skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was an article posted here a few weeks ago, written by a man who was held captive by ISIS for a long time. He said that he learned their ultimate goal has nothing to do with our culture or freedom. They believe armageddon is coming, that it is literaly going to be a big battle in a particular town in Syria near the Turkish border, and that the West is the enemy (descendants of the Roman empire) that their Moslem army must defeat. The terrorist acts are intended to force this battle to commence, which they are confident they will win.

If they really believe this, I'm stunned at how oblivious they are. If an all-out battle really took place, they wouldn't face an army. They'd face an airforce that'd be a lot more aggressive than the one they're currently facing. The US and Russia could turn Syria into a sheet of radioactive glass if they wanted to / had to in order to "win armageddon". The only reason ISIS is able to continue to exist is because of our tolerance and compassion.
I'm not in this area, so I don't know much about it, but can anyone compare this with GNUHealth[0]? At first glance, they seem to be trying to do many of the same things.

[0] http://health.gnu.org/
I have a nexus 9 and had a nexus 5 (turns out it can't survive the ocean) as well as a nexus 7.

I love unmodified android. I won't get an android device that another company has modified due to how long, if at all, they take to get updates. I also think they're kinda ugly or gimmicky anyways.

Nexus 5 and 7 I loved.

Nexus 9 is disappointing. It's just not powerful enough to provide a smooth experience for me.

Developing wise, I'm conflicted. I've done iOS and android development. I don't like Java and I like ios's framework pattern but android is easier to get up and running IMO which is nice. Also now that iOS has Swift, which I think is a lot better than objc, it makes it harder for me to want to develop for Android. I know you can develop in a bunch of different things for android, but if I was doing something for production, I'm not going to be using something not supported by Google.
There is http://www.taxi.eu/en/

My local cab coop uses it, and I'm quite happy with it.
Show HN: Text a curator for what you should watch on Netflix
Developing in C/C++? Why You Should Consider Clang Over GCC
Tech-Sector Unemployment Rose in November
Minimum setbacks, yard size requirements, etc. -- these are all things that people want and continue to pay for. This is Hacker News; instead of getting self-righteous with city dweller indignation, figure out how to make what people want.
Why I started a free, on-demand curation service for Netflix
I started Sense (www.wemakesense.co) because I increasingly became concerned with how Netflix was handling the recommendation portion of their product. I saw an ever-consuming reliance on data and computers that strayed away from what recommendations should be about. I wanted to make recommendations more human.

Below are some quick, short examples of the issues that Sense is working on correcting:

- Your recommended 'Top Picks' is a list of 25+ movies

This is a subset list of a list. You're already swarmed with movie choices in Netflix. You still have to decide between a ton of options here

- 1-5 star rating systems and predictors miss the point of recommendations

The goal of a recommender is to give you a movie that you'll enjoy spending your time in. It's not to give you something you'll like '4.223' or '3.4445' stars out of 5. The essence of a recommender is lost in this detail

- Recommending fully done by computers. No personal touch.

Human curation can be infused into the system without total overhaul

- You can love Fantasia without being a kid

After watching Fantasia, you'll be presented with suggestions to watch children's movies next. This is because of a reliance on a 'kids' tag to the movie. But Netflix knows more about me than that. They know I am a male in my 20s. I can appreciate Fantasia for other reasons

- 'Top Picks' and 'More like this' are a scatterplot of all kinds of different movies

This does little to center in on the things people enjoy within a specific movie. Instead it feels like darts being thrown at a dartboard
> A more Unixy way to do this would be /opt/swift-3.0/bin, where /opt/swift is a symlink to /opt/swift-3.0.

This could cause entertaining problems for people who routinely install both current and beta versions of dev tools (which is relatively common; if you're working on iOS10 features for your new app but still need to release iOS9 updates during the beta period you more or less _have_ to, for instance). I suspect that's why they changed it in the first place.
Hah, just this sort of confusion is part of the proposal to drop ++ and -- from Swift.

x++ returns x and then increments it, so yes the spec agrees with your intuition here.

Whereas ++x increments x and then returns the incremented x.

That subtle difference between x++ and ++x has been the debugging nightmare of many a C developer over the years. It's also why there's a fun irony in the C++ name and why people say the actual successor to C will be ++C.
>Some problems only need a solution that your nephew can hack together in a week.

There's also huge subset of problems that look like something your nephew can hack together, until he does and there's a huge security flaw that leaks all your customer data.
If they only care about their world and to further their own goals in the middle east and don't actually care about the west directly (we are a pretext), and don't plan to extend their power beyond their historic influence, how would anything happening in the west be to their benefit?

They already have all their lines of reason to collectively paint the west as an enemy, the west can't be made "double enemy". It's already the enemy, so what benefit is it to them we have self inflicted wounds, unless they have sights on expanding their dominion to the west?
Keep in mind that Iceland population is around ~300K people (with one third living in the capital city), so compared to the vast world, this is roughly equal to a mid-size city.
Looks great! Thank you.
In part, because of the existence proof of doing it that way. No, it's not as simple as saying that AT&T was bad. They established highly reliable landline service. I also hear that Bell Labs did a couple of interesting things in its history. :-) (AT&T wasn't nationalized but it was a regulated monopoly.)

However, you also weren't allowed to so much as provide your own telephone until AT&T was forced to allow it by the government. And phone service, especially outside of a small local area, was shockingly expensive for a very long time. (Yes, some of this is because of technology but AT&T also had little incentive and little interest in cutting rates absent competition.)

For the short video version, cue Lily Tomlin:

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw
One person I knew had a particular system down so well that they could fill the type-ahead buffer for several screens ahead of the mainframes response, the screens flashed by too fast to read.
Startup Founders: Please Learn to Avoid Software Project Overruns
AeroLeads | https://aeroleads.com | USA or India | PARTTIME or CONTRACT | Prospect Generation Software

AeroLeads is a bootstrapped startup based out of Bangalore, India. We are a prospect generation SaaS software used by thousands of startups and businesses who start their sales with our software.

We are looking for SDR in USA (Preferably) or India who can work with us part time or on contract basis to get us more visibility and sales.

Please mail me to "pushkar at aeroleads.com" if you are interested.
The truth about corporate lies
It's today's college environment elevated to the level of national government.
Likely not - they'll either have their heads in the sand pretending they don't exist, or claim that they invented 3D printers themselves, and give it a faux-latin name so they can trademark it...
I miss you Daniel <3
> But then, I think all the major telcos are scum.

The solution is decentralization through mesh networks.
I meant "deep nets" in terms of boolean circuits, which seems like a different beast from these papers.
> The vast majority of what I know about software engineering didn't come from my time at University

I think this describes almost all undergraduate degrees. The only ones I can think of that go against this are the 5 year engineering programs, and I liken those more towards a masters than undergrad.
From the article:

> Let’s stop pretending that there are artificial barriers to entry and accept that the main barrier to anyone taking it up is their natural aptitude for it. Instead let’s work on improving the social status of the software industry – I think this is in any case happening slowly – and also work on encouraging talented young people to consider it as a viable alternative to some of the other top professions.

I'd say he's arguing about getting more of the right type of people into the field, rather than pretending it's something anyone can do, and getting the wrong type of people into it.

If we (as in software developers) were trying to "protect our turf", all we had to do was to continue with what we're doing. The new candidates will be terrible, the potential good candidates will be somewhere else, and we'll be "safe" atop the knowledge tower we built.
> They already have all their lines of reason to collectively paint the west as an enemy, the west can't be made "double enemy".

Oh, we absolutely can. See, we could be a passive enemy and that would be good for them, but not as good as an enemy that actually engages. That's what drives the spiral of polarization and demonization. Without the spiral it stops at the first level and their recruiting power is reduced accordingly.
"More than 300 studies indicate that health-related materials far exceed the average reading ability of U.S. adults."

"90 million adults with limited health literacy cannot fully benefit from much that the health and health-care system have to offer."

"A two-year-old is diagnosed with an inner ear infection and prescribed an antibiotic. Her mother understands that her daughter should take the prescribed medication twice a day. After carefully studying the label on the bottle and deciding that it doesn't tell how to take the medicine, she fills a teaspoon and pours the antibiotic into her daughter's painful ear."

http://hospitals.unm.edu/health_literacy/pdfs/HealthLiteracy...
Boy behaves like a boss
Ask and ye shall receive: https://new-hn.algolia.com/?query=Web%20server%20assembly&da...
Speaking as somebody who has no idea what X..<Y means, I assume it means "start from X and carry on for as long as you are less-than Y"? Is that correct?

I wonder what somebody who had no idea about X++ would guess it meant? Based on my daily conversations, if I didn't know already, I would guess it means "variable X has done a good job and deserves some IRC karma"...
"Instant karma" would be a better title.
Free market competition does not exist in this situation. Verizon has a literal monopoly.
I disagree with this. I feel like the general idea of "learning to code" is simply typing commands into a machine that then get executed exactly. The coding part teaches very little, just mainly how dumb machines are compared to self-aware human beings.

Kids should definately learn how to think algorithmically and understand mathematics/physics concepts (as opposed to repeating some pattern recognition which is to often the case) and if some type of coding facilitates engraining this knowledge I think that'd be great, but as of yet I haven't read a study that showed this to be the case.

As a programmer, when I have kids I'm not going to teach them how to code. I'd much rather they spent time playing outside, building things with their hands, acting in plays, playing music, reading books, writing papers, doing science experiments etc. Computers are nice tools to help you do these things but they are not ends in themselves.

this all IMHO of course :)
A workaround for this to get the best of the two worlds:

let func = () => {};
One unfortunate consequence of the trend of retiring later and later is that it halts advancement and puts people's careers in limbo who would otherwise be climbing the ranks.

When people generally retired at 65 or so, "mid career" would be around 35-40, where you'd start managing or taking on more senior roles. Now you see people still clinging to their senior executive jobs at 85, crowding out everyone else's advancement. You have 40 and 50 year olds still in low level jobs, and you need to be in your late 50s or early 60s in order to start climbing the ladder. Kind of a crappy situation, unless you're one of the lucky type who doesn't care about advancement.
I think one of the seminal papers is by Belkin and Niyogi:

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~niyogi/papersps/BNcolt05.pdf
Thats not the reason for why Uber got popular in Europe. Europe had plenty of good taxi-dispatch companies.

The primary reason the real disrupting was their attack on legislation by allowing anyone to become a taxi driver.
This is awesome! I have had a Let's Encrypt private beta email sitting in my email for a while, but didn't want to install the client because it has so many dependencies.

Are you sure it does all the proper SSL verification, that is, what versions of Python is it safe to use this with given the likes of PEP 476?
The network effect was just explained above. The more drivers on the system, the shorter the ETAs. The shorter the ETAs, the more riders want to use that system. The more riders on the system, the less downtime between each ride for drivers. New entrants have to subsidize the market (pay drivers more than they make and give riders steep discounts) in an attempt to catch up.

Recent reports about Lyft burning hundreds of millions of dollars in a relatively short amount of time, without gaining much market share most places, shows just how high of barrier there is. Hailo pulled out of all of North America this year for similar reasons. It's just really expensive to try to subsidize your way to competing with the network effect.
I went to back to University after working after working as a professional programmer for about 5 years.

What I learned in Automata, Discrete Math, Algorithms, and the other more theoretical classes has been worth it's weight in gold.

The things I learned in "Software Engineering" on the other hand, not so much.
Ah, but it's not fiber we're talking about, but copper. As far as I can tell, they're years behind on preventative maintenance and unwilling to repair their infrastructure unless there's an outage and they are legally compelled to do so.

Edit: I see you were responding to the immediate parent, not me. Oops.
Eh, most of their lucrative customers want to play in stores or compete in official painting competitions, etc, which only accept Games Workshop products.

Arguably you can already play Warhammer 40k with any bits of plastic, but you still need the printed codexes and the setting, which is controlled by GW.
I assume it was a joke; it's not even a vaguely plausible proposition given Mac sales.
They're obligated to maintain their networks if only for E911 service. Let's not forget that people still depend on POTS lines for things like calling the police and fire department.

> In 10 years there might not be any need for a functional landline telephone system.

That's fine, but this is today, and we're not there yet.
Syrian refugee uses crowdfunding to start businesses
I'd love to see more towns turning to solutions like these: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/how-a-...

The internet providers are just as bad as the railroads. The have too much power to control which towns and cities thrive in the modern world.
I agree that these are two very important skills, but I have yet to see a "Learn to code" endeavour that actually focuses on teaching these skills.

Usually, these are more focused on I/O and making the machine output interesting things like visual charts and sounds (something that is more immediately satisfying and therefore keeps the student's attention).
I would argue that neither of those statements is true.

I think this idea that coding is some sort of silver bullet is ridiculous.
Come visit!
I haven't used it myself, but judging from (a brief review of) the documentation, the server dispatches on the request URI and responds with content updates for an arbitrary number of fragments, each identified by DOM ID.
As far as I know no mathematician was able to graduate from statistics department as second major or (second) minor (whatever you call it in English). I mean in my university. I hope you get the idea; it looks like statistics is hard for mathematicians, at least for most of them. Thus, I don't understand why they talk about this statistics topic with mathematicians but not statisticians. Yeah, may be should ask to a statistician! Duh!
The solution is to reduce the noise level.

We need new laws that address common speech and behavior. We would expand the rules that govern airports and government buildings to enclose everything and everyone always.
> Other research points to similar results. There seems to be a ‘double hump’ in the outcome of any programming course between those who can code and those who can’t.

> “In particular, most people can't learn to program: between 30% and 60% of every university computer science department's intake fail the first programming course.”

Argh, I knew when I opened the article that its evidence would end up pointing to the "camel has two humps" study.

That study has been retracted, and the author regrets the damage it may have caused to computer science education:

http://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/18/the-camel-doesnt-have-...

> Though it’s embarrassing, I feel it’s necessary to explain how and why I came to write “The camel has two humps” and its part-retraction in (Bornat et al., 2008). It’s in part a mental health story. In autumn 2005 I became clinically depressed. My physician put me on the then-standard treatment for depression, an SSRI. But she wasn’t aware that for some people an SSRI doesn’t gently treat depression, it puts them on the ceiling. I took the SSRI for three months, by which time I was grandiose, extremely self-righteous and very combative – myself turned up to one hundred and eleven. I did a number of very silly things whilst on the SSRI and some more in the immediate aftermath, amongst them writing “The camel has two humps”. I’m fairly sure that I believed, at the time, that there were people who couldn’t learn to program and that Dehnadi had proved it. Perhaps I wanted to believe it because it would explain why I’d so often failed to teach them. The paper doesn’t exactly make that claim, but it comes pretty close. It was an absurd claim because I didn’t have the extraordinary evidence needed to support it. I no longer believe it’s true.
You would probably have better luck examining the code for mocapped animations, particularly for 3-D fighting games and movies.

I think mocap has a lot of potential (though I’m biased here[1]).

For example, there have been some interesting experiments capturing performances by sportspeople of different levels and comparing them. These might be looking for patterns in what the better performers do differently, which might then give some ideas for how to train less experienced performers.

Some elite sports teams and athletes also use mocap technology to analyse their form and look for details that are difficult to see with human eyes in real time.

The challenge is that even state-of-the-art mocap technology is still a very long way from modelling the full complexity of the human musculoskeletal system. Remember that a lot of what you see in games, and particularly in big budget movies, was originally based on mocap data but then manually refined by skilled people for a considerable period of time. The mocap is certainly a useful starting point and it’s getting better all the time, but there’s a long way to go before it will get the fine details right.

That said, even with today’s systems, the amount of data you get from a decent mocap set-up means there is a lot you can investigate, as long as you know what you want to look for. As you say, there are a lot of degrees of freedom in a human body, and coming up with the right abstractions to capture the important details is a challenge in itself.

[1] I help to run www.ballroomgenie.com, which is a training aid featuring animations of ballroom moves using mocap-driven CGI instead of traditional live video footage. This lets us show various useful effects that live footage can’t, typically because of physics or because in our little niche market no-one can afford movie-level camera set-ups and editing to record the same action from many different perspectives simultaneously. On the other hand, even working with high calibre performers and studio as we do, it still takes a lot of work to get acceptable quality, and we’re still a long way from being able to reproduce truly lifelike footage. This is partly because we don’t have a Hollywood budget and a whole team of people to get each animation just right, but it’s also because as far as I know the technology to model a human body accurately enough that things like contact and pressure are spot on simply doesn’t exist yet.
In school (public school in Canada) I was forced to play soccer (among other sports), learn a musical instrument (participation in the school band was not optional), and code (a required course had an HTML/JS component). I also learned chess because, why the hell not?

I quite enjoyed the experience of public school, and I like to think all the extra things they forced us to do made me a more rounded person. Because they were required, the cost was also subsidized, as I came from a low-income family I likely wouldn't have been able to do many of those activities outside of school.

Anyhow, as far as 'coding' specifically, I do think a few basic courses in school, in an easy to learn language with a fun/easy game engine would be great. Say Ruby or Python (or even something like Scratch). I do think schools should still focus on the basics though, maths/sciences/humanities/languages, the rest is just to create well-rounded people.
> Today's youth think the suburbs was about race now? It was about a lot of people don't actually like living in a concrete jungle, that was what it was about.

Ugh. You realize that people can do things for more than one reason?
Quoted in SICP:

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

Marvin Minsky, ``Why Programming Is a Good
But would being a passive enemy simply allow them to run roughshod all over the middle east, consolidate power, disrupt energy resources, cause mass exuduses, unrest, power imbalances, civil factional wars, etc. which one might consider a sizable loss to the west?

I guess it depends what you mean by passive.
That sounds quite harsh or I must be fortunate - I can do all three and work with devs that can do all three.
What would be the benefit of this over using something like dokku (https://github.com/progrium/dokku) with Digital Ocean?
or we could you know, just have many ISP's instead of just a few big ones. Not that i'm against a different topology, but breaking them up is easier to ask for / implement.