skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another interesting part of the equation is BAföG.

From Wikipedia:

> The Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz (mostly known as BAföG, its abbreviation) is the Federal Training Assistance Act for students at secondary schools and universities in Germany. The law, which regulates student loans in the country, is often referred to by students who simply say they receive "BAföG".

Especially if a student's parents aren't well off, there's a good chance he/she can get a 0% loan from the government (and 50% of that loan is given as a gift).
Finally an easy to use report builder for MySQL
Empty Cities
If we can infect others with greycat's meme, we can dramatically reduce greycat's workload. :)
Caching is the classic memory-time tradeoff, everything from memoizing a function, to DNS caching, to storing a web resource that didn't change.

I think that, if a cache is combined with a push indicating a change, then it's basically a local "eventually consistent replica" which catches up as soon as there is a connection to the source of truth.

Seriously, many times you are READING data which changes rarely (read: every X minutes / hours / days). So, in the meantime, every code path that will need access to the data may as well look in the local snapshot first.

The question about consistency is an interesting one. The client's view of the authoritative server state may be slightly out of date, when the user issues a request. If certain events happened in the meantime that affect the user's view, then the action can just be kicked back to the user, to be resolved. But 90%+ of the time, the view depends on 10 things that "change rarely", so a cache is a great improvement.

Related issues involve batching / throttling / waiting for already-sent requests to complete.

PS: That was quick. I posted this and literally 10 seconds later it got a downvote.
The alerts don't work too great. I wrote this in response to a previous story:

"I actually had a billing alert set, and I did get an alert, but it looked like this:
"You are receiving this email because your estimated charges are greater than the limit you set for the alarm "awsbilling-AWS-Service-Charges-total" in AWS Account XXXXXXXX.
The alarm limit you set was $ 10.00 USD. Your total estimated charges accrued for this billing period are currently $ 1050.95 USD as of Saturday 18 July, 2015 17:34:36 UTC."
So, it came a bit too late to take action."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024958
Sex, and the Single Senior
MIT 6.001 Spellbook (1992)
Well the point of the article is that the said personality type makes good entrepreneurs. Its totally understandable that they would not be the best of employees (which is what you are describing).
Spectus.rb
It occurs to me that sharding shares most of these disadvantages. It avoids the problem of "you no longer read from your source of truth", but the overall complexity and set of failure modes looks strikingly similar.

I wonder how many sleepless nights have been caused by combining the two.
I definitely think Twitter is doomed because they are public. Actually the seeds of their downfall came earlier when they decided they needed to monetize and kill anyone else that was earning money by leveraging Twitter. But being public and having to listen to Wall Street where they are judged by Facebook's chosen KPI is the thing that will prevent Twitter from realizing its potential.

The thing about Twitter is that to this day, no one really understands what it is. It is stable only because the investors have been beating this drum for Twitter to explain and define itself. But whether you talk to founders, employees, or daily users, no one really can pin it down. However it's obvious that it has some unique properties in terms of how it lets celebrities get close to their fans, and how it allows a conversation to take place among influential people. Twitter has the power to spread ideas faster and across more varied demographics than any other tech product.

But the question Wall Street keeps asking is how can Twitter grow 5x so it has the same number of users as Facebook. They don't give a shit if the average Twitter user is 100x as influential. And it goes even deeper than that, because Twitter still faces this existential question of what it can become, whereas Facebook is pretty clear what it is, and the question is only how valuable their data is. In other words, I believe Twitter has a lot more upside than Facebook, but of course it can't take a risk on any of those ideas if it's judged by Wall Street's unimaginative criteria.
That's pretty cool, I wonder if it takes much force to move and what happens if you move both at the same time.
Wikipedia founder backs site's systems after extortion scam
1- Having children isn't very parallel to designing machines. (It might be more parallel if Hawking's parents specifically had a goal of producing more and more intelligent human beings, and genetically engineered their children to try to make that happen.) Human reproduction involves a lot of random variation and not a lot of goals, expertise, or the wherewithal to achieve them.

2- I think this is an interesting point about possible inherent computational limits on the ability to solve some problems that we might care about, including in designing more intelligent machines.

3- This is something people have thought about quite a lot. What superintelligent machines do depends on what they've been programmed to do. It's very unlikely that an AI would inherently value "diversity" or "fate" unless it were programmed to do so. The AI wouldn't spontaneously create new values (unless it were programmed to). Most concerns about AIs that exterminate humanity are based in the possibility that an AI would fulfil other goals in a surprising or unanticipated way, with bad side-effects for human survival.

4- Intelligence helps people wage war and dominate others more violently, both by coordinating better to do so (including motivating people to join in), and by developing new technology that helps make larger-scale violence cheaper. Weapons research can help you learn how to kill more people faster and at lower cost. A superintelligent AI could engage in this kind of research if it saw an important reason to.

5- I think that's exactly right; perhaps the important difference here is that the machine version would be more flexible (if you wanted to try overclocking it, or modifying the software somehow). This is dangerous and expensive and confusing to do with a physical brain, because it's hard to manipulate the details of its organization and structure, and because you can just die if you mess up. Think of the ease with which you can edit a PNG or SVG file in a computer compared to editing an oil painting. Perhaps with the computer version you can also run multiple copies in parallel -- something you also can't do with your physical self.
What do you see as being better alternatives?

I am not saying they are not there, but compared to online course for example, I think pyscially attending lectures gives more incentive to learn having invested the effort to actually turn up.

What do other people think?
For those curious: The reason Scottish universities can have that exception is a quirk of EU law: it only prevents inter-country – not intra-country – discrimination for public services.
I imagine that goes down well at an appointment. Someone you might see once a decade or less giving you lifestyle advice.
I don't see hw studying humanities gives you any more soft skills than studying computer sceince. That the sort of thing you would get from a sales job, not from sitting in a library. Maybe comp-sci just filters for the real nerds earlier.
Marc Andreessen Shelfie
> Now this is cheap populism I can get behind!

This is the lowest ranked comment right now, but I think it is great, and I want to rephrase it in a way that maybe more people can appreciate it (and hopefully doesn't get me downvoted like crazy)

So the reason I take offence at "advice" or a movement like this (not sure what it's supposed to be) is that it makes the speaker and everybody who associates with it look incredibly good, while it is barely bothering to offer any proof as to why it is actually good advice.

I am aware that this sounds cynical and I beg you to resist the temptation to downvote and/or ignore this comment. Instead I'd invite you to ask yourself: Could this argument have something to it despite the fact that it's pretty uncomfortable?

Going on, why does getting behind this make us look good? It shows that:

* we are not ignorant of questionable business practices in our field

* we don't prey on the (intellectually) weak in order to sustain our businesses

* we value ideals like craft more than money (ignoring that most of these practices are not driven by greed at all but are the only way to ensure the survival of some companies, which brings me to the next point, that)

* we are not afraid to "stick it to the man" (even though "the man" is probably a complete strawman and we don't have to fear any real retaliation for expressing this opinion)

Now there is nothing wrong with advice that makes us look good per se, but is it also good advice?

> People's capacity for bullshit is rapidly diminishing

Again, this may sound good, but it could have been said at any point in time and be true, the question is: Is it diminishing faster then new ways of bullshitting arise?

And maybe it is not diminishing at all. Take gambling for example. It is obviously "intentionally deceptive or insincere" in that it won't make you rich, it is in fact mathematically proven to make you lose money, yet people seem to have gambled for thousands of years and will probably go on to do so for thousands of years to come.

The attempt of linking bullshit to Sturgeon's law is also pretty weak IMO. It's not like anybody set out to put something in the bottom 90%, it's what happens to, well, 90% of things, and it's not at all clear that it was BS that put it there.
In other words: Naively looking at the top 10% and saying: "None of those is doing BS" does not mean the lack of BS got them there. All it says is that "In the top 10% you don't have to BS (because you can afford not to)", or even just "BS doesn't get you any further in the top 10% (and that's why nobody is doing it)".

Finally, Buzzfeed is certainly in the top 10% of "lighthearted entertainment on the internet" and it is BS (and only BS) that got them there, because that's the kind of environment that "lighthearted entertainment on the internet" is like. No amount of shaming will change anything about that (but would still make us look good, so produce some quality content over there already!).

tl,dr: Be aware of advice that sounds good. People will like to offer it even when it is not practical at all, or only under very specific circumstances, that may not apply to you.
It's worse. In a typical tragedy of the commons scenario, common resource eventually get depleted and the responsible parties leave. Here, you can't really deplete the commons, you can only compete for the share in it. Which means there is no limit within the system for the negative feedback loop that occurs.

Advertisers play a zero-sum game, committing more and more resources to one-up each other. They're wasting ever increasing amount of fuel, minerals and man hours on epsilon marginal benefit. Those are real, tangible costs for society.
http://Shelfie.com
Would we also need to carve out an exception for the typically vapid
"announcement" articles advertising paywalled academic journal papers?

The announcement-mills (phys.org comes to mind but there are plenty of
others including nature.com itself) are not really "original" sources, the papers are,
but such announcement-advertisement articles are submitted regularly.

Finding the freely available pre-print and/or author provided copies
without resorting to (ahem) other workarounds is a pain but useful.
Air Spectral
Alda does MIDI out, so you could probably route Alda to PD (PD is really good at handling MIDI signals).

While not graphical like PD, several musical languages make a distinction between the sound design (signal flow and modules) and events (notes, etc).

Csound is the first to come to mind, with it's MUSIC N orchestra + score paradigm. The orchestra syntax (especially the new changes in csound6) lends itself nicely to expressive sound design. Scores, however, are tedious to write by hand. Most Csounders opt to generate these using another program (which in itself is pretty cool, IMO)

ChucK does a similar thing as well, where you can write the signal chain (oscillator => filter => dac) and then you can control it using ChucK's C-like syntax. If you are interested in algorithmic composition and have a stronger background in programming, this is a pretty fun language to work in. That being said, Csound has a much better collection of sound modules.

Not exactly the answer you were looking for, but I hope you can check them both out, as they offer different approaches to computer music composition.
Sure but how does that change the fact that making it a industry scales it up to today's profiteering system of justice?
That's why in 2015 clusters like YC, if they achieve criticality, self-awareness and overall sustainability, have the chance to outgrow both unis and corps for meaningful and productive innovation.
> Also, Lambda-like options are available with most PaaS providers now.

Which other ones are there? I used to use PiCloud until they were bought out by dropbox and it atrophied. Shame, it was exactly what I wanted in a service.
That's spending on Google ads, not total ad spend. The ad industry complains that WalMart doesn't spend enough on ads.[1] Amazon's ad spending went way up in 2013, but it didn't help; too much was related to their mobile devices, which flopped.[2][3]

[1] http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/fix-walmart-s-woes-spe...
[2] http://adage.com/article/agency-news/amazon-reviews-media-ac...
[3] http://adage.com/article/digital/amazon-loses-126-million-ma...
calling this ps4 sdk is counterintuitive and dangerous. It may paint sony as embracing open source to the unwarned.

this is nothing but a hack-y way to exploit a browser and get access to very limited functionality. It can barely be called 'ps4 homebrew sdk'.
I can help answer questions about what we do or how/why we do it.

Some info: we're mostly a web development shop, and everything we do is 100% free and open source. Our flagship product is the Open Science Framework (http://osf.io, http://github.com/CenterForOpenScience/osf.io). We are also creating a free, open data set of scholarly (meta)data (http://www.share-research.org/; http://github.com/CenterForOpenScience/SHARE). You might have seen us in the news recently for the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716; http://osf.io/ezcuj). We're always looking for mission-driven developers. Feel free to get in touch.
I've been using one for a few months now. The layout has good comfortable placement, but the key feel is horribly mushy for my tastes. Very very rubbery, and I've occasionally had a key get stuck which is really confusing the first time it happens.

It's a stop gap while I wait for the King's Assembly to hopefully start shipping.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/70308014/kings-assembly...
> The Netherlands and Austria already complain about the masses of German students flocking to them.

Yeah because our universities either have ridiculous waiting times (six years in waiting for medicine is THE NORM, even with a perfect 1.0 Abitur degree) or kick you out when you fail the same exam three times forever - you cannot continue your study in Germany but have to study abroad.

edit: oh, I forgot to mention the housing situation: most cities with big universities neglected building affordable housing for YEARS and the market for small-ish single occupant apartments is running hot, more than most students without wealthy parents can afford.
Yes indeed. Maybe I've suffered from a broken recruitment effort in my case.
http://centerforopenscience.org/about.html

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nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)

Just sayin'...
> but the actual policies arose from public outrage in the 1980's and 1990's about the government being "soft on crime."

Bad laws are quickly removed from the books. Unless someone is pocketing money.

> Law enforcement, prison unions, private prisons, etc, have definitely benefited from these things

Yup.

> One bit of context that's lost in current discussions is how much consternation existed in the 1980's and 1990's about crime.

I remember. As I mentioned, policies tend to change with the mood ... unless someone is making money off of the previous policies.
David Garber describes this phenomenon in his book "The Utopia of Rules". Basically everythng that used to be learned on the job, becoming a craftsman, has now been replaced by studying a degree in it - essentially reenfocing the class sytem, as only the middle and upper classes will be able to afford it.
Used to? It still does. Consider my university, for example. For the academic year 2015/2016 it will charge £13,000/yr. to international students, versus £9,000/yr. to UK students:

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/infohub/finance/tuition-fee-rates-2015...
Actually, you're ignoring the author. He said that his publication successes drove him away from the system:

I have never been afraid of failures and of retrying, and retrying again;
my scientific successes are what discouraged me, because I know how they
were obtained.

My most important scientific articles were accepted in major journals
because the editors had a favorable prejudice toward me or my co-authors;
because I was insuring that I had a discussion with them before I submitted;
or because the reviewers they chose happened to be close colleagues.

You presume that he wouldn't "air dirty laundry" if he got a tenure-track position. But this ignores what he just said! Every academic success he achieved made him discouraged and want to leave. You aren't listening to him.

Why do you call this "dirty laundry"? He addresses that too:

Some of my best friends at Duke have told me that I sounded "bitter" when I
expressed these concerns. I insure you that I am not and that I am writing
these lines with the nonchalance and bliss of a man who has found other ways
to be happy and to satisfy his own scientific curiosity.

You aren't listening to him.

Look, every time an academic leaves, the existing academics try to point out his lack of career success. It makes it easier for you to dismiss him.

But that train of thought is flawed. By simple logic, the honest participants in corrupt systems WILL fail to succeed. These are the people to listen to! The honest scientists, with sound arguments, and poor publication records.
Biology too. I graduated with a batchelors 20 years ago, and pretty mush the only thing you could do with that was PhD, or some really crap lab job. They taught you to design experiments, but you would never get the chance to do that without a PhD.
I honestly don't know. I don't really see a lot of advertisements for the gulf and its not a place I want to travel. Sure seems popular with the rich though.
Legal technology is pretty much totally inapplicable to the work public defenders do. There's pretty much no documents to speak of in those cases, and the technology won't interview your client for you and piece together a detailed timeline of his version of the events. And since their clients are getting charged with the same sorts of crimes over and over, they already have the relevant cases handy in their previous filings.
I am sure it is ignored the same as people who are 200 pounds overweight ignore "You need to lose weight"

On the other hand, this is awesome. Giving them a concrete goal. A lot easier to say "Walk 30 minutes a day, 7 days a week" than "Exercise more"... go exercise!

(Not sure exactly how the cube system works, but it seems more concrete.. maybe it is the exercise version of the calorie?)
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10130341
If memory serves, the load average calculation was the only use of floating point in the BSD 4.2 kernel. Reworking the algorithm to get 4.2 running on the National 32016 before the floating point co-processor was available was my first time inside the kernel. Fun times.
The very latest versions of gdb actually can use gcc to compile code and allow you to hotpatch code into the executable. https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Compiling-... so I'm guessing maybe in the future this can be used for faster conditional breakpoints
To provide a shorter answer: polymorphism dispatches on types at compile time. Pattern matching dispatches on values at runtime.
I don't know how he thinks non US citizens have it easy to go to Russia, I've been there a couple of times and unless things have changed in the last couple of years you need to pre-book and pay for all your accommodation, and get sponsorship letters from each hotel you are staying in. It takes a month or so to process and takes a couple of trips to the Embassy (each of which is an hour or so wait).

If you want to visit friends or relatives then they have to undergo a background and finance check. Not pleasant if they are elderly relatives you are visiting.

When you get to Russia, if you're staying outside of the main centres then you need to register in each town (usually at the police station or post office). Hostels and Hotels really don't like foreigners turning up out of the blue without being on the itinerary.

This is from New Zealand who has a fairly cordial relationship with Russia and (before the current boycott) they are one of the biggest consumers of NZ dairy products.

Anyway good effort by the writer. Some hard and dangerous countries out there. I wonder how the heck he paid for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins#Work
These cars use IRC?
Can this language produce an actual grand staff notation, e.g. in a pdf format?

I'd like to use to write down compositions, but it would need that feature to be useful. If I could write down compositions in Vim that would be killer.
http://theshrug.com/this-is-the-best-drug-commercial-you-wil...
Personally I do suspect it's a multi-level, recursive scam. After all, convincing you that advertising works is itself advertising from the point of view of companies that you'll pay to advertise you (note: unless you are personally going door-to-door and telling people about your product, you're always paying someone; printshops that make your leaflets and posters are a big part of advertising industry). And since so many advertising is dishonest, it stands to reason that advertising of advertising will also often be dishonest.

A corollary: I do believe that "metrics" in on-line advertising are a tool for people using them to bullshit themselves into believing their ads work. Even an average college-educated person has zero understanding of statistics, and without it, it's easy to draw any conclusion you like from any dataset.
The headless-chicken researchers sounds replaceable by AI. If survival is the main goal, then it is a short-sighted strategy.