, but there are so many things to think about and problems to solve that even the best researchers can only focus on a very small fraction. For every genius there are hundreds of other researchers who are only, say, 10% as productive (this is maybe your typical professor at a top-20 school), but through virtue of numbers they can explore a much wider range of problems and have a large aggregate impact. Fetishizing of genius makes for fun pop-science articles but is not really reflective of how the bulk of research gets done.

Of course, even if it doesn't require genius, making serious research contributions in mathematics does typically require many thousands of hours of training and hard work (usually in the form of a PhD) which most people are not going to dedicate their lives to. Given this, I really like Bill Thurston's perspective, from the famous essay "On proof and progress in mathematics" (http://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236), which is that proving new theorems is only a small part of the project of mathematics. The real goal is to increase humanity's mathematical understanding, which does not necessarily grow monotonically: there are plenty of results proved 100 years ago that are not known or understood by any currently living mathematician, thus have been "lost" to the mathematical community. And of course there are new people born every day who know no math as all, so understanding of mathematics will tend to decrease unless people actively work to sustain it. In this view, understanding and communicating mathematical insights is just as important and valid a part of the intellectual process as proving new theorems, and requires a different set of talents. Plenty of great researchers are not great communicators, and vice versa. (Terry Tao actually is an excellent writer, but again he's only one person and there's a ton of math out there to be shared). You may not know as much math as Terry Tao, but anyone on HN probably knows more than the vast majority of adults (the bar here is really low), and the world at this moment is certainly not suffering from a surplus of mathematical thinking. So whatever your background and abilities, there are almost certainly lots of useful ways to contribute.
Crazy as It Sounds,Even Newbies with No Ist,No Budget No Clue Are Cashing In
How does the censorship barrier block art and science from getting OUT of China?
That's frankly ridiculous, or at least the CalTech example at the end. For undergraduate study, MIT and CalTech have a strong filtering function in that you must be able to do math and calculus based physics, and, oh yeah, one "humanities" course per term. A student brilliant only at math would likely fail horribly. And so a student who's brilliant at just CS might not make the cut for MIT, since MIT's EECS undergraduate program requires a minimum of both EE and CS (for better or worse, that's their view of what an undergraduate must have).

Change the domain to graduate programs and above and things are different.

While I'm at it, back some years ago last decade before MIT gained a lot of attention approximately 13,000 students applied a year for the undergraduate program. 3,000 were judged to "be able to do the work", and only from them was a class of 1,100 students constructed.
How I Hire People for Facebook: Zuckerberg
Vitter's reservoir sampling algorithm in Clojure
There are rare instances of people coming back to academia after being very successful in industry. It's hard to say whether the rate is low because there's a bias against it from the hiring committees, or if people are actually generally happy in industry and uninterested in going back, or likely some combination of both.
How League of Legends could make the Internet a better place
I agree with the basic point of the article but many of the stated facts are outdated by now. Since this article has been posted it has become much harder to bypass the firewall than it was back then.
The author might not have intended it but what he's describing is emacs, not chording keyboards.
New Concept in Solar Energy Poised to Catch on Across US
>One category of reactions that I receive all the time as a programmer that presents as feminine is: No one believes I am a programmer.

To be fair, I am a guy and no one believes I am a programmer either. Going through YC, it took maybe 3 or 4 times of pg telling me to talk to my technical co-founder followed by me reminding him that it was me before he caught on. In my opinion, it can be a real strength to be different. Some of the most intelligent programmers I have ever worked with have been girls and I have fought incredibly hard to hire them and others on to our tech team only to be beaten by a tech giant who offer big premiums or more security when securing a visa. I know I am not the only one in this boat.
The people who invented Unix disagree with you, or they would have put those files there when they wrote Plan 9.
Great news! Thanks Joel!
His comments are pretty interesting. He seems to lay the entire blame for the conditions of the experiment on Professor Zimbardo.

> Looking at the prisoners, they were all just like me. Unlike in real prisoners, there wasn't social or racial disparity. There was no animosity. They looked just like me, or people I knew.

This is an odd comment to make; I'm not sure what he'd be trying to get at here. The most charitable interpretation I could give it is that abuse is more expected if there are racial or social differences between prisoners and guards.

I'm really disappointed that nobody thought to ask him directly why he didn't object to anything that he observed. He says a couple of times that there were parts of the experiment he didn't agree with, but that he didn't want to taint or harm the experiment. So, he seemed to be willing to at least passively accept the abuse of other people -- his own schoolmates -- for the sake of a purpose.

He wasn't apparently aware of how the experiment is taught in modern Psych classes, and it's funny, some of his comments reinforce what those classes teach:

> We used the Stanford experiment to talk about prison mentalities actually and how prison effects people and changes them. How people become what the situation calls for. Like you said above that Lombardo set up that experiment and you did what you were told as a kid

and

> While the popular idea from this may be the inherent evil, I hope you at least know that those who learn about this in college/university do not learn it that way, it's more along the topics of conformity, and diffusion of responsibility.

...in response to his saying,

> In that prison experiment, leaving would have been an option, but I didn't for several reasons: first off, from my perspective, I didn't see that much happening that was bad. People looking back now ... can see it in black-and-white, two-dimensionally. At the time, it went on pretty much as advertised. ... Also, I felt a commitment when I agreed to participate in the experiment. For all I knew, if I left, the whole experiment could have unraveled. Also, I felt like this was a unique experience and I enjoyed getting paid for doing something unusual.
Technically he didn't say anything about the United States.
When I was at EA, I would get an email saying I had to interview someone that afternoon, here's their resume, and here's the title they're interviewing for. It was ridiculous.
> So everywhere you would use inheritance, you use composition instead? The stuff you'd have stuck in the superclass, you stick somewhere else and stick in your struct?

No, Go provides interfaces (aka traits or roles), which you can use to share composable functions (aka methods).
For the digital-network analogue, see pingfs: http://www.shysecurity.com/posts/PingFS
In most fields, raw brainpower isn't what's needed to make an impact. Grit, determination, empathy, creativity, exploration, there are numerous attributes. Hell, even in D&D they separated intelligence and wisdom into two attributes!
There was one potential security bug (Guninski’s find), which was probably not exploitable on any installation of qmail. I don’t think there have been any other security bugs found in qmail.
The optimization improvements sound impressive and it seems like they could present a big opportunity to make HTML5 video considerably better and more unified.
This same article was posted on r/programming yesterday (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2y4294/coding_l...). The discussion following was quite interesting, especially this one comment regarding the twitter exchange (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2y4294/coding_l...).

"I'm not trying to say the whole article is bad so stay with me here, but is it just me or does some of this just come off as negative thinking and negative assumptions?
A few examples from the article..
I have been a TA for weekend workshops that teach women to code. My male co-TA’s constantly asked me throughout the workshop how I was enjoying learning to program.
...
....Apparently, presenting as feminine makes you look like a beginner.
You were at an event to teach women to code. I don't know the specifics because I wasn't there however maybe the assumption should be that they just didn't realise you weren't a student?
I can understand how that must be frustrating but why attribute it to what you were wearing? I feel like the author didn't go into detail here.
In another section the author links to a photo on twitter[1] that makes it appear as a commenter is telling Casey Johnston to read her own article.
Casey Johnston: So many “solutions” to the lack of women in tech don’t get at the actual problems…
Tomas Sancio: @caseyjohnston read the full article. There's a chicken and egg problem w/ female tech role models. Men want to be the next Jobs/Gates/etc.
When I first read this screenshot I took it for what it was. "read the article"... i.e. "I read the article" and that's exactly what it turned out to be when I found the tweets[2] .
The author putting this screenshot of twitter in here I feel is simply misrepresenting the situation or hasn't researched into even looking at the full context? I have to admit i've only looked at this for 10 minutes, maybe I'm getting the wrong picture here, but from what i've seen it's a completely different story to the one shown on the author's page.
I often read these gender inequality articles, however I am always constantly disappointed when things like the above are over dramatized, or I do additional research to only find out that the author is presenting an incredibly biased view of a situation.
I don't want people to conclude that there is no gender inequality, however I feel that things like the above do not help get the point across. In fact I think they do the opposite."
When I sold my business I suddenly found myself in charge of four divisions of a much larger company. I found the YCombinator "How to Start a Startup" Lecture Podcast (https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/how-to-start-a-startup/i...) invaluable. Specifically the later lectures on "How to Manage" and "How To Operate" were fantastic.
People are convertible, but I don't think they are convertible under torture. I think the tribe you are supposed to convert to must seem like they would actually accept you somehow, not just dump you in a cell for the rest of your life and kill your former friends.
My original comment was "Python is losing to Ruby, Go, and JavaScript". From purely a job market perspective I can't see why'd you'd invest time in learning Python over Ruby and JS. For non-blocking I/O people are going with JS instead of things like tornado. From a pure performance perspective, Go wins out over most/all interpreted languages.

Python is only winning a few niche markets like numerical computation, statistics. and biology...which most developers are not in. If you are trying to learn a language to get a job, you're probably not wanting to look at small niche industries to work in.

Of course you can build billion dollar companies in any language, but that wasn't the question or comment being discussed.
PROFOUNDESSAYWRITERS|QualityCustomESSAYS
> So you refused to answer my direct question: how fluent are you with Haskell?

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

DH0
DH1 <-- you are here
DH2
DH3
DH4
DH5
DH6

> For an empirical advocate, you keep arguing from a quite theoretical point of view.

What you assert without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Their protocol and implementations are fully open source.
https://github.com/WhisperSystems
This is indeed an area of research, you're not unique in seeing this use (sorry! :D)

I am agoraphobic and am aware of, though have not participated in, virtual reality assisted exposure therapy programs for agoraphobics. It's early days, but there's people working on it.

It's particularly exciting for agoraphobia and certain other anxiety issues which respond very well to exposure, but exposure is expensive and difficult to do and takes a lot of work on behalf of the patient and practitioner, whereas VR obviously makes things easier if you can make it work as well.
درج اگهی رایگان، تبلیغات اینترنتی و نیازمندی
I get that from some folks too - people say "oh, you don't look like a programmer-type". And I want to say "what does that sort of person look like?" but I also half-know what the stereotype is. None of the folks at our coworking spot who are in the software world fit that mold, but they all are programmers of some stripe. It's odd - I know very few programmers who fit the traditional visual stereotype - like, fewer than 10% in my circles. Yet it's still alive and strong...
And if you've not seen it yourself in 10 years, of course it must not exist.
Windows 93 in JavaScript
It's just as annoying when a guy does it.

If anything, it's an ageist thing, since only young people seem to do it. It makes people sound young, inexperienced, and unsure.
Go to the Exploratorium, the California Academy of Sciences, The Marine Mammal Center, Muir Woods.

Learn about something that doesn't use GitHub. ;)
The latest unemployment numbers are great if you’re not black
For what it's worth, that's what the Whisper Systems people seem to think, after consulting their attorneys.
To go along with that--methods that have immutable/pure functional semantics, meaning they return a modified copy of the structure, with no side-effects, rather than mutating a shared object.
ورمی کمپوست
Ask HN: Splittable Browser?
Does anyone know an internet browser that allow this? Why no one builded it?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=6cfmiYTZgqI
> Most everything you've cited as an objective wrong was practically universally considered an objective good nary 60 years ago

Again, it doesn't matter what the popular opinion was on this. PG stops at murder. I stop at looking at other human beings as inferior life forms based on immutable traits.

I am supremely confident that in 60 years, my specific views won't be viewed as bigoted by future generations.

> Are we just supposed to believe that everyone that lived south of the Mason-Dixon line was naturally insipid, evil, and amoral?

Everyone that lived south of the Mason-Dixon and believed that black people were property? Which would be a majority, but certainly not every single person in the south then? Yes. Yes they were.

> which usually hinge on the belief that the enslaved group is naturally inferior and couldn't survive without the master group

Black people seemed to be subsisting just fine in Africa before being dragged over here on slave ships.

> you never know when infertility will reverse itself if the couple is otherwise healthy and under 40

So you support banning marriage after the age of 40 then, got it.

> Post-menopausal women or other permanently sterile heterosexual partners are OK because they are examples that reinforce the need for permanent heterosexual coupling and family structure, even if they are unable to produce children on their own

... or not.

What an unbelievable load of horse shit you are spewing. I can't honestly believe you typed that with a straight face.

If you're going to be this fatuous, then I'm not even going to bother with the rest of your post.

But just so you don't claim this is an ad hominem attack: the APA (and most every other unbiased organization that have studied this issue in depth) disagrees with your bigoted narrative: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/10/adopted-children.aspx

It doesn't matter anyway, you've already lost on this issue. The USSC is going to reverse the last 17 states holding out this summer. You can go pout about it with the anti-miscegenation crowd.
I used it for a few months as my main browser, but gave up. Would be so so much better as a Firefox or Chromium fork. Sometimes you want the traditional mouse stuff and it's just not there. Looking forward to breech.cc (not on my OS yet).
It's awesome, I am playing my childhood game from like half an hour
haha, yes, it's really full of surprises (:
In some sense I did (not Fields-medal level, but graduate math level) some years ago. The problem is not that it is impossible or that one needs stretched analogies etc., but that the mass is simply doesn't like learning about concepts that are foreign to them etc.

Or to explain it in different terms: When one asks me, what I'm doing as a mathematician (in research): When the other person works in a related area I can give a short, concise explanation that they will understand. On the other hand, if the counterpart hasn't that deep knowledge, I have to give longer explanations that are understandable for their level of knowledge. But this is not what they want to hear (and I have not yet found out, what they want to hear). For me it's quite illogical to ask what I'm doing research about, if they don't even want to hear the answer...
I don't think cute things are seen as sign of weakness. At least I haven't seen anyone complain that some octocat was too cute for a professional company like github.
Moxie didn't say it but the comment seems to imply that they are in fact comparable.
Here's the reason, it's because of how iteration works in Ruby with "everything is an expression" semantics: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/10/18/such-a-little-thing/

In Ruby iteration is implemented by letting something call a block repeatedly until the end of the iteration. The interpreter provides jump points in order to implement skipping or breaking the iteration. A continue is implemented as a form of jumping to the end of the block, a break is implemented by jumping past the call to the iterator function. Without the return it would be very awkward to return something from the function.Imagine a function that returns the first even item from a list:

>> def find_even iterable
>> iterable.each { |x| return x if x % 2 == 0 }
>> end
=> nil
>> find_even [1, 3, 5, 6]
=> 6

Imagine the non-local return was not available, you would have to rewrite it like this:

>> def find_even iterable
>> done = false
>> rv = nil
>> iterable.each { |x|
>> if x % 2 == 0
>> done = true
>> rv = x
>> break
>> end
>> }
>> rv
>> end
*
Where I live in Canada, there are professors who aren't even close to the same caliber of proficiency or importance as Dr. Tao and earn more. Granted, they represent a small percentage of professors, but the point is that top end professor do end up making quite a bit of money.
Puzzle HN: Can you please help us mathematically solve a puzzle?
I encountered a very simple puzzle that has very interesting ramifications. The puzzle consists of a set of cubes grouped in 3s or 2s that are linked together in a staggered fashion with elastic. We are meant to collapse these cubes into a 3 by 3 larger cube.

Here are a few pictures: http://imgur.com/a/nxA4Y

Now we know the brute-force way to do it, but I'm wondering if there's a mathematical solution to this problem that can predict the exact sequence of folds required. Is there some way for us to derive this?

---

There are 12 nodes in total and here are the pairings of these cubes:

(3,3,), (3,3), (3,2), (2,2), (2,3), (3,3), (3,2), (2,3), (3,3), (3,2), (2,2), (2,3)
Scientists Identify ‘Big Brain’ Gene in Humans, Neanderthals
Is there something in Scala that prevents one man's "val" from becoming another man's "var"?

Not that I don't wish we could swap tired old Java for Scala at work, but I worry that opt-in immutability means somebody will opt-out and foul things up in Scala, as well :-(

For languages (e.g. - Scala, Nim) that have separate keywords for declaring/initializing immutable and mutable symbols, I wish they would avoid short words like "var" for mutable identifiers, maybe using a keyword like "mutable", "datadivision" or "ipeedinthepool" to discourage mutable data.
High-Energy X-Ray Lasers Expose the Guts of Viruses from the Inside Out
I've just started reading The Three Body Problem (in a Traditional Chinese edition, since I'm more comfortable with that than Simplified). No spoilers please.

From my perspective, what little I've read of Chinese speculative fiction (such as a couple of Ni Kuang novels) seems to take a bit of what I call a "golly gee whiz" tone, making a big deal about ideas that would be old hat to most readers of Western SF. What I've read so far of Liu Cixin seems to have a bit of this, but perhaps not as bad; I'll see how I feel after I finish the trilogy.
Cable Car Museum.

Seriously. Gigantic wheels spinning huge cables (the museum is also the cable hub) is WAY more interesting tech than you're ever going to see at a startup.
Npm page here https://www.npmjs.com/package/amok
The actual paper is pretty interesting, even aside from the more political implications[0]. For faculty placement, their measure of network prestige outpredicts other network measures and other ranking systems like USNews (but still only performs modestly well).

They also released the data in the supplementals. This is a magnificent hand-curated dataset, especially because it's complete, for each discipline, and it's relatively large. Network measures suffer from sampling issues, so a complete dataset like this is awesome.

[0]http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005.
Yeah, which company on Earth large enough to have an IT department doesn't use Linux somewhere, for example? I know I would be hard pressed to find one.
"after being very successful in industry"

I've heard of one example of that in the MIT AI Lab in the '60-70s, although it helped that "very successful" can equal "can pay for his research budget" ^_^. And of course there weren't many real CS graduates to turn into faculty members in the bad old days.
If you have a car, or don't mind jumping on Caltrain for the ride down, you can go to Mountain View to the Computer History Museum: http://www.computerhistory.org/
Can I use that on the testimonials page?
I'm not sure what you mean? Which part of the quote are you referring to?

EDIT: whoops I now realized this is a reply to a different comment.
I think many people will suffer from this invention. Our brain did not evolve to be in an environment with access to so much sexual stimulation, people are already becoming addicted to porn and rewiring their brains to only be turned on by pixels on a screen. This results in erectile dysfunction when they actually try to have sex and decreased energy and motivation in their lives. Just look at some of the stories on the pornfree and noFap subreddits to see what kind of problems porn can cause.

Personally I'd hope to try VR Porn once or twice in my life, further than I can't see the value in it. I believe that sexual energy is a finite resource that should be spent wisely on people you love, not in cold virtual realities.