skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me, this is the real problem. I see little reason to believe that Common Core fixes it.

But then, I have a bit of an unusual perspective on the problem. My position isn't that the old curriculum is good and this new one is bad. They're all pretty darned bad. Common Core has some neat bits in it, but it's still polishing a turd; Lockhart's Lament still applies to it in full force.
This is my thinking as well. Robots have become the new jetpack it seems. Lots of conjecture and promises from people unfamiliar with the industry. I read these articles from time to time and they more or less assume we have some level of working AI and cheap robot arms and legs with the degrees of freedom and strength a person has. We're not remotely there. In fact, services like Google Now, Cortana, and Siri are comically well... stupid. Expert systems tied to various databases does not make for a very intelligent agent, at least on the level we're talking about here. The home robot market is also comically stupid and filled with things like Pepper or Jibo or Robotbase which are little more than ipads on wheels.

As a robot hobbyist I'm very bewildered about all this empty futurism. What robots have these journalists seen that can trivially roll into McDonalds are start taking orders, for example. How are they handle natural language processing in a noisy and high speed environment full of fault prone humans? If robots like these are going to come about we'll first be seeing stuff like this on the hobbyist level, then in children's toys and other novelty seeking industries, and only later in places like retail or offices.

I'm sure physical automation paired with intelligence will eventually eat the world, but eventually isn't two years from now. It might be more like two hundred. Or even two thousand. General purpose robotics is a hard problem. Its not remotely solved.
Same here, I didn't even know about most of these, except the list interpolation trick, "@{[ fncall() ]}", which is pretty common where I work.
Yes, that's generally correct. We still haven't fully decided on the exact syntax. If anyone wants to get involved, this RFC was the one that got merged, but hasn't been made stable yet: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0809-box-...

And this is the active, in-final-comment-period one which modifies it: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1228
What happens if you get in a car accident delivering Amazon packages and don't have commercial car insurance as I suspect most people don't have not realize they need...
> Singleton

What if two threads need to send mail via SMTP and Mailgun...
Depends on how badly you want this job. In my opinion, don't worry about what they may offer you whether they know your current salary or not. You should first decide what you want in terms of a salary as most of us have an idea of what we want. Then pad it up a little to leave room for negotiation.

Then tell the recruiter "My current salary is $current_salary but I would need ($expected_salary + $pad_amount) to consider joining. Is that in your range ? ". If the difference between your expected salary and current salary is huge, that is not your problem. You stick to what you want as long as it is reasonable within the market of course.

Let's use a specific example. Here are the scenarios:

$current_salary = $100,000

av. market salary = $130,000 (based on your research)

$expected_salary = $130,000

$pad_amount = $5000 (keep this low)

"Recruiter, I currently make $100,000 but I would like $135,000 based on my research and market rate for someone with my skills and experience. Is this in the range offered by Google ?"

By asking this, you are now taking the focus away from the fact that you asked for a big raise. You are now smartly getting into the offered range discussion and showing that you are asking for what you are worth.
> Understanding the concept is good, but being able to effortlessly put that into practice is even better.

Except we have tons of evidence that multiplication drills do not get lots of people to that effortless level.

I was a product of the old multiplication system and I think it's humorous that you chose 7x8 as an example, as its one I can never remember. I always have to calculate it using the actual underlying math. And guess what, that's always served me perfectly well even in a highly technical profession.
If 3(y-1) = 8, then what is y?

On what planet is this a high school math problem? How do people learn linear algebra and vector calculus in college if this is what they're at in high school?
Re: an eye for an eye.

My uncle who's a pastor gave me an interesting perspective on this phrase. Before Solomon it was common practice to escalate a transgression. So a theft begets a retaliatory murder, begets a retaliatory massacre. This adage is not as much about seeking equality in punishment, as much as a brake to limit escalation. "An eye for an eye and no more."
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The IR source is easy, but how whould they have done the imaging? All IR sensors I know are semiconductor based, clearly not a option at this time.
The trend nowadays seems to be for everyone to ask for tips. I guess I kinda understand as it costs them nothing to do so and they definitely don't lose anything (and only serve to gain) by asking / soliciting for tips.
> Getting a C...is basically impossible to do these days anyway...

Depends where you go. A great many respectable schools can be brutal depending on your major. I had an undergrad class that had a 50% failure/drop rate, and I've had two graduate courses with 50-60% failure/drop rates.

>the proper response is not for a student to raise holy hell about how unfair the world is and how the professor smells bad and how they should totally be given a special exemption to re-do things until they get the grade they desire

It's very interesting that this comes up so often with regard to Millenials. I'm a Millenial, and have been a TA in graduate courses targeted at working professionals. I have never seen anyone argue like these folks do. (Average age is late-30's to mid-40's.) Here's a sample exchange:

"I have been developing software longer than you've been alive! Your tests must be wrong - there is absolutely no way that my code failed."

Sorry, but everyone else seemed to pass just fine. Look, the bug is right there in your code.

"Well, that's not fair! You didn't include that edge case in the problem statement, and my solution works fine for everything else. Besides, I only need to add a two-line `if` statement to handle it, so give me half credit."

(Aside, I am stunned by how often I'm _told_ how to grade by Boomers & Xers.) You were already given partial credit; your final grade is consistent with the grading guidelines for the assignment.

"Well, are you going to curve at least? My employer won't reimburse if I don't get at least a B."

The grading criteria are covered in the course syllabus.

Don't get me wrong - Millenials are a pain in the neck, too. But fragile egos, demanding personalities, and pouting over poor marks are not unique to the young.
So? Our jails are way above capacity in the US, but we're still handing out long sentences.
Interesting conclusions, but they seem to be inevitable:

One is that ad blockers will evolve to valving systems for accepting advertising’s wheat while rejecting its chaff. (I explain the difference in the first post in this series. And, sez AdExchanger, 71% of Ad-Block Users Would Consider Whitelisting Sites That Don’t Suck.)

The other is that we’ll help marketers think past abuse and coercion as ways to get what they want out of customers. After that happens, they’ll realize that —

1. Free customers are far more valuable than captive ones
2. Genuine relationships are worth far more than the kind that is coerced
3. Volunteered (and truly relevant) personal data is worth far more than the kind that is involuntarily fracked
4. Expressions of real intent by customers are worth far more than guesswork fed by fracked data
I think Uber deals with this by having an insurance policy that covers the workers while they are on duty. I am sure Amazon will do something similar.
> I've never personally heard any reasonable criticism of Common Core

I'm a away from my desk, but the examples that are causing the most problems are not the ones shown in the referenced article (those seem quite reasonable). The problem is how they teach addition and multiplication. Basically they are trying to do abacus math without the abacus. They also accept estimates instead of actual answers and a total removal of the memorizing of tables. A buddy of mine who is an EE with a heavy math background has had trouble helping his child get the correct answer. The worst part is he taught his daughter math early and she struggles because she knows the answer but doesn't know how to express it the way her teacher wants. This is a true pain because he thought he was raising a kid excited about STEM and now its just a wall.

As to the state rights and such. Yes, that is a valid issue, but is much broader than Common Core and a continuation of lunches and NCLB. Common Core is just more evidence to an old argument.
I use a few of them in javascript. In fact, Venus can be shortened to just "+", ie.

+"123234"
+"1e29"
+"abc" // -> NaN
Is there an up-to-date official doc or blog post about that? I haven't been able to find one.

It seems like in practice expansion files never use deltas, and (as far as I can tell) APKs generally don't either. I could be wrong about the APKs, or maybe my updates are always big because I'm using native code.

[Edit to add: my paranoid theory is that they pre-announced this, but then never properly shipped it. But I'd love to be proven wrong!]

[Edit edit: OK, it sounds like APKs already get deltas and it all just works invisibly. But I don't think expansion files get deltas.]
If you want to see the complete SQLite SQL grammar that gets passed to Lemon, check out http://www.sqlite.org/cgi/src/artifact/f599aa5e871a4933

It's pretty easy to read once you understand the file format (basically for each "line": [parser stuff] { C code using results of parsing })
> They could, but they don't. Now why don't they?

One of the bothersome issues is with a `delete :: User -> DeletedUser` method is you now have both a User and a DeletedUser, seemingly as valid as the other. Most languages share the issue too, the type-encoding of state change doesn't really work because an instance in the old state is still accessible, at best it might blow up at runtime.

That's a place where affine types (à la Rust) are an improvement, because with `delete(User) -> DeletedUser` you'd completely lose access to the User instance.
So people who were trained to do something are better at doing that something than everyone else.
Design by Contract isn't just asserts. The only thing that contracts and asserts have in common is that they are expressed as semantic predicates.

DbC formalizes the idea of a contract (hence the name) between the caller and callee (in Eiffel parlance, the client and supplier of a service) and what each expects of the other and is part of the interface of a class.

Accordingly, there are rules for contracts (visibility of symbols used in a contract must match the visibility of the function it is attached to, how contracts are related to each other via inheritance, etc.).

It is not a terribly complicated concept, but it's also not just asserts.
Special case of the general class of 'business advice' writing. Any book that says 'here's how you build a great company' or 'here's how you close deals' or 'here's how to manage people' will be chock full of examples of how following the advice works, and how failing to follow the advice doesn't. But there's never any reflection on cases where following the advice didn't work.
How being positive boosts your charisma 1000%
Show HN: Make a rectangle – a puzzle game
The article also somehow associated treating TBI/PTSD through this BCI with creating Super Soldiers. I am not seeing that jump. Super Soldier would imply that they are able to carry out the same tasks that a team could by themselves. We are still very, very far away from that.

I think people are mixing with this article about with their future "expectations" about DARPA
You keep making wiiild claims based on "I don't see it happening (as much as you)". Don't you travel?

> I'm obviously talking about local breadshops in cities. they are alive and well, once again, and not going bankrupt. Quality still matters.

There's less. There's less of all these jobs you mention. You say in another post "but it won't go extinct" - well no, probably not, they'll still exist in some form. Horse carts also exist, but nobody's here saying "Cars have not fully replaced horses".

> It's way more simple to automate a train than a car yet it's not happening. Strange, huh ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation

This is in effect all over the place. When I went to Berlin I didn't find a single subway train driver.

"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.
One requires math. The other requires English comprehension before you can work out what the math problem is.

And in the "Write two equations..." example the English is very vague. There's no suggestion that what it really means "Show the steps you use to rearrange the equation as you work out what y is."

As I read it, it's clearly not stating the real problem correctly. If you write two arbitrary rearrangements that are correct but aren't steps on the way to solving the equation, do you get marked down or not?

The first example is clearly specious. What is being taught? The concept of multiplication, the memorisation of times tables for multiplication, or the use of multiplication to solve simple problems?

I have no problem with a unified national curriculum, but I'd prefer it to be a unified national curriculum supported by hard evidence that it improves outcomes and understanding. This looks more like pointless tinkering around the edges - especially if the textbooks are really bad, as others have suggested.
Troll Repellant comments on and closes issues opened by bothersome users
There are several level of classes at the middle and high school levels. Normally this would be taught in elementary school. But there are some students who do need to be taught this again in high school. There are a whole debate of possible reasons why, but providing the basic math avoids sticking them in classes which they are guaranteed to fail
Amazon Fire
The mods asked me to repost my puzzle game. Someone appreciates something I made. I want to cry. :)
Not your target audience, but it seems kinda nice.
Yep. If you can get a recording of the "board mix" it'll be nice and crisp. That's not to say that you'd use the same mix that goes to the various house speaker systems but if you have one guy mixing the levels for live sound and then a second guy running a mix for digital recording (or even just a multitrack master for later mixing) then it can sound pretty damn good.

Plus you only hear the crowd cheering and yelling between songs or during a "sing along" segment when the audio engineer intentionally brings in the crowd mics. During the rest, you're only getting instruments and vocals, not Bubba asking Todd if he wants another beer.
Hosted VS SaaS – key difference to understand for your success
Gold star for honesty.
Well, they cancelled trig when I was in school because I was the only one taking it. It happens and there is no real excuse. As to how we learn in college? I gutted it out and did every damn problem I could. I would imagine that STEM is beat out of a lot of kids in elementary so it might just be the survivors are already used to doing the extra work.
This feels reminiscent of the arguments over piracy and content distribution media. Back before spotify and netflix and itunes, pirating music was just the way of life. People made moral arguments one way or the other and they both had credibility. Now that we have essentially moved away from that model, I've noticed discussion about piracy drastically fall off many discussion forums.

Now the same thing is happening with advertising and ad blocking. Both sides have reasonable arguments, and the discussion really doesn't seem to be getting anywhere at all. "Ads pay for your free content!" "This content is so full of other garbage it isn't even consumable in the first place!" etc, etc. The google service to pay for ad space was interesting, I am curious if that will translate to the new "spotify" of the music industry. People might be more willing to pay monthly subscriptions for high quality, ad-free content. I most likely would be.

However, the most disappointing thing from that article is the search history for "do not track." That is why I run an ad-blocker. The amount of web tracking that happens is super creepy and ethically grey at best. I don't want to be a part of that system, and if running a script blocker does that, that supersedes any ethical qualms I have with blocking ads.
It's my belief that the future is a portfolio of things you built as a "resume". We have been building embedded projects (and the hardware around them) in my program called Contextual Electronics (http://contextualelectronics.com). Maybe this would be of interest in the short term?
I wonder how long it'll take for an online thievery marketplace will pop-up selling Amazon Flex delivery data. For example, if you know you delivered a $10k gold apple watch (hypothetically), I can bet you that a local thief would pay you at least $100 for you to tell him which house it was delivered to.

In fact, my neighbour's home was broken into last year. Turns out (unbeknownst to us), he apparently had a safe in his home with nearly half a million in value (watches, diamonds etc. Huge surprise to us because we know him as a chubby, nerdy government worker who drives an electric bicycle to work, never would've expected him to have some kind of tony montana thing going on in his house haha). Anyway so we spoke to him and the police after and apparently a small crew broke into his home and went straight for the safe with specialised equipment, i.e. they knew exactly where to go and someone had told them, and they made a massive, massive haul. Imagine you worked at Amazon Flex and delivered a rolex, that's valuable information.

Anyway there are the usual problems with this that you see at eBay or the SR (how do you escrow payments on what obviously must be an illegal online service with anonymous owners, and if you don't have escrow how do you establish trust between merchant and buyer), added to the fact it's pretty easy for the police to trace it back to a delivery man if it happens often enough. Anyway wouldn't be surprised to see it happen within a few years.
I'm assuming there are lots of people here on HN whose work is affected to a greater or lesser extent by design, so let me comment on something: Gray on Gray.

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/HackerNews/GrayOnGray.png

This is effectively unreadable for me.

If you do this on web pages, don't expect people to hang about and take whatever actions are necessary to make it readable. It just isn't, and people will leave. It's said that small things matter in design - I'm not sure this is such a small thing.
What I'm seeing with my Maryland 3rd and 5th graders is lots of focus on number patterns and word problems using the integers. I think they are also getting fewer, and sometimes harder, problems than they would have previously.

Some of that is good. At times they really are being required to think more deeply.

The problems I have seen are:
a. Emphasis on explanation even when it doesn't make sense. In 2nd grade they brought home worksheets with 20-30 simple addition problems where they were asked to 'explain' each answer.
b. Focus on a narrow range of topics, to the point where they are not always learning the basic vocabulary of mathematics.
c. In particular, there has been very little attention given to geometry.
This is not Solomon's phrase, it's Hammurabi's - it originated a thousand years before Solomon in Babylonian law. It also exists in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (i.e. the books of Moses), which preceded Solomon. Pastor needs to study his Bible better...
I think everyone here is too smart to follow this kind of pers-vatorial too literally? Or Bloomberg, at all, actually?

But anyway, the story is about someone (who happens to be Irish) who is trying to "retail" manufacturing. That's of course a useful service, and might work for a first production run, but it potentially cripples the entire project if that "retail" margin is significant.

For example, the bike light that's mentioned has got lots of press and "design blog" coverage, but it's something ridiculous like $40-50 to buy, and I've seen knock-offs, already, on aliexpress for less than half that. Is that the kind of Chinese manufacturing you need?

Also Bloomberg's mast photo makes the guy look like he's trying to strike a "power pose", which fails in too many ways to count.
I visited Hoover Dam a couple of years ago. The physical scale of the thing is just astonishing. You can look at it from the top, from a bridge nearby, from inside looking out and up, and it is just mind bogglingly big. Then there is the audacity of what it does. It reroutes an entire river and moves the water through these enormous turbines to generate power. Actually, the individual turbines are surprisingly small considering what they do, (to me anyway). Sort of the same magnitude as one of those stills in Islay that distill whisky.

But one of the most amazing things, neglected by the article, is this: The project was done ahead of schedule and under budget. It went from concept to working machine in a very short period of time. It seems to me that this was peak capitalism, working exactly as it should. I cannot conceive of anything so large today being built ahead of schedule and under budget. The parasites at Bechtel and Halliburton and whoever else would get involved would find ways to suck up time and money forever, and then the flaws would be discovered after all the checks had been cashed.
Secret Surveillance Court Picks First Outsider to Get a Look In
Interestingly, "oh people could maybe need this" immediately made me think you were talking about Scala.
> Doing `activeUser.Delete()` returns a new deleted user...

But don't you now risk having two mutually contradictory objects representing one user?
IoTweek 11-18 Oct in Stockholm
That's part of the appeal of UBI - we just accept that we are moving into a gig/freelance economy and these new jobs (and old jobs that have new conventions, like 3 day workweeks) are there to supplement UBI.

As a believer in capitalism, I see UBI as equalizing the labor side of the equation without economy-smothering alternatives like unions or excessive labor regulations.

It does by decoupling the need for a person to have a stable job. I think the effects of this would be almost as big as the shifts that happened during the Industrial Revolution. Once workers are truly free to choose their employers, we will see a massive shift in workplace norms.
Content Management System Role for SaaS Companies
I'd love feedback on this side project - it's something I'd love to make even better and maintain as a free resource.

Please share any content you think creatives might enjoy.
Direct Mail Has Gone High Tech. Have You?
> One is that ad blockers will evolve to valving systems for accepting advertising’s wheat while rejecting its chaff.

Well, I guess that is essentially what Ad-Block Plus is doing. They whitelist ads that are not intrusive and make the web a reasonable place to browse, while making a little money in the meantime. I like that idea, of purifying the web of bad content.