skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks great. I try just about every one of these new options. Kodapp was my last one, but it didnt last (back on textmate). I'll give this a try as well. It looks like it has even greater potential.

TextMate is a joke. Nothing worse than missed opportunity. Such a huge community behind it and MacroMates seems completely incapable of providing a new release.
Making Boston more awesome
what do you all think ?
There are bad teachers. Sure. But there are good ones too. And teachers are the largest professional field in the US (about 6.2M, versus, for example 1.2M lawyers). This indicates a couple of problems:

1) The thought you can rid yourself of all or even most bad teachers is absurd. You can't easily chop off the bottom 10% each year and bring in an additional 500,000 new teachers.

2) With a population that large the quality of teaching will regress to the mean. We just realistically can't expect an all-star team of 6M of anything.

So what do we do? The first thing is to realize the big problem is in the inner-city and rural areas -- in underserved communities. And honestly, I think we need to focus a bit more on the community and less on the classroom proper. Like I'd really like to see summer reading programs in these communities, with some strong incentives. I also think things like Khan Academy would actually really help. I'm probably overly optimistic, but I think getting kids to listen to lectures is easier than getting them to do homework at home.

My experience is that good schools and good students actually do quite well. The biggest thing that probably will get overlooked, even by what I'd like to do, are bright students at poor schools.
The focus is on fiction, but we have categories for non-fiction and "other". Ultimately, contributors decide what they want to fund.

OpenCalais looks interesting. Something that advanced would be much farther down the road for us, though. Right now we just want to find and enable great written stories.
You might not run OpenBSD, but if you're running ssh on your Linux system, then you're actually running OpenSSH from the OpenBSD project. If you appreciate being able to access your systems more securely through ssh, please consider supporting the project by buying a CD set, tshirt or poster from them.

http://www.openbsd.org/orders.html
You ask about online bulk storage at reasonable rates, but you've not mentioned what youre acceptable rate of data loss is?

How much data are you willing to lose per day out of your 100TB?
Last Alioth results I saw LuaJIT was slower than Java, and certainly not in the C ballpark at all.
Vico is a Mac OS X text editor with Vim-like keybindings.

If you want to try tiling window managers + Vim, your best bet is to use MacPort to install gvim and either wmii, awesome or ion3. Other WMs worth trying are wmfs, dwm, xmonad… you'll need manual compiling though.
Actually I rarely use the mouse and was mainly referring to Ctrl-f/b and j/k, as well as w on long lines. I don't actively notice the choppiness until I use some other editer, but I wonder why it exists in the first place - is the rendering engine slow or something?
> You can't easily chop off the bottom 10% each year and bring in an additional 500,000 new teachers.

Yes you can. You just have to offer high enough salaries.
So store it all on one of those fake Chinese USB drives. That gives a nice illusion, and is incredibly cheap...

Alternatively we could consider what level of reliability you want and how that will be tested.
A good intro page with lots of links: http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/

A lot of the newest work is under a few different names: "deep learning", "convolutional deep networks", "unsupervised feature learning", etc.

Here's a great talk by Andrew Ng of Stanford, who's a recent convert to this area: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNOAtZIgIk

(Note that this is quite a one-sided view of things, but it does convey the excitement of deep-learning researchers and the potential of what might be possible.)

Although I'm not in deep learning myself (I'm a computer vision researcher), here's a TL;DR as I understand it: rather than having people in specific domains such as computer vision or speech processing create their own features, the idea is to take raw inputs (pixels in the case of images) and train multi-layer neural net architectures that "learn" the relevant higher-level features in an unsupervised way (i.e., without labeled training data). Some of these seem to be pulling out interesting features and perform competitively on a few benchmarks in vision and other fields.

I'm not sold on this yet, because it seems like the complexity of designing features has merely been traded in for the complexity of designing different learning architectures, but it's certainly becoming quite popular these days (mostly led by Geoff Hinton of Toronto, Yoshua Bengio of Montreal, and Yann LeCunn of NYU).
For me there is no cost, but I rarely do the cycle-through-all-tabs thing (not never but rarely). For your workflow it sounds like there is a cost. If you work on multiple projects in the same editor instance then there is a significant cost as well, e.g. you may have 5 index.html files open and when you type the desired filename you then have to choose carefully. I have encountered this when leaving Emacs open for days or weeks at a time, switching between personal and work projects.

These days I use TextMate more than Emacs and for small personal projects I like quickly switching between say the readme, makefile, code, and test with Cmd-[1-9]. If there are few files to edit tabs can be advantageous. This stuff is highly personal and dependent on workflow.
My understanding of weekend project is not that it was developped in one weekend, but that it has been developped in evenings/weekends by someone who has a day job.

So it's not really saying it was developped in less than 48 hours, just that it's not their full-time gig.
...neither of the problems you cite is actually any individual teacher's fault.
Disqus is hiring engineers in San Francisco.

We're still only 16 people, so it's a terrific time to join our team, especially if you're interested in scaling problems (we serve nearly 600m uniques per month) or writing third-party JavaScript (our commenting widget is installed on hundreds of thousands of websites).

More here: http://disqus.theresumator.com/ http://disqus.com
To get a better look at the real pay, benefits should also be taken into account. Any government job should be compared to a similar skill-level private sector job, again pay plus benefits.

When it comes to schools, I don't think you can talk about pay or costs without also focusing on the administration. It is a system. Requiring a part of funding to go to teacher salaries would allow upping just that part of the equation, if need be. If this requirement already exists, and pay plus benefits are poor, then something higher up the food chain is broken and should be what is focused on.
In my calculations I was doing elsewhere in the thread, I was assuming 1 drive out of 4 would be for redundancy. There's nothing on these drives that's irreplaceable, and we have system-level redundancy.
Ted Nelson was the founder, yes. He was inspired by Drexler, who like certain later transhumanists did human rationality on the side. Do none still remember "Engines of Creation"? It had a whole chapter on hypertext.
This advice may or may not be helpful, but I have survived plenty of traffic spikes from HN etc on low RAM machines by turning Keepalive Off in the apache config file. It is on by default with a long timeout, which will tie up all the resources during heavy traffic. Lots of people don't even know about it, so hopefully this will be helpful. (this assumes, of course, you are using apache, but other http servers have similar settings)
http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/27/diomede-offers-green-file-s... seems to offer some more details. Their site leaves an awful lot to be desired.
Those projects , even macruby are not officially supported - there is not even documentation on apple.com . Who would use it as their main dev platform, knowing that apple has the tendency to ban 3rd party platforms. Obj-c is practically not used outside OSX - there is just no evidence that, when given the choice, developers would prefer objC. Open source developers seem to root for python, ruby etc, but certainly not for objc, unless they have to deal with OSX. GNUStep is not an active project, with practically zero applications, while there are lots of quality apps in c++ frameworks, python, ruby etc. I dont believe OSX developers are just different people who happen to love objc over everything else.
I didn't finish my college degree after I got into programming professionally and I honestly am disappointed I didn't. I can write software but I feel a lot of times I know how things go together the way they do, but not the why. There are times when I wish I knew the theory behind things instead of just knowing the syntax. I think the takeaway is that unless you're going to a really expensive school for the alumni network, find a low price school with good teachers and go for the knowledge. The degree at the end is a nice bonus but having that theory to back up your practice will take you to the next level.
I work on the cinematch team at netflix... I've reviewed all of the winning code... your characterization is incorrect.

The netflix prize would not have been won when it was without rbm.
We're not really competing with Kickstarter. An author could use both sites, for example (if Kickstarter decides to feature their project).

We think it's pretty hard for authors to make their work stand out among so much noise, including the increase in self-published work on sites like Lulu. Our site is meant to allow great writing to be found and showcased as evident by the funding it receives.

Yes, our site is pretty bare right now as we just went live a few hours ago. However, in our short existence we've had very positive interest from authors, readers, and others.
I'm just glad he believes in the existence of great ideas. This is a further extension of the evolution from idea + market fit > product > business.

It's easy for a person with expertise in one area to feel his/her ability is the most important.
everyone just slaps "on a machine" to the end of their patent and bam, you've got patentable subject matter. Linked lists on a machine.

That was the 1980s. Those patents have since be re-filed to protect the grand new invention:

$data_structure on a machine connected to the Internet.
Really nice start! I've been enjoying modal editing in Vim. One of my pain points is that I feel like I don't have a lot of control over which buffer I'm closing when I :bd or what will happen when I open a new file when selecting it in Nerdtree. Sometimes it replaces a buffer, other times it splits the window. Im sure it's me not understanding how vim works, but I seem to get the mental model in Vico a little better. Bravo!
I'd be willing to lose 100TB at once, assuming it wasn't every day.

If there were a system where it lost even 20TB/day, I'd be interested, depending on what the tradeoffs were! I'd expect that to be pretty seriously cheap to offset it.

That's why I'm asking what options people know about. If you know one that is randomly lossy but cheap, I'd be REALLY curious as to what their backend is!
Offshoring is stealing U.S. programming jobs
I'm never quite sure if all these Vim commands people rave about are any better than judicious use of the alt/option, shift, command and arrow keys with the default Mac behaviour.

Although one essential change to the defaults is to remap CapsLock to be the same as Control --see System Prefs-- and then using Control-F to move the cursor forward one. Helps you get past automatically inserted closing brackets with minimal hand movement. I find that really tedious and annoying otherwise.
Programmers in the U.S. are so hard to find that companies like Google are willing to pay $100,000 to CS grads with no experience, but this article claims our jobs are being stolen by foreign countries?

I honestly don't think that could be an accurate assessment of the current job market, but I can't find the numbers to prove it so I'm hoping someone else can shed some light on it. If it's actually accurate, I'll be very surprised...
It is unbelievable that it was found and that the search never ended. You can watch a video about this flight on PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/crash-flight-447.html
The low pay wouldn't be so much of a problem if teachers got more support from parents and administration. For example, when a teacher has to send a student out of the room for bad behavior, the student should have hell to pay from parents and the vice principal. Instead, what often happens is parents complain about the teacher's discipline and the vice principal calls you in to "have a discussion" with the student and to "hear their side of the story". It's a fucking circus.

Also, grading is a bitch. I left the profession mostly because of the insane hours you need to spend grading (well, high school anyway). Students will nickel and dime you for every point while comparing with their peers. "Sally missed the minus sign in step C of problem 4 but got the same number of points as me? WTF?" WTF indeed.

Silly waste-of-time after-school meetings about meeting standardized testing goals is also a complete waste of time as well.

Add to that, you have to be up and out of the house every morning by 6 am or so to be on time. If you have kids, forget about seeing them for breakfast before their school day starts. And that means giving up your evenings too because you need to be in bed early.

As an aside, I knew a teacher who "retired early" basically due to a mental breakdown from the stress. I suspect most teachers know someone who's done the same.

Edit: And if you're male, all it takes is an unsubstantiated claim of impropriety from a female student to end your career immediately.

Easily the worst and most stressful job I've ever had. And it really sucks because I was an excellent teacher. Got great reviews from observers and students. My students learned a ton. I really liked teaching too.
Well, you'd have to move here, but a relocation budget would be provided.
But they essentially have to be.

First, teachers outside of pretty narrow bounds will never be more productive. It takes one teacher to teach 20 students. In 10 years it will take one teacher to teach 20 students. Thus there is no productivity growth while, if you want people to be teachers, you have to eventually pay them more. So assume you don't have a hard time firing teachers; I just found a cute way to save a whole lot of money! Fire everybody with more than 10 years experience, ie all your high salaried employees.

Second, I don't think you'll possibly get good employees without strong unionization. Who would be stupid enough to teach without a union contract? Real people want to do things like own homes, put down roots, start families, and have some job security; that's enormously risky in an area with monopsony employer(s). I'm a software engineer, so there are dozens to thousands of employers in reasonably sized cities, whereas there are typically only one public school district and perhaps a handful of private schools. That's a lot more risk for the employee, since if I have a personality conflict with my boss, there are plenty of other buyers of software engineering. What happens to a teacher if he or she has a conflict with his or her principal? It's not like there are tons of employers around, and if the answer is that employee is just sol, don't expect smart hardworking people with choices to become teachers.
No its not intended for SSDs. There is not nearly enough IO bandwidth for SSD to make any sense. 2.5 inch hard drives are what you use if you want disks with spindles not just big storage. Eg for virtualised database servers.
In the US we graduate about 100k engineering students each year(http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2008/11/50-of...).

So even if we hired every engineering graduate from US schools every year, we wouldn't fill the gap, by a long shot.

My point is that for a population this huge you're not going to be able to backfill for any reasonable dollar amount or you have to significantly lower your standards, in which case you're probably hiring people that will largely fall into that same bottom 10% next year.
Ah, yes. I remember reading about them now. I'd be interested in looking over their offerings, if they ever release any.
The most important reason is left off the list - Cash Flow.

$10,000 in hand and $10,000 in debt with monthly service of $500 is infinitely better than zero debt and zero cash when a customer delays payment by 30 days because of their cash flow issues and your employees walk because their checks bounce.

Run out of cash and your business can and usually will die if it really is a business.
I have a 2004 G5 with only one of the two processors working and I've had to replace my burned 512Mb ATI 9600 with the original 64 Mb GeForce FX 5200. I won't put this thing to the trash until its last breath.

On its left, there is a low end Dell PC running an up to date Ubuntu that cost me 350 € two years ago waiting for this day to come.

That said, MacPorts is still alive and kicking, the latest update was a few months ago.
Restricted Boltzmann machines are as bonafide neural networks (NN) as you can get and has been around since the golden age of neural networks. You have the same layered structure, feed-forward connections, same "squashing function". The only "restriction" is that the unknown and the known nodes must live on different layers so that the connections are only between a known and an unknown node. It has been called different names and the theory explaining them has had different names too, for example "Harmony Theory" of Smolensky.

I think NN is a broad enough category that no matter what you want to use or describe, you will have to qualify your "lets use blah" statements with a particular kind of neural network. Similar in spirit to statements like "lets use a parser" vs "lets use a LALR parser".

But back to the topic of new found interest on NNs, part of the reason is that there have been new developments in training algorithms which work significantly better than what were used traditionally. With these methods NNs require far less baby-sitting. NNs traditionally really required a huge lot of that.

The other reason is that sheer scale and size of the data sets that are available now, have forced machine learners to move from powerful but batch optimization algorithms (quadratic programming for instance) to simple and online gradient based algorithms that have been the forte of the NN community all along.

Training a NN is no different than regression. It is another name/technique for (some what systematically) creating a tower of increasingly complex regression functions. If the simplest(linear) one works, its imperative that one uses the simplest one in the interest of good predictive accuracy on unseen data. Bundled together with the low training time that parent mentioned, its a win win.
Austin, TX

The Texas Tribune is looking for experienced developers to help us improve and open source our Knight Foundation-funded, Django-based news CMS (http://armstrongcms.org/), and build interactive "news apps" that make it easier to understand what's going on in the Texas government. (If you're looking for an internship, we can probably create a paid position for you.) Few people know what's going on in their state governments, even though that's where a lot of the things that affect people's day-to-day lives get decided. We're fixing that by making it easier for people to find the information that they should care about.

http://trib.it/ttdevjob / nbabalola@texastribune.org
Why startup is a crazy term ~ Innovation Investment Journal
I only looked at it briefly, but isn't Swift for multi-system installs, not multi-spindle?
Define your term "executed" as it applies to this Haskell source without using the words "transformation", "rewrite", or "evaluation". Probably you could do it somehow, but the point is that you're simply rewriting equivalent mathematical expressions as actual parameters are substituted in.

If this program is patentable, then Gaussian elimination and everything in my high school algebra textbook is patentable.
Are you having trouble finding work in Baltimore too? I'd be interested in hearing/discussing our similar experience. Mind if I send you email?
SEEKING GIG - In London, UK

Mainly Python/Django application developer. I am comfortable with both frontend (Javascript, HTML, jQuery, backbone.js, ...) and backend development. Aware of the main third-party apps and familiar of the South/Virtualenv/Fabric deployment stack. Decent sys administration skills, familiar with deployment/configuration using Nginx/Apache adn various wsgi libraries (gevent, uwsgi, gunicorn). Avid screen scraper too.

I love to work on great/interesting projects and have some degree of responsibility.

- My CV http://bit.ly/j7wTVH

- My personal site http://www.jamespacileo.com

- My blog http://blog.jamespacileo.com

- My GitHub http://github.jamespacileo.com

- Some recent side projects http://www.pycon.tv http://www.djangocanvas.com

Hit me up at jamespacileo[/]gmail[/]com
Facebook Development Tools
Patri Friedman - Careful what you ask for: My Alzheimer's genes
Youth Is A Power Of Tomorrow: Story of Appreciation
Seattle (or San Francisco) - Designers and developers

Picture of Health makes tools that help people take care of people. We are self-funded, pre-launch, and small (4 in Seattle, 2 in SF). This is an opportunity to be in the first wave and help define how we do things.

What we most need right now is one or two great designers to own branding, interaction, and visual design for our web and device products. We're building consumer services, and having the right design will be important. We're committed to making sure designers are full partners in the development process. (See http://vurl.me/AYRJ)

The current dev team is me plus three former Hashrocketeers in downtown Seattle. That's a great start, but we'd still love to hear from developers as well. (See http://vurl.me/AZHL)

We'd prefer to keep the dev/design team in Seattle for now, but we could bend this rule for an exceptional person who wants to be in SF.

BTW, my co-founder used to be CEO of Sun, so we have a lot of runway. Also, in addition to the usual startup chaos, we have a few big-company perks like salaries and health insurance. :)

Contact me at walter@pictureofhealth.com, or http://www.pictureofhealth.com/jobs.
> If you’re feeling really bold, try out Evan Reas’ hack: tell them you want them in your book so badly, you’ll e-mail them every day for the next 30 days with a good reason why they should do it.

If someone were to do this to me, it would bring me from on-the-fence firmly into the "no" camp. It shows a blatant lack of respect, IMO.
Chicago, IL - no remote

We're not a startup, but Trading Technologies (http://www.tradingtechnologies.com) is looking for an experienced Python developer on my team.

We're looking for someone who understands and loves testing, has experience with distributed and parallel programming, and wants to use Python 3. You should probably understand C/C++ because the product under test (a historical trade database) is done in C++, and we maintain an extension module that makes a lot of the testing possible.

Here's a more formal posting we just put up on the Python Job Board: http://www.python.org/community/jobs/#trading-technologies-c...

Contact me at brian AT python.org if you are interested.
The Arts School in downtown L.A. was originally budgeted as a $70 million project, then raised to $120 million before construction began, then finished with a final cost of $573 million.

Giving LAUSD more money to manage seems like a bad idea to me.
Fine. Amend kenjackson's statement to say that, in the real world, voters have demonstrated in practice they are unwilling to pay sufficient taxes to attract a high quality group of people to teaching as a profession.