skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not that you stated to the contrary, but the reality is that the theory and algorithms for convex optimization doesn't really differ that much from the theory of general nonlinear optimization. Basically, we get different guarantees, but we're still largely applying the same algorithms (Newton based methods combined with things like projection, active set, or interior point methods for inequalities.) Though, I very strongly agree that knowing convex optimization tricks helps this process immensely. If you're going to formulate a problem, please, dear god, choose the convex one if given a choice.

Mostly, this is a long way to say that if we're going to study optimization, we might as well study continuous optimization, which encompasses convex optimization and isn't that much more difficult.

And, yes, this stuff is incredibly useful with applications in most fields of study. I've made a nice career out of it.
Data.gov now supports Plotly and CartoDB
To those downvoting: a short comment explaining why you disagree would be helpful. If I've made a mistake I'd like to know so I don't repeat it. Thanks.
It's pretty fun to work on this kind of stuff. I wrote an OperaFS (3DO CD filesystem) extractor in Go to get at a video file that was contained in an old game.

Admittedly, I should get back to work - because I still don't know how to play the video file that I pulled out.
It still requires a bank account, just a difference sense of the word. If someone only has a phone, they need to store their bitcoin somewhere, and its unlikely to be their phone. So whoever is holding their bitcoin is acting as their bank.
>What China did to Github is inexcusable and deserves a response.

Github arguably operates in China by offering their website there. At the same time Github is refusing to meet demands by the Chinese government. Their refusal to meet those demands directly undermines policy enacted by the Chinese government. Now the Chinese government tried using their power to enforce their policy decisions.

I'm not saying it's right, but it doesn't seem that different from what's the norm these days. The only difference between China and powerful western countries is the kind of policy they enforce (censorship, not copyright protection or nuclear arms treaties etc).
Let me review what you've said, in case I misinterpreted any of it.

I stated the group identity replaces and/or subsumes personal identity.

You replied, "How is that personal identity formed, if not by social interaction? I think the dichotomy you refer to is illusory." I believe this indicates that you think all collections of people are "groups" regardless of the way that they formed, the size and any notion of in-group out-group membership status.

So I replied "social interaction != group membership"

To which you replied "I don't think the two are dissociable" which reinforced my understanding of your previous statement -- that you believe all collections of people, regardless of the size or reason for their formation, are interchangeable. A society = team = club = class = mob = airplane full of people = global population = tribe = clan = family = nation = citizenry = company = group = like-working tradesmen = guild = union = etc.

My claim is that this is patently absurd and a remarkably oversimplified model of how the world works, one that's so wrong as to be virtually non-functional. It doesn't provide any workable estimates or cause-effect relationship that apply even trivially across almost any pair of those words. We've decided that these things are so different that we even give them different words, definitions, legal status, philosophies, fields of study, and so on. In fact it's unusual when any of these two words even start to smell like the same thing.

For example, a team doesn't play a game against a tribe, people don't organize labor into a citizenry, a train-car full of people aren't a global population, a nation-state isn't a guild.

These concepts are vastly different and any model that conflates them is so useless as to not be considered.
What ARE the best condoms in the world? Does anyone know of a country with more superior condoms?
Looking for Beta Testers? Browse this community for free
As an educator, I can immediately think of a half-dozen small interactions/services/tools that I would employ if they did not distract me away from my primary tasks (or give the appearance that I am distracted, which is often just as detrimental).

Considering this, my gut says the real value of a wrist-bound device will be in the development of context & task-specific micro-utilities (rather than simply reducing the need to remove a phone from your pocket to check notifications).

So - maybe there won't be a 'killer app'; there will be a constellation of 'killer apps' that demonstrate value through the collective impact of their very small contributions to your life.
Recognizing and Handling Burnout
Sure, and San Franciso includes shops etc. So, there clearly not going to compete with 30 story apartment buildings. However, it's still fairly high population density so you can support things like good public transport links.

IMO low cost housing is about more than just poor people. Condos are expensive for young professionals, so a cheaper option with a reasonable commute could be very useful financially.
According to this half the world's population is unable to get a bank account: http://mckinseyonsociety.com/half-the-world-is-unbanked/

Bitcoin allows for anyone with internet or even text-messaging access to hold, receive and send money. To me, this seems revolutionary. I don't know how the author can ignore this.
Speaking of the name, it's a registered trademark of HolacracyOne, Inc. There are "licensed providers" of Holacracy.

I wonder what the financial incentives were for this author.
Tomb is better for this purpose than LUKS on Linux machines https://www.dyne.org/software/tomb/

More of a direct competitor to Truecrypt.
Bitcoin has many benefits for the average man, provided it is in wide use. Currently it isn't, so the advantages are not yet substantive.

For one thing, the government doesn't control the inflation of bitcoin like it does with dollars. The fed aims for ~2.5-3% "inflation" every year, however this is inflation beyond the massive deflation that occurs year over year due to technology and efficiency increases... The supercomputer that cost millions in 1970 dollars cost you a couple hundred (and fits in your pocket to boot.) The inflated 1970's million USD is gigantic in today's dollars, but only because of the inflation created by the fed because they believe it is the only way to keep the fiat money system working. If people realized the deflationary power by simply not spending, the consumer driven economy would crash and burn quickly.

What bitcoin offers is an escape from that inflationary cycle. If it's use spreads, it will allow people to protect their money in banks (although, they will be more like safety deposit boxes.) Banks can still offer loans, but it will be at a real rate in the market place. Fractional reserve banking will be a thing of the past. Federal (debt-backed) subsidies will no longer apply.

The inflationary spiral that keeps reducing wealth for anyone who wants to save without participating in the inflated stock market will end.

I see bitcoin as the cure to the woes of today. We have a real problem with the environment, and I believe much of it would be better if the money supply were not manipulated to support the consumer-driven economy. We would still have smart phones, but we probably wouldn't have throw away cases that we changed out with every outfit..
At the risk of being downvoted into oblivion: No guns.

In the US, if you're going to assault someone, they may well be packing. It makes you think twice. But in the UK, you know they're not (with close to certainty), so the only question is whether you're tougher than them.
"Color me, stupid"? Or do you think CMS is a messy name clash, too?
This same person has made a simplistic clone of MineCraft in C.

http://www.michaelfogleman.com/craft/
This tweet probably made one options trader $2.4M
For some damn fool reason we keep throwing beginners at frameworks--they should be starting with just basic HTML and CSS, and then learning JS, and only then moving on to frameworks. It's so damned confusing in part because people aren't learning the fundamentals, and so are lacking a mental model of how things work and what makes them slow.

Actually, I've been familiar with HTML+CSS+JS for a long time. The vanilla web is just not very practical for creating full-fledged web apps, especially given that there are so many frameworks that have a lot of things out of the box. Also, the vanilla web misses some features that are essential, such as the reactivity (binding).

Show me some numbers. If you want to talk about performance, then let's be quantitative. I'm also willing to wager that the HTML on the mobile device was full of bits you didn't need.

The last time I tried you wouldn't need numbers, as my pet engine did steady 60 FPS full-screen animations, while the iOS web view pathetically presented something closer to a slideshow, Android did better, but still not smooth enough. And the page loading was visible instead of instantaneous display with the native stuff. Of course, faster devices alleviate the problem.

>But still, there are better models, and there can be even better models.

Again, why do you think this is the case?

Because I've developed my own thing similar to what HTML+CSS+JS do, and I could clearly realize that you can do the same things with a much simpler model that also happens to work faster. Also, there are existing native frameworks that are examples of this.

It's quite clear that the web wasn't originally designed to be used how it's currently used and practical web apps are built with basically hacks over hacks and hack-based frameworks. Obviously, getting rid of all that clutter accumulated by incremental evolution would make a difference.
It's good if your enemies are vampires. Aside that, not much.
It's mind-blowing how much money and value is creating from teenagers wasting time.
I'm currently a software dev student looking to get involved in the OS community, but I'm having trouble getting into a community (or getting the hang of contributing).

I'm willing to do technical stuff or non technical stuff, so does anyone have advice on finding an organization or project to look into?
If you were happy to ignore hover, you'd only need to compute the bounding box when there's an event like a click.
I am aware of PGP, and yes, one could do that, but...
a) While I am not afraid of reading docuzmentation, TrueCrypt has always struck me as being really, really simple to use.
b) The whole point of an encrypted filesystem is that cleartext data never hits the disk/flash drive/whatever. Of course you can prepare your data, encrypt it with gpg, transmit it in whatever way you choose, then decrypt it. But then you have on-disk plain text data, which in some cases is just not desirable.

Just to be clear, I appreciate your suggestion, and in many cases it is entirely sufficient.

But for me, right now, TrueCrypt hits kind of a sweet spot in terms of portablity, convenience and security.
You are right. I should have quoted the excerpt. Sorry.
One thing that's missing in this description: who gets to decide how much people get paid?
I don't think that's true.

> If someone only has a phone, they need to store their bitcoin somewhere, and its unlikely to be their phone.

Why? Bitcoins do not exist somewhere, bitcoin transactions do, and they are stored in the blockchain. Bitcoins that you own are essentially unspent transactions to your address which is only a few bytes long.

A bitcoin wallet/address is not a bank account by any sense of the world.
Student Redesign of Boston CharlieCard App
I am the Visual Studio Product manager that created this page and am sorry folks that it caused some confusion. I know Ecio had the right intentions but I can see how it was confusing here as to the scope of our announcement.

The goal for us was to make sure that folks that do pay for MSDN Subscriptions know what we are doing for Visual Studio 2015 wave.

If anyone actually wants to try the latest test version of Visual Studio 2015 you can do so here:

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/visual-studio-2...

Also we have detailed release notes on what's new in Visual Studio here:
- https://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2015-preview-vs
- https://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2015-vs
I suspect that the half of the word's population that is unable to get a bank account has a sizable overlap with the fraction that doesn't have internet or even text-messaging access.
As a 25 yeah old I feel like I've completely missed this second wave of social media.

- Facebook is all old people that post horribly made memes and highly ignorant content.

- Tumblr is...what is tumblr again?

- No one I know uses Snapchat...plus what would I even send to other people "hey, bro! check out this cool bowl of cereal I'm eating".

- I've been with my significant other for 6 years so tinder, etc. is something I've never had to use.

- I do use Twitter.

- I also use instagram but only as an artistic outlet, not just random photos of daily life. I have a clear strategy for how I use my instagram account.

- I browse reddit but most of the time the quality of the content is extremely low.

- I use more industry specific social media like Github and Dribbble but are those even considered social media? Is HN social media?
Yoga Dog
I have no question there's a political aspect, though calling the Sony attack terrorism is a better fit. Assuming the purported objective was to prevent release of The Interview, how does exposing the alias Tom Hanks uses to check in to hotels accomplish that? How does that accomplish any objective? (Regardless of the responsible party.)
I don't think it's a trendy thing, I think the etymology of the word "nerd" has evolved to mean that you have a deep and detailed understanding of a particular subject.

Perhaps Tumblr, in the eyes of teens, has a steeper learning curve than spewing out pictures with Instagram/Snapchat and being adept with the platform indicates you have better technical capabilities.

Either way, I don't think it's a bad thing that the word "nerd" has changed in this manner.
Is US coming?
Amendments are often separate. But call it what you like, the MIT license includes an unconditional (implicit) patent grant, which MS takes away.
But then you would lose the evaporation that is needed for this phenomenon to occur.
Nerds developed our own culture. Now it's being aggressively colonized by the mainstream culture and the actual nerds being sidelined again.
Whenever I read these types of posts, I always feel like I'm listening to a lecture by Leon Trotsky on the theoretical perfection of Communism.

"You may not be interested in Holacracy, but Holacracy is interested in you."

> How do you hire, promote, and fire at a Holacratic company? How should you prioritize what work to do or decide who does what? The rest is up to you.

Those seem like big things to leave out of a management methodology...
You dont store Bitcoins, you store the private keys to wallets, which are tiny in size and there are many mobile Bitcoin clients.
Bitcoin is all about the underlying PROTOCOL, not the currency itself. Note that the currency only has value because the protocol is sound.

What is the protocol? Basically it allows you to trust a network in which you don't have to trust any participants. Think about that for a minute - THIS IS A PHENOMENAL ACHIEVEMENT.

Use cases for bitcoin? Who cares.
Use cases for the protocol? Countless. Just give it time. Its existed only for ~6 years people!
Orthogonal to the article: condoms are not one size fit all.

A lot of people think they are, and this causes problems. Too small, and condoms break. Too large, and they slip off. Either way feels far less comfortable than with a properly fitting condom. This ultimately leads to less usage.

Condom boxes have something called "nominal width" on the side. To fit properly, you or your partner need to take a precise measure of the penis circumference, then match that to the appropriate width:

http://www.condom-sizes.org/condom-sizes/suggested-condom-wi...

Note that you have to double check the comdoms. For instance, magnums list 58mm, but actually are 54mm at the base, which is the most important place.

Fitted properly, latex condoms will feel significantly better and work better.
> Micropayments. There is simply no other infrastructure that does this as well as Bitcoin does, because processing fees dominate.

You mean aside from currency conversion fees, the transaction fees (https://blockchain.info/charts/transaction-fees) and the massive $6,000 to $25,000 block reward?

If you do the math, bitcoin is easily the most expensive currency to transact in, and least economically efficient currency relative to legitimate economic activity generated.
It became trendy when "nerds" and ostensibly nerd-related things started making tons of money. Now it's mainly signaling: you can be a nerd for knowing some secret Facebook shortcut.
thanks for posting this, though its unfortunate that folks got confused and I am sorry if the way the page was setup did anything to contribute to the problem.

We appreciate your support of our announcement though :).
There are things that the third world already uses for this purpose, such as M-Pesa. Money through SMS is already in wide use, for millions, right now. How can I send someone bitcoin through text messaging? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
Except the unbanked have been transmitting money across the world outside of banks for a few centuries now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala I'm not so sure Bitcoin is a ground breaking change for the unbanked in developing countries, especially when the hawala market is substantially bigger and already widely used.
> It pretty much means "Bed&Breakfast"

No, it means something like "independent household". But functionally, yes, they are "bread & (maybe) breakfast".
Physical currency such as gold or cash is for Criminals, Cowards, and Crazies.

Criminals, who find it useful as a mechanism for transferring and storing income from illegal activities.

Cowards, who want to hide behind physical currency to protect themselves from social and government problems that can only be solved through education and democracy.

And crazies who think that Obama is a secret atheist muslim who is fighting a secret war of confiscation and redistribution against America.

> new allegations that it was the US Feds that stole the money from Mt. GOX users

Which category do you most identify with?
I know it's not related to this but if anyone has not watched the Linear Algebra lectures by Gilbert Strang of MIT. They are definitely worth a look as a strong foundation in Linear Algebra never hurt anyone.
(http://web.mit.edu/18.06/www/videos.shtml)

Also available on iTunes U.
Resque Bus renamed and now works with Sidekiq
BitCoin, or at least decentralized currency in general, is great for anyone for whom the current system isn't. People whose interests are do not align with the majority. The disadvantaged. Non-conformists. Individualists and free thinkers.

To some, indeed, such people are all "Criminals, Cowards and Crazies". But that just makes a stronger case for why something like BitCoin is needed.
> Press flowed effortlessly, funding fell from the sky

> Looking in from the outside, I could only assume they possessed secret advantages that I lacked access to.

Those secret advantages were just relationships with journalists and investors :)

I made the same mistake you did, where I conflated press and funding (especially early stage funding) as signals of some startup skill that must be critically important for success.

Incidentally, it was the Exec trajectory that broke me out of that thought process. When they launched, they raised a massive seed round and seemingly got press every week, and I assumed our company (somewhat a competitor) was in big trouble. But it turns out their product didn't work, and all the press and funding they had gotten didn't magically imbue them with any of the hard won insights our company had made.

Customers don't care about press, they don't care about your funding, they don't care about your growth. They care about you delivering them a product they want, and there are no shortcuts for that.
MC Kids was one of your favorite games? My wife and I actually played that the other night and wondered who actually bought it when it came out? Was it something you wanted or was it a random gift of some sort?
Why is not speculation/wealth storage not an use case?
In the classic book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore divided the early market for a product into three groups, not two - the technophiles, the early adopters, and the early majority.

The author of this blog thinks of himself as an early adopter, but he's actually a technophile - he buys these products not because he needs them or because they solve actual problems he has, but rather because he collects IoT gadgets for a hobby. In Crossing the Chasm, Moore basically disregards technophiles as a market, being too insignificant to support a product.

As I'm prone to saying, what characterizes early adopters is that they have a problem so frustrating, so confounding, that they will buy a buggy, incomplete product simply because it solves their problem. This separates them from technophiles in that they don't want the product, but rather need the product. This is a little different from Moore's view. Moore argues that early adopters choose products in order to develop a competitive advantage - they'll tolerate bugs and incompleteness in order to have an edge over their competition.

Moore's early majority is a different market - they're not looking for a competitive advantage, but rather parity. They want to use the same product their competition uses. That's where the money is, but crossing the chasm from early adopters to early majority is HARD (hence the name of the book). An early majority product will need real polish in order to achieve the grace the blog author wants - no MVPs here! You don't get the early majority market without something really excellent, something with the classical and romantic in at least moderate harmony.

But yeah. The problem with the blog author's PoV is that he's not actually an early adopter. He's not solving problems, except satisfying his hobbyist lust for the latest tech. So he's picking things up early in the MVP learning cycle. And frankly, features do outweigh gestalt at that point.
Watching the sprites in vram while the game runs is really neat, and shows a bit about how the game is put together.
For instance in Kirby's Adventure, (IIRC)Kirby's walking sprites take up about half the available RAM, and they get swapped out for the flying sprites when he jumps.

Compare this to some of the early non bank switched games where the all sprites fit entirely in memory, with some creative tweaks (bushes are recolored clouds, etc).

It's a bit myopic of Nintendo that on-cartridge mappers had to be necessary, but on the other hand, it's early 80's consumer hardware; it was probably state of the art in the late 70's ... which makes it hilarious that Wario's Woods was released in 1994.
You can use 7zip to archive, compress, and AES-256 encrypt.

You can also use GnuPG or openssl to encrypt a file or a disk image.

Lately I took a look at actual filesystems for cross-platform use. I didn't find a great one, but depending on which OS you want to burden with an extra driver, pretty good ones include exFAT, NTFS, and UDF specifically version 2.01. Like you, I am curious whether better answers are available.
How to Enable Offline Maps in the Google Maps App
Do we know if we can trust Eberhard on this?