skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has to be really cost-effective for MIT; I mean, they aren't really putting much in the way of resources towards these online students. But I think it's an attempt to solve a problem that's already in the process of evolving into a non-problem.

Most of the good programmers I know just go to school mostly for the credentials and to socialize with other programmers there, and then go home and self-teach for actual skill. School centers around getting a job. But it's starting to become not the only way to get a job. (Leaving out startups, of course; you don't really need credentials there except to impress VCs.)

Some companies are recognizing that formal education in programming is not very effective, and are paying more attention to StackOverflow and GitHub accounts and that sort of thing. Our work and expertise is becoming more visible through the Internet. That suggests that maybe we're not going to have to worry so much about credentials.

My older brother is doing very well for himself as a developer, without any formal training past some classes in high school back in the 90s. As for myself, I'm leaving for Kansas City once I'm done with my Associate's degree, and I'm going to UMKC there... for a few semesters, until I find a job and/or a cofounder. I don't intend to finish the degree I'm going to sign up for. They let slip during my visit there that they're already having issues convincing students to finish their degrees rather than let themselves be hired out.

But I do intend to go, in order to meet other programmers. That's the real power of universities: they collect bright, ambitious people and let them work together. Online classes don't have that power, and the credential problem is already being solved better, so I don't think this is going to go very far. But maybe it'll help accelerate the current solution by giving more credence to self-teaching and online study. Good try, but it'll probably be irrelevant in the end.

Kind of begs the question of whether one could recreate the social aspect of universities and leave out the expense of formal classes as they are now? For instance, whether you could make a sort of hackerspace-modelled university where all the "classes" were projects that one student was looking for help with? I'd attend that.

Hmm... sounds familiar, doesn't it? ;)
If you really think about this type of thing, eventually you will realize most of the structures originated from the early constraints, i.e. complex textual source in individual files.

If you keep going down that path, eventually even smart people run into a cognitive wall, because the sad reality is that programming is defined by difficult to parse textual code in a bunch of text files.

Good luck trying to break through that wall.
RelFS was an experiment circa 2004-2005 in blending RDBMS with FUSE: http://relfs.sourceforge.net/
epeus is right; I'm not at Twitter anymore either, but the last time I looked at this, per-country takedowns were clearly labeled as such (ie. you hit the tweet from the blocked country, you get clear "this isn't visible to you" messaging).

My honest guess? Cache coherency is hard, man.
It was also mentioned at the time Microsoft's Office UI Fabric project got released. It is very likely that both projects aim to help third party developers get a consistent look, when developing add-ons for their applications.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10147797
The Sears & Roebuck catalog was sent to rural farmers who had limited access to durable goods. It does seem to me counterproductive that Amazon tested this in cities that already have easy access to grocery markets.

$299/yr is $5.75 per delivery if you order something every week. But $25 if you only buy once a month. For the service to be worthwhile they need to sell to areas that need better access to fresh foods. There's a name for that, food deserts. And Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York are not on that list. Maybe if they had tested in a place like Phoenix they would have seen much higher use and could justify a lower subscription rate with delivery charge.

http://apps.ams.usda.gov/fooddeserts/foodDeserts.aspx
While the unions are arguably stronger on the US East Cost the International Longshore and Warehouse Union at the Oakland terminal certainly isn't a pushover.
A defense to accusations of insider trading if they're dumping equity, perhaps.
If you are using a prefix that's unique to you, then you've just created a namespace.
they didn't drop it, it's still the default data format.
The idea of blue-collar workers getting well-paid is very upsetting to some white-collar workers. They feel their social status threatened by people they deem beneath them.
>This is a pretty straight call on things. Nobody likes getting laid off, even if they had the day before been wishing they would get laid off. It feels wrong, it feels personal, and it feels bad.

I can't subscribe to this generalization. The context and manner are both extremely important.
"There's a good an bad side to modules:
Good: Provides a unit of compilation, a unit of code distribution. unit of code replacement"

I think that Joe ignores the major rationale for modularization.

Modules provide the way to cut out the fragment of a complex project and apply local reasoning to it.

In other words a module is the way to "divide and conquer" the complexity that crosses the border of the single mind's capacity.

As such a module is not about code compilation, distribution and upgrades. It's about human cognitive abilities.
One thing to be cognizant about is that cancer is really a disease caused by the reverse aging of particular cells. If you make a cell think it is too young it is going to become invasive. We don't normally think of embryonic development requiring invasive behavior of cells, but that is certainly the case. Take a look at the development of the cerebral cortex and how cells must travel through other layers to reach their destination. It appears that they are targeting telomerase which is very interesting and parallels cancer where its over-expression is used often as a marker. But then again telomerase under-expression can occur in early-stage cancer and is thought to contribute to genome instability/mutation to affect other genes before it is eventually over-expressed. So this kind of experiment is really exciting and will almost certainly give us insight into many different medical fields. I just hope that her experiment winds up on the preventative side of cancer rather than the causative one.
> because their test doesn't actually work all that well (I actually don't know enough about this part, as their work is mostly secret) they have to pivot a bunch of of their tests to using a different company's test machine

This is like if every time you fetched an Uber, a yellow cab showed up! Except for one market out of 200, where they run five black cars, in a small SF neighborhood.
Economics has a replication problem
Because programmer like my self who does not have knowledge in objective-c or swift can just use the standard web technologies to make a almost native like experience mobile app.

Agreed that still react-native is far to give you complete solution but the future looks promising.
Using the web site for a quick test, it gets me better results than Tesseract. However, it missed some words that free-ocr.com gets every single time. (free-ocr.com seems to have some voodoo magic)
Amusing side-conversation we're having right now: apparently my reply above didn't show up immediately for some folks.

Obviously, Hacker News is censoring me.
What do you expect they want to fix?

As a very recent 1password user: Make the more secure format the default for new installs. Enable migration to that format without this braindead[1] process.

[1]: https://support.1password.com/switch-to-opvault/

They charge upwards of $60 for a full Mac/Windows/iOS suite of this software. I really don't think this is asking much.
It is generally assumed virtual machines have better isolation (security-wise) than operating system level isolation like the containerization Mesos and CoreOS are making use of.
A simple LaTeX framework
That's absolutely not the case. My issue is that AgileBits need to push the new format over the old one. The old one is still the default. Most users, my self included, have no idea that the old format is insecure, or that a new format exists.

The article has very limited technical details to avoid confusing people who don't know what they are doing, but the reality is that if they are reading my blog, or are reading HN then they have the technical details to understand something much more complex than what I wrote.

I clearly state at the bottom of the article that the software still keeps your passwords secure and that I will continue to use 1Password. AgileBits still have my full support, I just want them to inform the users the downsides of using agile keychain, and to use OPVault by default.
I also had it in LA for $300 (I believe it was $200 on top of my $100 prime?)

It helped a lot when I was stuck at home with my newborn but after that I stopped using it as much. I do like the idea of not having to go to the market but Amazon hasn't nailed it yet.
If they were 8-bit, shouldn't they have supported 2 digits at at time (4 bits per digit)?
I love how this mixes the "n=1" self-experimentation of Seth Roberts [1] with the "not just the President, but also a client" salesmanship of Sy Sperling [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Roberts

[2] https://youtu.be/IuRLGdGnqSU?t=47s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_Club
This is the best explanation I've found:

https://support.1password.com/switch-to-opvault/

According to them, if you sync to dropbox or an external folder and use their default external file format for it, you might expose metadata, otherwise, you're fine.
Yes. Url changed from http://bionicly.com/liz-parrish-gene-therapy/.

From the guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No. It's not really a good sign if the VC doesn't have respect for other peoples religions. Even if the region in question is a bit out there for whatever country, its nice to be nice. Jerks aren't good business partners.
The Firefox version of uBlock Origin supports inline script tag filtering, which allows to work around Bild's block (and other such attempts).[1]

Chromium-based browser do not support inline script tag filtering, but you can still block all inline script tags at once, and the site will load fine, though with some broken functionality.[2]

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Inline-script-tag-fil...

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/821#issuecomment-14...
Some ways this is irresponsible, from the (much much better) Tech Review article:

>Fossell, the anti-aging entrepreneur, says even if Parrish were to somehow succeed in slowing the aging of her body, an outcome he rated as unlikely, the experiment would have no impact because of how it was carried out. “The problem is that no one is going to believe them,” he says. “The credibility will be zero even if they are right on the money.”

Also:

> “We as a company have our own ethics,” she says, referring to what she calls the need for inexpensive gene therapy treatments. “I am certainly not going to ask someone’s permission to potentially create new industries and cures.”

Anybody saying "we have our own ethics" is way way out there, it casts doubt on all of the rest of their endeavor.
It may be an outdated data format, but they certainly haven't dropped it. It's still the default format for syncing, presumably because 1Password for Android doesn't support OPVault yet.

https://support.1password.com/switch-to-opvault/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C9_League

As far as I know, the prestige university you go to if you want a specifically technical education is Shanghai Jiao Tong Daxue. (Don't take that as particularly authoritative; I'm mostly familiar with it as a contrast to Fudan.) But I don't believe Tsinghua is technically focused in the manner of MIT. It's very much part of China's Ivy League.
Are you that good in predicting the future hundreds of years ahead?

World population is not going to reach 100 billion in the next 200 years.

New technologies may allow:

1) Grow food in cold climate (Russia, Canada and even Antarctica).

2) Grow food in the ocean.

3) Grow food under ground.

4) 10x+ increase in food output from the same amount of land.

5) Industrial food synthesizing.
>> Kind of begs the question of whether one could recreate the social aspect of universities and leave out the expense of formal classes as they are now? For instance, whether you could make a sort of hackerspace-modelled university where all the "classes" were projects that one student was looking for help with? I'd attend that.

Sounds kind of like Make School [1]. Will be interesting to see the outcomes for their first real 'class' of students.

[1] https://www.makeschool.com/
Could I port Python to this and then run a Flask app directly under Xen?
Interesting. I believe the better question is: How to manage context? In a hierarchy or flat or ...? Natural languages have the same problem and a plethora of solutions mostly based on conventions or rules. You make even break them to end up with a joke or confuse your opponent. Scientists often think 'this makes no sense in given context' and rely on very strictly defined contexts. In common language the situation at hand loosely defines a context leading to all kind of misunderstandings when strangers meet. However, communication can drastically improve if a shared context exists and was found.

Is there a progamming language where one can construct/negotiate contexts in a clever way? Something more powerful than Python's 'import' or Javascript's 'with'?
Tower of London staff 'used magic to repel the forces of the Devil'
Are/were insider trading laws ever effective? It seems like they create an incentive for secrecy.
Driverless trucks move all iron ore at Rio Tinto's Pilbara mines, in world first
yeah I knkow - you might need to spend up to four weeks and go through, I shit you not, dozens of unpaid interviews - robbing you of 2 hours each, and not just once but often two or three times - before you get your next $80K-$140K job offer. The tech space is absolutely brutal. Nobody other than 90% of people would think this is a tenable lifestyle.
Opposite impression based on what?
> Yes, you could program treating everything like a web startup, but few simple assumptions like "this is inside my program so it responds fast and lives as long as the rest of the program does" can help tremendously improve the speed of coding and the speed of the program itself.

I think the distinction between regular Smalltalk OOP (designed before distributed programming was a thing) and what people actually mean when they call a language "actor-modelled" is that, in a language like Erlang, you get to lean on the language itself (or in Erlang's case, the OTP framework) to be pessimistic about other objects' behaviors for you.

One thing that I think is missing from today's OOP language landscape, though, is a concept of protocol parameter adjustment for long-lived peers, ala TCP window scaling. While I wouldn't expect this of anyone's one-off RPC protocol, the frameworks like OTP, specifically made to cleverly handle OOP RPC stuff, should be capable of multiple levels of "formality" in how objects speak to one-another, where an object that e.g. repeatedly sends messages to a named service should be eventually JIT-optimized into one that grabs the PID of that named service and messages it directly. Of course, if that named service dies, the process will crash—but like any other JITed code, that's just the point at which the JIT abort-traps back into the un-optimized codepath and re-runs the function. This can be generalized to an arbitrary degree; you can go so far as to imagine e.g. distributed Erlang nodes that pass bytecode to one-another and gossip about code-changes, in order to be able to JIT-inline remote (pure) function calls.
Only if the relationship between functions needs to be a directed graph. If a strict tree with no cross connections is sufficient, then there should be no reason for two classical modules to share identical functions. The existence of such a function would suggest instead the need for a third module.

Considering the idea of functions that need a directed graph to describe their relationships makes it pretty obvious, at least to me, that it's a bad idea.
Most managers/entrepreneurs I know absolutely hate firing & laying off people. It's their complete least favorite part of the job.

The difference is that managers are typically under more constraints than engineers, and then entrepreneurs are under both more constraints and more uncertainty than managers. As an engineer, your job is to make the machines do what your boss wants them to do. You may have many technical constraints, but you basically have only one human constraint: what your boss is asking for.

As a manager, your job is to keep the team functioning and keep your boss happy. If your boss says that your budget has been cut by 40%, there's nothing you can do about it, you've gotta let 40% of your people go even if you really like them and they've shown you nothing but loyalty. If you've got a brilliant technical contributor but he's socially abrasive and half your team's threatening to quit if you don't get rid of him, you can fire him or you can lose half your team.

As an entrepreneur, your job is to a.) identify why the company should exist b.) hire the right people and c.) make sure that there's always enough cash in the bank. And if you have to lay people off, it means you fucked up. But you do all three of these things under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Maybe the technical rock star that shined brightly in the coding interviews is a douchebag to women, and you have to fire him so that you don't lose every woman on your team. Maybe you hired in anticipation of growth, so that you don't burn out people, but then the market for your product turned out to be much smaller than you thought. Maybe you hit a recession and your whole sector contracts.

Remember that entrepreneurs are ultimately responsible to customers, and customers show zero loyalty. If a better product comes out, or they hit on hard times, or they change their line of business, they have no obligation to keep paying for your product.

Trust and loyalty absolutely play a big role in the software industry today, but business is a lot more complex than it seems when you come out of college, and you learn quickly that you can't always do what you want.
“Default data format” is not correct. Data / Backup stores in a SQLite database locally. OPVault in iCloud, Agile Keychain for Dropbox / Folder Sync.
If you think a title is poor you should probably email the mods to suggest a better title.

They seem receptive to that kind of thing.
Sequoia’s Michael Moritz Q&A: Venture Capital Is ‘High-Risk Poker’
Landing probes on Venus has been a low priority because it really offers poor value to send something all that way only for it to die within a few hours of landing in the acidic pressure-cooking hell that is Venus' atmosphere. Venera 13 and 14 lasted 127 and 57 minutes respectively. That sounds awful, but the design goal was just 32 minutes! Perhaps our inability to have any kind of presence on Venus' surface has reduced interest in orbital missions too, which is a shame.
I agree completely. I'm working on a static website CMS that I hope to release soon. I think there's a lot of room for the static website market to grow, particularly alongside proper management and deployment tools.
>Register for an invite to the private beta (iOS only)

Sigh.
Facebook Pulls College Kid's Internship After He Exposes Privacy Leak
Yes, marketing/publishing a game is definitely a different skill then making one. It's a skill I should have started working on long before I finished the game.

Thanks for the suggestion about updates. I do plan to make one or two more significant updates before deciding whether to move onto something new.
Gorgeous landing page. Really quite well done mate.
And of course, I do dislike this and think that the problems really should be fixed properly.
I wonder wether earth first looked similar to venus today and was made habitable by (what we today consider) extremophiles. If most of venus' atmosphere was captured in solids or fluids it would look way more habitable.
Why is it not enough when all private investors just loose their money if it turns out this company is worth much less that they hoped and payed for? What would it add when a short-seller makes a profit on the loss of the investors who took on the risk trying to create a business. Who would pay the shortseller's profit?

In general, I think all derivatives should be taxed the equivalent of casino tax, because that's what it is: betting in a zero-sum game for society. Of couse we know that betting provides very good predictive information, but that does not seem like a good reason to treat financial betting different from other form of gambling.
When I was growing up, having to get a release from school in order to be able to work before legal age, I never conceived minimum wage to be a livable wage.

I saw them as teenager jobs. Jobs teenagers did to earn some money to afford things or to augment household income. Seeing adults trying to live off it was "educational" and sad.

Personally, I don't think responsible adults should be working these kinds of entry level jobs, in a well rounded economy. They should have the education and aptitude to do more value added jobs, but I think as society we've failed in coaxing more people into being more curious and wanting to learn...

Many of my classmates barely graduated high school and some dropped out. Their outlook was one where they'd get a blue collar job, maybe a union job and enjoy "seniority". Some struggle and some are doing okay running their own business, but I think their outlook would have been better with an emphasis on education. Some of the parents of these latchkey kids simply thought sending them to school would be enough. As if education and preparation for the world began and ended with school.

On the other end of the spectrum we have helicopter parents...

One thing I think could help would be to have training programs to retrain workers as the economy shifts into new directions. Grant those in need of skills acquisition tools to learn new skills.
Argh I misread you the first time. Sorry! Good one.
Good point. I shouldn't make this into a left vs. right issue. It is absolutely a human issue (and I would argue that it's especially cultural in this sense).

That said, I do think that the reasoning behind these shamings does come back quite often to progressive thought. That's not to say that regular liberals or conservatives deliberately didn't engage. I'm sure that many of them did. And it's also not to say that liberal or conservative thought would somehow be inherently better just by way of the fact that it doesn't participate in shamings. However, from my view, the rationale behind the engagements seems to overlap a lot with progressivism. The reason I point that out is because I want to highlight how dangerous it is for any philosophy to assert that it is so right - so just - that those who disagree with it are bigots whom need to be silenced. Progressive thought does this. So that's why I call it out.

But indeed, I do agree that this is also a general mob mentality issue. We should just be weary of philosophies (or political movements) that are unwilling to listen to, engage, compromise, and respectfully disagree with their opposition.
How can you determine who the insiders are if you are an outsider?

I'm not familiar with anti-cult movements. I'll have to look into it.

I might consider that if you find yourself referring to other people as outsiders, you might be in a cult (though, I may be using a different definition than you).
Feds take official position against sexual ‘conversion therapy’ for gay youths