skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Andrew Ng is one of Coursera's founders. He's big on learning as the development of habits...in American educational philosophy this idea can be traced back at least to John Dewey with academic formality. So it's not surprising that Coursera often chooses fixed schedules and cohesive cohorts over self-pacing. Indeed, Ng's most popular course, Machine Learning is open enrollment, but not self paced and sends reminders when the student falls behind schedule.

That said, there are plenty of courses on Coursera where the materials stay up and online for years. But there's nothing wrong with teachers controlling how, when and where their course materials are accessible, and since many of the courses are from private institutions, e.g. notably Ng's Stanford, tax paying and citizenship (two orthogonal concepts orthogonal to accessibility of course materials) are mostly tangential to major MOOC mechanics.

It's absolutely amazing that the resources are so freely available and high quality. I am not sure where one would get standing to make demands upon the private entities providing them.
I would simply point to Apple's new language, Swift, dropping that feature as proof that they don't think it's the best way to design a language.

Our team is split (I don't know how evenly) on whether Obj-C or Swift's behavior is better. There are some staunch defenders of Obj-C's pattern being better.

I personally prefer requiring the programmer to explicitly handle nil/null. I think it improves maintainability, because future developers can see the code is correct, and it protects against changes (ex: you knew nil could never happen when your code was written, but then someone changed it so nil does occur and now your code is broken). It also saves future developers from spending time reasoning about the behavior of the code when nil occurs.
[Poll] Do you think Chromebooks are helping Linux Desktop adoption?
The IT Failure Blame Game
Yeah, I don't mind the reference points. There are pretty useful. But I dislike when a source gives only the reference point, but not the value itself. Not the case here, but it's a common practice.
Unicode disagrees about IJ and ij… although there are glyphs for them, they are "compatibility decomposable characters" which basically means they are deprecated. The rendering software should handle proper collation, capitalization, etc. without using the digraph glyphs (e.g. Firefox gets this right).

(A similar situation applies for English di- and trigraphs such as "ffi" and friends.)
The way I see it, it comes down to external vs. internal threat. As campy as the terrible interdimensional creepy things are, they are a clear external threat to the people of Earth. Making Dr. Manhattan the fall guy internalizes the threat as he is-was "of us".

With Dr. Manhattan as the patsy you get some superficial solidarity while every nation tries their hardest to recreate him--to obtain their own WMD+/God. With the terrible interdimensional creepy things humanity faces a clear external threat; Unite, people of Earth, for the Universe will fucking eat you.

Maybe the monsters could've been done in a way that wouldn't have people laughing at their implausibility. Using Dr. Manhattan destroyed the message. The film's ending wasn't worth the sacrifice, IMHO.
>>Yes, you can write get() and risk an exception. So don't do that.

>Yes, you can dereference a null pointer and risk an exception. So don't do that.

Except these aren't at all the same. With a reference, you have no good way of telling whether your reference IS nullable. With Optional, it's ALWAYS optional.

Therefore it is trivial to a) train developer habits to always check before fetch, and b) enforce an isPresent check with static checks.

Sure pattern decomposition is nicer, but that doesn't mean that Java's implementation "defeats the purpose entirely" like the author suggests. I'd love everything to be checked statically, but if that can't be done, I still like strong conventions which make the code clearer and safer.
What have I diluted the meaning of errors to?

Rust doesn't remove bounds checks in --release. It's wrapping that gets turned on in release. I'm not sure why you're distinguishing overflow as truly exceptional, as opposed to any other "this should never happen" error?

Also I don't think many C libraries that allocate expose that as a failure condition (I've certainly seen some which don't even check!)
But that's a bug in the library (or code you're calling into), not a bug in how you're using it. That's the main difference in my opinion.

Optional allows the code to say "I never intend to return null, only an Optional that may be nothing". In theory, a library/module/whatever that's been converted to use Optional should not have any calls that do return null.

In theory, its no different than a C API that can return a size or -1 for failure. Sure, it could return -2 because the language allows it, but you shouldn't need to check for that in your code that uses it.
Windows XP actually supports it, you just need SP3 installed (released in 2008). Android 2.2x (and below) is the biggest group of incompatible users, many XP users will be fine.

And before someone says "Android 2.2 users can just install custom ROMs!!!" keep in mind that a lot of unbranded or no-name handsets exist in other parts of the world, without a big enough community to create and maintain customs ROMs.

A lot of devices are legitimately stuck on 2.2 or 2.1.
WHO+IS+BEHIND+ISIS,SAUDIS+CIA+ISRAEL+USA+WHO?+-+YouTube
5.7-7.1 hours according to the study. They were in bed for 6.9-8.5 hours.

* Sleep efficiency was between 81% and 86%, similar to that in industrial populations.
* Naps longer than 15 minutes were uncommon, particularly in winter
* sleep was generally initiated during a period of falling ambient temperature
* Less than 3% reported sleep onset/offset problems occurring more than once a year

Note the last point: although sleep duration may not be greater in hunter gatherers, there may be a difference in quality.
Google seems to be getting worse with technical queries. I spend many queries just trying to craft a query that gets the results I am looking for. This is especially true for keywords where case is important. Google seems to just neglect case as a signal.
Further and Farther: a Theory
> I know... we're not in a bubble now... but losing money and making it up on volume was the big joke back then, iirc.

It's ok to say we're in a bubble. These companies that are selling goods at a loss predicated on the availability of venture capital, with no clear path to profitability, show that we're almost certainly in a bubble. The real question to worry about isn't whether or not we're in a bubble, but rather how substantial of a bubble it is, and how many companies might have exposure to it.
IMO they focused on the wrong parts of the chain. Like you said, anyone can start a cleaning service and if all Homejoy does is match you with a cleaner who might or might not show up then there's no reason for them to exist.

But there is no reason that an app-based cleaning service can't succeed, full stop. There's plenty of room to add value, just like there is in any other business where you can get economies of scale. Homejoy just didn't focus on those parts of the business.
First post that I know of that shows how to do it with .NET.
They aren't good at generating baseload during refuelling, obviously. Most plants have more than one reactor. Refuelling usually occurs during the spring or fall, when demand is lower, and only in one reactor unit at a time. It's not exactly a feature, but it also isn't much of a bug.

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2013.08.27/supplyreq...

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=12711
Agreement.

Massive pay disparity...

Profit sharing. What's fair?

The rhetoric about minimum wage is a distraction, used to obfuscate the simple fact that labor is getting its teeth kicked in.

If corporations (et al) weren't racking up record profits and warehousing cash, I'd be more sympathetic to their plight.
http://extoxnet.orst.edu/faqs/natural/natcarc.htm

Natural = less carcinogenic is not always true. E.g. peanuts with fungicide are way less likely to give you cancer than peanuts in their natural state. Also, saparilla has almost been completely removed from the diet due to perceived cancer risk.
Did anyone ever believe PC gaming was dieing besides those who wrote hype headlines? CounterStrike/Starcraft have been dominant eSports for over a decade and that was when PC gaming was "strong". They gave headway to the MOBA genre with LoL and DotA but they never really dwindled. Year after year gaming grew but so did the other platforms. People assumed PC gaming was dieing because console/mobile markets flourished? Its not a 0-sum market
US ventures aimed at helping the unbanked are taking cues from developing world
Many (most?) supermarket brand bacon (and many other cured meats) are cured in celery juice. So I'm not so sure that's true.
Deep Learning for NLP resources
This seems much better advice.

I found the opposite of PG. I discovered that when I worked on talking the way I wrote, my speech became much better and more interesting.

Now, PG speaks off the cuff pretty well. So I suppose if people find you well spoken, it makes sense to try to write more like you talk. But if you write better than you speak, make your speech more like your writing.
Sorry if this incorrect of me to do, but shouldn't the title be: "How eSports is* saving the PC industry"?

Unless of course it is "All your industry are belong to us" :`)

Thanks for the post!
No, the author considers it ineffective because you are not forced to think about nulls at compile time. Of course, at run time they will explode in your face, so you still have to consider them eventually.

@jontro is saying that proper Optionals make it impossible (or at least, more difficult) to forget about the problem at compile time.
Ah. Right! "doesn't solve anything" is definitely not the case:)
Beating performance walls with neuromorphic hardware
Yes. It is the 'scalability' factor.

A star performer's pay is possible because millions of people can enjoy his/her performance at the same time, paying a relatively small amount of money (say, $80/ticket).

The software that the poster above developed can potentially be sold to a lot of customers with no extra work, so he makes an above average salary.

A teacher cannot teach millions of people at the same time, the limit is usually set at 20-25 students.

A care-provider can only take care of one person at a time, a few during the day.
I'm moving away from HAProxy. The lack of zero downtime config reloads is consistently causing problems, especially in a high reload environment (i.e. using bamboo [0]). One team deploys an application that goes into a restart loop, changing our routing table constantly? Well there goes our 99th percentile out the window.

That said, would prefer not to be using nginx, so if anyone has any recommendations for high quality zero-downtime-reloadable HTTP proxies, I'd be very interested.

[0]: https://github.com/QubitProducts/bamboo
pg writes like a butt because he talks like a butt.
What Jay Rosen of the NYU journalism school has called "The view from nowhere." (http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-question...)
I have (had, until your post) no idea how much one HP is because I don't own a car and generally never liked cars (always was more into jetplanes), so I keep forgetting. But when I read something that gives HP values, I look up how much it is in watts; that's just one C-t "1 horse power in watts" <Return> away.

I know I'm shouting at the wind here, but I get the impression that most people today think education ends on high school, and after they graduate it they're not to be expected to ever go and look something up.
I think the same basic lessons apply. If you read something in a human language then when you're done, you know the information has been received, you know if there are any problems understanding it, etc. If you write something, you have no idea if anyone will actually read it, you don't really know if it will be understood or if there are problems with it, etc.
Yeah, you need an orchestration layer to really handle microservices at scale (yet another reason they're a pain in the ass!) Not just for HAproxy, but there are countless other situations where you need to use referential data to build configurations on the fly -- which is what an orchestration layer does.
Is there any perks to pass arguments like this? `-url=http://cloudflare.com`. I was thinking the right way was `--url http://cloudflare.com` or `-u http://cloudflare.com`.
Why We Fail at Productivity
He's still the majority owner of Gravity Payments. So, while this is somewhat reckless, he still owns a pretty valuable company.
I've taken a number of Coursera courses. The format works better for some courses than others. The key is that there is a recognizable student cohort and that the students are enthusiastically engaged in live discussions. That tends to happen less in the fifth offering when the primary instructor has moved on to other things.

Anyway, there's pedagogical theory that favors time boxing [and some that doesn't]. Coursera is opinionated in the matter. That's not a controversial opinion in higher education circles upon which Coursera styles itself and from which it draws it's educators.
I don't know who said it, and this is probably a paraphrase:

"If it can't happen, it will".

If a function says the result is optional, then it's optional. It's not not optional because you decided it can't ever fail.
I believe that Coursera courses are popular exactly because they only allow watching archives if you have signed up before. What I mean is people sign up to a large number of courses, just for being able to view the course any time in the future.

This also means that Coursera courses have naturally the highest "total enrollment" numbers, even though probably only a few percent of the students are actually taking the class.
Processed Red Meats Cause Cancer, WHO Says
Depends on if you look at eSports as an all encompassing entity, or as a collection. If you swap out "eSports" in the title with "sports" it works.
should be titled: how STEAM is saving the PC industry.
U.S. Companies Warn of Slowing Economy
Blowers then? Drones, especially flying ones, seem to be a colossal waste of energy here. That is, on Earth; on Mars it'll be hard to make such drone, because the air is much, much less dense. AFAIR NASA only figured out how to fly a long-distance recon plane there.
> If you use unwrap/expect/fromJust you are explicitly acknowledging that you want it to panic if it fails.

If you use Optional.get() without Optional.isPresent(), how is that any different? It's not as nice as pattern decomposition, but it's still fundamentally the same, and on top of that, transform functions are provided so that most of the time you can do null-safe operations.
> A world without wood smoke would be a poorer, sadder, less pleasant-smelling world.

It would also be a world without trees, because that's the only way to avoid ever breathing wood smoke. Forest fires are a natural phenomenon and there is no known way of entirely preventing them.
The way the 18% figure is used in THIS article is extremely misleading/unhelpful. Thank you for clarifying exactly what they mean by that (the 5-6% thing puts it into perspective).
Yes, the impact of a 1 percentage point increase is significant, but it's nowhere near the bloodbath that an increase of 18 percentage points would be, which is how I think most people would read "increased risk by 18%."
I'm not convinced it is a bad thing. Why would it be a problem for "avoid mood changing substances" to become a habit, calcified and very difficult to uproot and change?
Everything we know so far tells us that you can't transmit information faster than light using quantum entanglement.
"Infinitely fast phase velocity with zero-index metamaterials"
Microsoft's Brad Smith on the Collapse of Safe Harbor
I pay my housekeeper $80 to deep clean my entire house. Homejoy wanted $145 for their non-professional apathetic cleaners to do a light cleaning. Thats why they failed
Right, exactly. I didn't put enough conditions on my "should". I meant that in a crazy utopia, we would never be put at risk because of others, the real world is very very far from this utopia, and we put high levels of implicit trust in other people all the time. There's nothing wrong with this, given the world as it is.

Going back to Uber vs. Homejoy, the level of risk differential is much higher with Homejoy, because when using an Uber, you are probably not assuming much extra risk compared to what else you would do to get where you are going. For a cleaning service, then the risk differential is noticeable ('someone has access to my house' vs 'Only I and my family have access to my house') when jumping up from "doing the cleaning yourself". If you're comparing Homejoy to other cleaning services on a risk basis, you'd have to actually look at the numbers. I'm really not trying to bash Homejoy or cleaning services here.
Also note that an increase from 0.5% to 0.6% would be the same amount of "increased risk." Always look for the base rate.
Lots of great events lined up for EU Robotics Week #ERW2015
Check out the deep dive I wrote into how you can help prevent HAProxy reloads from dropping traffic without a large 99% hit over at http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2015/04/true-zero-downtime-h...

Looks like bamboo encourages folks to use this strategy via a custom reload command:
https://github.com/QubitProducts/bamboo/issues/152
Is there a way to set this permanently? I couldn't find anything.
Are you saying that because Google is the leader, people perceive a drop in quality that may not be measurable? I suspect not but hope yes.
Just wait until gamers start interacting with VR en-masse. The massive framerates required to make a transparent viewing experience (60-100 FPS) combined with the ultra-high limits on resolution perception at that FOV means that electronic entertainment enthusiasts will have big boxes in their homes for another decade or so at least.
There's a world of difference between choosing to leave a door open door and not having a door in the first place.
> how to set a vision long enough that a $900 million writedown doesn’t break you

Goodness. That probably means there was much more than 9 figures of losses in total. The trust MSFT places in Panay and his team must be gargantuan.

I really wonder what MSFT's upper-limit of tolerable losses was for the Surface program.
ART on Android does this as well.
I studied geology and none of the river paths in the LOTR map seem particularly unrealistic. Tolkien's map shows local elevation but not absolute elevation, which, when it comes to a river's path, matters more than people think.

For example, the plain between the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood could be like the plain in front of the Colorado front range: dead flat, but still at 5,000+ feet in elevation. That would give it plenty of vertical drop to the sea. It's certainly possible that the absolute elevation of the Anduin at the ford at Carrock is similar to the summit of the mountain behind Minas Tirith!

And it takes doesn't take much elevation drop to make a river flow. The Lune would work as drawn if there were cliffs or hills only a couple of hundred feet high on the southern edge of the Bay of Forochel, which could happen with glaciation--and it is known as the bay of ice in the books.
I hope nobody is surprised by this. $35M is insane for a launcher.
Java 8 Optional is useful (although the API could be better).

If only FindBugs would warn about calling get() without checking isPresent() first. There's an open FindBugs ticket for this: http://sourceforge.net/p/findbugs/feature-requests/302/
You are thinking about a different type of system I suspect. If anything the air would be cooler above a system of this sort as the heat is being carried away by pipes.
Smart people should take findings like these with a grain of salt, having a good idea of what risk factors are.

It is basically impossible to prevent with 100% certainty the occurrence of a illness like cancer, since it depends on factors outside our control.

It is possible to lower the likelihood of it by following a reasonably healthy lifestyle, which is a factor under our control.
Average 3-star Yelp review is likely a core issue.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/homejoy-san-francisco

e.g. "I have never had more problems with any service or company than I have with this business."
Tell that to Oracle. https://i.imgur.com/fQ6pQLn.png
A Wishlist for Swift 3.0
It's lower, but still orders of magnitude greater than complete the equivalent bricks and mortar course. If 1% complete the Android course that's 50 years worth of two classes of 30 students a year. At 10% it would take Adam Porter 500 years.

The thing about MOOC's is that scale is staggering.
Yes, the Uber driver could rob you or worse, but they would also be guaranteed to get caught, so they probably won't do it.

I think you are picking on a rather objective and dispassionate observation about incentives to take a grandstanding against classism, I appreciate the sentiment but the execution is flawed.
Great. Another thing to worry about when trying to start a family...
Sorry, I didn't mean to say they were a rich country, but had the means to advance rapidly compared to other third world countries.
Algeria had 186B$ of cash and was debt free. It even lent 5B$ to the IMF[1].

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/algeria-contribute-5b-imf-1846...
There's another potential asymmetry between the number of times you write something vs. how many people read it/how many times it is read.
How to approach a new system: Linux graphics and Mesa
>Also I don't think many C libraries that allocate expose that as a failure condition (I've certainly seen some which don't even check!)

This is a very common mistake in most C code. Malloc can fail, and it return NULL when it does.
Is Climate Change Behind the Syrian Civil War?
I helped my son build a mobile game app in his quest to earn an iPhone
You aren’t imagining it, freelancing is growing
An interesting article that would be improved by removing the references to "gnu atheism" and "scientism".
That's a neat trick! Is there any reason you can't do this with luac? I tried the equivalent to what you're doing with luac, but gcc complains that "member libmylib.a(luafunc.o) in archive is not an object".

What's the difference between the bytecode generated by luajit compared to luac?
Cool, a little expensive for me but seems great.

Please provide the visitors with pictures of what you can do, not just many bullet points. I think that would make this site much more easy to digest :)
“JAK-Ing” Up Hair Growth in Dormant Follicles
I'd blame politicizing infrastructure projects and (related) listening too much to NIMBYs. In China, they care much less. And probably for the better; infrastructure is a public good. At some point you have to tell someone to suck it up and take one for the team.
What about the absence of a phrase? I would like to be able to do

webwatch \
-url=https://example.com/privacy/ \
-warnmissing="never received a National Security Letter" \
-from=me@example.net \
-to=eff@eff.org
> The data's pretty compelling, though; I wouldn't smoke anything on a regular or frequent basis.

And I feel like this is the key for many of the these health issues. Habitual <insert bad thing here> is really the problem.
TIL and that's great. I was referring to solar only.