skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. I was a pretty good programmer before I got a CS degree. But I can say, honestly, that my degree program (not even a particularly good one) made me a much better one. I've consistently ended up in roles where other people in those roles were five to ten years older than me, not because I'm a supergenius (jesus, I'm not) but because I was able to derive some real synergy from the academic fit-and-finish applied by college to my existing skill set, and the lessons I learned in school to the skills I've learned since.

And when I say "my courses", I don't just mean CS. I have a B.A., not a B.S., because I wanted more breadth than being a mushroom sweating it out in the computer science lab. I did pick up a lot of actually useful, practicable knowledge around algorithmic analysis (turns out that intuitively understanding Big-Oh is really useful if you don't want to be a bottom-level code grinder), distributed systems (there's a reason I'm still the guy who acquaintances go to when they need to build such a thing), and low-level computer architecture (which still has to matter to somebody even when you're using very high level languages), but the humanities were fantastically important, too. Political science and economics courses have been invaluable; poli-sci for having something of a mental map of groups and organizations and an idea of the way that they change and flow in a larger community, and economics from the perspective of microeconomics, specifically the study of elastic goods and demand curves in general.

I might have stumbled on what I learned in college, especially around "how to learn", without going to college, but I think it's more likely that I wouldn't, or that I would have dismissed it as unimportant, because one of the greatest benefits of college was twisting my arm to do things I didn't want want to do (and those were among them. I also graduated with under $30K of debt--state schools aren't that expensive and I'd been working summers--after four years, and paid it off by age 27, while working at companies that definitely would never have looked at me twice if I didn't have a degree and making a lot more money for it.
This also assumes that the "eyeballs" looking at the code are doing it for the greater good and not personal profit. Given a big enough jackpot, do you really believe that the person who finds a loophole in the algorithm will do the right thing?
Broken link. Actual link is http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/11/gay-talese-the-...
You honestly don't think people in the 2030s are not going to think smart phones and tablets are "shitty useless junk"? There are plenty of people now feel that way.

Also I think your impression of 80s consumer tech is woefully laking.
Also http://www.sympy.org/
To do this, you would have to prepare a plan once and then use it for many queries. The problem with that is that you can't make use of query-specific information when making the plan, and that can be crucial to picking the right plan.

For example, if you have a query like 'select * from products where category = ?', then you basically just have to choose between a table scan and an index lookup. Which is best will depend on how selective the predicate is: if the category in question only covers one in a million products, an index lookup is probably be faster, but if it covers a quarter of them, then a table scan will probably be faster.

If you know from statistics that no category covers more than a small fraction of products, then sure, prepare an index lookup plan for all queries, and vice versa if you know that all categories cover a substantial fraction of all products. But if you have a spread, with some categories being big and some small, then you are best off leaving the selection of the plan to runtime.

It's much the same situation as with ahead-of-time vs just-in-time compilation, but with a bigger penalty for picking the wrong plan, and a smaller ratio of time spent planning to time spent executing, both of which push towards deferring the decision.

That said, perhaps a good strategy would be to do what JIT compilers can do with dynamic deoptimisation: pick a plan that looks good, but guard it with assertions about the things which vary at runtime. So, with the example above, if your categories are mostly small, prepare a plan which uses an index, but guard it with a check that the category is in fact small. If a query comes along for a big category, ignore the prepared plan and make a new one from scratch. Then track statistics about the hit rates on the guard conditions, and if it looks like different assumptions would lead to a more useful plan, switch to those. You could even have multiple plans for different conditions.

As for crazily crafting some JIT-ish code heavily optimized just for that one request, people are already working on that (the slides are in Russian, but the abstract is still interesting!):

https://pgconf.ru/en/2016/89652
I'm not sure how any of this comes off as bad for Putin. What's the harm in letting the world know that his friends get rich? Combined with what we already know about the effects on life expectancy of being in the opposition, this sends a pretty strong message. "Gold for my friends, lead for my enemies." I see the whole thing as a declaration from Putin to Russia, especially given his protestations. Authoritarian regimes are all about internal social control. Why do we think this has to be about the West?
Now you get billboards and news channels showing Win BSODs.

Did you know that you could plug in a serial terminal hit right mouse and drop into a debug session (ROMWack) from a non-recoverable guru? Guru got a lot of stick, but they were really useful for developing.
>Different countries have different cultural expectations and customs.

Thank you!

I'd also like to point out that this yahoo seems unaware of his own cultural baggage. I bet he'd consider it extremely rude for someone to cut in front of a line at a bus stop, whereas such things are perfectly acceptable in other countries (in France we hardly have lines at bus stops).

Just like cutting a bus queue can be taken as a disrespect, engaging in a transaction without acknowledging that the person behind the counter is ... well... a person can be taken as looking down on people who serve you.

Just as I don't assume foreigners are conspiring to pounce on unsuspecting tourists who cut lines, I expect our friend switch007 not to assume we're doing the same with respect to saying "hello".

This kind of blatant ethnocetrism betrays self-ignorance that borders on comical, and invites ridicule hereabouts.
Adtech – Lowering Network Latency and Transit Costs
Upvoted for pointing me to The Conversation. Great find! Academic results presented in a readable fashion, but by the study authors rather than a Chinese Whispers of journalists ignorant of the topic.
Falcon 9. On a boat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSx4DGBstYA
Isn't this only accurate once every 15 minutes, or something as bad as that? Plus, it looks ghastly.
They're trying so hard to be the victims here.

I guess 'Debate ideas not people' isn't as important as making sure a man who holds an unpopular opinion isn't welcome at a conference.
Humans tend to act by convenience not necessity. This enlightened me a while ago.
Beware, even things on Amazon come with embedded malware
If elected I promise to hire Hugo Boss to do the new Homeland Security uniforms.
That's ridiculous.

$400 to $600+ is at minimum a 50% increase in price.

You're also ignoring that many people want the smaller form factor.

Also, frankly you're dismissing the reality of how people actually interact with devices. My mother in law wouldn't consider buying a new iPhone at the existing price points that have been available. When I upgraded to a 5S, (so ~2 1/2 years ago) she started using my old iPhone 4. After a while, she bought a hugely over-sized Android phone, thinking that the experience would be largely the same (e.g. a smartphone, compared to the feature phones she'd used before).

She used it for maybe a month, and then went back to the iPhone 4 in spite of it being older and slower, with a much smaller screen. She used it until the end of last year when she upgraded to my wife's 5S.

She is not technical at all. She has pretty basic needs - a browser, calls, the Line app. She has tried the "Android experience" and is adamant that she doesn't want to try it again, the experience was so abysmal, even compared to 2 generation old iPhone.

I am confident it would be easier to convince her to spend the ~$400 on an iPhone SE than it would be to convince her to try Android again, even at 1/2 or 1/3 the price.
Check us out
When I went to university, we didn't have any digital cameras.

And we liked it!
> Laughter? Now wait a minute! A real scientist should avoid any and all anthropomorphism, which is why hard-nosed colleagues often ask us to change our terminology. Why not call the ape’s reaction something neutral, like, say, vocalized panting? That way we avoid confusion between the human and the animal.

These "real scientists" seem very anthropocentric in their rules about not anthropomorphizing animals.

I feel like he's attacking a straw man ... I'd rather hear more about these anthropocentric real scientists he's railing against, his railing isn't doing much for me without context.
I'm one of those poor kids who got out. My identity project was programming. An friend gave me a an old noisy Pentium II that became my best friend. I spent countless hours, day and night, learning to program. Skipped prom to program, dodged sports in high school, never attended parties. Programming was my identity. I started working before starting college. The prohibitive cost of college made me drop out to focus on my career on the first opportunity I had.

My current job as a software engineer pays well. I live a comfortable life and can afford things I never had but my lack of college degree also causes me to have a very bad impostor syndrome.

Maybe I should save up enough to go back to college and graduate.
What are the alternatives? I'm honestly asking. How can I coordinate the activities of 100+ people to a common goal, without providing intermediate goals to individuals?
This is false. Source: I am a Googler who has released open source code, written in my own time, using my own hardware/software.

Here's how it works (in California, anyway):

Google reserves the right to review open source projects to determine whether there is overlap with a current or potential Google business. This is done by submitting a form that describes one's project and then waiting a while for a decision. If the decision is "yes", then you are free to work on your project with your own time/resources, and publish it under your own copyright.

Google being Google, almost anything could be construed as overlapping with Google business interests. However, my anecdata suggests that Google is quite liberal in this regard: I had no problems myself, and know a few others who also had no problems.

In this case (i.e. this Hacker News story), I'm guessing that we're talking about something different. I suspect that the project in question was written using Google time and resources, and it is IMO appropriate for Google to own the copyright.
I like Mathematica and find it a sometimes, very useful tool. I've taken over two dozen University courses in mathematics, including topology, abstract algebra, analysis, combinatorics, number theory, etc. Yet, even simply equations can stump my rather meager ability to solve them and this is where Mathematica is so useful. You can use it interactively to quickly traverse the difficult ground on the way to insight or a solution about your problems.

Consider the simple looking problem, find the definite integral of sin(x^2) from 0 to positive infinity. This is a real expression that that occurs naturally in the study of electromagnetism.

Solving this is beyond the ability of most practicing mathematicians to just sit down and noodle out an answer. The integral in known as the Fresnel integral and has the pretty answer of sqrt(pi/2)/2. Mathematica gives me the answer in just a second.
Show HN: Booleans as a Service (BaaS)
I guess you can parse it any way, but I consider those to be very different. A more valid comparison is between the retail stores and Amazon's distribution network, fulfillment centers, warehouses, etc. These things all fall under capital expenditures (CapEx) and represent hard costs that must be paid/financed.

Like retail stores, they are also part of the required infrastructure to fulfill customer orders.

Prime, OTOH is more a marketing expense. I would compare it to coupons, store savings cards, etc.

So, the double-standard doesn't exist in my view; unless you were to count retail store costs without counting Amazon fulfillment costs.
Obviously you were not cool enough to sit in the back. ;-)
List of Time Series Databases
You're forcing me to make a request to the ad suppliers server. I understand this isn't unique to iframes but I'd much prefer that any ad content is proxied by the server I'm actually looking at. I go on a lot in comments about the invasion of privacy that ads represent and I think iframes go a long way to perpetuating that poor privacy 'deal' so reject them with aggression.
I often find I'm forced to use the mouse to grant them any focus (which is frustrating for me because I don't like using mouse pointers but I imagine it causes all sorts of havoc with accessibility).
Enough with the 'woe humanity the machines are coming' pieces. After ten years of facebook, and three years of snowden leaks, I have a hard time finding sympathy for people who purchase 'smart' (read data gathering) devices from large conglomerates before considering the privacy implications. The cards are on the table; we all know what the terms of this kind of convenience are. If you're concerned for your privacy, then stop opting in for fucks sake. You've just voted with your dollars for a future of ubiquitous, autonomous surveillance. Again. Knowingly. The ignorance card is utter bullshit at this point.

The 'inevitable' future bewailed by these types of articles is only inevitable because this kind of 'shiny! buynow thinklater' mentality. To paraphrase Sartre, "we have the surveillance state we deserve."

If you're comfortable with the tradeoffs, I have no beef. I'm not saying that people shouldn't buy these things if they want them. And they are cool, wantable things. But it's 2016. You can have your thing or your soapbox. Both are respectable choices. But you can only have one.
Except people email RMS specifically because they want to hear what he wants to say.

Professional field and the hacker and activist cultures are very different in nature.
Yes, it's clearly nothing like what Blue Origin is doing and the landing was perfect. You're arguing against something I never said. My question was specifically about the centering, which up until this point, SpaceX had always seemed to land (and aimed to land) right on target. This time it was not centered, and I wanted to know if anything had changed.
Ask HN: How are you taking notes
Right now there is an article article on the frontpage about note taking, Study: Students who take notes by hand outperform students who type [1].

So I wanted to see how are you taking your notes, not just related to college classes but generally when learning new things?

Currently I'm using a different notebook for each subject.I write down notes randomly (whatever I think is important), for math I'm leaving out the formulas if it's on the slides. At the end of the lecture I write down the key points at the top right corner of the first page.

I came across Cornell Notes but I'm not using it. I didn't find the optimal system for me right now, so it would be helpful to hear from other people.

Thanks

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11459710
What do you think will happen when the media companies realize that the promised subscription revenues will never come and scaling web advertising is not a realistic goal for them? Do you think they will say, "oh fuck it" and close shop? Oh, you thought they will wither and die. It's cozy to think that way, but it is not based on reality. They are gonna get bought. And do you know who is in the best position to snatch the market? Yup, you guessed it. They have entered in the ad business in a big way already. Just a select few partners to keep it quiet. For now. Buying distressed media companies is the best path forward. All the reach they need, the sales pipeline and even more data then they already have. Oh that sweet, sweet data.

You think your privacy is violated now? LOL.

Oh and btw, if you missed it, Verizon bought AOL. Have a nice evening.
I can't be excited for both because what BO is doing isn't very interesting.

Just going to space isn't very useful nor very hard. BO's main market for this appears to be tourism. There might be a bit of a market for very short term microgravity experiments, but that's about it. And getting stuff to space is something hobbyists have done for fun, it's not a huge challenge anymore.

Going to orbit, on the other hand, is both vastly more difficult and vastly more useful. Lots of companies will pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to put their stuff into orbit.

All you have to do to understand the difference in excitement is to look at the implications. SpaceX's landing is likely to lead to a near-term reduction in the cost of launches by 50-75%, and a long-term reduction by a couple of orders of magnitude. That's huge. That's the difference between a one-off Apollo-style Mars mission that only a government can afford, and privately-funded colonization. BO's landing means that you'll soon be able to pay a few hundred thousand dollars for five minutes in space. That's cool, but it's basically a better amusement park ride.
The Fed automatically tracks serial numbers of $100s cycling through its system. Most 100s never see the inside of a bank a again unless they are spent at a merchant. Nothing prohibits other denominations, but they are less significant.
In creating such a society we are placing ourselves in chains and handing the key to some trusted third party. Maybe we wont be abused at first but given a hundred year time scale the probability of abuse approaches 1. How many of the US presidents over the last 100 years would you be comfortable giving this power to?

>"Perfect enforcement" sounds only as horrible as the culture behind it is, to me.

But we know how terrible the culture behind it is. We have thousands of years of history. "The strong do as they please and the weak suffer as they must."

>And does perfect enforcement really mean minds can't changed, that the law can't be changed after it's created if it's understood that actions X, Y, or Z actually aren't against the universal bill of rights for living entities?

Whoever holds the reins of power can make of the law as they see fit. At this level of power imbalance laws don't really exist, "L'etat c'est moi".
How can you trust Dell or Lenovo, if you don't trust the FB I or NSA (or Chinese intelligence community)?
Better to let a hundred thousand innocent systems get hacked than to let a single Byte go undeciphered.
Putin, Putout
College doesn't "cure" imposter syndrome. I'm not sure what does.
Thanks for your question. That gives me the chance to clear thing up. It's going to be a long answer, but seems that my initial description caused some misunderstanding.

We are building a platform that targets people who are living in a shared property. So tenants will be our core users. Once signing up, a user will either create a new group or join an existing one (invitation only - users won’t be able to discover other groups). The group represents the house and inside that group only the tenants can interact, chat, do social planning, etc. It is a private place, where all the interaction between the users will remain private and they can’t be reached by people outside the group. That’s the core part of our app.

Now the second part is the marketplace of tasks and services, where people that have some skills or can offer some services and want to get paid for that, can list themselves. You can think of it as something similar to TaskRabbit.

Why are we building that? Because while interacting with their flatmates, people may notice that need some help on house duties or other tasks. For example you may want a professional cleaner to take care of the house cleaning, or you may realise that you don’t have time to do the shopping and want to find someone locally that can buy what’s on your shopping list. In that case, you go to the marketplace and ‘book' a person that will accomplish your task.

Finally the landlord will also not have any access to tenants’ activity. However we want to make it easy for flatmates not only to communicate with him, but also to raise any issues occurred in the house, such as damages, so that the landlord can take care (or even him can go the marketplace and search for a handyman that will do the fixes). We haven’t done any work on the landlord’s side, yet. These are just some ideas.

So that’s all! Please let me know if you have any further questions.
Reading this article is like reading my life story.

Get them out of their environment, let them be free, forgive them for messing up, and they will thrive.
I hadn't thought about re-encrypting the messages for end to end communication with the browser so it's a plus that the phone doesn't have to give away its keys but there exists a mechanism for the phone to retransmit the messages, because we can't see the source we have no idea if there's a way for WhatsApp to trigger this remotely and as such create a back door.
> the shuttle was designed for carrying much larger payloads.

Falcon 9 has about half the payload capability of the shuttle, but Falcon Heavy has more than twice the capacity, so you can make meaningful comparisons. Falcon Heavy's cost is $1,890,000 per metric ton to LEO [1], and Falcon 9's is around $5,856,000.

The shuttle payload cost to LEO was initially estimated at $260/kg(!!) [2], but turned out to be $60,000/kg [3], or $60,000,000 per metric ton.

Which makes Falcon 9 around 10 times more cost-effective than the shuttle, and Falcon Heavy around 31 times.

The spaceshuttle had a maximum payload of 25,060 kg (24,310 kg to LEO) [4]. Falcon 9 has capacity for only 10,450 kg to LEO [5], but Falcon Heavy allows 53,000 kg [6].

[1] http://www.nss.org/articles/falconheavy.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...

[4] http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Human_Spaceflight/Space_Sh...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy
It's true that it remains to be seen, but it's not likely to be a problem. The Shuttle needed extensive refurbishment because it operated at the bleeding edge. The engines operated just short of tearing themselves to pieces. SpaceX's approach is much more "big and dumb." They don't go for maximum efficiency, and they're operating pretty far from the margins.

They've also extensively studied the stage they recovered in December, and while they're pretty quiet about what they've found, what we've heard so far is quite promising. One of the engines apparently ate some debris and acted a little weird when fired, but everything else looked good. It sounds like it's not going to be too far from Elon's "wash it off and relaunch" goal.