skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed, I observed that among those of us qualified to teach the course, absolutely none of us had ever taken it. Here's what I learned about it, which may be unique to the US:

Just before starting freshman classes, the students took a math exam, and were sorted into three levels:

1. Calculus.

2. College Algebra, which like you say is a repeat of 10th grade algebra. Its curriculum is defined by the requirements for the minimum level of math that can be offered for credit at an accredited college.

3. "Remedial" math, which cannot be offered for credit, but is a preparation for college algebra.

I estimate that about half of the students were in calculus, and the other half in the lower two tracks. For all intents and purposes, if you're not ready for calculus as a freshman, you're not going to be a math or "hard" STEM major. It's the sorting hat. The opinion of the professors was that the algebra students didn't even belong in college, so the lower math courses were conducted under a black cloud. The rigidity of the accreditation requirements may have led to the rigidity of the curriculum, which I thought didn't belong in any century that I've lived in. For instance the course made no meaningful use of computers.

Since this was the state flagship university, the students represented K-12 math preparation throughout the state. The variation is huge. Some school districts offer two years of calculus. The high school that my kids attend has a deal with the university for kids to take college math classes beyond calculus. Some schools have no calculus. Some of the kids in my college algebra class had gotten A's in high school calculus, but somehow couldn't pass an algebra exam.
Google Search Guru Matt Cutts Resigns
You don't agree that wealthy people tend to be older? Even though time is the easiest way to increase wealth (compound interest is your friend). Or you don't agree that older people are less educated? Even thought the data suggests otherwise.
Ask HN: Need help with job offer negotiation
Background: I'm about to receive an offer for a position originally posted two levels above my current position. I passed the technical interviews with essentially no missed questions. But because the job description states 10 years of experience, whereas I have 8, the HR is preparing me an offer at one level below (but still an equivalent promotion for me).

Secondly, I graduated during the last recession, so my salary history is low. Their HR has heavily indicated that they base offers on prior salary history, with a 10-15% max bump. Glassdoor has base salary at 30% higher than mine, same company and title, but HR denies that it is accurate.

Due to circumstances, 10-15% may not bring much net savings increase for me. Presumably the job is of higher responsibility and workload, so only 30% becomes meaningful to me.

Questions:

1. How should I feel about being brought in one level lower strictly because of years of experience on paper? If there were doubts about my ability, they certainly didn't test harder questions during the interview.

2. How do I get HR to match what is on Glassdoor? I might get another offer soon, but HR indicated they want a prompt response. I doubt my company would move fast enough with a counteroffer too (VP is on vacation). On the other hand, I don't think they have another candidate ready, and they moved very quickly with me.

Thanks HN!
Asking whether A and B are different is not a useful question. There will be a difference 100% of the time. (Though of course sampling may not reliably detect the difference for feasible samples.)

The superior question is which is probably better, and by how much. If all you know is that A is 75% likely to be better than B, then go with A. It's useful information, even if it doesn't cross a an arbitrarily preset threshold of 95% or whatever you use.

You don't need to wait for certainty to act. In fact, all actions are taken under uncertainty. So it feels incredibly artificial and counterproductive to frame these questions in such a binary, nonlinear way. It's clinging to certainty when certainty does not exist.
Dude, you even have the guts to use caps. I was there, I had an account with basically the same name (http://da-archive.com/index.php?showuser=725213). Then one day my account went poof, with not much notice. Not a problem for a free service, but a lot of people volunteered to get the forum database and migrate it.

Guess what... he released it when LoL was entrenched, a few years later. That's how you can see my profile, on a tribute site where someone imported the database dump.

But at that point the community had already left and the valuable Dota web property was used to ramp up LoL. LoL would have made it without it, but these tactics where shady.
This is zero information article. In fact, zero insight article. Getting in to app-based cab business is hard because you need users so drivers come in and you need drivers so users come in. Its chicken and egg problem. The only known ways to break this is put up a huge hussle. Uber is just doing that and if its successful at it then it can virtually monopolize this segment and rip benefits years later like Amazon. Every one can make cab app, but not every one can get millions of users for their cab app.
i agree. they probably created it when trump announced he was running
> I am pessimistic about the ability for manufacturers to resist cutesy network/cloud/status/monitoring functions in these devices

Small electronics would probably not be affected by a coronal mass ejection [1]. CMEs wreak havoc with the power grid by "inducing a DC-like current" through transformers, thereby melting them [2]. Most diesel generators don't contain large transformers hooked up to miles and miles of conductive cabling.

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2643093/strong-solar-st...

[2] http://www.thepreparednesspodcast.com/the-difference-between...
ESCORTS THESSALONIKI – ESCORT CALL GIRLS
what technology stack are you working on?
Of course compound task federation like this is not exactly new. Blackboard systems did the very same thing using expert systems back in the 1970s-80s.

The problems then remain today: complex and compound tasks don't decompose neatly into well-defined constituent subtasks. Sub-task recombination rapidly devolves into a rat's nest of selecting from competing subtask components that don't have clearly distinct semantics, that are not free of contextual dependencies, nor do they plug-in-and-play independently.
I'm saying I don't see how someone gets "slapped around" by Steve Austin without being at least a little meta and a little humble in some weird way.
> Through massive subsidies the VC's are trying to buy monopolies in entire markets...

And there you have it, the core of the Silicon Valley concept, the ideal startup, the business model of VCs.

1. Create a new product.

2a. Create a new market; have first mover advantage

or 2b. Use Predatory Pricing or Anticompetitive actions to gain advantage

3. Establish monopoly

4. Cash out big.

5. Use money to fund new business ventures, see 1.
i use curl everyday. i use Mozilla maybe once a month. its absolutely no contest which is more important to me
I believe this kind of ties in with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13437332 in that many "lucky" people prepared so that when luck struck things were aligned to take off.
Common Code Smells – Georgina Mcfadyen – 8th Light Blog
Remind me of this quote from Meditations:

>If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth by which no man was ever injured. But he is injured who abides in his error and ignorance.
What are good alternatives for communicating with somebody then?
Laser Toast
It's a matter of logistics and scale. A small, homogeneous population is far easier to manage than an expansive, diverse one. Switzerland doing it is roughly equivalent to one state in the US doing it. The staff required to support such an operation is reasonable. Probably one central office employing a few dozen people to manage accounts, provide support, and oversee a modest number of nearby service providers.

Contrast that with a federal program and all of a sudden you have dozens of offices across the entire country. You have to add another layer of management to oversee those offices and ensure they are adhering to the same standards. Rolling out even a minor change requires re-training hundreds if not more staff. You've taken what was a relatively lean operation and turned it into a bureaucracy of the largest scale. And now it's a target for fraud because they're handing out free money and inevitably poorly investigate abuses at a snail's pace.
Isn't that true of all of Tor? An extremely attractive target; arguably anyone with the resources, including most state intelligence agencies, would see high value in finding exploits (and not revealing them).
I wish ProtonMail would offer more email aliases with its paid plans - credentials reuse is what often allows to snoop on someone's online identity. That would really boost its value in terms of privacy.
> Now we only need a desktop client that supports the same features... And iOS

For iOS ChatSecure was just released with OMEMO support https://chatsecure.org/blog/chatsecure-v4-released/

Regarding desktop clients, I can recommand Gajim which also has a OMEMO plugin.
World fastest mobile tech news
Array programming languages: APL, J, K, and Q, using RosettaCode tasks to assess my progress.
Pretty boring imo. I prefer watching TF2 even though it has much fewer viewers. It's not a fair comparison, I know. The TF2 comp community has been active for almost a decade now. I'm hopeful that OW will improve in the future.

Regarding OW, a lot of what made TF2 attractive has been scrapped in the name of making the game "accessible" to casual players. That's fine of course, but it unfortunately makes the game less fun to watch at a high level. For example, there is almost zero skill required for advanced map traversal (save for Lucio). In TF2 on the other hand, rocket jumping and sticky jumping are non-trivial, and are critical for map dominance. Another thing I find weird is character caps. The goal (in theory) was to ensure that there was variety int the meta, but it doesn't look like it's working tbh. It also shows that Blizzard doesn't really trust the comp community to independently minmax strategies for team comp.

Let's not even start talking about the collectible system. TF2 does this masterfully through the trading and crafting systems. I can get every single item in the game without spending a cent, including cosmetics - without relying on RNG of course. Blizzard on the other hand is in it for the $$$. Have you ever heard of a card game where you can't trade cards? An absolute joke!

But Blizzard is doing quite a few things damn well. Most prominently, their approach to openly communicating changes and stuff that's in progress is very refreshing imo. I hope other devs learn from this approach.
Those who want the healthcare system to "work more like a market" would do well to understand this article. Healthcare is different, you don't get to price shop when you're passed out due to a car accident. Even when you do have the opportunity to price shop, how do you know the cheaper option is just as good? Is the surgeon down the street better or worse? Would you trust Yelp for that? Would you bet your life on it?

Health care is complicated, expensive, opaque and even when superficially transparent is affected by huge numbers of external factors.

Good article summarizing some of the issues:

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_bills/2017/01/why...

The JAMA study cited in the article:

http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2518264

We have to think about these complexities because otherwise we'll keep hurting people. No solution will be perfect, but ideological ones will definitely be worse.
Especially if Dobrindts "A single app to book all taxis, carsharing companies, car rentals, train or bus tickets, in all of Germany" takes off.
I've been working full time on a rails app for the last 2+ years.

About 3 weeks ago I dove into Elixir for a big rewrite of a side project as a learning exercise. In the beginning it feels strange, mostly because of the functional way of thinking required and some new types to get used to (structs, keyword lists, etc.). Once you get the hang of it however it feels really, really nice. I dread going back to my rails app now... Others in the thread have stated most of the reasons why so I won't go into that.

I'm looking forward to launching this re-written side project in a few weeks and seeing what the performance is like. (This is currently a stale Django app). Running locally in dev mode the performance (Phoenix) seems like it will be excellent.
Avaya files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
Right now just Django + Heroku
For me, it's easier done than said. To not use Windows 10, I don't need to do anything. To say "don't use Windows 10", I need to spend some time actually saying it.
Array programming languages: J, K, Q, and more recently, APL; using RosettaCode to assess my progress.
Showcase your art in new ways with Tilt Brush Toolkit
I don't completely trust the NTSA and I'm skeptical about auto-piloting cars but accept that more and more of those will be on the roads. I will never ride in a vehicle that lacks an override mechanism.

In general, I think we are moving way too fast towards these self-driving vehicles because certain factions want to try and replace long and short haul truckers with robotic systems that are cheaper and damn the consequences.
I think, usually, hard work is necessary, but not sufficient. You won't succeed without it, but if you're not lucky, you won't succeed either.
M3DB – A distributed time series database
Suppose A is significantly better than the control. And B is not significantly better than the control. Does that imply A is significantly better than B? No. Statistical differences do not the follow the same logic as normal differences.

It feels so pointless to bin probabilities into yes, no, and unclear. We're throwing away information with value when we compress the problem this way. And I think it leads to more misinterpretations.
The problem with interstellar travel in general is that it is so expensive, in terms of energy usage. I speculate that even for Kardashev type 3 civilizations, shipping matter around will be impractical.

The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and aren't so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness, "traveling" from place to place by sending data is the most practical method.

All that is needed is that the destination be prepared appropriately. So that means firing off a kilogram (or so) of self-replicating molecular nanotechnology which can build the infrastructure you'd want to live in (compute on) at the destination.

I haven't seen any indications yet with physics that something more practical is in the offing. There's still a lot we don't understand (GUFT, dark matter / energy), but there doesn't seem to be much hope for life as we know it to flit around the universe faster than light.
The governments will sooner outlaw job automation or implement basic income than allow chaos to take hold.
So basically, it means waiting a while before performing the test again? Since "larger sample size" mostly just means "keep the test running for longer", so the difference is that in that case, the "second" test is very close in time to the "first" test?
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Can't delete sooo...
Very interesting, thanks for posting
Obviously they either 1) lost the PGP key(or other internal issue) or 2) got served with something that won't let them post new canary messages.

something tells me #2 is probably more likely.
I HATED "show your work". You want a proof, ask me for a proof. It's not my fault I can solve your problem in my head. Especially horrifying is if you want me to solve the problem a particular way. There is no better way of turning the fun and freedom of math into drudgework. You are licensed to ask me to arrive at the correct answer, or to prove a theorem from premises; telling me how to do it is mathematical abuse.
The reality is that, even after more than 30 years of research, query optimizers are highly complex pieces of software which still face some technical challenges.

Yep. It still amazes me how queries can go from absolutely great to scanning tables with a row added in the wrong place. WITH RECOMPILE still scares the heck out of me. It can really help when distributions change, but it can also kill your performance with a bad query plan choice.

It addition to the hint show, you can also force certain indexes. This didn't seem to be as big a problem on SQL Server as its parent code Sybase ASE. Sybase made some really, really bad choices on big tables.

No amount of optimization will fix a bad schema design.

This is also a field where talking to people about how you built your machines and where the indexes are located can make a world of difference. If you cannot have the whole database on the fastest storage, then at lest put the indexes there.
IIRC the former is basically what D does. The keyword is `function`.
http://distantjob.com is a remote specialized recruitment agency
Stop being so self righteous. Do you own a BMW or Audi? I do, and I'm totally polite driving mine. Also, when you have a car that handles and responds better you tend to drive it harder and you forget that everyone else is in some inferior product.
If the car can detect something in the adjacent lane, then it'll give you a warning if you try to change lanes into it manually too.
I did a quick search and I am actually shocked at how many studies there are on this:

https://www.projectcredo.com/briankung/the-impact-of-videoga... †

I expected studies like "Does playing video games improve laparoscopic skills?" but not "Impact of Super Monkey Ball and Underground video games on basic and advanced laparoscopic skill training."

† Disclaimer: I built this site
+1
Looks very interesting!
The power grid can't be shut down in a few hours.
>You say he damaged our ability to collect data but don't have any proof.

The damage is very obvious. He revealed a bunch of mediums that the NSA had the capability to monitor. Any sophisticated actor that wants to avoid US intelligence is now avoiding those mediums.

My point is that he didn't have to flee. Instead he fled into the arms of those who stand to gain the most from his knowledge of our intelligence capabilities. Putin is not giving him asylum for free. I'm sure he's getting something out of it, if just the ability to use Snowden as as a propaganda piece and negotiating chip. It'd probably be hard to make a treason charge legally stick, but I believe it is what he is morally guilty of. There are plenty of things that he is plainly guilty of that carry equivalently harsh sentences.

You're right, he had nowhere else to flee but the enemies of the United States. But that doesn't change the fact that he fled, nor where he fled to. He did not have to flee. And yes, I think he's a coward for it.
I's so important for everyone to understand that Google can only approximate describing the real world in a structured way based on vast inputs of unstructured data with minimal human attention.

Twice that I can remember, I've gone to a restaurant that existed on Google maps but when I got there I saw had been long closed. That's my fault, Google isn't to blame because there were stale web pages somewhere indicating these restaurants still existed.

But the more Google represents itself as presenting truth without significant qualification, the more they do so with their signature lack of humility or accountability, the more disingenuous it becomes.

I'm skeptical of Google and apparently even I still sometimes make the mistake of assuming its data is correct. How many people don't understand even the basics of how Google gets its data and don't distinguish between the real world and the representation of the world in a database so vast that it could never be vetted?
Original and Replica Shard Operations in Elasticsearch
In the iOS Maps app if you have both apps installed that is exactly how it works. You just have to click "ride" instead of "transit."
inbox.google.com
When you select computer to TV, it asks whether your computer has a port like this (this being a picture of a HDMI port.) I see no reason why they couldn't do the same for a tablet.
Afrika's Super Computer and the Problems It Will Solve
Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization
(Post author here) I'm not incredibly familiar with the ins and outs of MongoDB Inc's business model, but I agree with your assessment. They certainly seem to have embraced both of the OSS business models I described in the post as viable alternatives. We are going to start with just one, and there's still a huge amount on our plate.

MongoDB Inc did have its valuation reduced by some institutional investors. Hard to say whether that was premature or what the impetus was behind their decision. MongoDB is an incredibly well-adopted product that has gotten considerably more capable over the years. I would argue they've had good success with this business model, as building a $1.6B business is a huge accomplishment whether you've got an OSS business model or not.

It would be fair to ask whether they've done the balancing act as well as they might have. They've certainly knocked OSS adoption out of the park. On the other hand, I've heard anecdotally that they waited a long time before introducing enterprise features.

Regardless, I view MongoDB Inc. as a big - and still growing - success, and consider much of what they've accomplished to be worthy of emulation.
Show HN: Zerve: a tool to create a single file Python app serving files via http
I wish Google would penalize websites with pay walls
It doesn't require continuous engagement. You can drive with hands off the wheel for several minutes at a time in many situations.
Good. Those have been becoming increasingly prevalent to the mobile web's detriment.

I don't mind a few ads, but many of these interstitials are downright maliciously designed, making the entire page load consistent on hitting a tiny "x" target, presumably designed with the intention of facilitating accidental clicks on the ad.
So...better driving training, then, yes?
The problem with Uber paying subsidies now to build a brand is that for people paying attention to them their actions independent of the drivers are building even more of one.

Living in an area covered by both Lyft and Uber (and probably with many/most drivers working both), I will pretty much exclusively use Lyft - and I pay more for it as well, as I've tipped the drivers on every one of my rare trips. In the long term I expect their prices to rise to the point where it's more comparable to taxi services, but they still have some advantages there at least to my mind.
This title confused me. I thought Google was penalizing mobile websites by injecting intrusive pop-up ads.
There might be massive issues for power distribution but not power generation as generation can be quickly taken off grid. Local power plants could then be brought back very quickly.

There could still be issues in specific areas dependent on long distance power. However, nuclear subs and aircraft carriers have been used in the past to provide power for critical infrastructure ~(40+MW a pop) and local power grids would not be impacted long term. Compared to say a war this would be a minor long term impact.

PS: The $613 billion estimate over 5 years is 0.15% of the ~390,000 billion world GDP over that same 5 years.
I think you're being too kind to the parent. This is true for a very small subset / archetype of people. The majority of the country has much different situations and desires than just walking to ALDI.
If you have leadership skills, you can help lead your company, even from a low-end job title. However, it can take years to build up respect from management in that position.

If you have a high title, you get a level of respect immediately (whether you deserve it or not). It goes a lot quicker.