skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What I had done in learning Russian was to emphasize not just understanding of the language, but fluency. Fluency of something whole like a language requires a kind of familiarity that only repeated and varied interaction with the parts can develop. Where my language classmates had often been content to concentrate on simply understanding Russian they heard or read, I instead tried to gain an internalized, deep-rooted fluency with the words and language structure. I wouldn’t just be satisfied to know that понимать meant “to understand.” I’d practice with the verb—putting it through its paces by conjugating it repeatedly with all sorts of tenses, and then moving on to putting it into sentences, and then finally to understanding not only when to use this form of the verb, but also when not to use it.

Wow, what great timing. I remember reading this article when it was originally published (apparently in Sept. 2014) and I believe I read it because it made the HN front page back then. It's changed the way I think about teaching, especially technical skills to non-technical students.

The best students I've had so far are ones who are pretty smart and hard-working already, but by and large, they are also the ones who follow my advice to type out code by hand, run it, change it, repeat, break it, several times. And to memorize a few essential keyboard shortcuts (Tab for auto complete, Cmd-Tab for window switching, etc) so that the work of retyping and debugging code itself is much more frictionless.

Unfortunately, and understandably, most college students aren't thrilled with the idea of repetitive practice makes perfect (or at least, makes learning the important concepts much easier). This year I'm going to do a lot more testing involving writing code with pen and paper, on the theory that if you can actually write out code by hand, then you probably know the fundamental patterns (I'm talking fundamental, as in a common for-loop) essential for higher programming.

edit: One thing I should point out; this doesn't make me right but I do dogfood this approach myself when learning any new programming language. I'll write out a tutorial. Then write it the way I think it should work. If I'm half distracted, I'll write it backwards. The thing is, I'm an experienced enough programmer to know that taking the extra time to know how things work is always worth it in programming, because of how insignificant the work of physically writing code is compared to actual programming. Non-programmers do not realize this and approach it as if they were asked to write 20 pages about Hamlet, and then 20 pages about Hamlet using different adjectives.
Yes, I have definitely experienced this. At the company I work at we have dozens of super tiny services that could have been replaced with a single class, or module in a code-base.

Each of the dozens of microservices gets it's very own dedicated AWS load balancer, RDS instance, and Auto-Scaling Group in multiple regions. Just the infrastructure management alone is monumental.

Edit: punctuation.
It's probably safe to say that business-level regulation has fallen while product-level regulation has risen.
He doesn't! He's a smart guy, for sure, he has some pretty interesting ideas - but as for the interview, it was done just because he's famous. He's stating his opinions. If you treat them as anything more, then it's not exactly his fault.

I think people overestimate the value of interviews. It's just individuals talking, not a compressed textbook!
Yes, we should be able to go to space and have electric cars and ALSO improve living conditions for people. But one of those doesn't affect white guys in the tech industry.
Give the people with ideas funding and the future will happen. Instead what has been happening is the uber-elite have been hoarding their money and not putting it back into the economy. This is how to delay the future.

To me the future is welcomed with a guarded mentality, in that for all the benifits purported to follow it, but the reality is that as we progress technologically we are going to create a new wealth schism in the people of the world the blowback of that will come back one day and bite us. If we can push the future and lessen income inequality and increase the wealth, not of investors, but average people, that is the way forward.
I remember reading about this tech years ago in Business 2.0 magazine and thought it was the future, it would be nice to see someone bring it to market on a large scale. I also wondered a lot about the health implications, are there any?

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...
> I fit in so well, in fact, that almost all of my new connections on LinkedIn are these same 18-30 y/o.

Yeah, almost all of my connections are people I worked with too. ;)

I wonder if it makes any difference being > ~40 years old but having less experience. Instead of trying to walk in and be the ultra senior person, you just walk and do the job of a mid level dev.
‏@Pornhub twitter:
@BarackObama please pardon @Snowden. Russia just blocked http://Pornhub.com , he needs out ASAP!
There's something to said about attention spans in the digital age. Nautilus isn't a single serving news site; it provides long essays with sufficient background to digest a topic you probably don't really spend much time thinking about otherwise.

They aren't trying to give you a single sentence summary of some result. They are trying to get you to care about some esoteric subject. This one just happens to gel with the ycombinator crowd.
A CEO is responsible for execution. Execution of a strategy, declaring a vision, setting the tone of the culture of all the workers, getting all hands working together and delivering value. Understand the market, their future in the market, the direction the company needs to move in, the strengths and weaknesses of themselves (and the company) and design strategies to mitigate weakness and risk.

In that role, maybe they make lots of decisions, maybe they write things like "Part Deux", or maybe they stand around an scream a lot. Whatever works; probably a little of all of the above, and a good CEO knows when to use which approach.

At some level they may also report to a board, who helps them, or replaces them, all based on their execution success. And at another level, they report to shareholders who do the same.
> This post is a catastrophe.

This is a pretty ungenerous reading of the article. Your complaint seems to be mostly about the generalizability of the model (a legitimate complaint, as you've explained) rather than its statistical validity. It still provides some interesting insights about the performance of firms at trial. Notably, there isn't a correlation between favorable judgments in those cases which have gone to trial and traditional law firm rankings. That's surprising, even if it doesn't generalize to overall law firm "success".
You're saying it like GUIs are just a trick, an illusion...
I'm not saying this is the correct amount, but UN [1] says 30 billion/year would be enough to do it. However, I believe that they are taking into account only the financial needs and not the political effort necessary to do it, mainly to prevent people from diverting that money from going into the right place.

I wasn't going to get into this subject to prevent a long debate, but I'm always amazed on how these things go. We have all the money in the world to fix it for good, but for some unknown reason we just can't do it.

There was a time that I thought that if someone as powerful and "rich" as Musk ran for president for some big and important country (like the US) they could fix everything.

But for some reason that is unknown to me this will never happen. And when something close to it (in the power and money sense), like Trump running for president, does happen we know that we are not going to get this "magic fix".

It seems that at the moment that the possible fixer gets to a position where he can fix things, he no longer wants do it.

Another stupid idea, or parallel, is Pablo Escobar. At some point in his life the guy spent 2k+/day just for money rubbers. At first he wanted to be good and do good for Colombian people, but when he got to a position where he could do it, he no longer wanted to do that.

I guess we will never fix anything and the world will be as screwed as it is today. Or worse.

[1] http://borgenproject.org/the-cost-to-end-world-hunger/
1) Full disclosure: I haven't run blood tests to figure out exactly how much caffeine you absorb brushing with my toothpaste. Here's what I can tell you: in 1 ml of toothpaste there is just under 80 mg of caffeine. 1 ml is a bit more toothpaste than the pea-sized amount of toothpaste that you should use, but less than the amount you see put on a brush in a toothpaste commercial. You don't swallow toothpaste and brush for a brief period, so there is incomplete absorption. Based on the reported experiences of people who have used Power Toothpaste, it's faster acting, but say an hour later, it doesn't feel like you've had a full mug of coffee

2) (almost) immediate shipping. I have a few hundred units fully packed and ready to ship. I put a label on them and USPS picks them up! So it might be a day or two before it gets shipped. More inventory that needs to be packed before shipment.

3) Addressed this elsewhere in greater detail elsewhere, but as an adult you need less fluoride than children, and you may be getting fluoride in your water. I might suggest looking into a fluoridated mouthwash, sold at pretty much any pharmacy. I also don't reccomend Power Toothpaste before bed, so you might use a regular, fluoridated toothpaste :)

Thanks for all of the questions!
I think I see the difference. There are tail call optimizations, and then there is tail call recursion. They are two different things, potentially.

Thanks for linking the paper!
I think it's more of whether or not you need that scale. If you don't have the resources for it to make sense to optimize everything like that, you're probably wasting your time and making things slower by pursuing microservices.
A lot of people connect with concepts via story-telling. Life lessons aren't always learned by just consuming a stream of facts. And facts themselves aren't inherently valuable. A good story helps some readers filter what applies to them and what does not.
Whoops. Sorry. GCP has been my favorite.
I would say that I have benefited greatly from tech products or companies such as search, youtube, facebook, and amazon, just to name a few. Companies are not charities, they exist to make profit, often by providing useful services to their customers.
Looked fine on iPhone. What phone do you have?
Bullshit. Two of the three items on the GP's list have already been done and complainers seem to be in denial about that.

Startup industry is a great place to find tons of PR bullshit though, so I wonder if this isn't people projecting their own guilt...
This isn't specific to Apple or Ireland (or even taxes) fwiw. Ordering the company to pay back the subsidy is a normal part of the remedy for subsidies found to violate EU anti-subsidy regulations. The intent is to make it ineffective for a country to pay out subsidies, because they will in the end not have the intended effect, as the company won't get to keep the money. If the remedy were a fine levied on the subsidizing state, but without required repayment, illegal subsidies would have their intended effect of actually subsidizing the target firm (they'd just become more expensive, because the fine would become part of the cost of the subsidy).

For example, when Real Madrid was found to have been unlawfully subsidized by a local Spanish government earlier this year (they were given €18.4m as compensation for a land transfer that fell through), they were ordered to repay the €18.4m [1].

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36706262
I'm always happy to receive feedback. Well, that might be the wrong way to phrase it: I value thoughtful feedback (especially since it is a rather long piece).

1. I understand your frustration with the Chinese Room, but I thought it was easier than going through a Prolog linear simplex program, and then peeling back the hidden layer of a neural net, and saying "Are you guys worried about getting from here to there?" And Searle had done such a better job of intuition priming than reading through programs. Strictly speaking, you are correct in that the point was that a lack consciousness is externally indistinguishable from consciousness if the behavior is appropriate. I also think the amount of time spent on that section is what drives people to over emphasize it, which was a mistake.

2. "Declaring something unpredictable is a far cry from declaring it safe..."

That is true. And I don't mean to declare it safe. I think there is a real worry, which you and others have brought up, but its not a different worry related to AI. We live with that worry today. When someone's credit report, in error, makes them labor for 15 extra years. That is a form of "AI" that is with us, and that we suffer from today.

The Wittgenstein quote is overused, I know. I felt like a college kid, but it closed the whole thing off nicely.
Lightweight, wearable tech efficiently converts body heat to electricity
I thought it was a provision of the RealID act that states couldn't use your SSN as your driver's license number anymore.

IMHO, the idea that it's a secret number has been shot for years now. Fretting over who can find your SSN is pointless because the answer is anybody. It's ok as long as you don't give any special privileges to someone just because they know another person's SSN. It's no more special than your full name.
Omfg, how isn't this getting more upvotes?
aur is amazing. For a desktop distro, it's what makes Arch one of the best choices IMO. Want <insert package>? You can compile from source and get something your package manager can track. Not to mention never needing to reinstall for a new version.

I love RHEL/CentOS dearly for servers, but needing to write a complex spec file and deal with the rpmbuild system just to get an RPM for a library is a pain. You end up with /usr/local full of stuff that's hard to update.
Wow. What a sick puppy.
> new college grads willing to work for peanuts are very attractive.

Peanuts being a ways north of 100k a year at the bigger companies.

> advanced degree really is worth a lot more money, and not just in the long run.

Are we talking PhD?
My point is just that this is the only source of meaning for the word I'm aware of, and so I'm wondering where the other meaning comes from. Apparently the answer is "movies."
Coding a long day in and day out at 55 yrs old, I've been at it for 30+ years. Maintain and upgrade 911/Alarm/PERS/Telematics systems.

Self taught. I've never taken a computer course in any school. I do it because I love it.
This is a great point. Comparisons should really take in to account salary per real hour worked, not just salary per year.
Agreed. I filed this story away as a way to explain math-centric learning to the more literary minded.
The author is arguing that 'the latest wave of educational reform in mathematics' (in the U.S.) is overemphasizing conceptual understanding, and that doing so will be damaging to students.

The author advocates instead using a memorization and repetition based approach.

I can see where she's coming from, but the argument she is making is flawed. She describes a process for developing fluency both in foreign language and mathematics, wherein she experiments and plays with the constructs being learned—this is a great suggestion, but it's not in opposition to understanding: the two complement each other.

I think the error arises from making an overly strong identification between learning a foreign language and learning mathematics. If you take the representation of Euler's equation, for instance, and consider how much conceptual depth underlies it, versus a string of 20 Cyrillic characters meaning "I went to the store," or whatever—you can see the difference. You'd be wasting your time trying to get a deep understanding of the Russian phrase, but there's a reason to do it with the mathematical phrase.
My experience with a local WISP was so-so. Perhaps there are better technologies now, but what mine used was a white labeled version of the Motorola Canopy PMP (point to multi-point)

I was told 8mbs down and 2mbs up. That worked great for about 6 months and then it started to degrade month by month. I assume as more people subscribed to the service. By the end of 3 years I was only getting about 2mbs down and 700kbs up. (at 3am I might get 5/1). Worked ok for browsing facebook, but the main issue was really bad packet loss on the upstream end.

Through reading many of the administrator manuals for the antennas I found online, I came to the conclusion that it was just bad technology and exacerbated by inappropriate default settings. The gist of the way the canopy protocol works is that it is very easy for the AP to transmit data to an end point. The problem is how the data is transmitted to the AP from the customer end point device.

It must first send a request to send (RTS) and then wait for the OK. By default the AP's are set to 10 miles line of sight, which adds in even more delay for the timings. The end result is for a busy AP, most of the RTS requests will be ignored. Which works ok for browsing the net, but I was getting 5-20% packet loss on upstream, which basically meant talking to people on my voip office phone sounded fine to me, but people on the other end only heard bits and pieces of what I was saying. Trying to VPN into work was very painful too.

I dealt with that for 3 years before I finally realized that ATT had 6mbs dsl for $60 a month. I switched and was so happy.
Blame "too big to fail" and negative interest rates.

When big banks had problems, the solution was to make even bigger banks and giving them free money in order to look good.

They take savers money with negative interest rates and give it free to big banks and companies like Google, Microsoft or Deutsche Bank.

Given that if you(as a person or small company) ask a bank for money you will have to pay 20% interest rates or so, this is a tremendous advantage for them.

Big companies have free money because they can ask for a loan and give back later less that what they took after inflation!!!

This means big companies could buy the competition instead of competing with them , like facebook with wassapp, with stock, being cheaper than having their overvalued stock go down with competition.

It also means big companies could buy their own stock in the market and pump up their value, making the stock acquisition cheaper and increasing board bonus(from stock owners) look reasonable.

Central banks and politicians are obliterating middle class and business owners. This is a terrible thing because History teach us this always happens before a (violent)revolution.
AFAIK the content is curated. So content with a little ammount of upvotes can show up if some admin wants to.
> Most of the methods in a biological wet lab are very far from standardized and need a great deal of troubleshooting. Most post-docs in a new lab spend a couple months just trying to get basic stuff working that they've done dozens of times before.

Having had experience with syn bio in grad school and trying to reconcile the empirical (biology) and first principles (CS/math) approaches, I've been thinking a lot lately about how to streamline the troubleshooting process for picking up and optimizing wet lab methods. I'd love to chat - my email's in my profile.
I'll bite. How about for every incremental $1 in ecommerce spending, Amazon gets about 50 cents? And (roughly speaking) many new startups start out and grow on AWS providing new revenue as well as valuable intelligence.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-will-account-for-mor...

https://stratechery.com/2016/the-amazon-tax/
> It's federal isn't it?

Of course. You're right.

My point still stands though. It is a federal ID number and I don't really get the opposition to it (other than the religious objection).

If the feds want to deny that it's an ID number, they should take steps to ensure that no number is linked to a single individual.
I wouldn't either, but I would expect either knowing that or not knowing how it works at all, not "knowing" that they're fully autonomous. But I'm probably expecting too much.
Or at least know how to feed their own egos with self-serving "insights".
Checking If Font Awesome Loaded
This site is overwhelmingly supportive of Mr. Musk and his enterprises. Does everyone have to be?
Ask HN: What books are you reading this week?
Yeah, scaling app code is generally a solved problem: shared nothing with some load balancers. It doesn't work for every problem, but the above has been standard in my circles for at least a decade by now.

Databases are trickier though.
Markov Chains Explained Visually
Great interview, I'm always really interested in hearing what entrepreneurs like Musk have to say. However, none of the interviews ever seem to delve into the personal aspects of his life. I would love to have Elon go through a typical day and explain how achieves some balance in his life and what that looks like for him. Being a husband, a father and a friend must be quite challenging and I would love to hear more about how he views his life in general.
There's some good points here and some I disagree with. One area, though, where I think he misses the point, is:

> Additionally, many of these stories about performance gains are actually touting the benefits of a new language or technology stack entirely, and not just the concept of building out code to live in a microservice. Rewriting an old Ruby on Rails, or Django, or NodeJS app into a language like Scala or Go (two popular choices for a microservice architecture) is going to have a lot of performance improvements inherent to the choice of technology itself.

Languages and tech stacks generally have tradeoffs. Considering Rails vs Go, you could consider the (massively over-simplified) tradeoff to be that rails is better for prototyping and iterating quickly, while Go is better for performance. In an ideal world, you'd write your webapp in Rails, but put the performance-intensive stuff in Go. You'd need to communicate between the two by, say, http. Suddenly you have services.

The performance gains of using a new stack aren't orthogonal to services– they're actually one of the key selling points of services: you can use whatever stack is most appropriate for the task at hand without needing to commit the entire project to it. You can use postgres for the 99% of your app that's CRUDy and, I dunno, cassandra for the 1% where it makes sense. It's difficult (although not impossible) to do that cleanly within a monolith.
Wow you built something I always wished existed... going to check this out later, thank you much.
>except for Tesla who's motivating car automakers to go towards autonomous cars - but they had the tech before.

This is enough, no?

The same with Space-X...
Primary keys are slavery. Pass it on.
Right, it appears you can have multiple physical tamper-protected boxes that agree with each other, which makes it federated, but not decentralized.
> "no one wanted to hear the cure"

I interpreted that as "no one wanted to fund [finding] the cure". And then he died, and that was the end of that.
Besides the part about the importance of being useful and how to be useful I find the following answer most interesting:

> So it's not that I think that the risk is that the AI would develop a will of its own right off the bat. I think the concern is that someone may use it in a way that is bad. Or even if they weren't going to use it in a way that's bad but somebody could take it from them and use it in a way that's bad, that, I think, is quite a big danger. So I think we must have democratization of AI technology to make it widely available. And that's the reason that obviously you, me, and the rest of the team created OpenAI was to help spread out AI technology so it doesn't get concentrated in the hands of a few.