skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to look down on community colleges until I realized all the super hot J-1 visa holders that would take obligatory bullshit courses at them.

Eye opener right there, I like limited competition.
How Expensive Cities Hurt Workers
Navy SEALs have had that operational capability, as detailed by Chuck Pfarrer (and others) in his book Warrior Soul. (The "Beginning" sample on Amazon contains the text, if anyone's interested in reading it.)
You're over thinking it. Germans hype higher education and they don't have this issue. We flooded the market with virtually unlimited credit and didn't regulate prices. You don't even need Intro to Economics to know this would happen.
5 Minute Media Gallery with Carousel and Lightbox
My eyes couldn't look away from the extra "= 0x01" at the top; it was driving me nuts. Glad he noticed it before the end of the video.

The middle part got me thinking: how helpful is it really, to write 50+ lines of high-level code, just to get 8 assembly instructions? I get that it's more readable and whatever, but seriously, I might rather write the 8 assembly lines and be done with it. Maybe I've spent too much time on comp.lang.forth lately :)
Given that the human brain is full of electrical impulses it makes sense that external impulses can change our brains. The article mentions some people seeing the opposite results from the same protocol. It seems likely we will need more precise methods of stimulation to see better results given how complex our brains are.
You can't allow bankruptcy because there's no collateral to these loans, only the vague promise that the borrower will use their degree to make a good income some day.

For example, home mortgages are breakable because the bank gets the house. What does the bank get when you break your Sallie Mae loan? Zero. Only the government would lend money knowing the borrower might never pay it back. They might as well be honest and just subsidize tuition, in that case.
How often is formal correctness actually used in industry applications? Is this common outside of high risk things like aerospace?

Thanks a lot for sharing this, by the way
Never seen before photos of the Fukushima exclusion zone
My measuring stick for "cleverness" has two axes.

The first axis is how far away you are from the naive solution(s). The further away you are, the longer it takes someone else to understand what you're doing. In some cases you have to take a non-obvious approach, usually for performance reasons in my experience. Fortunately, commenting is a good way to explain when you are using a non-obvious solution to a problem.

The other axis is how many edge cases your solution has relative to the general case. The negative connotation of "clever" is that the clever approach works but is over-specialized for the specific set of cases where it's used. It might not solve the general problem, but it solves enough specific cases of the general problem for your current needs. Then when for some reason the larger program changes (new feature?) and the solution is expected to handle a new case, it fails, and now you've got a clever non-working solution.

To me, code that is clever in the sense of "non-obvious algorithm" is fine when it is needed. Just comment and explain it well. The problem is when your clever code comes with a side effect of brittleness. Either document the edge cases thoroughly, or use an approach with fewer edge cases.
Here’s What You Need to Know About Q2 VC
It's amazing how many javascript problems can manifest in subtle degradation of sites instead of complete breakage. Be warned.
They're each "proven" for a relatively small (sometimes overlapping) subset of the population. If anything, psychopharmacology has taught us about the extreme variance in brain chemistries and how difficult the problem is when it comes to treatment. Adding more options is a great thing, as long as there is strong science behind it.
The Six Main Stories, as Identified by a Computer
Ask HN: If you were an RPG character, what would be your stats?
I guess include whatever categories/skills you want.
Wouldn't catch instead of fail be more compliant with es6 promises?
Also Lily https://github.com/jesserayadkins/lily recently discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12015158
I used to work for a digital agency that specialized in working with non-profits.

It's perfectly acceptable to charge non-profits for services, and non-profits expect to be charged. Getting free services and products is often a great way to get crap. Non-profits have budgets, and they're willing to spend them to achieve their goals.

It might be effective to offer discounts or limited free functionality to non-profits, but you should probably view this as a marketing strategy more than as a moral pursuit.
I'm unique persective in that I have a degree I received 20 years ago, and decided a midlife-crisis meant going back to get an electrical engineering degree.

My chemistry class wouldn't transfer so I had to repeat it. So I took it at a local community college. Before I was allowed to register, I was forced to go to an orientation. The worst motivational speaker I've ever seen kept hammering the students about living life to the fullest and enjoying the college life. I walked out.

The last time I took a class, I could take a full course load for $700. The chemistry class was $800+ alone.

It amazes me that if you came home and told your parents you purchased a $80k car with payments they would consider you an idiot; If you told them you wanted to pay $80k for a college (with a 50% graduation rate) and received a loan that cannot be wiped out by dissability or bankruptsy -- they would think you were a genious.
> Christians believe that for folks who don't know Jesus, nihilism is essentially true

If nihilism is "essentially true" (whatever that means) for "folks who don't know Jesus" (whatever that means) then it is essentially true for people who do know Jesus. We're all in the same boat. Whatever the objective truth is, it's the same for everyone. The only question is who is burying their heads in the sand, and whether or not that's a good thing, or if it even matters at all. (Personally, I think it does matter, but I can see how a reasonable person could disagree.)
Yes demand is way up: http://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollm...

Basically there are not enough well paying middle-class jobs due to productivity gains, automation, globalization, and working women.
The 'lost' Steve Jobs speech from 1983 foreshadowing iPad and App store
> You can't allow bankruptcy because there's no collateral to these loans

Unsecured loans are often dischargeable in bankruptcy (even student loans are, though its harder than most other unsecured loans.)

The idea that only secured loans can be discharged in bankruptcy is false.

> Only the government would lend money knowing the borrower might never pay it back.

Obviously false, as private insitutions do issue unsecured credit that is dischargeable in bankruptcy.
Completely agree on that. The idea is to use instant verification and provide overnight settlement, which ACH cannot do yet.
I think default methods take care of most of the places where boilerplate would be required. The abstract collections are a great example of this; most of the methods required of a `Collection` can be implemented from a small subset. Sometimes you'll re-implement other operations anyway for efficiency gains, but that's supported with default methods also.

However, I may just be weird. My Java coding style is probably closer to Rust or Haskell. Lots of interfaces defining my type requirements, and static methods to implement compound operations on those interfaces. I like this because it's easily testable and traceable.
Why Childhood Memories Disappear
Checked out PrinceXML?
Not quite "FREE".

"SIM Only": $11

"Hardware + SIM": $99

Include "up to 300 MB data & 300 SMS", which expires after six months.
I'm not from US and it's always weird to watch NFL on TV and hear the pro players introduce themselves and their college: "Peyton Manning, Tennessee".
from the half-full glass POV we are just speeding up the natural selection of bacteria resistant humans)

Often, what's good for species evolution is really bad for some individuals. What good is a half-full glass to you if you're dead?

Also, as was noted elsewhere in the discussions, evolutionary pressure for bacteria to attain an immunity is high, but pressure to lose one is usually much lower. However, bacteria are small, and such pressure is higher than in more complex celled creatures. "Shelving" antibiotics does work, but would require widespread cooperation and the curbing of feeding antibiotics to livestock.
As long as people recognize the costs. It is painful to watch people try to solve a problem without looking into the costs of side effects. Because of hyperbolic discounting our brains are often prone to take the easier short term relief despite much higher long term costs.
I don't think you can include apologetics or even theology as part of having a fierce, honest, secular debate on Jesus or religions. Apologetics and theological discussion already implicitly involve the assumption of truth, which prevents a truly strenuous, secular debate. As soon as you bring the claims of religions, with all their impossible-to-prove truth assumptions, into the debate, you're no longer having a secular debate. You have to leave the assumptions of divinity, faith, gods, afterlives, etc. None of these things can be adequately defined outside their self-referential religious contexts, and thus the very concepts that ought to be discussed in secular debate can hardly be given adequate definition to inform and frame the debate.

Comparing the persistence of Christianity to Baal and Thor is, I think, just this side of intellectually dishonest. If you're going to discuss comparative religions and their place in the dustbin of history, then like with other such comparative discussions, you shouldn't be making comparisons to things long since dead, especially myths. Instead, you're up against other extant religions with their own rich and ancient histories—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.

More importantly, the persistence of any of these religions provides no informative or measurable proofs of their truth claims. At best, we'd be delineating the ways in which they provide subjective meaning—but that tells us nothing at all about their objective truths. We cannot really say we've identified any of Jesus' flaws, given that the sole information available are stories written long after his alleged existence, all of which claim a god-man free of flaws. We can critique the flaws of his followers, but that still doesn't inform any objective and secular discussion of the truths and meanings of religion.

It's true that billions find meaning in their chosen religions. Millennia of effort has provided no conclusive evidence this is anything other than subjective, though.
Of course, now, law is still an obvious pushed path and also a horrible investment.
You're right, that is a pretty generous scheme as far as a regular loan goes, but not necessarily as far as a student loans go worldwide. As an Australian my student loan debt repayment is paid as an extra levy on my taxes based on my income. An engineer earning 80 grand a year can expect to pay 6% of their income into their loan every year until it's paid off but you won't start making repayments until you earn at least 55 grand.

What's important is that this slow repayment isn't an issue for anyone because there's no interest charged on the loan. It is indexed (with the CPI) so its real value doesn't change. Expensive university fees aren't so much an issue because the repayments don't hurt in the slightest.

Obviously this can only exist as a public scheme. The government's effectively writing a loan that will provide no return at best, and for a variety of reasons may not be repaid at worst. Still, considering recent governments' zeal in increasing enrolment rates, it's a relatively cheap way of providing pain free student debt.
Unix: The Hole Hawg
I think we may have found a situation where the inverse of Betteridge's Law is more appropriate.
I honestly didn't see the same thing as you, my understanding is that using the Lagrange Interpolation is the "clever" choice, but when you add more points, you'll end up with a higher order polynomial and widely different curve which is probably not what you wanted in the beginning.

I read the piece more as a reminder that most specs are usually incomplete/too specific/not conveying what is actually needed, and a warning against cornering oneself with a too clever solution. I also didn't see any big issues with their stance on FP, except maybe that they dismissed the Monoid solution that someone posted down in the comments that looks both robust and readable.
That's a good point. There is also a fine line between craftsmanship and intellectual self-gratification at a customer's expense. Doing a good enough job that solves a customer's problems without gold-plating or unneeded complexity is what professionals in most fields are ethically required to do.

As tired as I am of seeing sloppy code, I also intensely dislike the trend at the other end, of creating a half-dozen RESTful microservices and throwing away the relational DB just because it seems cool, maintainability be damned.

I'm hopeful that software development (especially business software development) will someday escapes it perpetual adolescence, and will develop stronger ethical standards.
The New Nationalism of Brexit and Trump Is a Product of the Digital Age
I think The Far Side also stands up relatively well (although of course he retired around the time that webcomics started to take off).
An interesting but not widely known fact is that the Dartmouth conference was also attended by Ray Solomonoff.
Contrary to his colleagues he focused on questions of machine learning before learning became perceived as a worthwhile research direction by the AI community.

This has led Solomonoff to investigation of a question of universal sequence prediction. A couple of years later Solomonoff wrote a paper about such a system for prediction that used algorithmic probability (he is cited later as the original developer of algorithmic information theory which was later independently discovered by Kolmogorov who later acknowledged that the Solomonoff was the first). This method, Solomonoff's induction, is proven to be the most optimal (though incomputable) machine learning method possible.

He has never abandoned this project and for the rest of his life he focused on making more sophisticated system designs that are computable while still being proven to be optimal.

His latest system is called "Alpha", and it is designed as a machine for solving a sequence of function inversion and time limited optimization problems (a majority of science/engineering problems can be formulated this way) in a way that exploits experience gathered while solving these problems. This system, again, is proven to be optimal in a certain sense.
He also tried to implement this system with various practical optimizations, but it didn't converge fast enough on his training sequences and on the hardware of that time.

Still, with modern hardware it is a possibility that it could work. And the whole design is described in the papers, so people can (and actually do, though privately and perhaps without much success) implement this system.

Here are the relevant papers:
http://world.std.com/~rjs/publications/IncLrn89.pdf
http://world.std.com/~rjs/nips02.pdf
I don't mean to engage in gratuitous negativity, I really don't, but nothing about this makes sense to me.

Looking at the rest of the thread, this seems like a credible offering from credible people, but the reasons you've given don't align at all with my experience using the banking system.

>ACH doesn't work for paying out because the recipient needs to verify account

CapitalOne, Volkswagen Credit, and my university all gladly pull my money over ACH with just an account/routing number submitted over a web form and no verification process. CapitalOne clears overnight.

The requirement on recipients to verify account ownership, if it exists, is violated in vanilla transactions with vanilla consumers at massive scale every single day by household names. I have a hard time believing the banking industry would institute a requirement and then let everyone flaunt it like that.

>Small Banks/Credit Unions that may not be ACH enabled

Really? Is that a thing? I have seen checking account offerings missing all sorts of things - branches, mobile apps, online banking, bill pay gateways, even check-writing capability - but ACH is the one true constant.

Some institutional payees like CapitalOne and Comcast won't even process a check as a check, they'll take the account/routing number and do it over ACH instead. Lots of employers also won't cut checks - it's either ACH or a shitty debit card loaded with fees.

People using non-ACH-capable banks were left out in the cold by everyone else years ago; I'm surprised there's a business in accommodating them.
I'd prefer not to list my specific card provider on a public discussion board out of security consciousness.

That said, NY Times ran an article on "the holy grail" 2% cash back credit cards last year [0] which includes four:

- Barclaycard Arrival Plus World Elite Mastercard

- Capital One Venture Visa Signature

- Citi Double Cash MasterCard

- Fidelity Investment Rewards American Express

[0]: Credit Cards With 2% Rebates, While (or if) They Last http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/your-money/credit-and-debi...
Tried rust on my old c2d, feels like alpha level. I thought they'd be closer to a "wow" effect from parallel tree rendering but not in my 4 minutes test. Crashes and memory exhaustion.

Still wishes a safe parallel renderer to emerge so good luck to the team.
> the customer is always right

No, they fucking aren't, especially when it comes to medicine. Antibiotics should be controlled like opiates; at least over-prescription of opiates doesn't endanger the whole species.

> What surprises me is with the levels of litigation against doctors, this hasn't seemed to trigger any change in behaviour.

Try fines - that's supposedly solved the opiate abuse problem.
They talk about it in the article. It may have been run surreptitiously.
Depends on the blast size and location. There have been a lot of failed attempts to down aircraft. Ex: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot The only bomb they detonated killed one person on an aircraft in flight.
What happens when the pilots need to use the bathroom? This has always bothered me when people talk about reinforced cockpit doors as a cure-all for hijackings.
FWIW -- for non-commercial uses you can get a J-Link EDU for about $70. The hardware is identical to J-Link BASE.
Mask, gloves and a hoodie combined with shorts and sandals... looks like half-way of dressing up for the adventure he decided it wasn't even worth to finish covering all parts of his body.

Also makes you wonder what kind of person picks sandals as the best shoe to traverse a forest at night in the first place, but anyway it's consistent with just going to the red zone to take some pics...
College football is a huge institution and money maker. 100k attendees to college football games in the South Eastern US is a norm. It's like a minor league for the NFL. Most of the schools represented are excellent, but not necessarily academically better for general education or undergrad work.... Although being an alum in the region can be helpful in firming work.
Is it really exactly the same product? I mean same != identical.
Even though, maybe you could speak with your manager about the situation and how you feel about it? Say that you want to learn new things and not be assigned the exact same tasks.
It can take more energy than it's worth to transport energy from one star to another. Entropy is a pain, because it's like we're trying to find a relatively dry tree to hide under in a rainstorm and none of them stay that way for long.
Things change of course. Older lawyers I know are doing and have done fine. I do not know many younger lawyers, but the ones I know are doing oil and gas, and have done very well for themselves. One of the best developers I work with has a law degree :)
In most of these cases, Christianity did not organically spread. It was brought in and forced upon local populations by mostly western colonial powers. Colonial powers always export their cultural beliefs and identities in an effort to bring those subjugated in line with their own ideas and expectations. Where religion wasn't brought in by colonialism's force, it was exported and introduced by typically western missionaries, yet another example of using a different kind of force to help it take root and spread. After some time, it's true that Christianity began to evolve with its own localized flavor, but it's not like these non-western cultures discovered Christianity via their own Damascus Road experiences with local prophets.
You can not state that as fact. You do not know that. Nobody knows what this person's fate was. That was a theory that was bandied about by the FBI. And it was convenient theory for them given that they could not solve the crime.
You could substitute "Pokemon Go" with "Clash of Clans", "WarCraft", "Angry Birds" or any popular game where the money flows back to the company rather than the local economy.
You should submit that as its own post if it hasn't been already. What the author describes is a feeling I've frequently had but have never been able to describe. I do my best to notice it and stop myself but it's difficult to override the aversion.

Another feeling I've noticed myself having which seems related is an aversion to hype with the rationalization that "If it was really that good, it wouldn't need to be hyped and evangelized". I'm not totally ready to give up that aversion yet as it seems to be correct often enough, though that's probably just rationalization on my part.
WW3 USA UNDER OBAMA HAS PERPETUAL WAR, EUROPE BROKE,FRANCE GERMANTY ITLY ALL BR
Right... and it was becoming a more capitalist nation (technically a socialist market economy, otherwise known as state capitalism) due to influences by its Capitalist trade partners.

In a single year (1978-1979) new party leader Deng Xiaoping led economic reforms to the PRC, signed an accord with Jimmy Carter for the US to officially recognize the PRC, and attracted new business from Boeing and Coca-Cola. More reforms followed soon after. But it is absolutely clear that they thought the Capitalist model was what worked and they wanted a form of it, and used trade with the US as its beginning.

I make this distinction about the US influencing them because without the successful model (and attractive potential partner) of the US, the push for a market economy may not have worked.

Cuba could have done the same, except we were still giving them the finger.
Sounds reasonable. But in an unlikely best case scenario, the electric part might somehow be certified for single engine reliability, capable of everything except endurance. A wave of comparatively liberal cruise engine development might then catch up with a few decades of combustion engine refinement.
> If it were a smaller company I'd like to see proof.

Amazing how much trust the mere size of a company ensues.
Keep in mind that the $200,000 is equal to over $1,000,000 of today's money. Also, as someone else pointed out, there's also the hijacking endangering the passengers which probably more serious than taking the money.
'High' Achievers? Cannabis Access and Academic Performance [pdf]
Treatment Effects in Randomized and Nonrandomized Studies [pdf]
Genetic effects on social deprivation/household income in UK Biobank (n=112151)