skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, stop disclosing students' grades to anyone but the students themselves, and that cuts out that problem. (At least most of it.) Especially don't disclose to future educational institutions.

As an adult, no one gets my grades. They are for my personal growth and no one else's business. If someone wants to evalute my abilities, they have to do it by sitting down with me and figuring it out themselves, or looking at Github or something.

If I'm responsible for a child's future, and for her/him to have a decent future I have to do certain reasonable things that some backwards educational culture considers "cheating", I'll do it.

(Of course, I wouldn't want to put the child in such a toxic environment in the first place, where her success might put others at some weird disadvantage. There are more enlightened schools.)
A link to a pastebin (the only alternative that comes to my mind) would have required more verification effort, I guessed.
If you're interested in this you might like to read the extensive discussion from two weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5098832
I'm in the middle of a philosophy 101 class. I had been meaning to read the works of Plato, but until now I was busy learning other stuff.

I have to say that surprisingly, I have lost all respect for Plato after reading Crito (It's Plato's take on what Socrates' reasons for not escaping his execution.) It contains the most illogical, oversimplified, flat-out erroneous thought processes I've ever encountered. If Crito is an accurate representation of Socrates' philosophy, I have to question the intelligence of anyone who felt that he was "wise."

I was pretty dissapointed by this, because I enjoyed some of Plato's other writings.

I do happen to agree that the Iliad is far superior to the quality of writing found in the bible.
Why don't just register companies offshore in jurisdictions that reject/ignore patent law and avoid this mess? I don't think patent trolls would have much chance offshore.
The US federal government is a perfect example. Remote - geographically, culturally, and financially - from the people it governs, it has continually eroded the freedoms and protections of the bill of rights, and has usurped the sovereign authority of the state governments.

The federal government has been a great success for those with the money to control it and bend its power to their will, but has been an absolute disaster for the vast number of ordinary Americans.
Wikimedia Commons has a lot of samples, though they're not very strongly curated at the moment: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Audio_files_by_la...

There are various university projects for specific languages or regions. This site has a number of samples of American English and American German dialects: http://csumc.wisc.edu/AmericanLanguages/index.htm
Yes, but the algorithms relevant to a domain are not Algorithms 1&2 class algorithms. For example, writing a network protocol requires knowledge of finite-state machines, writing a type-inference engine requires knowledge of unification, writing a thread scheduler requires knowledge of various scheduling algorithms.

Knowing the most efficient way to find all the anagrams in a text is not relevant to any of them, though. And yes, I was given that problem in an interview last week. I got it right, but the actual position involved more knowledge of architecture, assembly, and compilation than of Algorithms Guru Yoga.
Should be a link to "Life of Brian" here - where Cleese says "What have the Romans every given us? Nothun'!" and a cell member raises his hand. "The Aquaduct?" "Oh yeah, the Aquaduct, yeah, that." And on and on until they have a long list of improvements instituted by the Romans.
If those are the Big Ideas, then we are bankrupt of ideas. Also, didn't anyone read Stephenson's The Diamond Age? Must have, to come up with skyscrapers out of diamonds. Gee, can diamond buildings be heated and cooled and ventilated efficiently? What about ambient sound control? By the way, where's my damn jetpack?
>2. Great programmers don't have to worry about learning libraries -- they just figure them out.

I would love to be able to do this. The amount of time I'll ponder on a library thinking "what are the internal mechanics of this?" can be quite frustrating. For OpenGL, for example, I have such a hard time processing a mental image of the system that I can't really figure out how to use it well.

Every library should have their first page be an explanation of how everything goes together, in layman's terms. The fact that the X server books had a huge introduction explaining everything really helped me understand the otherwise ungrokable code.
I don't know a damn thing about the law so I'm asking this in the hopes of education; I live in a country that doesn't recognise software patents. Presumably I can still sell software overseas, to places where software patents are recognised. What's stopping people such as Mr Meyer creating a company in my country that exists purely to create the effect that all sales of his software come from my country?

Not trolling or snarking; I genuinely don't know what the situation would be in that kind of case. Company employee in a the US making the software just as before, but technically working for company in a country that doesn't recognise software patents, and that company is the company selling the software to people in the US.
The second question

(0.1 + 0.2) + 0.3 == 0.1 + (0.2 + 0.3)

is not an edge case, unfortunately.
I read HN in bed on my iPad on weekends. Most of these games don't have on screen controls, but yours did! It was a little broken though, I could only press the right arrow most of the time.
This advice falls under the general pattern of addressing a relatable problem and offering a solution that validates the reader's intuition without explaining how to make the behavior habitual. Stating what I want to achieve (waking up before my alarm) doesn't help me achieve it.

The author claims to have 'given a lot of thought' to other products. What products? Is pure reason the right approach for deriving solutions to behavioral problems?
I submit that should have been Big Idea #1. It's better than the other 7.
Apple Push Notification Service in Rails
Tips For Your Next Presentation - Free PDF my coworker compiled
Its all context I guess. If you signed up for the honor code, then violated it, you have some moral difficulty there.

I agree though, that the ultimate idea is to educate. If that can be achieved through a back-and-forth exchange with a group or a graduate assistant, then that's maybe how it should normally be done. Maybe all semester, not just during the 'final'.
Microsoft / Technion effort mines old news for predictions
For the most part, I like your list better, but I do think everyone should read the works of Thomas Paine.

In particular, I think that every single American should have to read Common Sense first in high school, and then annually as a part of registration process for voting (Along with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.)

I also happen to think that the Age of Reason is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing the world has ever seen.
I always end up going back to Drupal. Sure you need to be an astro physicist to be able to get Views and Panels to work with a jQuery version from this century but where else can you build a fully functional social network with Solr based indexing and tagging in two hours? Rails? I think not. It took the Diaspora guys a year to build something that could have been done in weeks in Drupal with pre existing modules that can be turned on and off with a checkbox.

I admit she is treacherous as the sea and I swear off her regularly, but she's still my go-too gal when I have a dumb idea for a multi user site that I want to get working before lunch.
Evolution by natural selection entails faithful reproduction. Survival demands relevant reproduction.

It's kind of obvious, n'est pas?
So how can that be? That those presumably derivative texts know more about Christianity than the authoritative text, which you say is not worth the paper? Here, I'll guess: They're making stuff up. Rationalizing, trying to put a chaotic mess into some sort of order, but in the process injecting a lot of themselves.

So it comes down to, read your favorite author and believe what you want. Which is not going to go down well with a lot of people.
>>>and nowhere does it mention that the end user has redistribution rights

What's not prohibited is implied as allowed. You are worrying over nothing.
I'm not putting down the Etch-a-Sketch. We had one in our house when I was a kid. Just putting the tablet numbers into perspective because the person to which I replied didn't seem to understand how quickly tablets are selling. The iPad is only 3 years old. Android tablets are just starting to take off.
Never thought of it quite like that - yes, we did expand the Borders a little:-)
No. Bearing in mind that a lot of very smart people invest a lot of time studying analytics and refining algorithms to detect spurious clicks, I don't imagine that such "well-intentioned" clicking is ever going to be more than a trivial portion of the sites' income.

At the point numbers of "donor" clicks start becoming non-trivial, the site owners start getting their publisher accounts banned, so I'm working on the assumption they probably don't want me to do it.
Use vim, with powerline, nerdtree, fugitive, and other pathogen-based plugs by tpope, etc.

This IDE versus editor discussion is pointless. You should be configuring your tools, not learning them.

You need to practice at practicing, if you will. So wake up each day, grab a coffee, and [code](http://typing.io) for 15 minutes. You have to stretch your muscles, if you buy that memory and modules of the brain are elastic "muscles."

And I'm sure you do.
That's what examples are for. Start from working code; make it your own.

Sure it helps to have a mental model. But how to achieve that? Expect it to take time, and digging right in and looking at those examples, and changing them to see what works.
Jody Sherman on the experience of finding a baby on his doorstep (2009)
Solve the FRP chicken-egg problem with bacon.js
Here's a link to a FAQ I have prepared for my local mathematics students, "Courage in the Face of Stupidity,"

http://www.epsiloncamp.org/CourageandStupidity.php

designed to prevent exactly the kind of problem mentioned in the article kindly submitted here. School curricula in many parts of the United States (and perhaps elsewhere too, as I note the article is from Canada?) are designed so that most pupils will succeed in school assignments most of the time. That doesn't provide enough practice in taking on HARD tasks, and inadequately prepares young learners to succeed in either

a) study of more than one really difficult subject at the same time

or

b) successful problem-solving in adult life in private employment, when the problems are often open-ended and ill-defined.

As a parent of four children, and as a teacher of elementary-age pupils, I'm all about first bolstering children's expectations that initial failure is not a sure predictor of never succeeding, and then introducing CHALLENGING problems into their education so that one thing they practice while young is overcoming failure.
How about the Convention on Cluster Munitions? That seems to be a "True Scotsman".

- US policy is decidedly against it

- Lots of money in selling munitions, and definitely lives involved

- Norway organized it and locals campaigned for it
You don't seem to be disagreeing. The point was that you need to know which properties matter to your application before you can truly decide where you should worry about emphasis.

But, for those that want a good example of what you are talking about, it seems to mirror the recent post by Carmack regarding ray tracing. If I recall, the point was that, though ray tracing is better in O terms, it has an outrageous constant factor.
To wake early, go to bed early. Dead simple!
that is actually one good point, I find deploying PHP systems a lot easier than python ones (ex Django)

no need to write any services/complex deployment scripts, just push the files and your website is updated ..
When Darren and I were looking at baremetal OS - we liked it because we could quantify what Xen and other kernels were missing - generic drivers - and we saw we could improve everything by making a system more specialized and what we wanted to use (think about what you actually put a commercial system on, there's not too much choice - especially for HPC). An example of this would be an athlete like a runner, and a shot-putter. Think of their body shapes - they are very different! Yet we all treat operating systems as if they are the same (for compatibility). Being more specialist is obviously not for everyone! Linux (or any other OS) is...

Regarding compatibility - my personal long term aspiration is to abstract the HW through LLVM which will eventually allow us to target Xen or other exokernel systems or run more close to the metal by running/developing a true erlang kernel through a mixed ERTS/BMOS (Baremetal OS) code-base.

As mentioned in earlier comments, erlang already has a pretty mean scheduler, and memory management system. Personally as an academic exercise - I'd like to see how this operates at a kernel level and in the future, I'll be spending more time on this. All other existing operating systems I personally believe are just getting in the way of best possible performance.

Finally erlangonxen which you mentioned above is not open source. That does not make sense to me, and it does not give me what I want... Doing this is a very selfish exercise, as it's what I want. Hopefully other people will want (and make sense of) this too, but atm I'm not fussed.

Cheers
Andrew
Am I missing something here? I've been trying to use WebGL for weeks now, based on [unconed's MathBox articles][uc]. For the life of me, I [cannot get this to work][my] on any laptop that uses the Intel HD 4000 graphics card (my samsung series 9) ... which includes nearly all the macbooks, no less. If that pretty common graphics card isn't supported, how can anyone develop WebGL libraries, let alone expect others to use them. Perhaps this will be patched in some (linux?) driver update in the future, but until then....

[uc]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5158989
[my]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5088918

EDIT: I clearly don't understand HN's subset of Markdown, either...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5140135
George Orwell wrote them, but Allen Short was the person who applied them in that way to a security context. Much of the post is apparently greatly due to Allen Short, so he deserves some mention.
You need to ask, because that's what a trial is for. To give folks a chance to defend themselves; to allow mercy into the process.

Its pretty common for Engineers to deconstruct social processes into algorithms, but the humanity often gets lost.

Let me try: lying under oath happens during someone else's trial, when you're bound by law to tell the truth. During your perjury trial you're protected by the 5th amendment, so the process must by necessity involve information-gathering from external sources. Whether you lie or not then becomes almost immaterial.
Ask HN: Not-SaaS analytics
Hello HN,

We've been looking for analytics for web application, which could be run in our own servers. I like Mixpanel, but because of the nature of the service, we have to keep the data on our servers.

Any recommendations or experiences?
When people disagree that doesn't imply that the situation is highly subjective and all opinions are equally valid. In this case I believe they most certainly are not and I think you are drawing stronger conclusions than is warranted.

There are objective ways in which to judge programming, by considering whether simple rules like the SOLID principles, low coupling, DRY, using composition over inheritance, keeping code complexity measurements low, favoring immutability, statelessness and referential transparency, etc. have been followed.

If any programmer is certain of the superiority of 'his programming style' (singular), then that programmer is insufficiently humble and lacks knowledge of multiple programming styles. Tragically, if you don't know what you don't know, you can think you know everything and can thus speak with confidence on a subject.

One can wonder what comments would be left if you removed all those from programmers with less than 5 years of programming experience, programmers under 30 and programmers with experience in only a single language. My suspicion is that a pretty consistent picture would emerge, with a number of caveats and YMMV's, with an eye for the actual, intended and possible future use cases, the language, the maturity of the project, etc.
Makes sense. Bureaucracies are soulless moral-free machines good at crushing individuals in some mindless goal of self-perpetuation. In fact, makes perfect sense!
Huge tentacle-ye monster (or at least, close): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5026950
São Paulo World's Biggest Technology Convention underway
Concerns About A.D.H.D. Practices and Amphetamine Addiction
Under the spreading patent tree,
I sold you and you sold me.

When we're done with the well-deserved two minutes hate of patent trolls, lawyers and the broken legal system, perhaps we can consider the willing and eager participation of thousands of engineers in the corporate patent process. While it does not apply to the patent under discussion, the majority of software patents are produced not by individual inventors in garages but by employees in cubicles, then assigned to their employers.

Rationalizing comes easy, especially with the prospect of a fat per-patent bonus: "Everyone else is doing it, it's just self-defence", "If I don't, someone else will, might as well be me", "Most of these are silly and will get overturned in court anyway", "My promotion prospects depend on it"...

I was one of them. Forgive me, for I have sinned.

I fear few of my ex-colleagues would agree, though. When will the penny drop, I wonder? Will you be shocked - shocked! - when one of your patents is used offensively in a lawsuit? When you hear about Lodsys and Uniloc and realize that it's not just impersonal big companies who can afford it, but individuals who are victims?

Oh well. I'm off to buy an indulgence by contributing to X-Plane's defense..
Whether you like it or not, if you intend to acquaint yourself with "the classics", you won't understand half of the allusions made without first reading the bible.

It's like watching Futurama without a pop science level of familiarity with physics, maths and so on.
I don't really disagree with your point exactly. But something I've noticed with lots of the European software I've come across is that the makers are phenomenally bad at monetizing their work. Renoise is a great example, an extremely mature, very complex piece of studio ready software that you'd expect would run for industry standard prices of at least $500 per license, but runs for something more like $80.

Protools by way of comparison runs about $800-1000 depending on the package (the version upgrade to 10 runs $300-400).

As a consumer I'm very glad that Renoise is only $80, but I can't help but wonder if they might be taken more seriously in the pro-music industry if they just sold the same product for $500, and they might make a great deal more money.
You get an historical context by reading the original, "direct from the source", which you don't get from a more modern, easier to digest version. It also gives you a good reference point to be able to discuss the topic with other people, since the more popular text will've had far more commentary written about it and will have far more people having read it.

I think the historical context also has value just because I think, in our modern age, there's a tendency to dismiss the intellectual achievements of our forebearers. To think that humanity in the past made mistakes just because they were dumb. Which is dangerous, because these mistakes tend to repeat themselves. I think reading these older books can give you an appreciation for not just what's changed with humanity, but what's stayed the same too and I think that can be very valuable indeed.

So ponderous maybe, but I don't think it's a pretentious list. I think there's real value there.
I'm not sure why you were expecting to respect Plato for everything he wrote about. Plato may have been one of the brilliant minds of all times and have produced some of the most valuable bits of Western culture, history and philosophy, but even for his own time the guy had some seriously disturbing ideas about what the world should look like. The Republic for example has been a great inspiration for fascist ideas or the promotion of human inequality.
If you're looking for Google Analytics-style "high level website stuff" (visitors, pageviews, per-page, yadda yadda): http://haveamint.com/

If you're looking for MixPanel/KissMetrics style arbitrary event tracking, I do not have a good recommendation for you for an OSS or off-the-shelf solution. I'd be interest in hearing others' experiences.

A lot of consulting clients end up rolling their own. You can get pretty far with Postgres or Redis and hourly/daily cron jobs which dump their output to a few admin screens. They're several orders of magnitude more expensive than the SaaS alternatives (+), marketing can't use them w/o engineering helping out to set them up, and they're generally going to produce less pretty output, but they're often perfectly adequate for decisionmaking.

(+ I struggle to think of a consulting client which does metrics in-house that does not have six figures or more of implicit engineering cost in their metrics systems.)
Play Framework 2.0: Generate TinyUrl With goo.gl API
The Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email.
Which sounds a bit like a riff off Hayek, who riffed off a long and illustrious line of skeptics of rationalism.
That cuts off the motivation to compete against their peers and deprives them of the data that would allow them to analyze themselves in relation to others.
If you take a look at the code, most of that's dealing with the backend UI, comments, and stuff broken into multiple lines for readability.

Bashing based on LOC is as moronic as the old practice of LOC as a performance metric.
Multithreading with BlackBerry 10 and Qt
Etch A Sketch Inventor Dies at 86
Yeah, I think folks don't often realize how hostile an environment the human body can be to foreign invaders. Sure if you can sneak by the immune system, the human body is a microorganism paradise, but the immune systems of organisms are highly tuned to seek out and destroy foreign.
I've never used python, so it would be starting from scratch. I love a lot of things about rails but deployment is not one of them. Is it easier to deploy Django?
At a university level, that was the original idea of the University of California Santa Cruz, which gave students written evaluations of what they had done well and poorly on in each course, rather than numerical or letter grades (though you could still fail a course). As a result, there were also no GPAs or rankings. My understanding is they eventually abandoned it precisely because external people wanted to see the grades and rank students: employers and grad schools like looking at GPAs. So even if pedagogically it worked great (I would need to read more to determine if that were true), external factors made it difficult to continue with.
Indeed, hardness does not equal strength. "Strong enough to bend" is a phrase that comes to mind.