skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In regards to self guided study, don't fall into the trap of thinking that because you could do it, everyone else could.

This is going to sound really conceited and condescending, but I'm going to write it anyway:

I reckon that I could've finished my BSc in Computer Science in probably half the time required. I attended only about 2 weeks of lectures per semester, generally didn't start assignments more than a week before they were due, and didn't study more than about 3 days before the exam.

For most people though, that doesn't work. They need to go to lectures, they need to study for a couple of weeks before exams, they need to attend the tutorials. Structured learning and the education system is made for the bottom 95% of the population. Schools spend a lot more time, money, and effort on special education and learning support for less gifted students than they do for the gifted ones. It's different at every school, but I remember that through most of primary school, there were no supplemental learning or other activities for gifted students. I was stuck in the same normal stream as everybody else. It wasn't until I got to high school, where students were streamed into different classes, that I actually got pushed to learn and use my abilities, the top stream was basically pushed a year ahead of all the other students.

Even for the normal stream of people though, there are people who will excel in certain areas and struggle in others. But a teacher has a class of 30 students to teach. The education system is made for the masses, we would likely get better educational outcomes from having much smaller class ratios, 10 students per teacher maybe, but nobody has the money to pay that many teachers, and there aren't that many teachers out there.

Anyway, my point is that for the HN community, being given a set of learning goals and being told to find a way to learn them would work. For most people, they would flail around and struggle.
ccat: Cat(1) clone with colors
What is the future of dropbox sync between desktop and iOS? Am I right in assuming that since you keep only mentioning iCloud that it won't be possible? I can just decline to upgrade the desktop client, but I can't just choose to ignore updates to the iOS client.
This is not true for the industry we're talking about (or at least not as true as you seem to think). It really is in companies' best interest to be attractive to skilled workers in this industry and there really is a chance they will find themselves struggling if they get the wrong reputation. It seems (to me) like this is a major undercurrent in IBM's struggles, for instance (and outsourcing has not been a silver bullet). Thinking the balance is more skewed than it actually is is one of the things that skews the balance.
> So even your premise that “trade is not valid if both parts know they’re getting a good deal” (which makes little if any sense) does not apply here.

Your assertion that trade always implies that both parties are better off is just wrong, that's my only point. That you build an ideology around that premise is none of my business; I didn't propose any normative philosophy about trade.

> You follow with angry anti-market rethoric but you never explain how a number of people trading places in schools, according to their own interest, makes anything worse for those not involved in an exchange.

I just pointed out that the premise to your reasoning did not really hold. If the premise doesn't hold then your position might be justified, but it hasn't been justified. If you can't entertain the possibility that you're wrong, then I don't know what to say; perhaps peruse the other lines of reasoning that were considered in this submission's comments?

P.S. just because i'm dismissive doesn't mean i'm angry
Reasons to Switch to Cloud Services
I watched it, and don't get all the fuss.
https://www.itcontracting.com/software-development-source-co...
That was my first thought: is there a reason for anyone to contribute? It's a for-profit app that I assume makes you money. Why should I volunteer my free time to work on it for you?
No, many (if not most) academic fields have high-quality journals run by non-profit societies. In my field (geoscience) the best of these are trusted more than Nature and Science, which are higher impact even though it's common knowledge that there are more unreliable papers in the glamour journals, mostly because the editors optimize for impact instead of scientific solidity. The non-profit societies charge similar rates (a few hundred to a few thousand per article). The fees reflect outsourcing of web hosting, formatting (both LaTeX and Word are re-keyed to XML for many journals) and typesetting, as well as dead-tree publication costs which are actually common if rarely read.

Additionally, to get at your earlier question of evaluating a paper by its host journal: Because academics are strongly incentivized to publish in high-impact journals, if someone publishes in a crap journal it raises eyebrows, because the obvious question is 'why' and the obvious answer is 'because the authors didn't want rigorous review' or 'the work is of supreme unimportance'.

Furthermore, because of curation aside from peer review (editors weeding out solid but unimportant papers) the journal's brand makes a difference in how many people will actually see the paper. While many readers will come across papers either by specific searches in Google Scholar, or by going through the citations in a different paper, many of us still read the tables of contents of a few key journals every week or month to see what is being produced.

I'm a non-academic scientist (in the non-profit world currently) and though I will never face a promotion and tenure committee who really gets into impact factors etc., I still want my work to be as widely read as possible, so I push for the best journals that I can get in that still meet my criteria (non-profit societies that have open-access at least after a year embargo). Google Scholar also ranks papers by how highly cited they are, so there are still viral-type effects and getting eyeballs on a paper early greatly affects later discovery and engagement.

edit: I took 'paid-access' to mean 'pay to publish' which was the original thread's wording, and wrote based on that. Some of this reply still holds for 'pay to read' but not all.
> The flexibility benefit modern Python gives is probably more like 1000x

If true, that would mean that a 1 year C++ project could be done in 2 hours, and a 10 year project in half a week.
Pairing this with undotree[1] is really handy, as it allows you to see your full edit history, branches and all, and jump back and forth.

[1] https://github.com/mbbill/undotree
Sometimes what’s legal is incredibly immoral, and what’s moral isn’t legal. “I didnt break any laws” can be a very thin shield to hide behind at times. By the same token, breaking some laws can be the right thing to do, although that won’t necessaril shield you from legal consequences. For concrete examples of legal yet immoral, see Jim Crow, Segregation, slavery, and present day prison work. For illegal yet moral, selling pot to a cancer patient, spreading the sum of human knowledge far and wide, etc.
This reminds me of the unproven teaching fads pushed into public schools in the late ‘70’s and ‘80’s, which causes some educators to leave and start their own private schools which used proven teaching approaches like phonics.
No, just my business manager. It's possible I could do it if I line-item it in the budget. I'll try that. :)
Usually if I have something I find interesting or useful I share it with my friends or co-workers.
Surely you're not implying that it's a ridiculous expectation when that's what the company advertised, are you?
Outdoorsy: Airbnb for RVs and Trailers
Ask HN:Delete post
Thanks everyone for the suggestions!
Behavioral economics from nuts to ‘nudges’
Does Newtonian mechanics really have explanatory power? You can equally well describe motion in the language of forces and acceleration, the language of fields and momentum, and whatever other combinations you would want to pick. Textual "explanations" are just (non-unique!) assignments of literary constructions to procedures of prediction.
Lemmings could be the perfect VR game.

A complex 3D environment that is difficult for a camera to look around in but easy for a room scale VR player to observe. And then various analog controls built into the environment that you manipulate to help guide the miniature Lemmings to safety, sometimes requiring you to use both hands independently to manipulate different sets of obstacles in the right order.
I found a button to push?
Yup. I might read one section over a few times before moving on, and/or spend way less time in others. Reading I go at the pace I can digest it, not the pace of the lecturer.
Didn't realize this was silicon carbide - didn't read original article too closely. I used to work with a guy who did a lot of formative work with SiC.
> It’s not a security issue if the owner consciously sets it.

It depends on how conscious the decision was; were they explicitly aware that the information would be shared with the world at large?
How to ruin cancer’s day–The science of circadian rhythms to treat cancer
Erlang's statement separators seem to me more like English. I don't hear a lot of complaints about commas, semicolons, and periods in English and I don't find it an issue in Erlang.
There are abundant mentions of torrents, and little to no mention of successful third-party mirroring efforts. The files are useless without metadata and a database-driven site to use them with - is that stuff now included?
> for the HN community, being given a set of learning goals and being told to find a way to learn them would work

It depends very much on what you are learning. Even in computer science, much of what there is to learn - and most of the important things - can't be found in the book. Personal advice by an expert on technique, concepts, and perhaps most crucially, on what you don't know that you don't know, is invaluable. Also, a university has computer resources that no student can match. Then imagine chemistry, history, drawing, etc.

If you only mean passing courses in one field - that's vocational training, and passing courses is only a proxy measurement anyway. You're missing out on a lot if you think that's education.
For those who've missed it: there's a link to the original PC demo of Lemmings on the first page, behind the screenshot:
http://www.javalemmings.com/DMA/files/OriginalLemmings.zip
There's a clear difference between gambling/drinking/smoking/drug abuse and the crimes you mentioned like embezzling and human trafficking. The former are self victimizing while the latter directly victimize others. That's the rationale behind legalization and why nobody would suggest it for regular crimes. Essentially it's giving people the freedom to make their own mistakes as long as they aren't hurting anyone but themselves. Instead we tailor the laws to protect others from being hurt by collateral effects (no smoking in public buildings, no stealing for drug money, no advertising cigarettes to kids, etc) and we raise money, often to support programs to educate people about the risks of those behaviors and help those who want to recover.

From what I've seen from places that have legalized various vices, it seems to always end up doing more good than criminalization.
One of my favorite vim plugins is https://github.com/sjl/gundo.vim , which can open a pane showing the actual tree of versions, including at what time the version changed. j and k can move around in the tree, and the pane with the file will show what it was at a given time. I've definitely used it to pull out a version of a file as it existed an hour ago...
If we all got to seeding, surely we’d have the oppressors bent over a filthy toilet in no time at all.
I’m currently using the 1Password 7 beta with a subscription and no standalone license. I have one vault that is stored in Dropbox and another that is just local.

I have no idea why they’ve decided to handle what they’ve called out elsewhere in this thread as an “advanced feature” that won’t be going away by lying about the feature not existing.

It seems so weird because their subscriptions work exactly how I’d want them to work, but all their public statements actively prevent people like me from knowing that.
> This doesn't sound like a hack away from disaster at all.

It's been done. https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
Design for Humans: Or 14 Principles of Good Design
It's only awfully hot in the summer in my experience in the high desert around joshua tree. The rest of the year it's damn near ideal.
People fuck up commas and semicolons basically constantly in English.
TLDR The "this" in question is the Pocket Puter website with a good domain name that covers both tablets and phones. This website is a useful resource for people on the street or at risk of homelessness. It can be shared verbally or pre-installed on (used) phones or tablets to be given away to homeless or poor individuals.

I already have several websites relevant to this project, like San Diego Homeless Survival Guide and Write Pay. My initial thought was that I would do something like load up links to those sites on phones or tablets and give them away. The conversation clarified for me that I really need to be able to put a single link on a phone as a bookmark or default homepage that could be updated (rather than trying to put a growing list of links on each device, causing different devices to get different info). Previous discussions on HN were suggesting a custom ROM or app.

So I started this website with just the links page to gather together existing resources for the project. Then it occurred to me that I should add some pages with useful information about recurring issues, like working offline and managing battery power.

This site stands on its own as the informational piece of the project and can be updated as I see fit, or just left as a few useful pages. It doesn't necessarily have to grow.

Other pieces of the project are still in the works. I have a rough draft update on those bits that stalled in part because this post got unexpected traction on HN, leading me to post here and do some updates on the Pocket Puter site.

There is no plan to create a device called a Pocket Puter. The idea is to put together useful information making existing tech -- phones and tablets -- more useful for a particular problem space and to foster the ability to give away tech with information pre-installed in the form of a link.

Someone on HN asked me what could be done to encourage other homeless people to do what I had done and make use of the internet as a means to problem solve. One of the things I suggested was give away phones or tablets. They said they would take that bet, leading me to try to develop the information piece.

I currently have contacts on the ground and I hope to develop a pilot program locally that can be copied elsewhere for minimal investment and effort.
Even the copy editors do little work - they always are very insistent upon the author themself working through all of the style guide to make sure it conforms.

I think the main work they do is to lie about accepting LaTeX and scraping the PDF output instead so as to introduce new errors into articles.
I'm largely of the opposite group. Having names that aren't pronounceable helps me read code faster, as I don't try to pronounce it, and can just treat the entire word as a unit rather trying to "read" it.

I do the same in English when reading fast. I distinctly remember reading "Hermione" in Harry Potter as a child, and, because it was a name I hadn't encountered before, just "reading over" it and not thinking about the actual pronunciation. I didn't think about the actual pronunciation until some years later (probably when it was brought up in the books). Even now, if I try to pay attention to my internal monologue whilst reading, it's often words running into each other or being skipped, unless I deliberately slow down, because I'm not actively subvocalising and I'm reading faster than I would pronounce them.
Teacher here, can you provide links to studies that support the existence of distinct learning styles? I've yet to find any compelling evidence so it's not that I've discarded the idea but was never presented with a case to accept the idea in the first place.
It's kind of neat to see that something like that can be done in Excel, but as usual, my reaction to anything sufficiently complex being coded in Excel is the same: Please God, not me.
For as popular as Java is, and as much work has been put into it, and as high quality as its multiple JVM implementations may be, it still shows its heritage as a language designed for a different purpose entirely (to run set-top boxes) than either the one Sun wanted to put it to ("write once run anywhere") or the one it ultimately ended up dominating (server-side code).

The biggest example in my opinion is the grave error that Java made in making classes declare their conformance to interfaces. Go's structural typing is uniformly superior, and I believe this one change is roughly 80% of Go's ability to have generally simpler code and to avoid the framework monstrosities that populate the Java world. I fully recognize that sounds bizarre if you've only used one or the other, but I believe it. The ability to declare an interface in my module that some other module that knows nothing about me automatically conforms to prevents people in the Go ecosystem from having to pre-emptively buy into huge frameworks to solve this simple problem. (This is a great deal of the reason I darned near classify Go as a scripting language; for all the drama about "missing generics" I find the experience of writing Go to feel much more like Python than like writing Java.) I have enough of the "explicit better than implicit", formal proof Haskell-y sort of stuff in me to understand where that impulse comes from, but I believe that this is a case where those intuitions are disproved by experience.

Recently I was looking at an crash dump in an Atlassian product, and it clearly had two of those monstrous frameworks in there. We were 600 stack levels deep at the point of the failure. ~100 of them I could excuse as a template renderer recursing on the AST of the template, but there was just this amazing amount of junk in the stack trace. You don't get that in Go code; it looks more like a typical Python dump in depth.

There's a few other places where Go gets things right just by virtue of being newer; again, contra to accusations that the designers have never heard of newer tech, it has closures in it from the get-go. (Yes, I am aware those are hardly new, but if the designers really were completely closed off those wouldn't go in there.) Go has value types from the beginning, which Java is still jamming in. There's a few other things too, like just generally being a bit more memory-aware than Java and a bit more able to put things on the stack, even if the optimizer is generally not that great. It's the combination of these little fixes that are the reason why Go hangs in there with Java performance wise by most measures, and is often more memory efficient, despite the probably 3+ orders of magnitude more effort put into the JVMs.
Can you say more? How did it give huge boosts to speed?
My Own Personal Nothingness: From childhood hallucination to theoretical physics
Surgeon builds windpipes from arteries
In the old days with perpetually-licensed software, this was handled with a trial period (30-day demo or similar), or, where feasible, a feature-limited demo version (e.g. a game with one level as a demo). This is not a new problem or a problem without solutions.
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has made it a condition of approving loans that the minimum scheduled payments end up paying off the loan in the indicated timeframe, and this applies to loans for real estate which is supposed to be a source of income.

Perhaps it is time to apply the same kinds of rules to loans for education, along with increasing the minimum income at which repayments are required to be made, and the maximum proportion of total income that the repayments are allowed to be.

In addition, require that student loans must be not-for-profit.

Perhaps even consider nationalising the student loan system and having repayments taken out of incomes at fixed low rates, so the incentive is for the state to improve wages?
How 'Authentic Relating' Made Vulnerability a Movement
Cloud Native CI: Infrabox
Apollo Unified S-Band Technical Conference (1965) [pdf]
I've put a lot of effort into making my life work offline. As a foreigner, it's difficult for me to get 3G/4G data because my life isn't stable enough to have a subscription. Some of my favourite apps (iPhone 4S):

- Wiki2Touch (offline Wikipedia) and PlinyPedia.

- Galileo Offline Maps (with Google Maps tiles from MOBAC)

- Offline StackOverflow (my own project)

https://github.com/peterburk/stackoverflowlocal

- Offline Bible

- MyWi (extend the range of a WiFi signal)

- A lot of other scraped websites (web comics, 9gag, FML, UrbanDictionary, shortjokes).

Regarding removable batteries, I have a Third Rail case which lets me attach a battery only when I need it.

https://www.amazon.com/Third-Rail-Protective-Universal-Recha...

I also have a lot of adaptors so I can plug in anywhere (mains-8 female to kettle cable, light socket to mains, etc).

Although I haven't slept on the streets for more than one night at a time (thanks, CouchSurfing), I expect that I'll end up in a tent one of these years. Before I can get that privilege though, I need to keep trying to work in order to maintain my visa status, or move on to another country that might welcome me.
I definitely meant pay-to-read.
'You can divide programming languages into two groups - those that people complain about, and those that nobody uses'
Where's the Reactivity? The thesis is entitled "The Reactive Engine", yet I don't see any reactivity in the system— at least not as I know the term now. What am I missing? Or has "Reactive" changed its meaning over the years?
Isn’t it also a point that a Finnish library desires to offer a free, public, commonwealth community center where people can break through the Bowling Alone syndrome of commerial, isolated, glowing screen head-down solitude, rather than just peruse a pile of books that are probably available on said glowing box? Sure, there are few areas of libraries to have conversations apart from meeting rooms, but at least people can have a place to be in closer proximity to others and hopefully propinquity that doesn’t involve shopping or eating.

It’s like Iceland have baths. The US has coffee shops (was shopping malls). Does Finland have libraries for this purpose?
Yeah I was 1 character over the limit.
The most important skill I learned in school was how to deal with other people when you have to be together every day.
Hosted Apache Solr's Revamped Docker-Based Architecture
Does anyone have a complete copy? The seeds are very slow. I know someone willing to pay for this data. Shoot me an email.
Not being in a scientific field, one of the previous times this came up I asked if any of the working scientists felt like SciHub had positively impacted their work: exposing them to more papers than they would have read, guiding them in different ways, etc. and the answer was a pretty overwhelming "ohmygodyes".

From the outside, it's very difficult to see this as anything but a public good. It certainly seems like literally the entire world is benefitting from this (including the scientists involved in the publishing) and its being held back by a handful of publishers.
People seem to take offense with being called “deadbeats”.

I think though the term is warranted. It is despicable to enter an agreement to lease a car from a lender and then not make payments.