skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting that the outage in us-east-1 is causing huge issues for Heroku in eu-west-1 too - obviously a region for Heroku isn't self sufficient.
Some people believe multitasking is a myth. I'm one of those people. I also believe when listening audio books, you shouldn't do anything else. Probably not even driving. Laying in bed or sitting in the sofa are my best ways.

Lots of people get very interested in audibooks and quickly stop listening, citing concentration issues. I always recommend to those people to stop doing whatever else they are doing and simply listen to the book, and people often come back to me and tell me they gave it a second shot and love it.
Every generation become a product of the previous one. Just because you as young often revolt against the older generations, doesn't mean you can see through all the hazy clouds that surrounds you.

Historically there have been a lot of money poured into finding ways to convince people to long term thinking with short term gains. There are a reason why advertising quick loans and and credit cards have become popular. There is a reason why the US creditscore system forces you to take on debt to build you credit score (just think about how absurd that notion is) and there is a reason why people growing up in an environment where this is the norm become bad at saving up. It's systemic and it's done by the previous generations and not simply because the young generations are stupider or more careless.

You seem to believe that people in general rationalize far mor than they actually do. We are humans not rational machines.
One reason could be that social security takes 14% off the top. If the person invested the 14% instead of having it taken, they would have a much better retirement.
True, some of them did. Any idea what fraction survived?

I quite like the idea of being able to frame the backup an important piece of text and put it on my wall.
> BBQs and Potlucks as things "older people" (or at least families) do, but as I'm into my 30, they are things I find myself doing with my friends

They are things older people do. You just haven't seemed to realize you're one of them now.
I'm fully on board with this way of working.

If you only use one language for a long time, though, don't you think you're better served by avoiding breaking for flow as much as possible?
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Note, this is released freely under the new BSD license; it is not being sold for the one U.S. dollar; it's just name.
It's probably a good idea to pick other regions, especially the ones closest to yourself

However, us-east is usually the cheapest one as well
Or capable of understanding that most things are not all bad or all good, and even when thinks are mostly-bad, good can be done.

I'm not saying that you are not capable of this; I don't know you.

What I do know is that I've often expressed blanket-statement cynicism and I regret that now. Once I got to know people who are fighting 'on the inside', I started realizing that things are more complicated, and a lot of good can (still) be achieved. From that point on, I concluded that maintaining my cynicism would be nothing short of laziness or defensiveness, and I decided to either shut up or work toward change.

I'm still a cynic in many ways, but at least I try not to discourage others from fighting battles that I do not fight, whether out of laziness or cynicism. Because I truly think much more stuff can be changed than we think. And besides, sitting around being cynical doesn't help at all.
ArgoSIM Stimulus: formalize textual req and sim them to debug systems specs
It really depends on the nature of the exam.

If it's like the Oracle Java exams, for example, you can expect syntactical "trick" questions, eg. questions that appear to be about one thing, but are actually testing your knowledge of some unrelated syntax error.

In this case, you only have repetition at your disposal. Whatever works best, whatever is most time-effiicient, do it again and again until you are seeing success numbers that you're happy with. Actual coding is best, but there might not be time.

On the other hand, if it's a school exam, written by a professor it (probably/possibly) will be about understanding, and syntax won't be as heavily tested/scored for. This would be more like a physics test where you only loose 1 or 2 points for an algebra error early on.

In this case, the answer is coding. Dream up challenges for yourself and solve them. Guess what will be on the test and solve them. Read examples from your book and extend them.
I'm not an American so I could be wrong, but I don't believe they can take money from their Old Age Security (government pension?), but that is not enough money to live off of anyway. If you have personal savings, you must use that to pay your medical bills, even if you are living off of that savings. This system seems so inhumane to me as a Canadian. You wouldn't treat your own children or family that way (if they're hungry you would feed them wouldn't you?), why accept it as 'normal' for your society as a whole. Figure out a way to use your absolutely immense resources to take care your own. We don't have it perfect in Canada either, but at least I know I won't be eating cat food in my retirement even if my own plans for my future haven't worked out.

Edit - sibling poster pointed out that personal savings in approved retirement savings plans/schemes would not be put at risk for medical debts, which makes sense. The problem however with the folks described in this story is that a substantial amount of people _don't_ actually do this - they either have not saved anything, or their savings were in other forms (real estate, etc) which have been eroded/lost.
speed reading never seemed to work for me(faster = lower comprehension). If there's a way to speed read, I think it would be how to identify key points faster. After all, most of the stuff is boilerplate and examples.
The author of this article has an obvious bias or slant she's pushing and tries hard to paint a picture of doom and gloom and of evil corporations out to take advantage of employees, e.g. when talking of self-directed 401K retirement funds with company contributions: Workers got shafted

But you know what? In many ways the opportunities that these retirement-age workers have sounds like an adventure. What's the alternative? Sitting at home watching soap-operas on TV or feeding pigeons at the park? No matter what, getting old sucks and you'll be popping Advil and aspirin for aches and pains. But companies like Amazon and the Park Service give these folks something to do and a way to keep contributing to society.

At the start of the article May was out of money, living in a trailer with no electricity or water, contemplating suicide. But by the end, thanks to Amazon and other companies she had turned it around and she was having a ball. Obviously work at these companies can be hard or boring, but we get quotes like the following:

Despite the boredom, May was grateful for one part of her job. “The best thing was the camaraderie,” she said. “I made friends there.”

“Oh my God,” she said, explaining that it was a relief to be around people who she felt understood her. “The other day, for the first time in years and years, I felt joy. Joy! That’s better than being happy.” Before long, May was helping two of her neighbors...

May told me she was doing fabulously. “My whole life has been ups and downs,” she said. “The happiest I’ve been is when I have very little.”

Sounds to me like Amazon and the others were a god-send for May and her friends.
And so will the Indians and the Chinese once they get used to consumption. Ask anyone who in India og China got used to a ar or a dishwasher whether they want to go back and I am pretty sure what the answer might be.

You are actually just proving my point.
There is only Zuul?
$2300 for a 2BR is still pretty nuts. My mortgage on a building with 2 2BR units is only $1800, and that's with FHA PMI and escrow for hefty NH property taxes. This is about 45 minutes from Boston.

Although I look with envy at my parents, who pay about $1000 in property taxes a year, and a mortgage that was about $600 before they paid it off, on a house with 50+ acres of land. With that much land (and with only a single neighboring house in sight), you can do pretty much do what you damned well please. This is about 4 hours away from Boston.

I could make quite a bit more money than I do now if I moved to NY, Boston, Seattle, California, or wherever, but if I'm increasing my salary by 50%, while doubling or tripling my cost of living expenses, and I have to live crammed into an urban area with people everywhere, that seems like a shitty deal. I'm hoping I can stick it out long enough for most people to realize that you can be just as effective as a software engineer when you're not breathing the same stale oxygen as your coworkers.
Mossad always seems to run the craziest ops because of a lack of ability to project significant power in foreign lands.
Because "power company can turn off your AC" is not a feature for you, it's a feature for the power company.

The power company's problem is that everybody has their AC turned on at 3pm and either the node supplying those houses is overloaded or they must buy energy at crazy spot prices to clear the market.

If they can flip a switch and knock out nearby ACs for 10 minutes then they have time to figure out how to solve the problem before it becomes a blackout.

Now they could "theoretically" introduce a pricing mechanism such that a number of people would shut off their AC due to an increase in price. But that is a lot more complicated (most residences do not do real-time billing for energy, harder to forecast how many users will shut off if price is raised, have to maintain real-time channel for price data) and in practice something will go wrong and you'll blackout instead.
You'll just learn the syntax automatically in that case.
Yep. That's why they still __could__ be. Of course they also couldn't be. The beauty of unknowns. Opening a vast world of clickbait headlines....
I'm not the OP, but if you slow read you will quickly find out whether the books is worthwhile or not. I don't think finding books is that hard, especially novels. For technical knowledge, I regularly read reference books and literature surveys, so I know what's in the book before hand and I know the quality. Keeping track of authors is hard in the beginning, but keeping track of publishers is easier and yields relatively the same results. That's why they charge so much...
An economic perspective because the article didn't really touch on it:

There are two main schemes for creating a pension system like social security: Pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) and Fully-funded.

Under the PAYGO system, contributions from the current labor force are shared among retirees.

Under the Fully-funded system, current earnings are collected as taxes from workers when they are young and invested by the government on their behalf, then paid out at retirement age.

Social Security in the US is a PAYGO pension system. PAYGO works great when 1) the working-age population is increasing relative to the retiree-population (tax-base is increasing relative to tax-drain) and 2) worker productivity is increasing (more taxes extracted from tax-base).

Fully-funded doesn't depend on population growth as the rate of return is generally determined by return on private investments, such as bonds and equities.

There are benefits and drawbacks to both systems, but with the shift in employment dynamics (less young, more old), the slowdown in the growth rate of the US population, and observed 6-7% market returns over the long-run [1] it seems like it would be worth considering phasing out PAYGO and switching to a Fully-funded system, or a hybrid of the two.

Here's more info for those who are interested (article is from 1998 but seems even more prescient now): http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic...

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a1.ne...
Not to be a dick, but "they also might not". The article doesn't present many good reasons for believing augmented biological intelligence will be superior. Or even what that means, ie, for how long? Obviously the human brain is an existing form of intelligence, so in that sense it may be easier to bootstrap from. But ultimately, augmentations to the brain would be limited by the requirement of being attached to a brain.

The space of augmented brains is a tiny subset of the space of possible intelligent systems. There's comparatively unlimited scope for superior designs to augmented brains within the realm of artificial intelligence, or "every other nonbiological intelligent system concievable"

It's possible to believe that augmented brains might get a lead in intelligence for a short period, they are limited by their format, and would ultimately be overtaken by superior designs.

With regards augmentation prostheses, Kurzweil makes a strong case in his book "how to Create a Mind", that anything you plug into your brain is bandwidth limited by how much information the brain can actually process at a time, in a similar way to how most things in our visual field are immediately discarded from working memory and we can only really email with the small set of visual information that we pay attention to.
Try the speed reading courses from http://www.irisreading.com/
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It was a good decision for about 10 years, maybe longer for arm due to power considerations. After that transistor budgets started to allow low cost brute force decoding of x86.
The social phenomenon that can make you go bankrupt (Diderot effect)
You should train your retention in addition to speed when learning and practicing those techniques.
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Is there something like Mailchimp / Sendgrid built for developers but for more channels than just emails? e.g. Mailchimp + Twilio + Postal Mail ... etc through a single API.

I'm looking for a dumb service and not those graphical platforms.
Tangential question, how do software firms get contracts like this? Seems like a good business to be in.
I started to answer this as a language syntax question, but it really seems like a big API problem. And yeah, just cram them and learn the signatures well. I'd just read a lot of library code and follow along in some hello-world scale examples.
> I wonder if widespread exploitation of this issue will finally disillusion the community with the supposed wonders of an open ecosystem.

The problem is not that we have an open ecosystem; it's that we have multiple closed ecosystems with controlling entities of varying competence.

> An single entity that can unilaterally release (or better yet, push) a fix to all users is starting to look really good

A single entity which can unilaterally push a fix to my phone is a single entity which can be ordered by a court to push malware to my phone.

> compared to the "democratized" approach where every company with a finger in the pie has the autonomy to sit on its ass.

It's not currently democratized; it is, if anything, feudal.

What we need is for phones to me simply computers, with users free to update and upgrade them as desired.
You learn it by using it.

If you have a decent professor giving the exam, he will be more concerned with mastery of the concepts more than getting the syntax exactly right. Of course, if you were supposed to be using Maple all semester, it would make sense to expect you to get the syntax right.
I use org-drill, the spaced-repetition tools for org-mode,

http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html

Combined with org-capture templates is a great tool.

Several commenters are saying that it does not make sense to remember the myriad commands you need to learn. I disagree. Just as you are much more efficient when your hands can execute the emacs chords and editing happens without conscious thought, programming is a much more enjoyable experience (and it is easier to stay in the flow) when you don't have to stop and look up your next move.
Isn't the point of that subreddit to showcase people who are outwardly insecure about their intelligence, rather than people who are intelligent and awkward?
Win95 was cheap, easy to install (no reformat needed), had masses of software support, and sold well. Microsoft would have preferred to sell NT but the market voted with its wallet. (By the way, Win95 mainly used DOS as a loader.)

Otherwise, which tactics were unacceptable in the context of a small company being attacked by a giant monopolist that wanted to drive it out of business?
Interesting how the speed readers tended to give short replies with links to tools while the slow readers tended to give longer replies, questioning the premise that learning to speed read is effective for learning. If OP, a speed reader, speed reads poorly, whose advise will s/he follow?
You could try picking up a reading & comprehension test-prep book, like you would find for SAT/ACT, GRE, MCAT, etc and practice reading the passages fast and doing some questions for comprehension. This way, you have concise material (500 - 800 word passages), that are complex in wording and ideas, and you can test yourself to see how much of the passage you understood.

Reading fast is one thing and comprehension/retention of the material is another. Ideally, you would want to improve all three simultaneously. That's why I'm suggesting start off with smaller, more manageable passages and analyze your understanding as you progress. You may get every question wrong in the beginning, but don't let that bum you out. Keep doing a few passages every day and you should definitely see improvement.

Once you build up a strong base, you can move onto articles, like you would find in The New Yorker for example, that can span several pages and are littered with more complex ideas and examples. You really won't be able to test yourself with questions at the end, but you can ask yourself general questions, like:

"What was the main idea?"

"What side did the author take?" (if the piece was argumentative in nature)

"What were two examples that the author used to support their claim?" (again, if a claim was being made)

Be honest with yourself, if you find it difficult to answer questions like these, read through the article again and go through it with a highlighter (sparingly, mind you). Also, you can write little notes in the margin to help you gather the content and your thoughts as you go along.

I hope this helps and best of luck :)
I think the notion that "more police on the street [makes] punishment more quick, clear, and consistent" needs supporting evidence.
Write a lot of code, and you'll remember the things that you happen to be doing whether you're trying or not. The rest, look it up (because you have to after all). For me, with the small brain that I have, trying to learn and remember everything about a language is a waste of time that is better spent building whatever's in front of me.

I think the original question was about exams, which is an unnatural thing, and nothing to optimize a lifetime for. Write as much code as you can, study however is most effective for you, and empty your brain when you lay your pencil/keyboard down.
I read fiction based on recommendations or liking other works by the author, but more importantly, based on hearing people saying interesting things about the work. A good recent example is this gwern article, that finally convinced me that I must watch Neon Genesis Evangelion:

http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20and%20Dark%20Side%20Editing

I read nonfiction in a project-learning approach - if I need Partial Differential Equations for a game I'm writing, I'll read an article or book about PDEs. I sometimes read a nonfiction book simply because I love the author or topic (Feynman's Lectures, Hamming's The Art Of Doing Science And Engineering), but it usually doesn't work as well (project-based is awesome because you always have "how can I use this in practice?" in the back of your head, leading you to process the material in interesting ways.

Skimming also helps.

The most fun I've had studying a book was Steven Smith's DSP book, at http://www.dspguide.com/ (I recommend that you learn how to make music with synthesizers before you start reading.)

My online reading diet is more of the fast-food-and-candy type, which is something I really should solve.
Hooking into an RTOS doesn't really give you much cross-platform ability: most RTOS only give you a scheduler and synchronisation primitives, not any drivers. The closest thing to a a cross-platform RTOS I know of is chibiOS, and it supports a fairly low number of platforms.
In a slightly similar vein, there was a device that stored data on VHS cassettes as black and white blobs - https://web.archive.org/web/19970110151745/http://www.danmer...
"Until this incident is resolved, you might be unable to open new support tickets with us."

Maybe they should host the ticket system on a separate provider?
Sweet, thanks. Looks like I'll get $2600/mo at age 70. If SSA holds out that long, I can live on that, but I am not hopeful.
I don't see airbnb or IMDB being down. If there's some advice on what small time apps (like mine) can do to get thing up again sooner, please let me know.
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While I agree that the process for hiring should be better than "pointless credentialism", it must also be highly selective, or else the increased salaries will go to the same people, resulting increased costs and unchanged results.
You are assuming that distributions we work with are normal, and the sampled values are independent. If you take a fat tailed distribution (for example Cauchy), bootstrap wouldn't work. If values, are dependent it wouldn't work either.

See also here:
http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/172920/bootstrap-me...
They give example of non pathologic distribution for which bootstrap doesn't provide good estimate. It's unform(0, theta)
It is said that true fundamental innovation in a technological sense takes 15+years... stable ecosystems (govt policies, strong economies etc) are needed to foster this innovation. Fundamental innovation also creates new methodologies in two or three areas, whether it be tech, market or implementation.

Everything else is incremental innovation (new tech enhancing products in a known market), this can be achieved in 1 to 3 years.
> Every generation appears to become more hedonist and think less about retirement. Many of my friends(millennials) make six figures and barely save any money for retirement.

Well, maybe I am too unimaginative but not being an American, I am curious where does all the money go. Reading Paul Graham's article about Ramen Profitability, I get the idea that a bare minimum lifestyle can burn as low as ~$1000 - 1500 / month [1]. Now a person is earning 6x this figure, how you don't end up saving something. Bars, clubs would only be fun to a certain extent. The only reasonable explanation I can think is, people buy everything that they don't need.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html
Doesn't this tear down the entire premise of the article? "Just trial & error" dismisses all the thought that goes into designing experiments and analyzing the data.
I think it's like learning any other language: lots of practice, with occasional - and hopefully gradually decreasing over time - use of the documentation.
My somewhat faulty short-term memory retains the information once it's in active use. I reckon it's like some sort of "brain cache with garbage collection". For example, I've been in Ruby for the last 3 years, and I don't have to google syntax as often as I did 2 years ago. Compare that with my last gig, writing pawn software. I used to know pawn laws quite well, now I'd be hard pressed to recall mush of that info.