skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a contradictory rant and it's not obvious what the author wants from the reader beyond us purchasing his product. Ok, maybe that's a bit harsh but I honestly don't know what the takeaway is. Maybe it's the realization that KA isn't the answer to all our educational challenges, but that seems like a straw man. Given how many problems KA has solved for so many people, I think it has more than justified its existence, educational approach, and resource pools and funding.
I had 25 training images for this perceptron, and it
still wrongly identified my unseen images. I noticed that
$\boldsymbol\sigma$ was still changing if I trained it
repeatedly on the same data, and it didn't stabilize
until around the tenth time. Maybe it needs more
training data, maybe the perceptron is a bad algorithm
for this task, I really don't know.

Perceptrons are particularly delightful because you can answer all these questions based on properties of the data. It is almost lawyer proof, if you do not mind me saying so.

The other beautiful aspect of it is that unlike many learning algorithms that have a training phase and a deployment phase (where it stops learning), a perceptron can keep on learning nonstop, even when deployed. The reason you can do this is because the learning algorithm only needs to process the new data point (and not the set of all old training data points augented by the new examples).

Now to the lawyer proof part, this requires that the algorithm keeps learning when it is deployed (what follows is correct, but nevertheless it is tongue in cheek): Say your client is that "I will sue you at the drop of a hat" kind. He/she wants you to promise on certain quality of performance. Well, with perceptrons there is a way. Just make him/her also sign that all past, current and future data points that the algorithm will come to see in its lifetime will be such that you can pass a slab of thickness d between the 2 classes.

Now you can guarantee that the algorithm will never ever make more than R^2/d^2 mistakes, regardless of how many examples it is tested on, even if you do not know what are the exact examples the algorithm will be tested on in the future. If the client comes back with a log that the algorithm made more mistakes than you promised, dont worry if the client threatens to sue, with that log you can sue them back, because in that log you have a counterexample to their claim that you can pass a slab of thickness d through the data that the algorithm was exposed to.

EDIT: R is the radius of the sphere that conatins all the data it saw. Search for perceptron and mistake bounds, the proof is surprisingly lucid (no calculus, just geometry and a little high-school algebra).
I can sympathize; I too use C++ by day, and have become increasingly bitter/jealous/frustrated as I've spent more time with Haskell by night.

To the point that, I've started writing several libraries that enable in C++ several of the features I miss most in Haskell. In particular, I've missed the natural syntax of higher order functions, e.g., currying and functional composition, as well as the pithy expressiveness of Prelude vs the STL. With C++11, we can have these things, and while Boost gives us a wealth of functionality, it's hardly the most natural (and lightweight) library.

fc (functional composition) (https://github.com/jdduke/fc) and fpcpp (functional programming with C++)(https://github.com/jdduke/fpcpp) are my recent (very much work-in-progress) efforts towards this end.

With fc, one can naturally compose functions, lambdas and function objects, e.g., given composable functions f, g, h, write auto fgh = f + g + h; or, auto fgh = compose(f, compose (h,g));, and then call it as fgh(a,b,c);

fpcpp enables syntax like

let pi = [](unsigned samples) -> double {
typedef std::pair<double,double> point;
let dxs = map([](const point& p) { return p.first*p.first + p.second*p.second; },
zip(take(samples, rand_range(-1.0,1.0)),
take(samples, rand_range(-1.0,1.0))));
return 4.0 * filter([](double d) { return d <= 1.0; }, dxs).size() / dxs.size();
}
EXPECT_NEAR(pi(10000), 3.14);

In writing fc and fpcpp, I've actually become less and less concerned for the future of C++; having used a good number of the C++11 features available, I've regained a good deal of my passion for C++ programming. Really, C++ needs a more expansive and natural standard library, iterators are powerful but are NOT the answer.
And? So? Ages ago, 9-year olds went to school and nothing happened to them, except when it did, but then they wouldn't write about their own romanticized experiences in a newspaper, so nobody cares about them.

Also, "Disrespect was not tolerated. Neither was whining." is begging for "unless the one disrespectful/whining was the parent, then it was okay".

Finding yet another guy whining about the fact that he has to pay more attention to his kids than his father did doesn't really change anything about the previous dude who did that.
One thing that always surprises me is how many times companies reinvent the wheel and the need for it. In your post you mention an expenses system; something pretty much every company will have to implement. Since HMRC require this information you'd think they'd provide a tool that everyone could "plug into", giving them full visibility of the data they require in a standard format with little effort, and allowing businesses to also benefit by just downloading the relevant information from this service into their own systems for any internal needs. If all companies were using the same service this would also be one less thing for new employees to learn, since they'd be familiar with the expenses process from previous jobs.

On a persona note, I'm definitely in the automater category; on the few occasions when I've left a task unautomated because it was only supposed to be a one off it's come back to bite me repeatedly when month after month that same one off task pops up (admittedly after 2-3 repeats I then ignore the advise that it's a one off and automate anyway). These days if I can automate a task in slightly over the time it would take to perform that task, I automate by default. If there's a significant difference I weigh up the likelihood of repetition (by myself and/or others) against the extra time required to automate it.
Always give your best because you never know who’s paying attention
To start with, the way vim keystrokes combine is pretty nifty. To move forward a word, w. To delete the next word, dw. To delete the next 6 words, 6dw. To move to the next "g" character on the line, fg. To delete everything to that character, dfg. To delete everything inside the parens surrounding the cursor, di(. Something I do a lot with viemu in ms sql: Select everything inside parens with vi(, then hit F5 to execute the subquery.

But it got really fun when I started using macros. Once you're doing everything with keystrokes and text objects, you can record a macro while you're doing it. So, keeping with sql, let's say I want an update statement.

First I use an IDE feature to give me a list of all columns in a table, comma-delimited.

qa starts recording a macro into register a

Wi<return> advances to the next column name and inserts a carriage return

<Esc> q stops recording macro

10@a plays the macro ten times

Now I've got each column on a different line. I go back to the first line.

qw starts recording a macro into register w

ia.<Esc> puts "a." at the beginning of the line

yw copies the column name

A = b.<Esc> goes to end of line and adds " = b."

pA, pastes the column name and adds a comma to the end

j^q moves to beginning of next line and stops macro recording

10@w does the same macro ten more times

Now with a few keystrokes, I've changed this:
column1, column2, column3, ...

To this:

a.column1 = b.column1,

a.column2 = b.column2,

a.column3 = b.column3, ...

And the key point is, I did it without having to think about it much. I used the same editing techniques I would have used to make that change for just one line, and with half a dozen extra keystrokes I made it apply to as many lines as I needed.

Possibly I made small mistakes in the exact keystrokes above. When doing it for real, you see all the changes on that first line as you do them, so if something isn't quite right, just hit u to undo and keep going. It's so easy, I can record and replay new macros all the time. I almost never have to do repetitive editing.

Another trick, not available in viemu but available in vim: select a bunch of lines, then type :norm and your next editing commands after that will get applied to all the lines. For example, to add a comma to the end of every selected line, :norm A,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3554814
Unfortunately I cannot live without the Gmail web client. There is no comparison (even with the, worse for me, new layout). It's fast everywhere, even via my bad phone internet connection, it indicates properly when it can and cannot send stuff etc. It's just better than anything I know and have.

I have tried to use other things, but for my, quite insanely big mailbox, nothing else works. Not only did I import into Gmail all my mail I received since the late 80s, I also get immense amounts of email through the system as I use mail for creating alerts and emergency lists on servers I monitor and such. Wether or not this is proper use of mail (I think it is; I am very productive with ONLY the mail client open; everything I need comes to me in there, neatly filtered, including news, server health, error logs, bug tracking etc; everything has it's own email address I can mail and receive mail from), it works very well, but it's not supported by normal clients; Mail.app just stands there getting mail with high CPU load and Thunderbird is unusable as in stuck all the time (I haven't tried that for a while, but it used to be anyway). Gmail webclient is just nice and fast since the last infrastructure update Google did (the engineers mailed me nicely that I wouldn't be able to use my mail for about 1-2 days while migrating and this proved to be true).

I know what I need instead of mail (but including mail functionality); I just don't think it has been built yet :) Or has it?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1403295/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7752640

I was originally looking to link to something less like a lab report, but you can see the original studies here, and in the references associated.

Basically, the more impaired you expect to be, the more impaired you become. So, if you expect alcohol to make you violent then you will behave more violently under the influence. Of course, one would question why, if you expect alcohol to make you violent, you would drink at all - other than to use it as an excuse to behave like a dick.

Alcohol will affect your reaction time and your motor co-ordination. It makes you feel awful the next day as the liver is taxed by removing the poisons from your system. It's an addictive substance and is associated with a myriad of substance abuse problems.

Whilst it is true that alcohol will have an effect on your body chemistry, it does not make you violent, it does not make you behave badly or aggressively. Those behaviours come from within you. Alcohol is not an excuse for behaving like a dick; it may, however, be something that you accept as an excuse for letting out the dickish behaviour you wish to display.

I don't know of any scientific studies that show that alcohol lowers inhibitions, but the above studies (and the references in their bibliographies) show that people will lower their inhibitions when they think they are consuming alcohol, regardless of the alcohol content of the drink.
I wish I knew more about the person writing it, its hard to contextualize their opinions as it stands currently.
Its easy to ignore all the thousands of students, like me, who have improved and understood concepts I hadnt learned before in formal school. We arent really visible, its like we dont exist.

Just as I havent seen anyone improving their understanding of mathematical concepts from the mathalicious school.
I'm at a small startup with ~8 people, which is currently working out of a 5000+ square-foot warehouse with dozens of spare office rooms along the side. And you know what? All the engineers work together in just one large room, so they can ask each other what's going on with some part of the code and things like that.

Well, yes, of course. 8 people can all work in one room without constant distraction. The question is, will everyone working in one large room still be ideal when your startup reaches 80 people?
Cells age mostly because of telomere shortening.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Telomere_shortening
of course it works! no one would expend the significant time and resources that are required to spam effectively these days if there wasn't any reward. It's a numbers game, they just blast their ads (which are generally for high profit margin things that appeal to people in a desperate/impulsive mental state: penis pills, forex, get rich quick schemes etc) to as many people as possible, if you hit 100 million email addresses, and 1% of them get through spam filters, i'd bet you'd get more than one conversion.
Clicking record repeatedly while it's playing back an existing pattern creates some awesome cacophony.
The isolation/frequency curve is one factor, certainly, but a bigger problem is that the ear's response is logarithmic. Even if the earplugs or earmuffs have a perfectly flat isolation/frequency curve, so that all frequencies are attenuated by 33 dB, you can still hear just fine; it's just not as loud. Only if you introduce some masking sound (even white or pink noise will do) in combination with the attenuation can you render the outside sounds inaudible.
Is it far fetched to think of traditional universities meeting the same fate as Blockbuster?

How far can this go?
http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

That is the best way to learn Python for a beginner, well at least in IMO
Khan Academy is providing an alternative educational path for students who want to learn on their own pace. And Khan Academy is doing this right!
The Future of Peer Review
Mirror anyone? I'm getting a 509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded message. Thanks.

EDIT: Nvm, google cache has it : https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&outp...
It's a good point. In videogame development, C has been a standard for a very long time. Wolfenstein 3D was written in C, 20 years later, Modern Warfare is still being written in C (albeit a bit modified). Most other game development is done in C++, also not exactly a brand new technology.

Had you invested correctly in the right languages, you'd be doing just fine today.
Okay, so the consensus is that the article is a joke (khan academy helped me a lot couple of years ago in high school so I agree). Why is it on the front page of HN then?
If you subtract out "HTTP can be applied to JSON", what seems to be left is a minor specification of a standardized error JSON object. There's not much "there" there; everything interesting is "left to the server".
Historically, doctors and lawyers did teach themselves and many would sell their services without the appropriate papers. (Or the appropriate papers were obtainable through a test without requiring spending X amount of hours beforehand.) There's nothing fundamentally different about those fields as opposed to programming that make it so you can't learn the majority of the knowledge you'll need in the field from home. You can definitely diagnose without formal training--there's a story I heard of a guy who was having the signs and symptoms of a heart attack, googled them, realized he was having a heart attack, and called the ambulance. There's a book whose title I forget that describes in fine detail plumages, shapes, and other features about a huge variety of birds, but has no pictures, and it's commonly used by bird watchers to help them classify.

You may have an argument with biochemists since it's still a relatively new field, and specific universities are a decent place to find mentors, whereas historically you might just go seek a mentor from your local village or in the Big City for things like alchemy. The mentor may even have their own "School of Me", we don't have those anymore. Or maybe you might send a math paper to the Big Shot in Math in the UK, and if he likes it, he'll tell his circle of other math guys and suddenly you're "in" and will be recorded in the history books written by other people in the UK.

I think online media has revolutionized all fields of education and will continue to do so, but only in the simple way of making more correct information available and easier to acquire or recall. Self-learning is as old as books and online education only changes the source material from book to computer (which has a ton of benefits of course). I do agree with you that it is unlikely online education will ever completely replace having offline classes with other people, I know I would have preferred a programming mentor when I started out but all I had and knew of was a book. (It didn't occur to me then to seek out mentors at, say, a meetup.) The main reason I agree is because I don't foresee a decoupling of the university degree for a subject Y and a certification for doing Job X in a field sort of related to subject Y any time in the near future for many jobs, such as doctors and lawyers as you mentioned. What would be truly revolutionary for the Plebs is a mandate from the government saying HR departments can't require an accredited education, just as they can't require a particular race/sex/etc. (This won't stop discrimination of course just as the other mandates don't, but it would help I think even if it just dispels the notion that "I need a degree to get a job" that follows directly after "I need a high school diploma / GED to get into college.")
What makes you think that he has not bought and payed for the movie Inception - to which he then bacme a rightful owner of a dvd/blueray? Having ownership of it, he is free to copy it for his own purposes, such as to make backups or to borrow it to his friend, like any other private property he has?
Anecdotally, a relative of mine who's now in his 60s and has been a mostly unemployed programmer since the 1970s. He's yet figure out how object-oriented programming works, it's very hard in his words, although I don't think he complains much about it on the internet.
"When Bill Gates and others generously donated millions of dollars to Khan’s organization, he immediately turned around and used this money to hire an all-star team of…computer scientists. Of the twenty people who work at Khan Academy, none has ever taught in a K12 classroom in the the United States. Zero."

When you look at it like that, you never got it; leading to erroneous conclusions.
To address our challenges, we need to do what every other successful country has done: invest in professional development; give teachers more time to collaborate; and provide them with resources that help them not only meet the learning standards, but exceed them.

You could have copy/pasted that conclusion without altering a word from the debate about every other educational reform: school choice/vouchers, NCLB, high-stakes testing, teacher testing, etc etc. It's invariant under every proposal because the goal is to employ teachers and education of students is a welcome-but-unnecessary industrial byproduct.

It is also just as false that the US lags peer nations in professional development / collaboration time / pointless frippery ("resources that help them not only meet the learning standards, but exceed them") than it was the last 47 times this was brought up as a panacea.
I think this piece would be more effective, or at least somewhat effective, if its author had described a vision for online learning that takes the best of Khan's approach and combines it with, well, something interesting. The author never really explains what that something is. I don't think Khan Academy is perfect. Its gamification techniques will not work for all students. But it is an alternative for some students. If a kid who is ahead can stay with her peers at the same grade level while watching Khan videos at night, great. If a kid who is behind can stay with her grade level by using Khan to catch up without the shame of remedial math, even better.

Frankly its author sounds bitter.
Filabot: Desktop Plastic Filament Maker for 3D printers
Studies like these don't look at the holistic picture. Productivity isn't just a function of minimal distractions, but a combination of a bunch of items.

In particular to this study, it doesn't account for employee happiness. Personally, I and all of my employees, are far happier with an open space. Happy employees, make for productive and loyal employees.

I would gladly take an open space knowing the trade off that it might be a little more distracting, but a much more pleasant environment to work in.
Typed-cl: function and variable type declarations made clean and simple
I'd say traditional universities will most likely move to similar platforms rather than just going extinct. This is because Universities provide more value than just the classes, like research.
I really like this book. I haven't finished it but I did kickstart a friend on Haskell by getting him a copy as well.

It is worth noting that the book uses HUGS examples instead of GHCI so there are some (mostly minor) differences between the example interactive code and the results in ghci. I don't remember off hand but I started the book thinking I'd just use ghci and that it would be the same as hugs, but there are a couple important differences between hugs and ghci that impacted some of the examples in the book. I stuck with ghci but to someone completely new to haskell it might be a confusing point.
How will they combat cheating? I mean if it's all done remotely then what is stopping somebody completing the degree for somebody else?
Your comment suggests you don't understand the distinction between saying something is false and saying there's no evidence either way.

I'm not saying the no poaching agreement had no effect. I'm
saying he offers no evidence for his claim that it had a big effect. Complaining that someone has offered no evidence for
a claim is not an "implied statement" that it's false. Do
you understand that distinction?
What about expensify - baseline activity is free. More frequent and complex usage isn't. https://www.expensify.com/upgrade
For one thing Khan Academy does not say it strives to solve the problems you discuss. It's only goal, I believe was and still is accessibility.
Let me rephrase. What if every cert authority might do it to some company (different companies for different cert authorities)

How would you even know if they did?
Ask HN: Company vs. Startup
When you release more than one product does is become a company ? What is the actual difference between a company and a startup ?
I was never a spammer, but I worked a datacenter and had frank conversations with former customers who were terminated when they were found to be spamming on the network.

Yes. Yes it pays. Quit a lot and quite easily.

Some quick figures. The average server purchased can send (extremely conservatively) 5-10 emails a second. If you assume that they will be caught within 48 hours after setup, that means that between 864,000 and 1,728,000 emails can be sent out in that time. Rough cost expended - $150 for server setup and $20 for an hour of your time setting it up (Most spammer I have come in contact with are not highly skilled, this hourly rate is my own guess if I would hire them). That means it costs about $1 to sent between 5,080-10,165 emails. The going response rate in my experience of talking to them is about 0.02%. Which means they are getting about one or two people for every dollar expended.

Sell fake viagra for $5 a pop, you just turned a very nice profit.

Again, all of these totals are low-end averages based on spammers I spoke with. They were not Leo Kuvayev or Alex Blood.