skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a University's job to educate students, and to expose them to many fields of study that will give them a grounding for later study and inquiry. Basic instruction in many different topics at least gives the students enough grounding to ask good questions.

Education in foreign languages has far reaching affects on many aspects of life and cognitive abilities - this is a documented fact. The analogy to Exchange is broken in many, many ways. Training on a product only brings some level of competency in that product, as soon as it end-of-lifes, the skill is useless. Learning a language opens many doors, and I don't really see German being end-of-lifed any time soon.

Perhaps every university doesn't need a research oceanography unit, but it sure would be nice if they provided at least a teaching unit or two on those. Or do we just tell the students that would like to know something about it, "screw you, enroll at these other universities too, if you want to learn the basics of that.". I understand that in the Netherlands, this may not be that difficult, it is a small country, but in many places, e.g. the US where UVA is, the college where they kept an oceanography program is probably sever hundred, or even thousands of kilometers away.

Finally, the basics of subject do not need leading experts to teach them well. For low level classes, most people capable of getting a Ph.D and an interest in teaching can cover the material quite well. In fact, there is a whole school of thought (with pretty good evidence) that suggests that experts can't teach novices a subject very well at all. (this is known as the tacit or expert knowledge problem).
I think I should clarify what I meant by "the conclusions are nevertheless trivial." Let's look at the key statement in the conclusion of the study:

"Based on these results, the conclusion can be reached that while unit testing can detect some type errors, in practice it is an inadequate replacement for static type checking."

As I've already pointed out, this seems to me an ambitious and over-reaching conclusion, given the scope of the study.

But, equally important, it is simply an example of something that was already provable. It should be axiomatic that in principle automatically-generated validation like that provided by static typing should in theory be able to catch type errors not caught manually in a dynamic context, either for reasons of human oversight or human error.

In other words, it seems to me that all that has been done here, is to provide a few concrete examples of what was already true and uncontroversial: auto-generated coverage of specific types of validations can be more comprehensive than some human beings will be in some environments and contexts. It has not shown that the perceived benefits of dynamic typing with good unit tests are outweighed by this fact, nor that, statistically-speaking, errors of this type are common enough to warrant a preference of static typing over dynamic typing with unit tests in all contexts.
An overly large sense of entitlement and lack of passion are the two biggest red flags for me. Someone with a great attitude but lack of skills can be trained; someone with a bad attitude can't be fixed (at least not by the hiring organization).
It is a broad statement and relies on the good people having a good or at least neutral support situation around them. Good people can have health problem or have people they are supporting in rough situations. The net result of firing them will be "bounce down" or "bury".

As an employer you should do what best for all the people at the company, but do not kid yourself into thinking "good people" will recover and move on to a better place. It might happen and they will go on to fortune and fame. It might also be the final brick in the wall. That is just a nice way of making yourself feel better in this situation.
Prismatic Opens News Discovery Service To All, Adds FB & G-Reader Sign-Ups
If MicroSoft can implement a Secure Boot. Linux will implement it much better :)
I had to manage a guy like that once. He'd start a build at 4:45 on a Friday and I'd have to stick around until 6:30 fixing it.

What an asshole.
There isn't any difference, except often when people microwave water they don't get it all the way to boiling. With a kettle it's pretty obvious when your water is at boiling.
I don't think the problem is he doesn't "get" the concept.

The problem is that the site doesn't even say what the concept is.
I think Go's type system is decades behind the state of the art. I can't believe they repeated the mistake of Boolean Blindness [1]. Sum types and pattern-matching are crucial for useful strictness with flexibility. This results in funny things like encoding the optional error result in Go as a type product rather than a sum, allowing reading of a result even if it does not exist due to an error.

[1]: http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/boolean-blin...
I would rather it was a logo. Currently, it comes off as kind of precious. It was actually quite distracting. I came to your blog to read an article, and found myself presented with this bit of text, which I initially mistook for the beginning of the article.
Those are not very strong objections, and no one really seems "baffled". Furthermore it seems clear the magazine author contacted them and tried to get them to say "bad science", it's not like they volunteered these positions out of the blue.

The first guy predicts how he thinks the first xenoarchaeologists in history will behave upon finding an alien head, not too dissimilarly from a lot of archaeologists in the past, running roughshod over a site and grabbing what they can. He thinks this is unrealistic, but he's an archaeologist not a xenoarchaeologist so what would he know.

The second guy, geologist, doesn't have any strong objections to the actions of the geologist in the movie.

The third guy, biologist, criticizes the killing of an alien that is trying to kill them. He is wrong. Killing the alien that is killing you is a realistic thing to do.

The fourth guy, physicist, has a criticism of seeing FTL ships underway. This is reasonable, but on par with criticisms of hearing explosions in space in Star Wars or seeing laser blasts as they move through the air, these are common tropes to show the audience something that in real life is invisible or silent.

And the fifth guy, psychologist, supports as realistic the movie's setup of having the scientists meet for the first time at the site, have problems, go crazy, and get killed.
Sometimes you have to drink the coffee anyway, and cream and sugar do in practice make it much better.
My first thought on seeing the name was that it had something to do with Fourier transforms.
If you are a good programmer, you don't need typing, you don't need interfaces, you don't need many things that make bad programmers better programmers.

You might still use them, and there's nothing entirely wrong with that, but you probably don't need them.

This is why so many people have problems writing JavaScript.
This. Not all statically typed languages are created equal. Java's type system is old and is not state of the art. I wish people would stop using it as a straw man when anybody brings up static typing.

Java was state of the art 20 years ago, but it's definitely not the case any more.
>one of the iOS/Android powered home locks (~$300)

Check out Lockitron! (https://lockitron.com) - we come with an API, no monthly fee, and a variety of locks that will work on most doors or apartment buzzer systems.
I started last week to work on the API. Stay tuned.
If their life situation allows them to quit. The world is not an ideal place.
Can you still send 802.11b/g/n with 0.03W power consumption?
I'm aware that people migrate from rural areas to work in the factories for a while before returning. But for the duration of their stay they form part of the 51% urban population and are subject to different stressors than the rural population.

I'm not saying that the urban/factory-working population will necessarily be more prone to commit suicide. Suicide in the rural population in India, for instance, is a major problem due to the ready availability of agricultural chemicals.

All I was trying to say was that using the average suicide rate may be misleading when the population is so diverse, and urbanisation is concentrated in certain areas.
I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With
Same here, I always do 60 instead of 1:00 or 90 instead of 1:30 to save an extra button press.
It's a serious problem when it happens, but it's not at all widespread. Though there's a good argument to be made that we shouldn't wait for problems to become widespread before fixing them, especially when they are as potentially damaging as rootkits. Imagine if we'd spent the 70s and 80s taking buffer overflow issues very seriously, for example. We'd live in a much different and arguably better world.

The point still stands on whether or not this is actually the best or most effective way to go about tackling the problem. And as you point out the "unintended" of securing the DRM chain and of increasing vendor OS lock-in are not to be ignored and probably just as much a factor behind adoption as the purported security issues.
Another one to add is personality. Generally at the end of the interview there are two questions I have to answer:

1) Can the candidate do the job?

2) Can I work 8-10 hours a day, 5 days a week, under stressful situations with this person?

I've had candidates just rip apart their past co-workers and previous companies. Sure you might have some gripes with how things were done at your previous company, but make sure you don't end up portraying yourself as someone that is difficult to get along with.
Ill Doctrine: All These Sexist Gamer Dudes Are Some Shook Ones
When a comment of yours is marked dead, that's typically not an invitation to immediately make the same comment verbatim.
Ask HN: Do comments with higher word count rank higher?
I have noticed the following when editing one of my HN comments:
I submit a comment. Initially ranks mid page. I edit the comment a few minutes later. Comment stays in same rank position. I edit the comment again, this time adding words. Comment moves upwards in position.

Why? Does it move up on word count or number of edits or both or other?

Obviously I may just be seeing things.
Technically it often is. The SEC never really cared because historically friends+family funded businesses didn't end up on the market.
Your typical neighborhood Italian restaurant doesn't IPO. If it did, and grandma who gave you her famous meatball recipe, turns up with her team of IP lawyers things will get interesting

The difference here is that you are inviting 1000s of random people to invest. Then even assuming you are totally honest and above board - once you are marginally succesfull the same VCs will come and screw these investors in the same way that they screw foudners.
You can disable secure boot, or if you can’t you’ll be able to install Fedora/RHEL, or sign your own OS (or Ubuntu) with Microsoft key (for a fee).
In Python, there are a lot of errors like "NoneType has no attribute '...'", and those disappear too.

Missing imports and redundant imports also go away.

Lots of lots of invariants in the program can be encoded as types, too, so any bugs relating to them go away too.

When you want parallelism, you get useful guarantees about not changing the deterministic result you had before you added parallelism.

I used to use Python, but after Haskell, there's no way I'd go back...
When I saw "If this then that" I instantly knew what IFTTT was. However, when showing it to people I noticed they "got it" after seeing the recipe "If the forecast calls for rain tomorrow, send me an SMS message."

BTW, really really cool!
I wrote a few comments earlier about this device, but I thought I'd try and sum up my thoughts on it in one post.

This is terribly dangerous. Thus far, they've been lucky - nobody has done something wrong or stupid. That said, it cannot last. Putting industrial robots like this on a moving track, and then putting them close to humans at high speed is a recipe for disaster. This system has a 6 meter by track length operating envelope and moves over 4 meters per second. It also has control over 110kg of material - putting its weight in the 2000kg range (minus the track).

There are safety systems available, but none that are commercialized that will allow humans and robots like this to exist in incredibly close proximity with any expectation of safety. Some of the recent research we completed at Carnegie Mellon points to a future where this is possible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Xc4yq-rz0

But we're not there yet.
I have been using it from the beginning where the concept was even more vague.

I think you either get it or you don't. Apply whatever abstraction of "get" as you want.

There isn't that much to get really. If you are a programmer if this then that should kind of tell it all.

I am not a programmer (but know how to program a little) and I had no problem "getting" it. I don't believe developers dont get this.
I think it will be a logo at some point, this site and my company site are rather new and works in progress. I sincerely appreciate the feedback.
If you write compilers, it would be really beneficial if you had a curiosity about the state of the art in programming languages.
I was just speaking with a friend about effectively this same idea the other day. He was super excited and thought it could revolutionize the way research funding works.

It won't. I'm sorry, but it just won't. There are several reasons why a kickstarter for academic/scientific research is doomed:

1) People underestimate the amount of money required to fund research. Starting this Fall, I'll be receiving a grant from the NSF for one year of funding. That funding pays me approx. $1800/mo, plus covers my health insurance ($800/mo), tuition ($5k/semester), and travel ($7000/yr). The university also provides me with facilities and access to faculty and thus have overhead that need to be covered. This grant is shared among 3 PhD students and totals over $180,000.

2) Progress does not happen in leaps and bounds, it happens in inches. Kickstarter projects go from conception or prototype to finished product. Research does not work that way. You go from previous algorithm to slightly updated algorithm. It's a marathon, not a sprint to production.

3) You get nothing. Kickstarter projects give you a cool gadget or game or piece of art or whatever. When you fund a Kickstarter project, you get to see a video of some prototype or sketches that look like they'll be awesome. By the end of it, it's finished and you have this cool new thing that you can enjoy. You will not get any cool new thing from researchers, because they don't even know what it is they're trying to make yet. At best they will produce a conference or journal paper, maybe with a neat little demo of low production quality, and then they're on to the next problem. Scientists are not interested in building production-ready toys, they are searching purely for knowledge. So you as the funder get nothing tangible.

4) Most science is boring to the average person. Researchers live on the edge of human knowledge. They are tackling problems for which there is no known answer. Odds are, if you're in a sexy area like neuroscience, robotics, etc., then the problems you want to solve have been looked at for decades by people much smarter than you. Thus, you are not going to make some gigantic breakthrough that leads to strong AI-- you're hopefully going to develop a new learning algorithm that performs 3% better than the state of the art on a handful of benchmark datasets. Exciting, right?

Overall, it'd be great if we had democratized funding that worked. Unfortunately, due to the costly, slow, intangible, esoteric nature of scientific research, it's unlikely that will happen. Most academics have a hard enough time convincing experts, who have dedicated their lives to the area, that their work is worth funding. I just don't see how it could possibly work.
I check my email on my phone. For most of the emails I send, the phone is also sufficient. If I need to send something longer than this comment, I will switch to my MacBook Air. Honestly, it's no more of a hassle than pulling out the iPad and it has a keyboard.
I thought the same thing. The coffee table $15K plus ~~atrocity~~ research idea has become this.
Show HN: Kmote, personalized product & travel recommendations
I wonder how this will reflect on FunnyJunk in the future.
The claim static typing adds verbosity is a common fallacy.

Haskell code is more concise than most dynamically typed languages.
I think in terms of it being a good platform to develop for with a large installed base; it will still be there for a while.

That said, its management is so in a cascading spiral of incoherence, and its standing financially (it is bleeding on one side and not taking in enough revenue on the other) that its longterm viability as a stable/growing market leader is by anyones measure -- done. Their overall product line is (compared to Apple) incoherent and (compared to Android ecosystem) lacking breadth. The only player its beating in that arena is Nokia, which is like saying you could beat up a quadriplegic really well if you trained harder.

It had more Playbooks stolen last year than sold. That, while snarky, is nonetheless true.

This is a difficult spiral to get out of; almost no one ever does at this stage, so I think that's where the dismal outlook comes from. Even Apple in its darkest days had more cash on hand and options available to it than RIM does now.
Using the type system to prevent the generation of malformed HTML (and most types of invalid HTML) at compile time is actually a standard example for a situation where unit tests become mostly superfluous in the presence of a static type system. Some unit tests for the escaping functions in the library can be useful, but code that uses the library can just trust the compiler.
Podcast: Highs and Lows of Remote Work
Does it matter? What if ribbon is not so popular, would that mean that Microsoft would actually listen and change? Or will it just go on like it always does?
>it says nothing even remotely resembling "this benefit applies to all languages with static typing".

That is precisely what it says, and that is reiterated later:

"...the conclusion can be reached that...in practice [unit testing] is an inadequate replacement for static type checking."

I'm not sure what you're reading, but there's no qualifications in the language used here regarding the idea of 'static type checking,' nothing so modest about the scope of the conclusion as claiming it was merely a "useful test" as you put it. It was a sweeping generalization about two very broad and extremely complex categories of languages. Had the conclusions used more moderate language and qualified itself adequately, I wouldn't have a problem. But all that has been shown here, is that in some contexts more care needs to be taken writing unit tests in a dynamic environment to catch some errors that are automatically caught in static environments. That is all that the data warrants.
In case grandparent is too elliptical for some readers --

The maximum current determines how thick the wires have to be. Since power (ability to heat or do other work in one unit of time) == current * voltage, doubling the voltage doubles the amount of power a wire of a given thickness can deliver.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"In Comments:

Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."
[Video Tutorial] How to install Opsview Pro
Definitely relevant. Even in today's market, people want good employees, not just warm bodies.
The article is about developing a stable balance between family, work and side projects- how does monthly visits to your son create as a good balance? It sounds more like a temporarily tolerated situation rather than something feasible (or desireable) long term.
Pro Tip: Whenever the headline includes both "scientists" and "baffled," you can skip the article if you are a scientist or if you aren't frequently baffled.
The exemption is just for private placement as opposed to an IPO. You still have to be accredited.
[Video Tutorial] Installing an Opsview Agent on Linux
If you're filming a kung foo scene, you're already very careful to not collide with who you're "fighting". I don't see how this would be any different other than the robot is perfect and your opposing actor is not.
Secure Deletion of Data in Linux
Yes, you can write a Query type that is vulnerable to SQL injection, if you want to.

But if you write a secure version, you only have to write it once. You only have to maintain it in one place. You only need to test it in one place. And if you forget to use your secure Query type, anywhere else in your code, the compiler will yell at you. It's a significant advantage.

This is easier to see in a language with a rich, flexible and expressive type system than it is in Java. The writer of the original article used Haskell for a reason.
Are we having a battle of anecdotes? I have my own experience owning all of the devices. I'm not biased against my tablet, I'm telling you my experience with owning one and how I use it.

>"And notice the way he's using it, like while sipping coffee, while exercising"

I'm sipping coffee at my desktop right now. And I sip coffee with my laptop ALL the time. Exercising? Well, I think it's ridiculous you'd carry a tablet rather than a phone.

>"We are not even talking about the apps (both in terms of quality of apps and the variety) that make things much easier and pleasant."

No, we're not, because I disagree. A laptop with Windows 7 is going to make far more things "easier and pleasant" in the real world. Once again, what can your laptop do that the iPad can't? Lots. What can the tablet do that the laptop can't? Nothing. It's just easier to hold.

>"Did your cellphone replace your landline?"

Yes, it did. For me, my mother, father, sister and almost everyone I know under 30.

>"Did your computer replace your calculator?"

Uh, it most certainly did. If I need to do some basic arithmetic, I'm using Excel, or a calculator on my phone.

>"Pretty much everything in the First World is a luxury. Visit Africa and you'll realize that."

That's one hair away from Godwin's Law. Yeah, you're right. Everything I have is a luxury compared to some poor sucker in Africa. Thanks for pointing that out.

It's like you're trying to convince me that I should be using a tablet more. I own them all, and I use whatever tool is most convenient. The tablet is only ever my "go to" device in very specific cases that I've mentioned. I like it, I'm not selling it, but it's not overly useful. It wouldn't affect my productivity in any way if it disappeared tomorrow. And, to bring it full circle to the original article, it isn't because it's an Android instead of an Apple; it's because tablets just aren't that advantageous.