skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> TSP is actually very amenable to heuristics and state of the art branch-and-bound algorithms can often find optimal solutions even for instances with thousands of points.

In own research (inverse problems related to signal recovery), I've noticed that a lot of NP-hard problems are actually easily solvable given that the data has some kind of structure to it. I know very little about computational complexity theory, but I've read some papers describing how there is often a phase transition where a high SNR puts the problem in P territory, but a sufficiently low SNR moves the problem moves to NP territory (but it's still solvable). Beyond the phase transition, a solution is information theoretically impossible. I wonder if most of these real world TSP problems actually lie in P, but I don't know how one would go about showing that. (I haven't performed a literature search, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already demonstrated this.)
I'd posit that the majority of road warrior types know how to tether.
A few years ago I saw a project to 3d print high end telescopes using smart phones to process the image at a maker faire. It was an open source design, I think this one

http://www.openspaceagency.com/ultrascope/

For myself although I'm not an amateur astronomer I think I would be more interested in something I could make/tinker with myself.
This theory reminds me a lot of the folding funnel. It used to be thought of as a paradox that a protein could fold in mere minutes if it needed to explore each possible configuration before arranging into its "correct" configuration. This paradox was solved with the theory of the folding funnel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding_funnel) which states that the potential energy surface is not flat, but rather it is 3 dimensional funnel with points where it is practically impossible to go backwards. The nascent protein does not explore the entire potential energy surface, instead it just folds into relatively few transition states before assuming its final form.
I think by "better" you mean "more properly" ;)

I'm sure IELTS doesn't cover important life skills such as "use of the word innit".
Some sites do that against adblockers, with mixed success.
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As someone who has built his own telescope and been somewhat involved in amateur astronomy, this sounds like marketing bullshit to me. It reads like a press release. The first bullet point is especially damning; it's pure marketing speak devoid of any substance. Aperture diameter matters -- that's the total amount of light available. It's why when you want a better telescope, you go bigger. There's no way around that.

Bullet point #2 is nothing special; it's just using GPS for location and a clock to automatically point your telescope at a specific object. This has been around for a long time.

Bullet #3 appears to be talking about image-stacking, which, again, is a technique already commonly employed -- put your telescope on a computer-controlled equatorial mount, take many 30 second exposures (typically the max allowed by a DSLR) over the course of hours, and combine them in software. And I seriously doubt that you can get much utility out of stacking images taken by different telescopes in different viewing conditions.
I think that all they've done is integrate a CCD with automated stacking into a newtonian.

I wouldn't exactly call this revolutionary, as amateur astronomers have been coupling cameras (film then CCD) to telescopes for a century - but if it makes viewing DSOs more accessible to junior-amateurs at a good price point, then that's no bad thing.

I've just replaced my entire astronomy setup as the mount was getting old and cranky, and it has involved ordering about 40 distinct pieces of kit, with a lot of knowledge required, so I can certainly see the appeal in a push button solution for casual observers.
God forbid we discover our ancestors used to eat dirt.
> So my question is, what happens when other top universities begin to catch up or even possibly dethrone CMU?

What happens when CMU gains an even greater advantage over other top universities? Will Pittsburgh be able to handle the deluge of talent and businesses wanting to move there?
"than there are people looking to pay, on average, $11,000 for 12 weeks of intensive training"

...able to pay $11,000 and not work full time for 12 weeks

FTFY

There isn’t really much evidence of a “skills gap”

Except that hiring is nearly everyone's biggest problem in tech and, you know, that whole crazy H1B thing.

Companies and Gov't job programs should be paying for dev schools not poor people. If they did it would all work out fine. As a matter of fact Iron Yard's corporate dev boot camp has been the profitable part of the business for some time.

I'm flabbergasted by this article. I'm not going to waste the time to reply to every one of the ridiculous assertions.

America desperately needs more skilled programmers in almost every market. Dev boot camps can and do get people to work. Many people in the position of needing a dev boot camp can't afford to go without work and pay for it at the same time (or at all).
That doesn't seem particularly revolutionary to me though. You can already do this with existing software used for image-stacking, though not directly through a viewfinder (though the "viewfinder" on a real telescope designed for astrophotography should be a computer display anyway).
Great teachers are expensive. This needs to be emphasized more. Even if there is strong demand for the dev bootcamps, the bootcamps still have to hire great teachers. The teachers are highly experienced developers, the kind of people who could be making something between $120,000 to $160,000. So the schools face some very high expenses.

A comparison might be made to retail. Sometimes you'll see a store that is very busy, full of customers, and then it goes out of business. Why did it fail when it was so busy? Often the reason is that the landlord raised the rent.

High costs can kill an otherwise good business idea.
Interesting, can you expand on services business being lifestyle vs product being venture?

I had never heard of that distinction before and usually just thought of lifestyle businesses as slower growing vs faster.
That is good advice from a technical standpoint but from a legal standpoint creating security features that prevent scraping gives you a clearer cause of action against scrapers so if someone starts making a lot of money off your content you get leverage to force them to pay for it.
What to look for when buying a telescope
Never seen an accent in an email. It probably never was possible.
That's true, but a longer title for the article might have been, "The oft-repeated, scientific support for capitalism is shit".

Libertarians and classical economists often use data to support capitalism, so a scientific look at it is warranted.

This isn't a particularly scientific article, though. It's more like "let's cut through all the cynical rhetoric that capitalists use to make it seem like capitalism is good for everyone and not just the wealthy/powerful."
Printed Solar Panels for Less Than $10 a Square Metre
Which is fine if you happen know what it was designed for prior to starting your project, and can also be 100% sure your project will never mutate into anything else...
Aperture isn't just the amount of light, but also resolving power. A small aperture with a long exposure might show you a DSO, but probably at >arcsec resolution.

But - this makes it accessible. I don't think you can say the same for pixinsight, dss, phd, etc. - there's a fair old learning curve to do it the proper way.
Better than nothing but worse than the C++ solution of returning a const reference which can be checked at compile time.

Both are just immutable views on top of mutable containers. But in both C++ and Java it is trivial to create a truly immutable container of T. Not so in Go.
How the Swedish administration leaked EU’s secure STESTA intranet to Russia
Is there a good way to learn those skills at a professional level outside of a university setting? I feel like I've taught myself a sufficient amount of front end, back end, ops (Docker, IaC etc), but I'm at a loss for how to test my ability with algorithms and data structures, memory management, etc. I've picked up some books, but I don't have a good way to measure my ability or demonstrate it to employers.
I appreciate your reply and your explanation of assessing the human casualties due to the tsunami separately from the deaths due to the reactor failure. Thank you.

Comparing the Fukushima reactor failure (due to the tsunami) to deaths from the tsunami and concluding the reactor failure was "not the biggest deal that day" seems somewhat of a non sequitur.

That is, the tsunami had two immediate effects and many people feel both are worthy of international attention and historical comparisons.

To my mind, the loss of life does not make the nuclear reactor failure relatively inconsequential. For me, they multiply the crises caused by the tsunami.

I understand how you can arrive at your assessment, but I believe that assessment is based on a comparison that compartmentalizes events a bit too rigidly.

EDIT: remove extraneous word.
> there is no IT worker shortage.

There is no junior worker shortage. A bootcamp grad is competing with other bootcamp (100+ boot camps) grads, and people who just self started and got to coding.

Finding mid-level and senior people is actually quite challenging.
SyncBird – New and Free Mac App Trying Google Material Design
If you deep dive into any subject head first, all in, you tend to get pretty decent at it but you have to have passion and grit to do that and not everyone does. There are some people with exceptional intellect but those types are very rare so being good is achievable for most of us but being Elon or Carmack or Hassabis isn't.
> "there is no f'en way I can do this 40 hours a week for the next few decades"

Not a bootcamp grad, but I just hit my two year mark a couple weeks ago and want to blow my brains out.

Writing internal web applications is the most mind numbing thing ever. It's gotten to the point where I have so much trouble keeping focused at work.

The real issue is that I have no idea what field I'd pivot into.
That sounds to me like a resounding success. 50% of your hires from a 12 week program worked out? Do you realize what that would mean for the country if we could put people back to work that cheaply?
Over the past week I went through all the motions of setting up docker for mac with docker-compose for a local ruby/rails development environment. I was excited about the prospect of using containers to silo my app and all it's system dependencies, and also make it easier to onboard new developers. My setup had 3 containers. One for app, elasticsearch, and postgres. Unfortunately I have to go back to running my app directly on the system. I am leaving elasticsearch and postgres containerized, however.

The docker for mac setup is seriously bottlenecked by slow volume read/write performance. There is an ongoing discussion here on the issue: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/77. Even after adding the new :cached option to my volume declaration in docker-compose yml file, performance was a huge issue.

My app leverages babel, as I write some react components in ES6 and transpile them to ship to the client. Right now transpilation after changing any javascript code results in a minute + of transpilation time as docker for mac has yet to solve the performance problem. This resulted in a totally unacceptable environment to write code and test in. Also, rails boot time on docker for mac was crazy slow. Running unit tests became a huge pain in the ass.
This whole toxins thing is a load of crap.

That's what I was always using bluntly in arguments with the 'detox crowd' until I learned about chelation therapy [1]. So it's not as simple as 'no way administering any substance will get rid of toxins'. Now, that doesn't mean there is any truth whatsoever in typical detox claims (think 'drink this tea for five days and you'll get rid of toxins stored in your body') but it does mean, to me, that I won't be using overly general claims like 'this whole detox is a bunch of crap' but instead opt for more prudent statements. Which is imo what the one you're replying to did: it wasn't about the standard detox stuff, but about avoiding toxins in the first place and about toxins binding to certain food. Which I'd love to read more about.. Sources anyone?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelation_therapy
Cleveland Clinic and NASA could have a role too, but could really use some coordination.
Education, quality control and help towards addicts implies the need for regulation and taxation of profits. For instance, gambling and casinos tend to be permitted but tightly controlled by law in many countries, for exactly this reason. An entirely anonymous market will have trouble enabling regulation and taxation to offset the damage done.
You're replying to someone talking about tethering their tablet onto their phone by wifi access point ... and suggesting they plug their phone into their computer.

I have experimented - in both Debian and Windows 7 - using plugged-in / USB connectivity, but a) it's a bit spotty, b) it means I need a cable connection and that's often not ideal when on the go, c) it doesn't (as noted) work with tablets, and d) it doesn't solve the underlying issue of slave devices thinking they have non-mobile(3g,4g,lte,etc) network connectivity and sucking down lots of data.
Would it make sense to have two "flavors" of the protocol? One "internal enterprise" flavor supporting this case, and one "external" flavor for everyone else?
Why on Earth would you run OpenVPN through ssh? That makes zero sense. It's like running ssh through ssh.

OpenVPN is pretty much the ultimate VPN that can do anything and handle any situation. It is indistinguishable from regular web SSL traffic and can run on any port via TCP or UDP. It can even run in routed (TUN) or promiscuous (TAP) mode!

Once you've got OpenVPN setup there's no need to tunnel with ssh since OpenVPN is your tunnel.

I used to run an OpenVPN ISP named VPNOut many years ago. I had CTOs from large organizations begging me to tell them all the IPs I used so they could block it because apparently employees were using my service to access things that were normally blocked inside their corporate networks. Even to this day that problem exists: If you configure iptables to forward all ports to an OpenVPN daemon on both TCP and UDP you can get around basically any form of blocking that isn't IP-based. You can even do some tricks to make it look like regular web traffic for the initial SSL preamble to get around "intelligent" firewalls!

OpenVPN is the best!
Rapideye and SkySat aside, Planet primarily operates a monitoring constellation, rather than a tasking constellation. The doves (satellites used to take this and the satellites being launched) are focused on imaging the land surface of the Earth with an approximately daily cadence. They don't target a particular area, try to reorient, or even have active propulsion (just reaction wheels).

This is an exception -- the satellite was tasked to try to capture this and did reorient itself to do so.

For the most part, though, the doves just point straight down and capture images whenever they're over land and it's not forecast to be completely cloudy. There are over a hundred of them imaging the earth like a line scanner as it rotates beneath their orbit.

The Rapideye satellites operate completely differently, though. They are tasked, and do have to reorient as you mentioned, thus the minimum area requirement for acquisition of Rapideye imagery.
Agreed. If you're using webpack, dev-in-docker won't work well at if at all. For an API-only rails app, it does seem to be fast enough.
About #2 - I think the 'new' part they're touting here is no longer needing to ensure the telescope knows exactly where north and the horizon are. In other words, given a known location from GPS and some images of stars from the builtin camera, it'd be possible to calculate in which direction (az/el) the telescope was pointing. Is there a general term to describe this sort of thing?
Genius Doesn't Have to Come at the Cost of Kindness or Happiness
One has to wonder why interns even bother. /s
Would the vacuum piece make it much easier than landing on a carrier
Well written and very interesting.
There is a small typo in your article (there is both positive regret and positive regret).
Well paid to do little, and the owners are happy. First world problems are so hard.
go is for hipsters
Performance Visualization for Elixir apps
We've attempted this setup a few times with Rails, but we ran into the issue that the Docker OSXFS performance for mounted volumes was too slow when working with the parts of Rails that touch many files (asset compilation for example). It made it pretty much unusable for us. I know there are some new tuning parameters https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/osxfs-caching/ - we haven't tried these yet though, has anyone tried them and do they work well enough for Rails?
Satoshi Nakamoto was a good programmer. He influenced the world by speaking through code.
Try to derive e.g. a face detector from bayes theorem. You immediately arrive at computationally intractable sums/integrals. Yet, we have super-human image classifiers. Therefore, bayes theorem is obsolete. Sure, you can try to retrofit bayes theorem on top of a neural net, but who cares?
> APL ... ⌹

I really wanted to learn APL after seeing Conway's Life implemented[1] as one expression with no loops or temporary variables (using ⌹). Then I realized I would never remember how to type all of the {di,tri}graphs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4
I think the question "how do I know if I'm good at programming?" is a non-helpful question if the ultimate goal is introspection or diagnosing professional development. Any mentor who hears such a question should absolutely take the time to get the asker to pull back and re-think what they're really asking, rather than dive-in and start giving specific pseudo-objective advice about "code".

First, it is far too broad. What does "good" mean? Good enough? The opposite of bad? Compared to whom? And even "programming" is a ridiculously vague thing-- everyone who has worked even a year in the SW development profession will know that programming is only part of the job and that there are many different roles, many different kinds of skills.

Next, what is the intent of even asking that question? What can one do with "the answer"?
Actually can be built with existing materials I remember reading
The free way is of course with books (http://teachyourselfcs.com is a good guide), but if you're looking for a school you could do something like bradfield or something like https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science (disclosure - I'm a cofounder of Lambda School).

As far as demonstrating it to employers, that comes down to the interviewing process, which is in and of itself pretty broken, but they'll probably just ask you a lot of contrived questions about that stuff.
What is the average boot camp instructor salary?
The next step will be the realization that asymmetry of direction towards self organization on all levels, coded as energy consumption/dissipation efficiency, is a built in property of our reality, and life and counsciousness as we understand then are not random accidents.

Quarks -> protons/neutrons, nucleus+electrons -> atoms, atoms -> molecules, molecules -> proteins, proteins -> cells, cells -> organisms, organisms -> ecosystems, stars -> galaxies, galaxies -> clusters, etc.
> America desperately needs more skilled programmers in almost every market.

Outside of a few hotspots like SF, do offered wages really back that up? It's good being a developer but it certainly doesn't look like a desperate shortage.
The two examples in the article were owned by large educational conglomerates: Apollo and Kaplan. They are clearer examples of big companies end of lifeing a product than examples of the Bootcamp market.

Since the salary a skilled and experienced developer can make in the current job market does not really align with University of Phoenix's adjunct pay scale and tuition rates, it is hard to see how a Bootcamp could generate similar rates of return to UoP's accredited college degree programs. UoP has a widget making process via the sharing economy similar to Uber's. The analogy might be if Uber recruited professional race car drivers for a service claiming to get riders to the airport faster.

Both Kaplan and Apollo have a different economic model than many bootcamps. Many bootcamps generate significant revenue from job placement in addition to or in lieu of tuition. Currently, the sweet spot of bootcamps looks like it might be outsourcing on the job training more than as traditional private business schools. Over the long run, programming will be better suited to the private business school model as programmers become common in small businesses in the way bookkeepers are.
There are many typos, in fact. I personally find it really distracting and wish authors of articles with interesting content would get someone to proofread before publishing them.
> When learning electronics searching the Web for help quickly showed how useless it is

Not just electronics. When you're dealing with any kind of non-trivial problem, searching for help with sensible solutions from internet is an exercise in frustration and futility. The answers, when you find any, tend to be out of date, ill-informed or just flat out wrong. Often all three at the same time.

Simply put: most of the technical information on the internet is written by helpful idiots.
>Maybe I am clueless but why not just stick a NFC chip on the back of your smartphone or just get one with NFC?

Because then you don't feel as cool when you tell people about it.
amen to that. i took a look at one of those teacher gigs and couldn't believe how much they were charging the students. it seemed like i would be participating in a scam.
Which is more of an issue with those VCs than the founders; there are a number of self-driving car startups here and they have a unique advantage: they aren't biased by the immaculate freeways and roads in California -- Pittsburgh has a much wider variety of challenging driving situations, weather, and conditions than California so it is a great test bed for developing autonomous vehicles (indeed, CMU won 1st place in the DARPA Grand Urban challenge, readily beating the likes of Stanford and Berkeley).

Some California VCs are mistakenly under the impression that anywhere outside the Bay Area must be Siberia. It's going to eventually bite them in terms of missed future opportunities and ROI on their funds.
Vast emptiness, nothing holy.
Advertisement for a toy, accidentally posted on wrong website.
Similar to doublerebel/publictransport, I ran into some issues hydrating structs the way I expected from other languages.

So I wrote bellows [0], a helper to flatten and expand nested maps and structs. Not quite the same but might help someone.

[0]: https://github.com/doublerebel/bellows/blob/master/README.md
Unless the websites work together to protect themselves against crawlers that work that way (e.g., rejecting requests to different hosts from the same origin within a time interval).
Yep, same for us, it's a great tool, except it crashes a little to often for a backup tool.
I think people underestimate how difficult it is to teach yourself, especially when there are so many different ways to learn and a million different paths to take. One of the most important parts of bootcamps, in my mind, is that all of the curriculum is there, in the right order, and on a set schedule. When I taught myself to program I probably spent 80% of my time finding the right resources and understanding what I should be learning and 20% of my time learning. I think it takes a pretty special person to self-teach when you don't know what you don't know.