skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a fundamental difference between the loop and the comprehension: the latter is far more declarative.

That is, the comprehension is equivalent to saying something like "even contains every number from numbers that is even". The loop is like saying "start with even as the empty list; for each number in numbers, append it to even". It's much easier to understand what even is from the first description.

The for-loop version is much less direct and has too many low-level details--why are you appending to the list and using extra state? From the second definition, you can know what even is just by looking at it; for the first one, you have to think about what the code is doing.

This is the fundamental delineation between imperative and declarative code. The former is about how and the latter is about what. In general, specifying the what is much simpler--and therefore easier to write, easier to work with and easier to maintain--than specifying how to get it.

I suspect you find the for-loop version easier not because it's simpler but because that's what you're used to. And while familiarity is certainly an important factor, it's always relative and temporary: every person is familiar with different things, and you get more familiar with different constructs over time.

Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy"[1] talk is a great description of this whole idea. He makes the matter far clearer than I have any hope of doing.

[1]: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
For me, there are two things that immediately stand out:

An Amazon Kindle, and a subscription to Audible.com.

When I bought a Kindle, I really did so on a whim (they're cheap!), but they're actually incredibly awesome devices. Ever since I've gotten one, I've read far more books, learned a lot, and have greatly improved my personal satisfaction. I've always been the sort of person who feels 'guilty' when I don't read frequently, and having a Kindle around has really solved that problem for me. It makes it very easy to swipe, read a few pages, and set back down (while code is compiling, whatever).

The Audible.com subscription has also been really amazing. If you're not aware, Audible is an Amazon company that sells audiobooks. You can listen to them on your mobile device (Android, iOS, etc.), and it's a great companion for running errands, commuting, doing chores, or working out (unless you're lifting weights, in which case you may want some real music >:)).

Audible has essentially helped me read through an extra ~40 books last year, all of which were really educational / helpful.
It's contrary in that a naive interpretation leads to the opposite conclusion. That's all I meant. And I'm not sure how you define what is a different argument and what isn't. It's all about the value of these scores.
I agree with you fully. My experience has taught me that the people I want to associate with have a narrow definition of risk and are not willing to fail.

I have met "entrepreneurs" who have said things like, "if this fails, we will just do another project! No big deal, failure is part of the process" conversely I have met people in corporate America who assume that any financial or personal risk is completely ridiculous to take.

The 3rd group I have met are entrepreneurs who are willing to take a personal and financial risk while assuming success will be there's despite the odds. They never talk about failure because it simply isn't an option until it is inevitable. They stay consistently focused on execution and do not worry at all about the potential for failure because at their core it doesn't matter.

People in the 3rd group are the people I want to work with every time. They take well calculated risks naturally and deliver results.
I provided value to the company, I migrated legacy code to modern programming languages, I debugged the code from other programmers that couldn't figure out why their programs didn't work right, I was one of the few that actually wrote documentation, used a standard naming convention for variables, used comments in code to explain to other programmers what it did, I converted from MS-Access databases to MS-SQL Server because nobody else knew how. I wouldn't say I was the best, but I did valuable work.

I mean the original article in this thread is a man with schizophrenia who was a success at college, how is he less valuable to the college because he is schizophrenic? John Forbes Nash Jr. is schizophrenic and he won an award for economics in the Nobel Prize, should he be given a lower salary and lower position because he is mentally ill?

The other workers could not finish their tasks because they were too busy trying to bully and harass me, so management reassigned many of their tasks to me to finish. I even took work home and worked at home for no extra pay to meet deadlines.

But because of the constant stress from the bullying and harassment I would keep becoming sicker and sicker, yet I was able to still get work done. Eventually I suffered a nervous breakdown from the stress and had a panic attack at work, and then was fired on that very same day. That experience had broken me, and my doctors put me on disability being too sick to work. Being put on disability also broke me, it made me develop a mental block and writer's block which I am only now overcoming.

But had I not been bullied and harassed, I would still be doing valuable work and earning even more money.

I admit there are those out there smarter and better than me, but I am not an idiot because I am mentally ill despite people thinking that.
Self-Improvement and Narcissist's Mirror
Can you chime in and inform us where is Lennart wrong and how? I (and probably many others) would LOVE that.
You're talking about rainbow tables. They aren't used very much anymore, since the salting of hashes has become commonplace.

As for your idea that hash functions can't be reversed, not so much. They can't be easily reversed, but that's not the same thing.

In reality, brute forcing is pretty much the only viable attack left now that salting is commonplace. Still, if you have managed to get your hands on the password table, you can brute force without having to worry about rate limiting etc.
"What "standard deviation"?

Typo: should have been "standard distribution"... Less colloquially: "a two-variable normal distribution."

"What does "ellipse isn't irregular" mean?"

Eccentricity. Sorry `fer the double negative.

"Kepler? The linked graph? How is this helpful in understanding what's going on?"

If you take the scattered data and draw an ellipse containing a fixed probability (presumably represented with some confidence, by the data shown), the ellipse would be more eccentric for the same enclosed probability, the higher the correlation. It's a single statistic and is analogous to Kepler's 2nd law ("a line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time."), except with probability rather than area... (To contain the same probability, you have to adjust the ellipse's size, while holding its enclosed probability constant, and accounting for the new eccentricity, which isn't under our control. If the area is fixed and the distance changes, solve for speed... I think visually. Alternatively, think V=IR.; if V is constant and R is known, solve for I.). The link was just illustrative of any such scatter plot. It was the best I could find, but I agree, it could have been better.

I agree that the article is low on quantitative statistics though.
Providence theater experiments with 'tweet seats'
Looking at the source for the page, the HTML is clean and there is nothing particularly fancy or out of the ordinary about the CSS. It does use semantic HTML (menu, section, nav, etc.), but that shouldn't be a problem.

I'm really curious as to what browser that is, seems like you have triggered some weird bug.
Is Twitter's Vine Launch A Response To Popular Social Video Service Keek?
Islam and science: The road to renewal
You can't specify everything in the rules. For example, I know a case where management decided to hand out bonuses to the staff for minimizing inventory, because inventory costs money. The staff minimized inventory, all right, and got their bonuses. Meanwhile, the production line would regularly get halted because they'd run out of things like 5 cent resistors. It was a disaster.

The same company decided to rate programmers based on the bug list. A big chart was posted on the wall that showed the daily bug count. It wasn't a week before huge fights erupted over the bug count - over what was and was not a bug. The programmers quickly gamed it. They'd hide bugs, they'd refuse to fix one bug if that fix would produce some other minor bugs (e.g. if the bug was "feature X missing", then feature X is added, but had a couple issues with it, then X would not get fixed). They'd even add "bugs" blamed on other programmers and then "fix" them to get the credit.

Management gave up on that after two weeks and pulled the banner down.
The ghost machine
Why is it so hard to build an efficient artificial solar powered CO2 + H20 -> O2 + carbohydrate machine?
FYI there is a petition on whitehouse.gov to deny those people who work on GFW entry US.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/people-who-help-in...
To be fair, if there's a new discovery related to evolution, you are likely to get non-scientists to respond. Granted, those will be people who argue that Darwinism is an evil, false influence in the world, but biology still has its own knowitalls.

Or, look at controversial topics in other domains of science: AIDS was created as a biological weapon, vaccines cause autism. Fluoridated water is a Communist plot to "deplete the brainpower and sap the strength of a generation of American children." The WTC could not have fallen because of planes crashing into it, and must have been leveled due to planned explosives.

This holds even outside of science. Ask a question on copyright laws and a bunch of people with no formal law training (including me) will chime in - leading to complete ripped movies on YouTube prefixed with the magic phrase "fair use."
Yes, you should be an expert of the field to critique it. Otherwise you are talking about thing that you don't know yourself.
Python questions in UK citizenship test
I'd love to see some more information on this but can't seem to find much. This feels pretty wrong.
Haxe has a similar (but not quite identical) bag of tricks which act as a "gradient" of stronger/weaker couplings.

You have to specify that an implementation can use a specific interface, but you may overload an implementation with multiple interfaces. http://haxe.org/manual/2_types#interfaces

You can use structure types instead of classes and rely on structural subtyping to match them.
http://haxe.org/manual/2_types#structural-subtyping

And you can ask for dynamic type behavior wherever the code needs it.
http://haxe.org/ref/dynamic
Do you use your PIN number at an ATM machine?
> Yeah, it's a purely practical question -- and is why I brought up contributions back to FreeBSD vs. Linux

Well, in the war of anecdotes...
Not books, but I always read these blogs:

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/

http://blog.optimizely.com/
I hope that non-corrupt telcos from other countries keep raising the bar on services and quality to make it more apparent how badly we are getting screwed in North America.
I went into the article thinking it was going to be about some way of renaming functions or something. Probably just my limited internal definition of the word refactor. After reading I would say Go has a cool built in way of using the adapter pattern. More interesting than renaming functions.
We're hiring - but we probably won't pay you.
This is the corporatist way. Everything is measured so it can be 'tweaked' by managers and technocrats because school is a business now.

Having a bad teacher to me doesn't matter when any kid can turn on his phone or laptop and watch free MIT lectures, free Stanford lectures, free Khanacademy lectures, free Android and iOS developer courses all over youtube, ect.

Gates obsession with teacher metrics would be better spent on building an entirely free university with worldwide standardized credits, so somebody in Pakistan can have their education credentials accepted should they start working overseas instead of being forced to drive a cab around Montreal while spending thousands to retake what he/she already learned.
Most of this is beyond me; but I have a domain name originally for a translation site that could be useful to someone looking to solve these problems (depending on approach) -- scatterlang.com.

Let me know if anyone's interested.
Welcome to bounded polymorphism, circa 1989. A young Wadler would be pleased.

An aside, it is not "duck typing" if it involves a static type system.
There was much earlier discussion of this (not all very aware of the legal background in the United States) three days ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5109847

The earlier discussion got off to a bad start, in part because of bad reporting in the submitted source, an annoying problem here on Hacker News.
The natural result of the "code is speech" argument?
Swivel - Convert SWF to 1080p video
"it seems like a great way to counter people selecting "1234" or their birthday."

It would be, were it not for the fact that the pin is randomly assigned. I've had a card issued with "2468" as the pin.

"I'd really like to see six to eight digit PINs, though..."

Whilst the default length is 4 digits, you can change it to something longer if you choose.
Important expectation-calibration note: I'm not making any claims about teacher performance, the usefulness of the value-added idea, or any lofty topics in general. I'm just trying to figure out how to recreate the first graph in the initial posting and get a closer look at the data behind it.

I grabbed the data set [1], loaded it into R, and tried to recreate the first graph in the original post. Observations:

1. The value-added scores are quantized so, as some people have suggested, it's hard to see the true density relationships in the original plot. There's a lot of overlapping data points.

2. I re-plotted the data using jittering to more accurately show the density distribution. I also added a GAM smoother to show the trend. Result:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2Tqdso8AsFNS3lWQTdPUGpHZlk/...

3. I also plotted the change in each teacher's value-added score from one year to the next. The resulting histogram:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2Tqdso8AsFNeUNiM3hHUGwzdlk/...

4. If we model the relationship as next_year_value_added = this_year_value_added + random_error, here's the fitted model:

Call:
lm(formula = va_0910 ~ va_0809, data = ds_cmp)

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 0.009157 0.002315 3.956 7.67e-05 ***
va_0809 0.820085 0.017646 46.475 < 2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 0.2153 on 8691 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.1991,	Adjusted R-squared: 0.199
F-statistic: 2160 on 1 and 8691 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16

If you want to see exactly what I did, I threw my R code and the data sets up on GitHub:
https://github.com/tmoertel/nyva-cursory

[1] http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/156599/now-available-...
The problem is that office politics are usually the only way to resolve issues within a company.

Invariably there's someone tasked with deciding which language something will be developed in, whether you can develop something in a given language, etc.

Usually these things are decided based upon whether the stupidest programmer in the room can program in this language, and whether in general bottom of the barrel programmers can use that language. Whenever you see Java, PHP, or C# you'll usually find the reason has something to do with the ability to hire 200 programmers to do the work of 2 or 3.

This is the office politics that kill companies, the usual Jimmy doesn't like Frankie stuff is minor and easily dealt with. Also, it generally only actually kills the company once a competitor is operating inside their OODA loop. In general with out a competitor that doesn't have office politics there's no serious threat to the organization.
I love the non-lawyerly language... "screw them, seriously, screw them". So refreshing to hear a corporate guy speak like a human being instead of a highly trained PR bot.
> If it's just a question of accent then I would agree. But if it's a question of grammar and word choice I don't. The article isn't clear on that point, since Freakonomics is about junk science that titillates and not about actual science. If you "sound black" because you have an accent that's just a reflection of where you grew up. If you "sound black" because your grammar is bad it really does reflect on your education.

A dialect is a combination of accent, vocabulary, and grammar. And no, it doesn't reflect your education. It reflects the culture in which you were raised.

There literally is no Standard English, let alone a Standard American English dialect. If you have been taught that there is, you have been taught incorrectly. All languages evolve, as a result of culture (including pop culture), geography, and time period. Even today, linguists have no consensus on the proper third person pronoun to use for an anonymous or hypothetical person. Some might say "He", some might say a randomized version of "He" or "She", and some might say "They". As of 30 years ago, all of them would have told you "He", and that anything else was bad grammar. But culture (acknowledgement of sexism) combined with common usage (which was/is incorrect grammar) have definitively changed the accepted standard.

Languages change. This isn't just an attempt at being politically correct...it is a fucking truism. The simple fact that I am referring to you as "you" is an acknowledgement of this fact. A strict interpretation of "you" requires usage in a plural second-person context. Culture, specifically in the reference to royalty in the plural (an implicit acknowledgement of royalty as being ambassadors of God), changed it from a plural pronoun into a singular pronoun in limited use cases. Contextually improper and uneducated overuse of the form led to its complete abandonment as a plural pronoun. It is now considered a grammatically correct singular pronoun in every known English dialect today.

Any sort of attempt to legitimize one dialect as proper or as a standard is a pure manifestation of xenophobia at best. Within the context of the article, people confuse the African American Vernacular with the lack of an education. In reality, it is a racist expectation that those belonging to one culture conform to the independently evolved standards of the culture that systemically isolated them and abused them for hundreds of years. I never said that the article was about other countries. It is about the ability to look past someone's dialect to see their education and experience. "Sounding Black" doesn't make you stupid. It makes you different.

And if you can't learn to get over it, you don't deserve a well-payed professional job...the kind of job where you will meet and talk to people from thousands of different backgrounds, all of whom will be noticeably different from you. You deserve the ditch digger job where you can be racist and expect everybody else to conform to what you grew up with. And yes, that last sentence was grammatically correct as of a few decades ago. Get over it.
Minor correction: Vine is 6 seconds, not 9.
The screenshots at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/WidgetLayout show pretty poor results with the new layout. Hopefully things will get better before it ships.

Also: they use GTK tools for designing the UI, but are they actually using GTK to implement it? Is its Mac support good enough now?
Ask HN:  Is finishing codecademy resume worthy?
It could be he didn't pay for the web design because it sucks and he can't even hyperlink his own site correctly.
Which Kindle did you buy?

Earlier this month I decided that I'd finally get one... so, I thought I'd get the DX (because it's large, and I figured since I'd be reading normal PDF's made for standard sized papers, it'd be my best bet) -- but, it seems Amazon stopped making them. Which is a pity, because it's everything I'd wanted: e-ink display, and large.
Not a python expert, but python3 has had to add unlocal to let you create a non local variable. Lua requires explicit local, else things are global (which has different problems but seems a more logical choice).

Lua also makes all loop indexes local to the loop which is very clean. Python has difficulty with this.
prtfl.io is obviously building a thoughtful product with the goal that people will get value out of it. prtflio.eu did the equivalent of putting a file upload widget in front of s3 and calling it flickrcom.eu.
I'm not sure what's sad.

There's always a precarious balance between security and convenience.

The customers own their code. They have been around longer for more oscillations between the "cloud" and bare metal than most people who have an opinion on it.

They're forward thinking enough to not embrace the cloud, or bare metal, and instead are exploring hybrid cloud technology that can run on a combination, and more importantly, move dev ops between different environments.

One reality is many people who blindly think it's ok to put everything on in the cloud, don't always know of the reality of liability, or have a relationship with any codebase and the associated IP for more than a few years.
Also, if you have the following custom license plates in California, you get a ton of parking tickets..

Noplates

Missing

XXX

NV
I thought this was about building the source; something I for one have tried and found a point of pain.

FF(O)S, people!

Invest in some cloud build infrastructure (binary blobs excepted; wrap the existing glassechidna client for that), expand your device count, and help people try out your code. No try, no show and tell. No show and tell, no excitement. No excitement, no devs. No devs, no win.
I think also the construction of the for loop makes it more natural. Lua is "for i = i, n" vs the more complex and off-by-1 prone "for (i = 1; i < n; i++)" where you need the less than vs an equality.
I don't think it's so easy to manipulate a classroom full of students into thinking you're a great teacher when you're not. Remember, you're in front of them several hours a day, 5 days a week.
Iran responds to EU oil and gas sanctions with… oil and gas sanctions
Isn't the point that before starting a measurement exercise one should have defined how one was going to interpret the results - and the whole is or is not successful if it meets its own success criteria
Ask HN: I'm looking for an objective-c/iOS development tutor.
It would likely have to be over skype or something of the like.

Any experienced tutors out there in this area? Thanks.
We compile with -Werror, so triple checking compiler warnings isn't required, it won't even compile if there are any warnings.

At one point we were using an older version of GCC, and an older version of clang and both would miscompile different pieces of the code with optimisations turned on. A lot of things have been fixed since then. There were a few cases where the code that was written was undefined in the standard and the compiler could do as they pleased, but there were quite a few cases where that wasn't the case. The places where it was undefined we fixed, the others we never did figure out what was going on. Newer versions of GCC/clang did the right thing, so we finally upgraded, solving a whole lot of the problems.

At this point in time it just doesn't make sense for us to compile with optimisations turned on, so why risk it?
Those are both brilliant links. The books I've found all seem a bit pedestrian.