skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe because they aren't that many ways to teach? there are certainly some known fundamentals and maybe some tricks that improve teaching marginally, but I doubt there is some pedagogical silver bullet waiting to be found.

But more importantly, professors would do a better job if they had incentives to teach. It is time consuming to prepare a class, especially if there are labs to set up and maintain. Even worse, some professors have to teach classes for things that are not their domain of expertise. In some universities, it's not uncommon that, let say, a professor specializing in logic has to teach operating systems.

All the time spent on teaching is basically lost as career advancements are based on research and administrative work.
Dropping the RDBM and replacing it with something like Cassandra is fashionable, but sounds like bad advice to me.

A quick google gives these stats for Uber[1]:

- 8 million users

- 160 thousand drivers

- 1 million daily rides

- 2 billion rides so far

The biggest data, as stated in [2], is the trip info. They are storing the trip info as a 20kB JSON blob. If you add a custom data type [3] for a trip to PostgreSQL and encode it efficiently (binary, using deltas), you should be able to do much better than the ~3kB they get by using messagepack and zlib, say 1kB.

All that data should easily fit into 4TB. At one million rides per day, one reasonably beefy RDBM server should be able to easily handle that. You can partition the trips table and move the trips that are older than say, 1 month, to a slower disk to save money on disks. That helps with schema migration too: new data uses the new schema, and you use a view on the old data to adapt to the new schema.

I very much doubt you need anything much fancier than that. It would help if people really learned their tools (in this case PostgreSQL) instead of jumping to a different technology at the first problem they run into.

[1] http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/uber-statistics/

[2] https://eng.uber.com/trip-data-squeeze/

[3] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/xtypes.html
Ah look, it even has snowflakes.
Small watch batteries are an interesting example, I don't recall seeing any warning stickers on these toys or their packaging. Perhaps something is buried in the back of an instruction manual, but that would be obviously ineffective.
Not surprising. People actually in the market for STEM play things will get their kids telescopes, microscopes, chemistry kits, soldering irons, computers, hobby robotics/electronics parts, ...

The market for people who want STEM play things, don't know what to buy, and can't tell crap from gold, has to be incredibly small
> thought "cyber" wend out in the 90's

A year ago someone in my research group claimed that they were 'getting into cyber'. I looked around the room and almost every other member of the group looked confused and a little concerned.

Apparently 'cyber' has become a byword for 'cyber security'. I hope that this does not last.
I recently watched "Command And Control" (http://www.commandandcontrolfilm.com) on a whim. I hadn't read up about the film before seeing it, so I understood "nuclear missile accident" to mean, presumably, almost accidentally firing a warhead -- a more-or-less standard nuclear nightmare.

This, of course, is not what happened. The Damascus Titan accident did not involve a nuclear weapon being mistakenly, but intentionally, armed. The very real fear was, instead, that the explosion of a damaged missile could accidentally detonate the warhead as well -- or, in a case only slightly better, blast it into radioactive dust.

I'd never considered the risk entailed by the simple existence -- intentional use entirely aside -- of nuclear weapons. Reading the list of (public!) broken arrow incidents is harrowing.
They are shutting it down in coming weeks; team will focus on CNN endeavors.
I wouldn't say they don't have the time or resources. At any given point there are a fair number of ants that are effectively waiting in reserve for something that requires their attention.

Don't get me wrong, it's quite impressive.

Still, considering how fastidious ants are about cleaning in and around their nests* it's quite feasible one or more colonies might take to disposing of seeds in a way that lets the seeds grow and/or pick up on the habit of dumping waste products on the seedlings which the plants then use as fertilizer.

One thing that shouldn't be ignored is that it could work the other way as well. Maybe a seed was made one day that carried chemicals which caused the ants to plant it and/or poop on it.

There's evidence of this sort of thing with moths whose young emit chemicals causing the ants to carry them back to the nest and feed them until they reach adulthood and fly off.

And there's the infamous "zombie ant" fungus.

Again, the ants probably don't "know" or "care" in any intellectual sense whether it will work, it's simply an idiosyncrasy they picked up. I imagine there are plenty of strange activities ants are evolving to pick up right now that will or wont work to make them more fit to survive.

* The next time you see an ant hill note how well maintained and free of surrounding debris it is.
Young engineer hates Google after leaving college
For those who are new to Bloom filters, the article doesn't quite finish connecting the dots to a common use case:

Bloom filters give no false negatives but a controllable rate of false positives. If a Bloom filter indicates that an item has not been seen before, we can be certain that’s the case; but if it indicates an item has been seen, it’s possible that’s not the case (a false positive).

This style of probabilistic data structure can be used to achieve a significant speedup when the full test for set membership is very expensive. For example, run the test using the Bloom filter. A negative result can be taken as truth, while only positive results will have to be tested against the expensive algorithm to weed out false positives. Obviously, the expectation should be that negative results are far more common than positive results.
One of the major major major issues is the hardware itself.

Let's jump back to the late 90s. You want to try Linux. You might partition your disk, or build a different machine and get a KVM or use an old laptop or add a second hard drive. In all cases, you can just install a Linux distro and see if it works. Maybe Ethernet or sound or something doesn't work. You could try a different distro with a newer kernel, maybe compile your own kernel with the modules you need, etc. But no matter what, it would at least boot (usually).

Intel x86/64 is a standard architecture. EFI makes the booting process even easier (although some motherboards still fuck this up; but for the most part fiddling with efibootmgr and turning off TPM will work. If not you can always turn on legacy BIOS and use the MBR). ARM is not a standard architecture. It's a spec that is sold to companies who all make their own SoC templates. There are things like Device Tree Config that make some of this more standard, but it's still far from x86/64. Just read Torvalds rants on ARM to learn more.

Even if you make some standard Android builds with all the drivers for all phones in a massive 20MB initrd, a lot of kernels are fundamentally different with the way bus connections are defined. Manufactures take forever to release their kernel code, often under threats by people for GPL violations, and even then they are filled with tons of binary blobs and shims that connect their .o files so kernel calls.

Stuff like Plasma looks amazing. It only has like two phones it supports. If you look at any android rom project, you see totally different builds for every single device. If Intel had been like this, Linux would have died off in the 90s, for both servers and desktops.

Device manufactures depend on you buying new phones. They cannot support phones after two years or else it kills their profit margins. Planned obsolescence like this leads to waste (don't kid yourself, e-waste recycling gets shipping to Africa where kids remove components. A small percentage of phones actually get recycled).

TL;DR Mobile phones are based on unmaintainable and non-standard hardware (intentionally). I wrote a post on this a while back:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/
> If they're all rational

I feel you, but that assumption is where this argument diverges from reality.
Chrome-only? wat
> You can't seriously think cities in Europe are all rich enough to be able to afford large infrastructure projects?

No, I don't think that. But I do think it's likely that the various levels of US government like to stake their claim to more autonomy compared to the various levels of government in Europe (particularly at the local level -- I'm sure the EU and national governments love to "get involved").
Yes, many regulations exist for good reason and have significant upsides.

However, it's false to say that EVERY individual regulation meets these criteria. As TFA pointed out, these objects are far less hazardous than firearms, fireworks, automobiles, and even balloons (the leading cause of child suffocation, and for whic labeling is required), but because they are novel the CPSC decided to slap them with an absolute ban, which is stronger regulation than any of the other products listed above and thousands of others.

This was a very badly considered and executed regulation, and the judge acted rightly. FWIW, I don't think anyone is saying what you imply, that all regulations are baseless and bad.
Redraw the States: How arbitrary is the electoral college?
Yeah but that still doesn't mean that Yale Library authorized the production of the the replica. They authorized access to the original. Nothing more. I can go to any library or museum and once granted access do anything I want with the data I acquire. Now granted, they may be curious about why I wanted access, and maybe I'd even do it under supervision in order to mitigate damage, but the data and the manifestation of that data becomes my own original transformative creative work. The library doesn't own it, or even a part of it, unless a specific agreement was made regarding that.
I personally think that K-12 education is a disaster driven by dogmatism. I think the only reason K-12 education works at all is because of the incredible effort individual teachers put forth.

I think we may both be right in a sense. My view is based on my schooling experiences: I have dysgraphia, which made the traditional methods of K-12 education literally torturous for me. Despite a formal diagnosis and a IEP, I had to constantly fight with teachers and school administrators to get accommodations.

I went to a small school for college, and I graduated on time despite being one of the most academically rigorous institutions in the country. College was definitely a struggle for me, but I felt that the professors were on my side, and had a holistic view of student success. This experience might be different if you went to a research institution, where classes were taught by TAs.

The only reason K12 wasn't a complete disaster for me is because my parents were immensely supportive, and because I realized that a learning disability didn't make me worse than other people. I get angry every time I think back to the other kids who were in special education with me, who were treated like problems by teachers and administrators because they interfered with the K12 machinery. They internalized all of this hatred towards themselves and hated themselves because of it.

The focus on test scores, graduation rates, and college attendance in K12 education is a disaster that hurts the most vulnerable children in our school system. I listen to my friends who are teachers, and they all know who these children are, but they don't have the time or the resources to help them. Enforcing accountability through grades and test scores ensures that these students will be left behind, because their energy is better spent making sure 10 other students score 5 percentage points higher on the next standardized test.
'Cyber' usage has recently become de rigueur by people in positions of authority. see http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/trumps...
The only reason I think gift cards feel more like a gift is because it means the giver put some thought into what you might want to spend it on. Thoughtfulness is important.

But gift cards themselves suck. They are strictly worse than cash. If you want to be thoughtful but give them something more useful, give them cash with a card that says, "I thought you might enjoy spending this on ___."
My first reaction of SF is San Francisco, not Science Fiction. Am I the only here?
Stickers or labeling on packaging sounds pretty inexpensive and straightforward. For sure, too many stickers and labels turns into noise but I would argue that we aren't there yet, most of the toys I purchase for my children are relatively bereft of warnings.
the variables are named for the registers they represent, it's not single letter variables for the sake of compactness.
i'd like to see the same group of people asked to pick a random integer between 1 and 10 inclusive, and compare that distribution to what we see in the first graph.
I think this is a relatively mild period of anti-science. Religion is largely on the decline. Fake news is being called out as "fake". College educations are valued even by those without them in general, and the job market certainly values them.

I think it seem like there is a much larger anti-science sentiment then there is because these people have been given a fresh voice with social media and for the first time in a long time they can connect with each other and build echo chambers to shout at eachother in.

Some of this spilled out in the last election and provided a non-trivial number of votes for a candidate who was clearly a demogogue, instead of voting for a different demogogue who appealed less to the uneducated.
K&R is amazing, really makes you appreciate how simple C is as a language
GCHQ -- NSA without the ethics, answerable only to the King
This looks like a handy tool, certainly for puzzles and exploring encodings. It makes decoding puzzles like this very quick! 11100111 10111011 10011101 11100100 10111000 10001101 11100100 10111100 10011010 11100110 10010100 10111110 11100101 10111100 10000011 11100100 10111101 10100000
Barns are painted red because of the physics of dying stars
> but they might leave them to play with a bunch of magnets without realizing the danger.

Or, according to the website, "a balloon, the #1 cause of child suffocation, a novelty everyone grew up with and often believe to be harmless."
The Science Behind Deadly 'Thunderstorm Asthma' Possibly Linked to 6 Deaths
The big problem is simply how much time it takes to teach effectively.

Teaching even a single class (2 lectures/3 hours each per week+new homework assignments so students can't copy your old ones+answering questions in email+office hours) when you are fully engaged is a 40 hour per week commitment for 12-14 weeks.

If you are required to teach more than 2 classes, your teaching quality suffers. If your research needs priority, your teaching quality suffers.

Improving pedagogy is wonderful, and I'm glad people are looking at it. However, what everybody actually needs is the time to put it into practice.

The fact that teachers are woefully underpaid for this kind of thing just makes everything worse (Most lecturers I know get less than $5000 for a 12-14 week course--they could make more at McDonald's or WalMart).
Dublin Mean Time (1880-1916)
Bare metal is operationally very expensive because someone has to monitor it, back it up, patch it, test it, fix the software when it breaks at 2am, fix the hardware when it breaks at 2am, explain to security that its either full of confidential stuff or not, decommission it years later, and none of that is as standardized as virtualized or containerized stuff.

Also "in the olden days" we had prod servers but shared dev and test servers. Now a days you just spin up resources assuming your ops is flexible enough. I'll spin up a test image to eliminate one bug and then destroy it, no sweat. In theory you can do that with metal but the accounting must be weird. You could make a pool of bare metal test boxes for people to use as they please, I guess...

I also like spinning up new images for software upgrades. Oh, a new version of the database, here's a new image, test it out.

Some of it is organizational hacking. After a few legendary disasters procedures will be formulated where standing up new iron takes interdepartmental meetings and signing off with the network and security and ops teams and the data center guy has to sign off on the thermal and electrical loads and power points all over the place. In comparison, you wouldn't make someone changing a cell in a spreadsheet go thru all that, right? So you deploying a virtual image is just clicking a harmless little button, as long as you operate under a blanket agreement with ops, infosec, networking, etc... At least until enough legendary disasters inevitably happen that clicking "create" on a virtual image requires weeks of time and at least 4 signatures and 3 departmental meetings of micromanagement. Hopefully we'll invent something new by then.
Thunderstorm Asthma: What Is It and Why Does It Happen
Yes please consider Authy, they make it especially easy to do 2FA as a user.

https://www.authy.com/developers
When regulation is used by incumbent businesses to block competition, yes.

When regulation is used to protect people from being taken advantage of, then the benefits are well worth the cost.
A Tale of Two Cities
This! So much this! (Unfortunately my single up-vote is not enough to help you sir.)

Unnecessary complexity is god-mother of all evil (premature optimization included). The goal is to use as simple (to understand and to maintain) means, code, idioms etc. as the problem you are solving allows. I know fancy stuff and I know when not to use it (i. e. almost always) and value simple robust code much more than fancy fragile crap.

Seems like more people are trying to solve easy problems by complex means than people trying to solve difficult problems by any means. Sad thing is by using unnecessary complex means even the simplest problem can be obscured beyond mental capacity of anyone. Welcome legacy spaghetti mess.
I think it's still really helpful to learn C and as a reference, but the code has a very terse and difficult to read style that I wouldn't recommend actually coding in, for example this is introduced in the first chapter, before anything is even studied in depth: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hbwyid5jwen43t/Screenshot%202016-...
Many years ago, trying to keep a NT 3.5.1 server functional, this was a frequent chant in the server room.
(I am an author of Sciter)

I am comparing distribution sizes of would-be-sciter-based-IDE with Brackets/Adobe, Visual Code / Microsoft and Atom / GitHub.

Common for all them: they use HTML/CSS/script based UI.

Sciter's IDE uses Sciter Engine as it is.

Others in the set are Chrome/Node.js based. So they appear as include JavaScript runtime twice - the one in Chrome and the one in Node. But conceptually you just need JS once.

Sciter has a built-in option to style arbitrary text runs so syntax highligting does not require DOM change and so it can be done directly in standard <textarea> editor. Yet Sciter exposes existing HTML/CSS/script tokenizers to the script. That again makes highligting as fast as possible yet code reuse of the whole thing.
No, you mistake not caring with not calling out those who misrepresent me, e.g. I didn't start it out with the Jews,
eli_gottlieb did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056653

That's because as I see it, the single most distinctive thing about the Alt Right is that we don't believe in the noble defeat of movement conservatism, in wearing sackcloth and ashes for the rest of our lives when we're called any of "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic", etc. etc. We're in this to win, sort of like how Reagan was the first President to decide to end, not "contain", the Soviet Union. Which of course is justifiably terrifying the Left, for they've gotten too used to the easy victories of the last few decades after Reagan passed from the scene.
Probably just the parser getting tired.

In seriousness -- does this behaviour persist if you drop the computation into a `for` loop for a number of iterations instead of calling it manually every time?
Any analysis which ties some outcome (self-assigned ratings) to income is flawed unless you control for income vs cost of living.

The engineer with a compensation package worth 150k in Silicon Valley isn't the same as the guy with the same package in Austin.
...right.
It seems implied to me that he considers the regulation effective. His argument requires it. The cost is also implied: a wholesale ban has a steeper cost than the other, less onerous methods of regulation.

My comment was merely meant as an explication of his comment since your interpretation of his comment seems unsupported and bizarre. He stated clearly "We need government," but feels a wholesale ban is overkill in this case because for more dangerous things, we don't ban them outright.
I feel like I'm looking at a Sharper Image catalog. Lots of neat, expensive, completely useless things (for the everyday person) that I'm surprised anybody buys.
I would agree with you if we were talking about a defective product. But neodymium spheres are not defective, they're just dangerous. I have been interested i this for several years as I own a whole lot of Buckyballs, a previously popular brand of strong magnet sold to the public, which were taken off sale after repeated CPSC objections.

Yes, they're dangerous is you don't follow safety precautions and I would never allow children to play with them. When children visit we make sure the magnets are not accessible - it's our responsibility to think about others' safety. But it's not the responsibility of the magnet manufacturers, as long as they make it clear that their product can be dangerous (and the vendors I've bought from certainly do). The mere fact that something is dangerous is not grounds for taking it off sale, otherwise we should shut down every gas station and hardware store right now.
Why did you feel the need to reply with this sentence? How does it advance our conversation whatsoever? You replied saying

>Having a cost and having a "large, economy-wide negative impact" are very different things.

Is a large cost not a large negative impact? Are regulations by the federal government not economy-wide? Are you making any discernible point that couldn't have been expressed by "NUH UH, I'M STILL RIGHT LALALALA!"?

To pick a random example: The article doesn't say it costs shoppers in Des Moines $4,029 per year due to milk-market regulations. It costs US citizens somewhere between $500 million and $2.1 billion per year - in 1991.

The journal article I linked is literally about the large, economy-wide costs of regulations. Your response is a non-sequitor.
Do you talk like that as well?

I used to pepper my comments with phrases like "to be honest" but I never use it in speech. I've tried to eliminate it recently because it usually isn't needed.
Please don't hijack the back button.
Someone should make realistic looking fake gift cards that you can put cash bills inside. Or for the HN crowd, perhaps bitcoin wallet info.
Unity and UE4 can use Enlighten for GI as someone mentioned below.

For voxel GI there is:

http://www.sonicether.com/segi/

http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC2/Voxel-Based+Global...

https://developer.nvidia.com/vxgi
How I built a motorized sun tracker for my solar panels
Piano-Flow – A music game follows the piano flows