skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Standardized tests measure students' ability to take standardized tests. This loosely correlates with their knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, and correlates more tightly with knowledge of test-taking strategies specific to the test they are taking. So no, most of what students need to know to pass the tests is not useful real-world knowledge.

To put it another way, knowing the material is not the easiest way to pass the test, so even if the test nominally evaluates useful real-world knowledge, a high score won't guarantee that a student actually possesses that knowledge.
I had the same problem: of course an empty loop will run at the maximum because any worthwhile compiler would optimize the loop away.
Sell. Will make it easier for you to raise money on your next company and even if you sell at a discount (say $1m exit or even less), don't disclose the terms, and you will have a much easier time in the future.
Israeli startup Everything.me shuts down, despite raising $35M in funding
If you find something you would add, edit or, worst, you find some bug, please report :)
Thank you for your feedback.
It would be cool if this functionality could be hooked into cd like rvm does.
Anybody used Glacier for home backups? I still don't understand complicated billing of backup downloads, I fear that Amazon will charge me for many thousands of dollars.
True. If we are able to channel more wealth to the poorest they will definitely spend much more on health, education and such. Even more so if it's done on global level: How much more would Africa, India and such consume if given the chance!

But when all that is done we are back to the fundamental problem: Productivity can raise without a limit, while consumption is inherently limited.
They'll ignore it like they ignore most of science.
Can the backups be locally encrypted before sending them to potentially insecure aws cloud?
So if it's all so fast what does atom (latest) do with it all?
I'd be more interested if you would give at least 20:1 odds against it.

In any case, you should heed the Kelly criterion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion).
Duolingo reverse tree enhancer. Make any X – English course into English – X
Also note that in systems such as those, that lean heavily on numeric computation, you'll see only a little bit of templated code, used sparingly, to make writing the rest of it easier. In fact you won't even see any deep nested class hierarchies.
Discussion here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/10954397 (Login required)
There's a nice generalisation of splines to higher-dimensional spaces, in a non-ad-hoc way:

For the case of fitting a 2D surface to interpolate some control points {(x_i, y_i)}_i, x_i \in R^2, y_i in R, we can seek to find a surface f : R^2 --> R that attains the minimum

min_f sum_i ( f(x_i) - y_i )^2 + \lambda || D f ||^2

where \lambda > 0 is some real constant parameter.

I.e., we seek to find a surface f that trades-off goodness of fit to the control points (in the least-squares sense) against smoothness (measured by the norm of the derivative).

In the 2D case these are called "thin-plate splines". They can be viewed as nice energy-mininising surfaces that interpolate between a few control points. The functions f live in Sobolev spaces - analysis of this stuff descends into a lot of PDE theory and approximation theory if you want to compute approximations to them in practice.

To get non-singular surfaces in higher dimensions than 2 you merely have to increase which derivative appears in the smoothing term, but the same idea basically works. (You also need to ensure you have enough control points to define the surface -- note that if your smoothing term is || D^k f ||^2 then a degree k-1 polynomial is invisible to it -- so the smoothing term does not control a degree k-1 polynomial component, so you have to ensure you have appropriate control points to define that part)

If you are curious to read more about this, there's Grace Wahba's book "spline models for observational data". e.g. http://bookstore.siam.org/CB59/
Computers are fast? Try ray-tracing, or physics simulations in general :)
3/18 , most of the time I picked something 10x slower than the lower num. Guess I'm stuck in the past :(
I'd be mighty interested in learning more on this. Care to recommend some reading materials?
Technically software engineers are the shovels...recruiter anyone?
You can actually easily (compared to some time ago) write your own language to do that via the power of LLVM. You'll also be able to produce object files that can be linked in C/C++ programs, if you wish.

Edit: Or, you know, write a different macro preprocessor for C++. There's nothing special about the standard CPP other than coming bundled with the compiler.
Funny but true, many people think computers are "smart". When I am confronted with this statement in the general public I always remind them: "Computers are fast, at well computing, humans not so much. Computers however are stupid, they follow my directions exactly as I give them and will keep doing the same stupid thing until I figure out my mistake."

When we have a computer that can read the original post and give estimates and comment here on HN I will be impressed. Until then it's just a faster z80 to me, amazing, don't get me wrong, the things we can do today with the power at our disposal starts to feel like magic. [1]

All that said it makes me sad when I find code that someone didn't bother to think through or even use the profiling tools available to maximize the amount of resources it's consuming. It's true that "premature optimization is the root of all evil"[2] however at some point it can be worth you time to review your assumptions and crappy code and give it a tune up.[3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
[2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth
[3] http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1513451
Or use a sales team. Our company had a brilliant sales team who managed to sell a good product with a horrible looking and unusable website by directly setting up face to face meetings with clients for a sale.
> Are you proud to be an American

I understand "pride" as a satisfaction about one's own actions and accomplishments, and as such I think that being "proud" to be black, or American, or Irish is stupid; be proud of the decisions you took and of the things you've accomplished, not of the way you were born.

> Are you a Christian, [...] Parrothead, [...] Swimmer, [...] SF fan, [...] entrepreneur, [...], Taxpayer?

Most of these don't denote identity, they are just descriptions that allow us to stereotype people in some way and make better decisions faster. E.g. if I know someone is a Muslim, I can reasonably assume that s/he will observe Ramadan. Or if I know that a person is a Mets fan, I can infer the cause of his/her sadness if I know that Mets lost that day.

I do realize that some people strongly identify with their "identities", but I think that that kind of in-group behaviour originates from a lack of self-confidence and I consider it silly. It also often has very bad consequences, e.g. football hooliganism in the UK.

But in any case, most of the above are choices, not immutable facts. I'm a programmer because I know how to program and I do it often; if I started spending most of my time fishing, I'd be a fisherman instead. Perhaps a better example is the fact I consider myself a "geek"; but again, that's simply because my natural tendencies and interests fit the stereotypical description of a geek, and I distinguish true geeks (like myself or e.g. comic books fans) from the people that want to be geeks just because it's cool (e.g. because of Zuckerberg, or the influence of Big Bang Theory, or because it pays well) without actually having geeky interests.

Most of the above are fundamentally different from biological facts such as sex and race, in the sense that they arise from our choices, and can change over time. Instead, some people want to make sex a choice as well, so they made up the concept of "gender", and they intentionally conflate these concepts by suing the same categories (man/male can mean either sex or gender for them). Personally, I'm perfectly OK with a man being feminine, dressing up in stereotypically women's clothing, fitting the traditionally female social roles, etc. But he's still a man, biologically.

Not sure if this comment makes much sense, I just tried to gather a few thoughts I had about your comment.
Awesome! I will definitely include this in interview questions, it's a very good way to check how much someone knows about computers.
I don’t have an audio snippet, but I can transcribe what the voice says on different runs. It usually pronounces random letters individually, but sometimes pronounces syllables with letters missing:

“L-W-R-D”, “L-L-W-R-L”, “hell-erl”, “H-L-er-D””, “eor-D”, “H-L-L-erl”, “L-L-W-L-R-D”, “H-L-W-R-L”, “hell-W-R”
"Ai Weiwei produces his art for political reasons...."
And what is wrong with that?

Do you perhaps labor under the impression that China is a land of song, flowers and boundless prosperity?
He risks his life and comfort to show us a dark and evil side of China which would otherwise be ignored.

People like Ai Wei-wei serve an essential function, moving humanity forward in dignity while it makes material progress.
There's a number of benchmarks at [1]. It would be nice if somebody would compile+run them on an AltJS environment and publish the result for different browsers.

[1] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/
The Brain in the Machine
Intriguing findings, but antibodies (used here to detect fungi) are notoriously prone to false positive findings. Direct shotgun sequencing of brain DNA, in a blinded design with sufficient numbers of patients and controls, would have nailed it. Actually, I wonder why they didn't do it already? Maybe lack of money?
Unfortunately, when it comes to "state-run" institutions and policies, you're arguing against an ideal, rather than an implementation. I.e. You could argue it is some form of the no true Scotsman fallacy.

Additionally, there is a very prevalent and saturated belief in the current society that views anything with 'for profit' motives as somehow bad/greedy. Consequently, everything that is "non-profit" (including the state) regularly gets undeserved moral brownie points.
Input Device Capabilities in Chrome 47
Arq is a full featured backup solution. Freeze on the other hand is not really meant to be a backup solution, it's rather a file transfer client for Glacier where you get a raw view on your vault's inventories with upload/download features.
just pick a part of LA and spend a day or two there.

Yeah. If you go to Paris or Tokyo or Mexico City or Seoul you can go to multiple parts of the city. Don't try that in LA.

Cities with first world infrastructure make it reasonably easy to get around like that, LA doesn't.

But that shouldn't ruin your trip. There's plenty to do around Hollywood or Santa Monica or wherever to keep you happy and learning new things for a few days.
I don't have any real data. I know my own behavior for "sites I don't care about" and every once in a while I'm exposed to someone else's password (when they tell me their password for a site they don't care about, or where I see a password in plaintext in our shared password manager).

There's an awful lot of "capitalize the first letter" and "replace e by 3, a by 4, o by 0" and "sometimes append a bang". That results in meeting the password complexity rules without any additional entropy in the first 2 rules and 1 bit of entropy for the last rule.
In the python example you're running a function, while in the grep example you're launching a program (grep) from your shell.

To make the comparison more fair you'd store the python program and time starting and running both from a shell.
As with the pi, I'm concerned by the usability of say a clojurescript/react app on their browser, can anyone comment on its performance?

Having spent many many months looking for a combo of cheap boards + touch interfaces, I'm very excited. Now if you can root that thing without spending a couple of days staring down esoteric error messages or fighting with drivers post-root, I'm ordering the 6pack right away.

Maybe even flash Arch Linux arm on it...
I'd hope Wikipedia would provide that supporting narrative.

Science is awesome---but I don't see how even if the improvements since 1900 would dwarf any improvements before would have any bearing on my argument that `throughout most history, the causation was reversed.' Those are two completely independent observations.

In any case, it might be instructive to look at "Productivity improving technologies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_improving_technol...) and see how they enabled science vs were enabled by science.

Containerization of sea trade is one of my favourite topics there. It's a huge productivity improver----but science played little role in its introduction and success.

On the other hand, the Green Revolution is an example for the successful application of science to technology. Also, the Haber-Bosch-Process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Haber_process). Many of us wouldn't be alive today if not for these two developments.

As an aside on Mendel: his data looks too good on some measures. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel#Controversy)
I can see both, but...
The self driving taxi will kill automotive market as it is now.
If you could use an auto-taxi for $.20 a mile and get it in 20 seconds... why would you need to own a car?
And for longer trips? Most people would need something with more range / performance probably for 3-5% of the time, so instead of buying a Ford Mondeo etc. they could take a car from a motorpool, paying for usage, and they could take a Porshe or a Jag... still paying less.
You're completely right!

Other readers, check it out for yourself with

gcc -g sum.c ; echo 'disas main' | gdb ./a.out

gcc -g -O2 sum.c ; echo 'disas main' | gdb ./a.out
In the competition for (real or abstract) resources, individuals will align along whatever differences suit them. If they are all the same race, they might align along religious differences. If they are all the same race and religion, then its which side of the tracks, football team, musical tastes, editor and programming paradigm...
What makes Alzheimer's so awful is the slow pace at which it takes away the people you love. You see them slowly disappear while still being physically there, over the course of years, and there's nothing you can do.

I lost my grandmother to it, and it was an incredibly, and increasingly, painful 5 years for the entire family, to the point where we felt relief more than grief when she finally passed.

I can only hope they find a cure or a treatment.
Oh, absolutely. But equally absolutely, there are no absolutes. There’s still plenty of areas where fast code is infinitely more valuable than anything else, including developer time. As I said, whether you should optimise for the former or the latter strongly depends on your problem at hand and external circumstances. PhD students are cheap, Xeons aren’t.
Basically the plot to many religions.
Hydroponic growing is done at scale, but usually in greenhouses. Using only electrical light is too inefficient for regular foods, even with LEDs.

https://www.google.de/maps/place/Almer%C3%ADa,+Spain/@36.753...
Freeze has no encryption or compression features built-in, so you are responsible to prepare the data as you want it to be stored on Glacier before you upload it.

I don't like built-in encryption features in file transfer or backup apps too much, because they are often proprietary and that may make it hard to switch to another client.

As a workflow example, I personally encrypt my archives with gnupg and store them on external hard drives and additionally upload them to Glacier for disaster recovery.
Great idea! Reminds me a bit of the sous-vide following.

I've never disabled javascript on a site before, but the browsing experience is greatly improved for doing so.
But that's also a silly exemption, and would pull most of the teeth from such a tax.
I also confirmed this behavior with disassembly, and now I'm wondering what the basis of this optimization is. Can anyone explain the logic that gcc would have used to do this?

As a human, I can see that the loop has no effects except to increase s by 1 each of NUMBER times, and that the result of doing so would increase s by 1 * NUMBER, and that s started as 0, so s ends up as NUMBER. (Also the loop variable i is incremented NUMBER times so it ends up as NUMBER too, but its value is never referred to again.)

I'm wondering how the optimizer observed and represented these facts, and how much more general its attempts at optimizing this loop were.
Some of many critical comments from a previous discussion on HN (one week ago) [1]:

> "As a biomedical researcher, I'm confident in calling this sloppy science."

> "The discovery, if corroborated by others, could indeed be huge but I'm afraid it wouldn't open up new treatment options anytime soon. Fungal infections inside the body are really really hard to treat in the first place."

> "I bet if they double stain with anti-amyloid-Beta they will see the staining overlap. They just say they used "antibody raised against proteins obtained from C. glabrata, C. famata, C. albicans, P. betae and S. racemosum", so they don't even know (or want to say) what these antibodies react with..."

> "All of the Alzheimer's patients were 79 or older, while all of the control patients were younger than 79 except for one. More than half of the control patients were under 60. That doesn't seem like a very good control to me."

> "This article does NOT provide compelling evidence that fungi are the causative agent for AD. It merely reports correlative observations. You may conclude that antifungal drugs could help patients with AD. You may also think that vaccination or some other mechanism of prevention could reduce the prevalence of AD. These conclusions are simply not supported by the data."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10401344
Eve Online continues to surprise me as a place of social economic experiments.
Yes, with very similar characters. Although in practice only those actually needed to resist forgery are commonly used: 1: 壱 2: 弐 3: 参 10: 拾

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals#Formal_numbe...
Exactly how fast are we talking? Dual 10gbit nics are now often for $150 + cost of optical modules or DACs.
He doesn't scare me. I just thought people would get tired of his site by now. I can't figure out the appeal anymore, unless you come from a third world country, or are under a dictatorship, or you in you twenties, married, or with kids.

Don't get wrong, I don't hate his site. I just don't get the appeal anymore, but it might be me. I'm older and I can take only so much of the social posturing, 5000 friends, photos that are so self-aware--I cringe, the constant positive affirmations about a person's looks, the crying out for a attention, and praise, the nosey algorithms, etc.

I have one question, and it's geared towards Americans, "What are you getting out of Facebook these days. I'm not trying to be cute, or clever. I'm just curious.

Maybe it's my fault. I have used Facebook in order to look up old friends. I have found that so many people seemed to have caved into social pressures, and become politically correct conformists(which is fine), and I understand why they need to protect their online identity. It just depressing looking at people who raised their hands in class, tried to fight certain aspects of the system just settled, and went along with the Villagers. I'm not even bothered by that--it's the phonyness, or I hope phonyness?

Has anyone over thirty, gone on Facebook and looked up someone you used to know, maybe that women/man that was different than the rest; and viewed their profile, and said, "I must get in touch with that person!". I have found complete opposite effect.

I'll admit it's probally just me, or I'm being too negative, or my experiences on Facebook is not typical.
10 Sources to Learn Growth Hacking
Thanks, that's great feedback. I admit that the app is not as user friendly as it should be, I'll work on that for the upcoming releases.
> Sure, it allows some loopholes, but it'll probably save you a lot of votes too.

Alas, yes. Not only loopholes, but favours homeowners, who are already among the better off, over the real poor.
If the tax is proportional to land value, and the development restrictions imposed make prices drop, than the reduction in tax is automatic.
The perverse incentive is: the billionaire would be wasting less space for himself and sharing it with other people---but the tax system would discourage that.
What Will It Mean If the Yuan Gets Reserve-Currency Status?
No exemption necessary. Just eg pay out all the land value tax as a basic income. And automatically anyone sitting on less than the average amount of land (in terms of value, not size), will get a net income. People sitting on more, will make a net payment.
It's actually not too hard to calculate the storage costs and it's really cheap. I've been using Glacier for backups since the service has been launched. The calculation of the retrieval costs are a bit tricky though. But if you use Glacier for disaster recovery only, it shouldn't matter too much.
You'd have to be storing absurd amounts of stuff for it to add up to thousands of dollars. from their docs:

Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month. If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn more. In addition, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.021 per gigabyte for items deleted prior to 90 days. Learn more
Or live in Vallejo/Benicia/Fairfield for that extra $5 bridge toll

shudder I was thinking about it, there is one thing LA beats the bay area at - if you live an hour away from work, paying a toll is just an option (for high speed lanes, if they exist). In SF, you either pay the toll or you.. don't cross the bridge, because there's no other choice!

But growing up in the Bay Area, I never thought a 6 mile commute would take me 40 minutes on a day with horrible traffic. Thankfully, it's usually only 20 minutes!

Another thing about LA: The traffic lights are really the worst thing. Even the 405 during rush hour isn't that bad - just a typic freeway parking lot. I've seen 80 look just like it!

Now, for a uniquely Los Angeles experience.. here goes:

You're waiting about a block and a half from the next red light in evening traffic. Finally, the light turns green, but cars aren't moving. You need to turn left up at the intersection, but the left turn lane begins about 5 cars from the limit line.

The light turns yellow, and then red. Finally, the cars in front of you start moving again.

So you start moving, and wonder if you'll actually get into the left turn lane.... sadly no. There's 2 cars in front of you, and a cement median that keeps you from waiting in line.

Lather, rinse, repeat. The light turns green, cars move, you're finally in the left turn lane at pole position! In the midst of that you watched a handful of fed up people run the red arrow because they couldn't stand waiting 5 minutes for yet another green light.

Eventually, you get going.
You have this in English-based schools as well. 7 + 4 + 2 years. Primary, lower and upper sections of the last 6 years of high-school, respectively.

Even though the tests are only towards the ends of the level, most of the time prior to it is spent teaching for it as well. Except for primary, I think you get to pass that no matter what, unless there is something seriously deficient in your knowledge.