skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The Dignified Professor"

excerpts from "'Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!' Adventures of a Curious Character" by Richard Feynman, Bantam Books: New York, 1986

I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I am making some contribution" -- it's just psychological.

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you've got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it's the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer period of time when not much is coming to you. You're not getting any ideas, and if you're doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can't even say "I'm teaching my class."

If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.
Try the web_dev and learnprogramming subreddits. And no, there is no "good single resource"...it's a staggeringly wide and convoluted field and no one source prioritizes the exact mix of things you're interested in.

If you're interested in network security and so forth, r/netsec is also a great subreddit. Honestly, I don't think it's very productive to try to teach yourself database management and security unless you are actively running a database-backed product and need that knowledge, like, immediately. I learned databases because I needed to learn how to join different databases when doing research on governmental agencies...that led to learning more about programming on how to build workflows and clean data. I learned websites because, well, I wanted to publish my work online. Through that learn-as-I-need-to path, I was able to pick up a good amount of security practices. But honestly, nothing trains you better for DB admin and security than doing it in the workplace. As a hobby, it strikes me as one of the least appealing ways to get into programming.
Don't take the advice of strangers online. Talk with your peers who know you and know your interests the most.

If you don't have a solid peer network, go with your gut, and deal with the consequences later.
I understand the antagonism towards VCs, but they have financial reasons why they push for only unicorns. Best reasons I have heard so far are:

1) The only way VCs can make large amount of money for their investors is via a liquidity event. Investors would much rather prefer .25% of a 1B dollar public company than 25% 10M dollar private company, because you can liquidate the former far more easily.

2) Overhead costs are significantly less when you focus on fewer companies, which is what happens when you push all companies to be a unicorn. A VC would much rather care about 5 companies with significant promise than 500 small companies. In the latter situation, you would need way more employees to make sure your investments are safe.

3) Funding a few unicorns is better for marketing purposes. VCs need to raise money from institutional investors, hence need to "wow" them.
I'm not sure if people realize how significant this hack is.

We just might have seen the first public hack that will cause people to die or be physically hurt. Homosexuality is illegal in certain countries (like Saudi Arabia) and this hack might expose people to harm in these countries. Some reactions of spouses might also be violent.

It looks like the reaction of most commenters is very different compared to when Gawker exposed the Conde Naste executive. This hack might have done this very same thing to many people.

On one chat website (I'm not sure if it's a good idea to post links) people are already requesting emails/domain and others are providing them. This can be used for blackmail, revenge, or to contact spouses. There will certainly be divorces resulting from this. August 19 will be the day when many people's lives were overturned. I don't know of any other hack that had such an impact in the past.

Apparently, the emails listed in the leak did not require user's confirmation, so people are posting a mix of fake and real emails. I don't know if the email confirmation flag was included in the hack or not. This could easily result in people who were not involved in any way with the website to become falsely implicated.

I don't see how Ashley Madison can survive this. They will surely be sued by multiple parties. This hack also supposedly shows that fake female profiles were used. Hacker's message calls it a scam with 90%-95% of users being male. This is a company that just a few months ago was thinking of an IPO and of raising $200 million (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-15/adultery-w...).
Two answers:

1. Pick the one that will let you meet more people, whether as coworkers, customers, tradeshow attendees, etc. People will be far more valuable to your career than what frameworks you know.

2. "When in doubt, flip a coin, because in that second it's in the air, you realize that you already know how you want it to come down." You already know which one you want, so why are you asking us?
It is a symptom of global shortening of the attention span due to constant distractions and multitasking (on the internet and elsewhere). Watching a movie in a window while browsing the web and chatting on irc seems to be quite usual these days.
What every computer science major should know
>your best move in the Valley IS to just try to get in to the biggest, best name, with the most talent flowing into it.

even better to get into such a company before it becomes that "best name". Unfortunately, on couple occasions i wasn't able to recognize it - they were such ugly ducklings back at the time :)
Well, Lua is moving fast and is lightweight and Tcl is a heavyweight and moving slow.

So the momentum is about the same and therefore both are relevant.
Thunderfoot did a video about this where, like you, he estimated the order of magnitude to be 1-2x greater than the most likely fake number reported by the Chinese government: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hcwMwFbJKc.
Learn Cloud Orchestration with the Cloudify Widget
You should receive some gift from pocket team :)
I frankly can't tell the difference. It's certainly no less coherent.
GrabTaxi Lands $350M from China’s Top Uber Rival Didi Kuaidi and Others
There was a post [1] from the creator about why he's not using RNNs, namely:

1. It requires a GPU and a ton more computational power, whereas a Markov chain is something a normal server can do with a few spare cycles. (I believe he's using one of Reddit's servers.)

2. char-rnn, the most accessible implementation, doesn't seem to support online updating

I look forward to when RNN tools are convenient to use, or when there's a computationally simpler version of the same idea, like GloVe is to word2vec.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3goxte/wh...
Adding the salt increases (albeit linearly) complexity of hashing w/ regard to brute forcing. So using a very long salt reduces hash speeds.
Jitters over land-use politics in Peninsula downtowns squeeze startups
I remember back in the day (2010) when I asked pandora in email to "NEVER PLAY ME AN ADD FROM THAT SCUZZY COMPANY AGAIN"... they replied that "we only play PG ads and we vet all adds so they are appropriate to all audiences. no apologies, just "you're wrong dude". I cancelled my account and I wasn't asked to cheat on my wife on a 30 minute basis after that.
You're using the same argument for condoms than Agile : if it doesn't work for you then you're doing it wrong.

The fact is, imagination or not, condom means less sensation for a lot of us : Bill Gates is financing research to produce even finer condoms to help facilitate its acceptance.

I think people who down-voted me, read more in my comment than what I was saying. Less sensation doesn't mean you should take the risk of a STD (I sure don't).
Ha ha. That was one funny reply.
Employers don’t care either way - what they care about is getting high quality employees.

Candidates want to be able to signal to an employer that they are a high quality employee. The way this is done is by using the college admissions process as the means of signalling (the harder to get in the better the graduates must be).

Any new college faces the problem of attracting high quality students since they are not able to provide the needed signalling that their graduates want. The historical way this has been overcome is by paying big dollars for star teachers and researchers. This will draw in some good students who care more about quality than the signalling, these good students will raise the entry requirements which will then bring in more good students creating a virtuous circle.

I hope you see why online colleges are worthless if what you want is employer signalling - they may of course still provide a good education, but they are not going to help you get a job.
> [...], which means a significant number of people are harmed by not having access to the drug in the interim.

Yes, that might happen. The more likely outcome though is that we are saved from a lot of drugs that don't work any better than chance (or even worse).
When all you have is a HammerFactoryImpl, every problem looks like an INailIter
Very nice article. I wasn't aware of most of those projects.
I am especially interested to see the results of "World Wonders Project", "Solve for X", "Ingress" and "Google Sky". I am sure Google is also secretly working on other projects that they don't want to communicate on yet (Same as Apple).
Note: all those projects really remind me of Hailo's project XYZ in the Silicon Valley Series.
Let's be real about what the business model actually is, though: scamming men who wish they were having more sex into paying a recurring fee, and then try to string them along to keep them paying, by having fake profiles of beautiful women 'wink at' or 'poke' them, chat, or whatever.

By now it has been documented that Ashley Madison customers are overwhelmingly male (duh...) and that they have fake women doing fake interactions (such as 'collect' messages the male users have to pay to read).

I don't find that business model disgusting, exactly, but it's pretty sad and sleazy and lame. (The facilitating affairs aspect of the business, if it were actually real, wouldn't offend me personally.)
Whereupon we find out that a developer had indeed added CC to the database, and the CTO didn't know...? :-\
It wasn't until second visit I found this was a NodeJS emulator and WYSIWYG editor. And not a graph maker.

It would be cool if you could plugin coding snippets to your own website.
I'm writing JavaScript tutorials and this would be very helpful.
The title makes absolutely no sense to me.
ORMs under the hood
> Imagine being able to use a laptop, or a phone, for days without plugging in.

A Kindle has a battery life of a couple of weeks (30+ hrs active use), but it's actually a mixed blessing. Daily charging is a nightly routine you get used to. Biweekly charging, you just end up forgetting when it's time to charge and don't have any power when you need it.
Any crooked peer can route into the dreaded Omaha and to a crooked NY peer faster than any safe route can go west through Asia.

I think the idea is that you can't go through Omaha and have a router in Asia saying that it handled your data within the time constraints.
> Seems to be this behaviour that humans have to mine a particular area until it's completely exhausted [...] in fossil fuel consumption/extraction [...]

Not actually true. There are lots of examples of mines closing down because exploiting them further is not economical. Some of them restart operations when prices for the dug up commodity rise.

(A Google search for `mine reopening' easily finds a few examples in the news around the globe.)
> One response I would have to both your comment and @alephone's rewording, which is perfectly correct, is that they are incomprehensible to most people.

They are incomprehensible to those who do not understand the mathematics which are being discussed.

> So the question is: How do you bridge the gap to make non-mathematicians understand?

By teaching them mathematics.

> Too much precision, in this case, undoes the goal of reaching another audience.

No. In this case what failed was the author's understanding of the criterion for diagonalizability: the operator being normal or self-adjoint (depending on the underlying field). It isn't hard to add a caveat emptor saying "in some cases operators may not have a full set of eigenvectors, so it is only appropriate to say a matrix can have at most as many linearly independent eigenvectors as its order", provided the author realizes that this is indeed the case.

Precision is important because there are phenomenally important cases where operators have no eigenvectors at all! Consider an arbitrary rotation in R^2 (fun fact: in odd dimensions all real operators have an eigenvalue, why?); clearly, this fixes no vector.
> It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself

This wasn't assumed in the premise, though the mentored may for sure have some experiences that the mentor did.

Learning and internalization happen after we synthesize stories and narratives into lessons that we can deeply connect with.

If a junior teammate comes to me with a solution and I say "I tried it that way once and it didn't work because xyz," that teammate will change their execution and, from my experience, not really internalize the xyz. This means they'll come back to me in the future with the same problem and we'll go through that again, because they didn't learn.

The critical action in both success and failure is reflection. Discovering the lessons through discussion is the way for us both to learn, and to ensure the experience is meaningful and sticks.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10083536.
Just a nit pick: The term "taxpayer money" is more accurate, I think. It isn't "government money" it's our money. When they give millions of dollars to someone studying the effects of underwater basket weaving on the English parliamentary system it is our money that is being well-allocated and utilized, not "government money".

I feel the distinction is important because it connects the burden or benefit of the decisions government makes to those who work real jobs to pay for those programs, investments and financial bonfires. It's money that came from a single mom working three jobs, truck drivers, engineers, doctors, high school kids, servers at restaurants and a million other people. It certainly isn't "government money".
Possibly the worst bit is the "you need to pay us money to be removed from our database" aspect of the business model, which gives the whole thing a decidedly protection-racket-ish air. And then, apparently, they didn't remove you from the database even if you paid the protection money!
One reason could be that it uses usernames, and does not tie someones identity to their phone number. So it makes it easier to use in some socially riskier endeavours.
But isn't the whole point of Tcl to be a lightweight embedded scripting language?

No doubt it's not going to be dethroned in any way from the numerous industry tools (most CAD systems support it for example) but if you want to embed a scripting language, is there any reason to use Tcl over Lua these days?
Hmm, is it Newton day on HN? I am guessing that you submitted this after seeing it linked to on today's other Newton thread[1]?

I am the author of Dash Board, so feel free to uh, AMA, as the kids say these days...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079507
barack.obama@whitehouse.gov is in there (and verified, whatever that means), as is tblair@labour.gov.uk (unverified), pointed out by zerohedge.
>"So I sat down with Laura and explained the situation—and said that in light of her spectacular service, we would give her a spectacular severance package."

A whole lot about that article and this quote in particular smells like BS to me. Self serving patronising crap
Battery energy density is hard to improve. Lithium is already the smallest non-gas atom, and we're within an order of magnitude of its absolute limits. Even though it seems like batteries have improved a lot over the last two decades, the vast majority of that is due to electronics that consume less power, not increased battery capacity.

That said, cost can still be reduced and cycle life can still be improved. And there are exotic ideas for better batteries too.

[1] An article on the progress and limits of batteries: http://www.nature.com/news/the-rechargeable-revolution-a-bet... (might be behind a paywall)
http://www.macfarlanlane.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/N...
Worried about Security then look @ this wolflink routers. They are far better than this onhub and it can be controlled directly from mobile and the highlight of this router is that it comes with parental control https://www.wolflinks.com/
> This is a company that just a few months ago was thinking of an IPO and of raising $200 million

"Life is short. Have a boom!"
At least, population growth. Our waistlines may be another matter...
It seems like the moves by the FCC to closed source/keep proprietary the baseband firmware on routers is a move to ensure backdoors and exploits always exist on these wireless systems.

So, here's what I'd like Google, you tell me if this would be possible and I might buy your hardware.

Could you sell me a wifi router with an open source baseband firmware that you "own" and provide regular signed updates for to comply with the FCC rules? As for the rest of what you have to offer, no thanks - I would need to flash your firmware and run my own software on your router hardware. Thanks!
It's all quite generic in the press release. And, nobody even tries to answer the number one question: how long until batteries like this could eventually hit the market?
Yep, Two wrongs never make a right. i agree with you.
Banks are broken, they will only issue mortgages, high interest credit cards and charge fees.
Crowdfunding Is Driving a Board Game Renaissance
> Edit #2: Okay, I was not wrong. For example, take a look at the link on that page to "December 1982: First thread about AIDS" [2]. The link takes you to a Usenet post that doesn't even mention AIDS, in the newsgroup fa.telecom.

I think that help article is just messed up. That section of the list seems to be doing something weird with the permalinks. The full links still work....just see e.g. the link in this 2002 metafilter post about the AIDS post. Still works: http://www.metafilter.com/22004/First-mention-of-AIDS-on-Use...

edit: though it's worth noting every other link in that list I've tried (even the ones with the weird permalinks) has worked correctly so far
this is legit checker. Some emails confirmed, others not. Probably indicator of time window of stolen data. Created mine approx 4 months ago and is not in list. e-mails I communicated with are on the list indicating their accounts were older?
React Native module for audio/video calls (WebRTC)
I've said "I'm a tourist" before.
I was just being snarky. A router requiring you to have a Google account seems needlessly complicated. We could crank it up a notch and allow only the users of an esoteric and obsolete messaging system use it.

Wave was a cool idea, though. But refusing to integrate it with e-mail under the assumption everybody will stop using it was a tad optimistic.
Is there a word for things that only other people can be?

Kinda along similar lines: expats vs. immigrants.

"Oh no, Paul and Iza are expats. Not at all like those job-stealing immigrants who moved in next door..."

(aside: does wrong fit your original question?)
Congrats. I love when someone build a clean, simple product that it works fast, and do its job!! Maybe a lot of web developer should learn from such simples, right to the point, products!

(Do you consider to open source it?)
I assume "verified" means that Ashley Madison's server sent a verification email to that address, and the user at that address clicked on the verification link included in that email.

Certainly, someone might enter in barack.obama@whitehouse.gov for fun. Presumably, emails to that address (and the official public email address, president@whitehouse.gov) get routed somewhere. But who is checking the emails sent to the president's public address? That likely requires a team of people, one of whom might have clicked on the link.
interesting, he puts it between 3kt and 300 tons based on the fireball size from the video where is my first immediate estimate just based on the same video - only i used distance and blast sound wave - was 2kt. I adjusted it down (mainly by adjusting down the most speculative element - estimate of the sound wave from the video) to 500-200 tons once i saw the next day photos with the apartment buildings still standing at 300m distance. Once i saw the crater - i became pretty sure that it is more close to 500 than 200.
Funny how a "we are dying" note reads like.
> you just end up forgetting when it's time to charge and don't have any power when you need it.

This is just a design problem though. The Kindle should warn you when you only have a few days battery (or, say, a hundred page turns) left, or maybe an LED could light up to remind you, and it'd be fine. I say this as a mildly inconvenienced Kindle user myself, because I too forget to charge it...
UBL Funds Introduces the First Mobile App in the Asset Management Sector
Agreed on the wide and convoluted field part. I was hoping though that there'd be some kind of resource along the lines of "the must know things of developing web apps" that covers the various topics from how to manage user data, to managing transactional email using parallel processes, to managing your data.

Initially when reading your answer I thought I might be giving the wrong impression in that I'm looking for security based answers. But the longer I think about it, I realise that most general web app related questions will be security related stuff too.