skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In June I wrote a bit about this:

"When automated fabrication—the scenario where you get your next bicycle by
downloading bicycle blueprints over the network and sending them to a machine
that then produces a bicycle for you without human intervention—happens, it
will not be by means of 3-D printers, which work by depositing layers of a
small number of materials. Instead, it will take the form of automated assembly
by robots of parts mostly made by other means, such as laser cutting, torch
cutting, CNC machining, and planar printing processes."

I posted that on http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2012-June/00.... What do you think? Is that correct?
Should be "Nice class 9", not Vienna, sorry.
Everything was great up until the end. I thought this line was completely unnecessary:

I hope to post again Friday with some conclusions but for
now, based on a day’s reporting, I will say this much: I
reject Mr. Musk’s central contention that Mr. Broder’s
Sunday piece was faked in order to sabotage the Model S or
the electric-car industry.

I also reject that Broder was in the pocket of the oil industry as redditors are claiming, but I have little doubt that Broder didn't embellish parts just make the story juicier and more readable. Since he writes about energy mainly, his role was probably more to review the supercharging network than the car. But reviewing the network makes for a pretty boring story and having an article that is controversial and paints the tesla as a dud, looks like a classic news hook. This reminds me of the death of Jan Berenstein, author of the Berenstein, and the Slate article that declared that she was a bore and exclaimed "good riddance" [0]. After that post came out there was a good follow up analyzing the journalist motivations in that piece and the allure of the "news hook" [1]

It's unfortunate that this journalist was willing to trade their integrity for more pageviews. Karma's a bitch.

[0] http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/02/27/jan_berensta...

[1] http://www.themillions.com/2012/04/the-berenstain-bears-and-...
Seeing how required programming classes in university (several MATLAB courses freshman year for all engineering students) affected the attitudes my peers had towards my work, I have to be opposed to this.

Forcing people without an aptitude or interest to take some sort of "one size fits all" coding course is going to perpetuate myths and misconceptions about the industry. It is better for students to know that they don't know what programming is like than for them to think they know, and think it is awful.
"Required programming classes"?

Sounds like a bit of a buzz kill already.
I agree this tendency is strong among Jews due probably mostly to historical prejudice. But it's clearly the case among many Muslim communities (look up the Maldives) -- you don't even really have the option to give it up.

And as for Catholics, I have known many who say it's always there as part of their identity, regardless of their religious beliefs.

Protestant Christianity seems almost an outlier in the way people come and go in the various sects. But even there, especially in the Southern USA, I've heard people say it is so ingrained into their culture that the thought of professing agnosticism or atheism is a truly life-changing, possibly life-wrecking decision.

I stand by my premise, that religion is way more mixed up with family identity than would be the case if it were simply a pure expression of belief.
I'm up in Johnson City and grew up in Knoxville. I love Tennessee, but there is zero tech scene as you know. I do freelancing remotely and it provides a great life for us.
(crossposting from the earliest HN submission)

Now that's quite a sight. Here's a blog with more videos and pictures:

http://www.russianmachineneverbreaks.com/2013/02/14/what-is-...

I don't know about the accuracy of this news report, but take a look:

http://rt.com/news/meteorite-crash-urals-chelyabinsk-283/

And this from the Bad Astronomy blog on Slate:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/02/11/asteroid...

On Friday, Feb. 15, the Earth is going to get a very close shave by an asteroid. Called 2012 DA14, this 50 meter (160 foot) rock will pass just over 27,000 kilometers (17,000 miles) from the Earth’s surface. This is closer than our geosynchronous satellites, so this really is a close pass!

But, to be very clear: This asteroid poses no threat to us right now, nor in the foreseeable future. Friday’s miss is just that: a miss. And, in fact, this is a good thing, since any time an asteroid gets close (but misses), we learn a lot, including how to find them, how to track them, and even how to talk about them to the public.
I'm not feeling good about the trend of teaching everyone how to program. There are other skills that are equally as viable, if not more so, and there are a ton of people who wouldn't be able to cut it, anyways.

Grant it, we all have our weaknesses (I have terrible rote-style memory so I did terrible in History), but I don't think that purposefully pushing kids into classes were there is a chance over 50% can't get a grip on it is a good idea. As an elective course, it is great, but should be no more mandatory than a foreign language or requiring people to master pre-calculus before graduating. I mean, with programming being so mathematical, why would you mandate students to program when so many struggle to get past algebra in high school?
I agree. I think that this sort of thing is going to produce a "me against the world" mentality, and so I understand why these reactions occur. But although I understand it, I don't think it is right to say "fuck you" to the doctor who treated you, unless there is real cause for it. Their job is already hard enough.
Ah, but you're overlooking the extremely strong possibility that the contract Broder / NYT signed as part of borrowing the test vehicle authorized Tesla to use the onboard telemetry in any way Tesla sees fit.

Furthermore, this situation is extremely dissimilar to a private individual lending a car to another private individual to do things where the borrower has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
I never said they weren't! However, you still need to know about them and understand them to write the software -- and to figure out why your CNC job went wrong if the software screws up.

For instance, maybe the software is smart enough to throw a red flag if your reach length is no good for the CNC job you're going to run -- but you still have to know about it and understand the concept to set it [correctly].
This is totally bogus. CNN didn't even try and break it!
This could be a good idea, but there are only so many hours in the school day, so what are you going to cut to make room?
Uh-oh, Counter Strike: Source is available on Linux... there goes my startup.
Sensationalized article title. The text reads

The president suggested that with the high interest in digital technology among
young people it makes sense to teach skills like programming and graphic design
in high school so that students can go on to pursue a career, with or without a
four-year college degree.

which seems like a reasonable position to take. Doesn't say "mandatory" or "required" anywhere.

EDIT: I'm wrong. The very first line of the article:

President Obama says he wouldn't mind seeing a curriculum requirement for
American high school students to learn a programming language.

Still, mentioning it offhand in a google hangout seems very different than introducing it into legislation.
It's been significantly warmer the last few days than it supposedly was when the first trip was done. Given that temperature has a big effect on the car's energy, both the battery capacity and use of the heater, I'd say CNN's results don't disprove the NYT article.
This doesn't really mean anything if the temp is much warmer now.
Yeah, but the online interface and experience is atrocious. Tried it a few times and it simply doesn't compare to going to the store.
I can't help but notice this is only a few positions above the large hadron collider shutting down story. Correlation?
This is a welcome change but I'm still irrationally resentful of Quora for not offering a legitimate API for accessing our data.
I may open source it soon. Still trying to decide where to take it.
Ultimately, it is about trusting the system. Even when on gasoline, and the indicator shows empty, we have a gut feel for how much further we can push it.

But with these new cars, that trust is not there and hence the blaming of the system.
"Universally more productive with computers" does not mean "know how to program a computer." Should kids be learning how to use and run a spreadsheet and type without hunting-and-pecking? Yes. Should they know how to compute big O to be productive? No.
Remarkable Role of Virtual Assistants in Online Marketing
Really? Is that so hard? All you need is a table on the router that tells it the best information it can currently have about the number of requests processed on each dyno - without doing a roundtrip. This requires exactly one additional (one-way) package: A message from the dyno to the router, telling it that it has finished the current request.

Now, to avoid dead dynos (because the finished message might have been lost somewhere) the dyno can repeat the finished message ever 30 seconds or so (and the router ignores messages with counts <= 0).
I'd consider this a pretty high priority. Even for a demo.
Not really a surprise - I don't think there was really any doubt about the performance of the Tesla in normal weather. The NYC area right now is well above freezing, approaching +10C in the daytime, nowhere near the deep freeze that occurred during the NYT drive.

This still doesn't put to rest the expected (but somehow controversial) concerns about lithium battery performance in cold weather. This concern IMO needs to be put to rest if electrics want to break into the mainstream market. Early adopters may be willing to plan judiciously around range and expected weather, but I doubt mainstream consumers will be so forgiving.

Having a car of (somewhat) limited range lose a large chunk of its battery just sitting overnight in a parking lot, in weather that is cold but hardly unusual for the region, is a problem. That both on-board software and human advisers seem poorly prepared to compensate for this is hardly a nail in Tesla's coffin, but does need to be sorted out.
Opera acquires Skyfire for its video-optimization and smartphone monetization
A) 25x? I'd have to be an idiot to believe that. The ratio isn't that high between the USA and China.

B) When I looked this up the ratio between Brazil and China ranges between 2x and 3.5x. (China doesn't have a single national minimum.)

C) On the more important comparison, PPP per capita GDP the ratio is less than 2x.

It seems like 60% tariffs are still significant. We're all acquainted with the nearly universal practice of doing most manufacture in a cheap nation and then doing only the final assembly (or sometimes disassembly) in the importing nation. If this isn't what you're seeing you haven't been paying attention.
Buying Nexus 4 via Play store in India for under Rs. 22.5k
Heroku Admits To Performance Degradation
This is something that has hit my consciousness only recently as a result of the gun debate (3-d printers are being used to manufacture magazines). Since then I have checked out some uses for it on YouTube and have seen everything it used to manufacture model airplanes that fly to hand-grenades (yikes!). I have already been pricing out units myself and would like to purchase one of these one day in the not-so-distant future. The change that this technology will bring to so many individuals around the world is nothing short of revolutionary. I believe that it will really impact our society over the next decade in ways we would not even realize yet- kind of like the Internet did in the 1990's.
I'm having trouble finding information about this. It's disturbing how little attention seems to be given to load balancing relative to how important it is.
I don't get why everyone all of a sudden needs to know how to program. There's more to the world than the iOS SDK...why does every kid need to be able to write an app? I really don't understand.
Every time this is brought up, there's pearl clutching and handwringing from technical and non-technical folks alike. The fretting goes, "What about the people who don't like it? What about the people who have no aptitude for it?" And to this I ask:

What makes programming so special that we should shield people without aptitude from learning it?

Many have no aptitude for language – we still require english classes. Many have no passion for the sciences – we still require studying chemistry and biology. Some could care less about history – but every year of high school typically includes a history class scoped to one period or region.

So why should programming be different? Why should we shield people from learning a subject which has ubiquity equal to language or mathematics, and infinitely more lucrative application? Why should we accept a substantial chunk of our population being illiterate on a discipline whose misunderstanding can have terrible consequences for both individuals and society at large?

Understanding how a computer works, in a world dominated more and more by technology, places you at great advantage. Ignorance of the same leaves you at the mercy of those who are technically proficient and, more and more, limits your lifetime income potential.
The point that I probably failed to make, is that trying to drop out of the work-for-wages/acquire capital/hire-people/produce goods ecosystem only works as long as you have a lot of people prepared to work-for-wages/acquire capital/hire-people/produce goods who will create the environment that keeps you alive.

I would never besmirch the good name of the sun, nor suggest that we don't all depend on it. I think we can all agree that we've greatly benefited from living within the sun's ecosystem.
Great article. It's tempting to look at the Obama campaign's digital savvy as the key to their victory, but it's mostly a symptom of the central problem of the Republicans--they have a message that just does not work with smart, innovative, young people.

So most of the smart, innovative, young people go to work on Democratic causes, where they seek to engage other people who already lean the same way. Of course their social software works better than the Republicans--their audience is more social and more software-savvy.

And the few smart, innovative, young people who do work on the GOP technology projects reject a huge portion of the modern GOP coalition. They're not religious, they're not bigoted, and they're not violent.
It's worth pointing out that they're staying at the Milford SuperCharger quite a lot longer than Elon's data showed NY times did. They're charging it a lot more - and would even if it was too chilly out for the batteries to operate at optimal discharge rate, they'd still be in the clear as a result.

This is more of a PR move - of course if you calculate it out it's possible - the NY Times driver wasn't staying at SuperChargers long at all and missed mark by 30mi.
As an optional class would be cool.
This is awesome!! I love this guy.
> Still, mentioning it offhand in a google hangout seems very different than introducing it into legislation.

Absolutely, and there's a big difference between "endorses" as in a quick mention and "endorses" as in pushing for it with all his political power - however, just because it's him mentioning it rather than him trying to make it happen it doesn't change the fact that he did endorse it, as the title claims, and that for him to do that is still very relevant.
As a game developer, the best value of bitcoin is that it is a hack-resistant and durable way to exchange currency.

Gold is nice, but we can make gold someday or someone can discover a bunch of gold somewhere and it all goes down.

The government backed value is good, but governments are controlled by people and they can be corrupt.

Other forms of tangible value is ok, but it suffers from all sorts of various problems that make them generally less good than gold ie. less elementally stable, too fragile, too common, etc.

The way bitcoins works from my understanding is that:

1. Anyone can make a bitcoin if they find a pattern that matches a description of a bitcoin.

2. Bitcoins are traded publicly with ledgers distributed. If you trade your bitcoin 1075 to me, there will be a record of that transaction on several servers around the world. This concept is perhaps similar to bittorrent.

The benefits to these two basic principles are mostly that which javert has stated.

----

As a side note, there are a TON of services to get you started with bitcoin, today, for free. I feel that as a technologist, you should try it out.

1. Go to https://instawallet.org/ to get an address for others to send you bitcoins
2. Go to sites listed https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=90718.0 and get some free bitcoins

----

Now, on a very personal note, I find bitcoins very interesting, but I don't believe it can reach its intended goals. Governments need to be able to track spending to tax and regulate. Bitcoins makes things like money laundering very easy. If bitcoin reaches any real scale it will be shut down, fast.
Nailed it. Also worth mentioning that maybe being forced to take a class isn't a good way to learn something. I learned to love to program by playing with it as a hobby. I hated the programming class I took as an elective in highschool because the content was outdated and the teacher was pretty terrible. Another good question: who would be teaching these classes?
It's possible a damning story in an influential newspaper could have as much impact on Tesla's business as an M&A contract.

If I were the journalist I would have got my facts checked with Tesla. If I were Tesla, I would have checked that my response was ironclad, especially when accusing a journalist of lying. Now, they have two problems.
I don't think it is a counterculture yet. I think it will happen in 10-20 years, maybe more. Just a humble prediction. So no, it's not a counterculture right now. It's a bunch of vague ideas and random people who don't feel totally comfortable using Facebook or putting on Google Glasses. I think once tech begins to infiltrate further into our social lives (even further than it already has), _then_ the counterculture will coalesce.
This works out in the end, really. It's a shame, but it's a hell of a great indicator for who to avoid. If I had to guess, the justification in their mind is that they still get the work. Though in reality, they're just painting a sign on their forehead that reads "I'm clueless."
"In order to view our advanced, sophisticated website, please type in the following command to your computer:

$ sudo apt-get install flex-mysql-lib
"
That's actually the way things worked in Ukraine when I was going to high school. Granted, it was programming in Basic, but everybody in junior and senior year had to take a course that combined keyboarding and programming.

Ukrainian (and post-Soviet) education system is somewhat different from US, as students can leave high school after their sophomore year, if their future plans involve going to a vocational school, community college or just straight to work. Only those who plan to enter college stay for the last two years.
Now this is just ridiculous.

Everyone knows that Al Gore invented ChromeOS.
Love, the Leanest Startup
Quora's response to the signup wall
Hipsters are SO into Facebook. And even _more_ into Instagram. They define pop culture by positioning themselves against a "phantom" pop culture that is even more pop.
THE CHANGING DEFINITION OF “ADDRESS” ON Your CARD
Big-O isn't programming, but basic programming knowledge like how to use scripting for everyday tasks does lead to increased productivity with computers.
Nowhere on the linked page is there any reference to a 6.9 quake. There wasn't an earthquake of any kind, although, "Witnesses said the explosion was so loud that it resembled an earthquake and thunder at the same time..."

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to believe anyway. Wasn't the rule that RT is considered accurate on any stories not involving Russia?
have you tried reverse engineering someone else's non-trivial spreadsheet? a programmer might build a good spreadsheet but the average person builds a nest of lookups and hacked up nested if/then statements. seriously, i think spreadsheets are un-auditable - the only way to double check something is to write your own version and check the output... now you've got 2 problems...
I don't understand this sentiment. Lots of people get through life just fine, and in fact are immensely successful in life, without knowing how to program. The fact is that the HS flavor of all of those classes are basically recite and regurgitate with a different name attached to it. The other difference is that there are different levels of classes for different levels of students, unless things have changed drastically from 15 years ago, this was the pallet of choices in math for a senior:

Pre-Algebra

Algebra

Trig

Geometry

Algebra 2

Pre-Calc

Calc

And sciences were similar (and all elective):

Chemistry

Biology

Physics

etc...

I really don't get why "computer skills" should be conflated with learning how to program completely. The world is very large and needed skill-sets change very fast. I guess that we should, since it is the current trend, force students to learn about handling large amounts of data and working through statistics and probability courses as well?
This is NoSQL at startups in a nutshell. A master-slave vertical scaling database won't work when we're the size of twitter, so we're going to settle for a shoddy user experience while we customize the hell out of it. Heroku gets away from this with Postgres and hopefully they can get away from this with their load balancing too.
At this point they haven't really done anything. I'm really curious to see what they come up with.
God has made it possible for me when it should not have been possible at all. Somehow, God proves that He is real to me in that against all odds I keep going. All of these answers in this thread that I have read are great answers for doing all that you know how to do. Sometimes it takes God to put you over when nothing else can. If all else fails, try God! Lol!
I find this so annoying: "We ask people to sign up because it's important to our mission -- to share and grow the world's knowledge. The more people who join Quora, the more knowledge is added."

How stupid do you really think we are. Just say it, having more users will make your BUSINESS successful. I hate being talked down to like some oblivious idiot.
Jeff Weiner gives every LinkedIn employee an iPad Mini
Minecraft Shop
The fact that you're arguing over the synonymous/non-synonymous semantics of two phrases, rather than actually refuting locke's main point, says a great deal about your argument.
If it isn't introduced in legislation, then a politician doesn't actually care. This is a basic truth in politics.

I wouldn't expect this to happen given the general trend away from anything resembling vocational training and the lack of skills to teach the class.
I think a "time bomb" would be legal if it disclosed in advance, in the contract language, and the client is aware of it before signing on the dotted line--as is the case with Genuine Advantage and shareware trial periods.

If it is hidden in the software without telling the client, it's a defect at best.

Edit to add: The nature of the relationship might matter too. There is a difference between a software purchase agreement, and a consulting "work made for hire" contract.
Witnesses say there was couple of minutes between flash and explosion sound.

That means about 30 km distance.
No, its not that.

For one Excel can be learned just after looking at it, and most people have someone who can teach them the basics.

Plus you just click one button and turn it on and then its a matter of making sure your logic pans out and the numbers get calculated correctly.