skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My kids both had abacuses at their desks in Elementary school.

Yeah, and I'm not sure that is a good thing http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/feynman.html

> I haven't seen this at all.

I have and the estimate is what was supposed to be the answer given, not the actual answer. This causes stress in parents and children who know math.

> You're conflating a lot of different things under the umbrella of "Common Core." When was the last time you went to a school board meeting?

Never went, also a school board meeting is not the be all and end all of the standard. I have a nephew and niece coming up and have seen the homework of my peer's children. Also, I've read the standard http://www.corestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/Math_Standar...
It is if you just want to play video with some UI around it, but they don't want to do that. They want to encrypt it.
I'm not arguing one way or the other as to the morality of these situations, but I don't think that they are analogous. Each of the following should be considered separately:

1. The transfer of money from the advertiser to the ad venue

2. The viewing of the ad by the consumer

3. The effectiveness of the ad campaign as perceived by the advertiser

In the case of the bus, the most important consideration for the bus company, whether it was paid for the ad, is unaffected by whether or not you choose to look. Also, the advertiser knows beforehand that it is only paying for the probability that a passenger will sit near their ad. The fact that someone did not diligently view all the ads will not change their estimation of the ad campaign's value, since it is already factored in.

In the case of online ad blocking, all three are affected to the maximum degree. You have no chance to view the ad, the effectiveness of the blocked ad is known by the advertiser to be zero and the site is not paid.
The first class that touched upon the formal theory of limits for me was called 'Analysis'. The calculus courses I took before that were informal and leaned mostly on intuition and algebra.
US Oil Export Ban Is Holding the Economy Back
haha indeed! Then we also have these stupid investors throwing money at some kids renting out their homes for some little money, we have hotels for that kind of stuff!
A Curated List of Angular-js Directives
The new design for our blog is out
I think session types are what you're looking for, but AFAICT they are very limited (they have the expressivity of regular expressions in expressing the sequence of messages expected over the channel -- no more). Personally, I think that for more interesting properties other formal methods, and in particular model checkers, are the way (and they're much, much easier to use than advanced type systems like dependent types and predicate types, which basically require no less than formal proof). The question, then, of using a type system like F#'s (or Haskell's) vs. C#'s (or Java's) becomes a matter of an entirely different set of tradeoffs, because neither can come close to verifying the kind of interesting properties programs need for verification (and model checkers can), and by comparison, one only helps verifying properties that are only marginally more interesting than the other (and that, too, comes at a cost).

I think that much of the benefit of languages like F#/OCaml comes from immutability by default rather than from the type system. In fact, even in the example in the article, the very same (not working but nevermind) approach would have been idiomatic in C#/Java if they, too, were immutable by default. But, of course, immutability has its own costs (unless mitigated by linear types, which also don't come free).
The ECOOP 2015 paper examines the code size issue. The bottom line is that code is often smaller because it's better optimized, has less type checks and boxing/unboxing.

What kind of information do you think it would be useful to propagate about effects?
When I see the stuff posted on Facebook from Buzzfeed, Business Insider, Mashable, etc., I'm reminded of an interview with Steve Jobs from the mid-90's, pulled from another HN thread:

A lot of times we think “Why is the television programming so bad? Why are television shows so demeaning, so poor?” The first thought that occurs to you is “Well, there is a conspiracy: the networks are feeding us this slop because its cheap to produce. [...] but the truth of the matter, if you study it in any depth, is that networks absolutely want to give people what they want so that they will watch the shows. If people wanted something different, they would get it. And the truth of the matter is that the shows that are on television, are on television because that’s what people want. [...] And that’s far more depressing than a conspiracy. Conspiracies are much more fun than the truth of the matter, which is that the vast majority of the public are pretty mindless most of the time.

I want to hate these publications, but the truth of the matter is that if I could run a financially successful blog catering to the crap that people will get somewhere else if not from me, I'd be happy to do it.
It's been a few years since I read it, so I didn't recall that. Is it stated or just implied?

Still, I remain unconvinced of the author's depictions of a lack of consciousness. The problem is the "philosophical zombie". It looks and acts, to all accounts, like a normal human, but has no internal experience. Since I can't even prove anybody else has experience (despite acting a lot like me), what's the basis for different behavior just because an organism lacks consciousness?

I found it intriguing but unlikely, based on evolutionary fitness.
Debt by Degrees:Which Colleges Help Poor Students Most?
I assume you meant a signature.

Or a combination of Amazon and the logistics companies. Mind you it's very safe to drop things at my house. (Rural home with a long driveway.) But I've noticed a trend toward a signature requirement becoming very rare whether it's Amazon or others.
I'll take them more seriously when they stop voluntarily giving the NSA zero-day vulnerabilities months before they get fixed, essentially giving them "temporary backdoors" to their systems.
A little advice: state what you do in the first sentence. Lost my interest after one paragraph.
I've gotten a few deliveries in the evening, mostly next day deliveries though where they probably didn't get the package at the local UPS hub until the afternoon.

To deliver in the evenings on a large scale they'd have to compress the work they do in the 8-9 hours of the normal working day (more in some cases where they do actually deliver in the evenings giving them almost 12 hours of delivery time) into the ~3 hours between 6-9 (starting at 6 because who actually gets home at 5 with commute times). All that goes to say if you want evening deliveries you're going to have to a lot pay more for deliveries just because it will require a lot more drivers (who will want better pay for working evening when they'd otherwise be home).
Look where this is published.
(a) too much data and (b) the value is not just in what's included but what's rejected. You can't trust servers to be honest about their own indexes. Google work very hard at anti-"SEO" measures.
Agree, I also find useful to split between domain concerns and application concerns.

A report is something that belongs to business, but the fact that it could be sent via email is totally accidental and depending on the technology we use (as it is the persistence layer, or the protocol which exposes the app).

Domain concerns live on domain object (which knows only other domain objects), while application concerns live in services. And here is where you have interfaces, concrete implementations and, where necessary, factories to switch or add the implementation at the flip of a switch.
Eg: a ReportMailSender which implements a ReportSender, that someday get replaced with a SlackSender implementing the same interface. You want both? Wrap them on a AggregatedSender.

Now your DI framework is getting really useful.
Better yet, put the tip in the app, with a notification that pops up after delivery asking you:

* How would you rate the delivery experience? (multiple dimensions here)

* Do you want to tip your courier?
> Which would eliminate the freedom of delivery companies to efficiently use delivery vehicles.

At present ( in the UK ) most courier delivery fleets stand idle in the evening after being out during the day missing deliveries to people who are in work. And having to call again the next day.

It perplexes me why they don't shift their delivery period six hours later to start at 15:00 and end at 21:00. That would cover both business and residential hours.
Holy Typo Batman!
The DeWitt Clause
Nah. Today I reached the chapter and it talks about for example, if you have 4 multiple choice questions, choose the one which has the most similarities to other questions. Why? Because questions are designed to have misleading options for answers, such that the answers will have some elements of the right answer in them to mislead you, making it quite unlikely that an answer which is radically different from all the others is the right answer, and making it more likely than average (randomly guessing, 1/4) that an answer which is similar to others is the right answer.

So if one answer is x^2+y/sqr(z) and another is 15y/sqr(z) and a third is 15/xy/sqr(z), then they suggest c because you have the most elements in common with the other answers, 15, x, y/sqr(z). This is literally in a McGraw-Hill (one of the 3 big billion-dollar education publishers) book on the GMAT.

It has nothing to do with any real world, practical application, and it's completely different from what you describe which are completely sensible approximation techniques. These aren't approximation techniques, they're guessing techniques and it's total bs. It's not teaching you a strategy to learning, to approaching problems to find meaningful solutions, or to approximate answers to questions, it's teaching you purely to game a test and the real world doesn't work like that.
Pointing out that this phrase might carry extra meaning beyond its literal interpretation != taking offense.

But in any case, "Let a thousand flowers bloom, then rip 999 of them out" is much more evocative of those events than the casual uses you cite.
So who are the tracked ads aimed at? Is this a question of hunting the 1%, the "whales"?
From Inflection to Genuflection: The Digital Destiny of Humanity
Strictly speaking however "precedent" doesn't apply to pardons since they are a power specifically granted the president by Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution. Precedents are important in courts, so if e.g. the Supreme Court had previously ruled that pardoning pot smokers is unconstitutional then that precedent would be relevant. My impression is that the courts don't want to touch pardons, which is only right, since the point of putting them in the Constitution was to give the executive the ability to rein in the vindictiveness of the legislative and judicial branches. I expect that if Congress passed a law attempting to restrict the use of pardons, even the most conservative jurist would toss that shit right out of court.
I'd be pretty angry at NSA for being incompetent if they didn't spy on foreign intelligence agencies. FFS, that, and spying on heads of government/military, is their ultimate purpose.

Counterterrorism and such, which has the slippery slope to spying on private citizens, is completely secondary at best.
This would be Senator Sheldon Whitehouse a Democrat from Rhode Island. Not likely to have a viable Republican challenger so voters will probably need to primary him out. He isn't up until 2018. He was unopposed in his 2012 primary.
While I agree that many people use north=up/south=down, I'm not convinced that it's meaningful to talk about the 'modern frame of reference' in this way.

We have one major river in the US which flows south, the Mississippi. It's such a big influence on the local views that people in New Orleans may use "north" to mean "up river" even in a bend where the river flows from geographic south. The Mississippi is very influential in US history. Northern slavers used the threat to "sell down the river" to the South.

We also have the Hudson River, which is important for New York. Someone sent "up the river" was being sent to the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, thirty miles north of New York City.

So it's not surprising that those set a baseline for a lot of people.

But if you're from Portland, OR, then the river flows (locally) west. If you're from Jacksonville, FL, the river flows (locally) east, after coming from the south. If you're from Nebraska, the Platte flows mostly east. In Boston, the Charles flows mostly northeasterly. (And to double-check, the Upper Charles River Reservation is indeed 1) upstream, and 2) southwest of the mouth.)

To say that the modern frame of reference has changed, I would want to see evidence for change. Where is the "upper" part of a river system used for something other than upstream?

Otherwise, my belief is that eponeponepon is asserting a personal view that is not really backed by the evidence.
That would coincide with rush hour?

Apart from that it's a good idea.
For the users of Mocha - could you contrast it with Torch? I am curious if, as of today, Julia is suitable for serious deep learning. (I.e. as an alternative not only for Julia lovers, but as a reason to learn Julia; I am looking at it, and (except for the matlabish syntax from time to time), looks it tempting.)
5 Must-Listen to Podcasts for Building Online Products
Snowden stopped being a whistleblower to me when the docs about the CIA's sigint spying gear was published.

There's a lot of docs that are useful for laypeople to improve their privacy, and then there's the ones that are going to do nothing but damage the spying capability of US intelligence agencies against nation-state adversaries.

If his sole goal was to damage the spying capability of US intelligence agencies, then he was a mole, not a whistle blower.
I attempted to use only intuitive explanations in my programming class once, and a student rebelled and asked for some more definite rules. She wasn't asking for a dictionary, just SOME structure to help her out. The conclusion I reached is that you need a mix - ground students in rules while supplying them with high-level concepts. You shouldn't rely on only one approach, but give them multiple entry points into the idea. Moderation, as in all things.
Why are they so unpopular there?
Actually I'm surprised they don't require some sort of login for iplayer rather than just limiting by Geo-IP, allowing VPN-using non-license-fee-payers to get the content.
California is a better environment. The UK government allows covenants not to compete (Non-compete agreements)
Sure. Thanks for the advice. I was trying to post my experience in launching a startup and not detailing into what the startup does. We are working on simplified marketing automation platform that does email and social media automation depending on customer's online behavior. Very similar to marketo and pardot but simplified and priced for small business
The Anonymous Letter
Oh! I'm glad to hear about this. I was getting painfully close to having to implement it myself...
Ah, now that's informative - I had no idea that gitgud existed as a protest against github removing sexist content.
> This is in effect all over the place. When I went to Berlin I didn't find a single subway train driver.

I'm not talking about subways, I am talking about normal intercity trains. NONE of them are automated. Anywhere. Check it out.

> "It won't happen" is talk from people who didn't want to accept an eventuality a decade ago. Today, it's happening - putting your hands over your eyes is very much unproductive.

I'm not saying this is not happening, what I am saying is that it's happening at a most slower pace than what all the hipsters on HN claim it's happening, and just like everything else, we are going towards fragmentation and not complete removal of most of these jobs. So the "singularity" dream of some people here that the human race will see all of its jobs done by robots in 20 years, and that we need to think right now about income without jobs (UBI and the like) is pure delirium. Society won't change so fast.
Thanks for noting it. We are fixing it right away :)
Show HN: Craft: a CLI tool to share files over HTTP easily
Yes, I discussed those in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10290874

In this comment I just discussed Go, since that's what the parent comment mentioned.

Haskell and OCaml are both great languages, but to a lot of people, they come off as much more "academic" or "ivory tower," and require a lot more effort to learn to use effectively for people who are not used to functional programming.

Couple that with the fact that they still use GC, so are a lot harder to get consistent low-latency performance as well as being a lot more difficult to use for any applications where you need to embed them in other applications, and they just don't offer enough of a reason to move to them over the current combination of "Python for high-level stuff, C or C++ for low-level, performance sensitive stuff".

Rust, on the other hand, promises to be effective for the low-level, performance sensitive stuff, is good for embedding in other languages, offers the additional benefit of giving statically checked memory safe multithreading with shared mutable data structures, and provides a powerful static type system for effective programming in the large.
The BBC absolutely understand the implications of the technology choices they make, think back to their Olympic coverage.

They could provide content in completely open formats but then due to contractual restrictions would be limited in what they give.

They could buy all their content outright but then due to financial restrictions they would be limited in what they give.

They are extremely open about the decisions and compromises they have to make.

They do listen to license payer and work hard on their behalf. Recently they worked with license holders to allow downloads as well as streaming on their mobile radio app.

They are not directly state funded, they are independent of the government.
I don't think they do create a lot of the programming, I thought they mostly licensed it from production companies.

I can't find stats on it. Can anyone else?
Anything on here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
The problem is what is trying to be sold, not the medium it is distributed in. News can't be copyrighted and is willingly distributed for free. Most news is actually cheap to produce as well.

So the problem is that a previously lucrative business (news) is no longer lucrative at all, and in fact that are many people who will give it away for free just for fun.

Unfortunately for those in the business of news I don't think there's a "fix" for this, it's just the onward march of progress.
Define boycott gets:

noun 1. a punitive ban that forbids relations with certain groups, cooperation with a policy, or the handling of goods.

In the sense of "cooperation with a policy", this certainly is in fact a boycott. Also, a bit of a stretch, but blocking adds is forbidding relation with a certain group (advertisers).

Further, a boycott may or may not include suppliers (or any other group associated with target). For instance when some restaurant chain is being boycotted, you don't often hear "also don't buy $X apples, they sell things to the evil chain".

The point being - it is consumer activism, people are saying "I like your site, but I won't be involved in the unreadable mess that it becomes with ads popping up everywhere." That's a pretty strong message, and far more pointed than just avoiding a site. In the later case, the message is unclear... is the problem the site content itself? Is it the ads? Is it something else like the layout?
You might like this: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittor...

Really you just want the very first part, since the more complex bits are around having mutable "latest" versions and usernames.

And here's the github repo: https://github.com/cjb/gittorrent
Isn't every whistleblower within the intelligence community a criminal by definition due to the laws surrounding the material? (Assuming they are blowing the whistle about non human-resources issues)
Could the headline be changed? It's not the same as the original headline, and trial is not a verb, except as a very recent (post 1990) colloquialism. Verbing nouns is annoying, particularly when there are perfectly good words to use: "try" or "test".
Agreed. I honestly don't understand why Amazon made that choice.

It makes the delivery much more awkward and transactional. Probably one of the most brilliant things Uber did was eliminating tips.
Not sure how it works for not UK users, but if you accessing BBC from UK, main menu at the top has `IPLAYER` button [0]. Any program I choose from there will use HTML5. Anywhere else, that includes news videos and live TV, HTML5 is not an option.

[0] - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
Snapchat will let users replay snaps as it tries to generate more revenue
The Great September Gale of 1815
Lessons learned: how we fixed our problem of issues getting ignored
Ahh, missed that. Thanks.
No, they state they are testing and expect it to work on chrome under linux.

Also, you don't need a licence if you are watching catch-up tv
I have a prototype of the product that you can check out at http://demo.maaxmarket.com/app
> [web advertising] might not even seem like advertising, by current standards.

I agree. This is one commercial video I enjoyed watching (Jimmy DiResta):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOawsNpTEYk

There are several aspects of this that made it a good medium:

* it was clear it was paid by DeWalt to make

* if one took away all the DeWalt tools, the video would still be fun to watch

* it was me who decided to watch it, not a random third party
The other design smell with these noun-verbers is they’re almost always singletons. Oh you might not realise they’re singletons, because you’ve cleverly hidden that behind your dependency injection framework: but it’s still a singleton. If there’s no state on it, it might as well be a singleton. It’s a static method in all but name. Oh sure its more testable than if you’d actually used the word “static”. But it’s still a static method. If you’d not lied to yourself with your DI framework and written this as a static method, you’d recoil in horror. But because you’ve tarted it up and called it a “dependency”, you think it’s ok. Well it isn’t. It’s still crap code. What you’ve got is procedures, arbitrarily grouped into classes you laughably call “dependencies”. It sure as hell isn’t OO.

What's so terrible about static methods? If you need to perform some sort of calculation that doesn't mutate any state, isn't a static method the correct choice, at least when you're working in a language with no functions?

A procedure with no side effects is really just a function, is it not?
I had promised to write this post in an earlier HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10030854

There is an accompanying Git repository: https://github.com/maxmind/getting-started-with-mmdb The repo contains a Vagrantfile, so Vagrant users can get up and running with an MMDB development environment in a few minutes.
> at least 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent

It should be made clear that this statistic was not derived from counting up actual innocent people who were sentenced. It was a statistical estimate with a number of assumptions built in to it. Not defending the death penalty, just pointing out something that was not stated precisely in my opinion.
Apple says "Less than 0.00673% of customers have been affected by government information requests." That's approximately 1 out of every 14,000 -- seems like a lot to me!