skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Students need real-world, meaningful context for what they're learning. Not contrived word problems....

This unfortunate meme is spreading like foot fungus in our schools, because there is some truth to it: you DO need SOME experience applying your skills in real-world contexts for your brain to decide they are worth keeping.

Unfortunately, this is misunderstood to mean that you don't learn things that aren't learned in realistic contexts. This is false and reflects a misunderstanding of the nature and value of math.

Math is the study of abstractions. When you learn that adding two apples to three apples gives you five apples and adding two bunnies to three bunnies gives you five bunnies, you soon discover that you can think of all such problems abstractly: adding a number to a number. When you then study how to add pure numbers, you are gaining experience with an infinite number of concrete, real-world problems simultaneously.

The point is not to give you experience with specific, realistic problems that you might encounter later, but to give you enough experience with different, concrete instances of an abstract concept that you begin to see the underlying similarity of all such problems. You don't need the instances to be "realistic", you need them to be recognizable enough that they lead you to an understanding of the abstraction. If problems are too realistic, people are tempted to solve them on the basis of domain experience and possibly miss the abstraction they represent.

You also need enough practice working directly with the abstraction (e.g., adding numbers that don't represent anything specific: pure numbers) that the result is fluency in recognizing a problem at an abstract level and easily solving it with your skills in manipulating the abstractions.

I think applying these abstract skills to some realistic problems is a great thing to do. But the fashionable notion among "progressive educators" that the study of "contrived problems" and "meaningless symbol manipulation" is to be avoided is a sad example of the blind leading the blind, robbing students of the true power of math: the ability to think in mathematical abstractions instead of being limited to the real-world contexts they've directly experienced.
Assume the pricing for seats is as follows:

$100 for first 50% of capacity

$120 for next 20%

$170 for next 20%

$300 for next 5%

$600 for final 5%

What is the revenue impact of expanding capacity? The solution is not obvious, but the author's approximation is more accuare than you suggest. You obviously can't solve this without a stochastic ticket demand model, but 4.8 is much closer to the right answer than 0.
It cannot be shut down for the same reason that Bittorrent cannot be shut down: it is a peer-to-peer decentralized protocol. You need to learn about the basics... http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=66
The Genesis block references The Times, too.
You need to be careful when talking about the demographics of mental illness. Much mental illness leaves you still able to function and contribute socially to a fair degree.
As go 1.1 is backwards compatible and much faster, and gofix makes the transition easy, I doubt many people will stay on 1.0 long enough to make this a useful feature to have built in. Have you used it? I think they initially tried to make the language versionless too but backed off and went back to versions when they realised this wasn't workable, I suspect the same will happen with packages and import long term.

I haven't seen much use of the go language auto-versioning feature in the wild, whereas lots of people have noticed the lack of support for versioning packages/imports and the implications for unpredictable builds - any dependency imported the normal way could break at some time in the future or for different coworkers who checked out at different times, unless you fork which has its own problems for maintenance. Personally I think versioning packages is more important, and would prefer to have that option rather than the option to maintain branches for different versions of go (which can be done manually where really required and is unlikely to be an issue in the 1.x series).
You obviously are not above average in terms of height. I'm 6'5" and planes are a nightmare of cramps and bruised knees. A single inch can mean the difference between being able to sleep comfortably on a long flight and staying awake while stiffening up for eight hours.
Looking down onto the tracks: http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,2,1,2,1,2,0,2,2,2...
The three distinct stages are fascinating. The third stage is like white caps on the ocean viewed from an airplane.
It should be a config option - "colorful language" vs "boring speak".
Your local Community College might offer them online. I did most of my AS that way.
I tried to use airbnb twice to book whole houses (ie no one else there) in March/April during a 4 week trip back to Australia.

First place, the host accepted (so we were billed) but 20 minutes later she sent a message to say she had to cancel because someone her husband knew died. She never cancelled the booking, it took several days of me complaining to airbnb before they agreed to cancel it themselves, so we could get a refund.

Stupidly I didn't learn my lesson and tried to book another place through airbnb later in our trip. It was only after they had authorised my card for $1100 for the stay that I got a message to say "you need to provide more information" - I don't have a LinkedIn or Facebook account, so my only options left were to upload a photo of my drivers licence add then they wanted to verify me by my card, so they charged < $1 and said I needed to tell them how much they charged (from my transaction history). They gave me 11 hours to do this - my banks visa transactions are about 2-3 days delayed.

When I emailed them about this, they suggested I create a video.

I never did stay at any of their places. One of their phone support staff tried to tell my refund was taking so long because "Austrlaian banks can't believe we want to give your money back".

I will never (attempt to) use airbnb again. The fucking around is simply not worth it.

Both times when airbnb let us down, we stayed in a short term rental, organised directly with the owner over the phone, both times at late notice because of airbnb.

The second time we stayed, he left a bottle of wine for us. It's not a huge thing, and neither of us are big wine drinkers but it was enough to cement that place as somewhere we will go back to whenever we are in Melbourne.
I'd guess the Polish rant is based on that Soviet really did support the anti-nuclear weapon movement, and so on.

Seing conspiracy theories like those, I am strengthened in the belief that the US extreme left and right are equally crazy. In Europe we mostly see the Chomsky brigade, some variation would make it less irritating.
Show HN: A social football betting site
> If I refused to buy anything that was made or sold by anyone that had ever done harm to anyone, I'd probably starve to death...

Boycotting does not have to turn into a religion that drives you into starvation. You can just try to support the less evil choice, or only when you have time to spare.
Really like the name!
For me, faculty connections were worthless. The real driving force behind my college education was the quality of my peers. They forced me to study extra hard and learn the material incredibly well to fight for an A. I suspect this will be the case for most people: if they're measured against a population with a high mean, then they'll be forced to work harder to keep up.
I understand how easy that is to do. But when do you have the time to read them? Part of the fun of the web, is getting a little lost in it. But I totally loose focus. Have you ever tried limiting yourself to one window and the judicious use of the back button?
We have an existing, widely deployed VM that is portable and sandboxed, fully described by open standards, and has several competing but fully compatible implementations -- most of which are already very fast -- and people want to throw it out and replace it because they don't like the file format...
The other side of the coin is what do you do when there actually aren't jobs available in the region and there are too many people to effectively set up in self-employment? Making people jump through hoops and then frowning at their failings is fine when isolated to an individual, but at a demographic level it breaks down.

I recently spend five months out of work and unable to find a job and received welfare. I saw others like me playing the system. I saw others like me struggling to satisfy the system and more, applying for everything and getting rejections similarly. The system doesn't differentiate between the two.

To some degree it's the old 'where do you draw the line' - do you prefer to see the innocent suffer or the guilty go free?
Isaac Schlueter: The Road to Node.js v1.0.
Microsoft may still be able to hinder the web by using its influence in W3C to push for detrimental standards like Encrypted Media Extensions, and by refusing to implement things like WebGL.
This one stops after a pretty long time (put it on Fastest).

http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#5,3,4,1,3,2,1,2,4,2,3...

How usual is this?
> In Haskell, the type system--thanks to typeclasses--can figure out how to generate random inputs automatically, just based on what type is expected.

No. The reason why the type system is able to generate these values is because of algebraic data types, not type classes.

Type classes are completely unrelated to this problem.
Shadow-banned rather. You are the only one who can see your own comments. Specifically, these two comments are [dead] -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5708906

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5708984

Try and email pg to ask to be unbanned manually. Or wait for the mods to notice and perhaps they can do it.
Watch this one on very fast: http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#2,10,0,8,3,1,8,2,0,3,...

Cool!
How did you test your app, did you just check to see if your app updated on the timeline correctly?
I found his post interesting, because I have found that as I have matured I find myself much more in tune with exactly how unfair the world really is.

And, to put a point on it, how unfair it is to people who are unlike me. Some members of my family express confusion as to why I find this troubling--after all, "I've got mine."
“If you want to learn something, read about it.

If you want to understand something, write about it.

If you want to master something, teach it.”

–Yogi Bhajan
Don't Flood Your Twitter - Schedule
Yes, but presumably you looked at the apartment first.

Unless airline search sites start listing seat pitch, amenities, seat recline, in-flight entertainment quality, etc. next to the ticket price when selecting a fare, it's hard to see how these factors would play into a purchase decision.

Even if the data were there, I'm wagering that the lions share of customers would keep $20 in their pocket at the cost of some minor discomfort.
I think the main problem is that we got used to these dependency tools, and many developers coming to Go don't have experience how development was done before they came into existence.
To address a question below about GT's program, NC State's is practically equivalent to their campus-based stuff.

Out of curiosity, how does this work with project-based courses where the students design their own projects? Or do those not exist?

At least in the kinds of CS masters projects I'm familiar with, they tend to require a lot of one-on-one meeting time, which seems like it would be hard to scale up. It's certainly possible to do online, so online vs. physical isn't really an issue. But if one of the goals of offering these programs online is also to massively increase student:teacher ratio (as GT seems to be indicating), that seems like it would present a problem for individualized projects.

A typical arrangement is that students propose a project, possibly based on some suggestions from the professor. In the ideal case it intersects students' interests with something active going on in the research world or even the professor's lab, so the students and professor might even co-write a conference paper at the end of the course (for the best projects). They meet with the professor a few times to refine the project idea and scope so it's appropriate for the course, likely to be doable, etc. Then they meet a few more times during the project to ensure they're on track, agree on what parts could be cut if time doesn't allow them to be completed as originally envisioned, etc. Finally they do an oral, conference-style presentation of their work/results, and then hand in a report.
(Not the downvoter.)

I've read that site several times. Frankly, while I'm sure a lot of patients don't do well enough on levothyroxine or need more intensive tests than the TSH, I'm very skeptical of people who develop fanatical, rigid opinions about how to treat hypothyroidism without extremely careful and rigorous study, largely because I'm very skeptical about people who develop fanatical, rigid opinions about anything without extremely careful and rigorous study.
I don't really get the text-only web browser comment.

An aside... If W3m was as fast as Firefox - I'd most likely use it. Bizarre really as you wouldn't expect it to be slower.
:set relativenumber

shows… line numbers relative to the current line allowing you to:

1. find the last line of the block you want to operate on

2. see the number you need to use

3. use that number

Motions and text-objects are very useful as well:

dip
da{
d{
d/foo
d?bar
d'a
d]m
…
UKs Ryan Air was even proposing ideas of having people stand during flights (yep, its really that ridicolous) and letting people pay to use the lavatories...

Not that they would get through with that but still, they are searching for every inch to make more money.
This one is lovely. Water falls from Sierpinski triangles. It's still running, will be interesting to see if this pattern is stable

http://www.wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#3,4,2,1,0,2,2,2,0...
First improvement: do this for every team ever. Then combine for all teams, first in an individual season, then try basing the win% iteratively based on more history.

Based on these models, you should have some good examples of selection bias, and see how the model changes based on what you are not testing for, but what is implicit in the data (since data is merely a set of samples of data generated by one iteration of the (unknowable to some degree) true talent functions for each team (player, lineup decision, injury, close call by an ump, etc.)

If you're interested in going down the rabbit hole, there's tons of people who can show the way (and they're nice! At least tangotiger is way nicer than he should be in listening to people who have put no effort in understanding what is good and what is beginner's blind bliss)

Hot and cold streaks are just random variance, so is whether balls are hit within reach of fielders or safely out of reach, given a certain contact quality (ground ball, fly ball, infield pop up, or line drive all have vastly different tendencies to fall for a hit - line drives ~.600-700 babip if I recall, FB ~ low .200ish, GB ~ .300, pop up 0ish?) point is these are all known, to se degree, given the historical data.

If anyone wants to explore this stuff further let me know & I can point you to the right spots to help a specific interest?
(Oops) I said p-values above when I meant probability-of-being-true instead of probability-of-null-hypothesis-being-true-given-data.
Not all Java implementations map language threads to OS threads.

The implementations that use green threads are no different than go-routines, which were seen for the first time in Modula-2 just as information.
> I am guessing that many online/distance-learning degrees are conferred without making it clear that the degree was earned in this way. Although this is great for students, I'm sure this causes angst in administrations for fear of brand dilution and obvious revenue threats.

It also opens opportunities for smaller universities with decent programs to make a dent. My university recently did entirely away with the on-campus format for the degree I received since most students signed up for the online format (I did). My diploma does not say "Online" at all.

If the quality of instruction and coursework is alleged to be equivalent, why not put the full standing of the University's name behind it? To me, adding the caveat of "online" makes it seem like the school is admitting in advance that the degree isn't equivalent to "not-online" MSc degrees.

I wonder if, since this is accredited, the body that certifies Georgia Tech's offerings wouldn't agree to do it without an "online" tag. Though, if that were the case, I wonder how my university was able to change its MSc offering (not Computer Science, though) to entirely-online without adding that word since both GATech and my college are covered by the same body.
Wow, I finally got a neat one via random. 4 states, 13 symbols, yields an interesting illusion of depth as "blocks" start moving towards and away from the viewer. Recommended two notches down from default speed, three down if you're patient.

http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#4,13,3,1,0,0,5,1,2,1,...
thanks for sharing, the 11 hour countdown with no hope of fixing it seems to be a standard move. Perhaps getting us to make videos is the real purpose of this fiendish system?
I'm having a hard time believing these sellers ever even touch these items.

Given the cost of an embroidery machine that can actually embroider these items, and the fact that nobody seems to have non-stock photographs of any the items, and the fact that ~90% of the images showing available fonts are completely identical, I'm guessing they're having a third party do the work and either drop-ship the item directly to customers or ship it to the Etsy seller, who then re-ships it to the customer.

See also:

http://www.etsy.com/search/handmade?q=tutti+frutti+cosmetic&...
vs.
http://www.wholesaleboutique.com/wholesale/monogrammed-items...

http://www.etsy.com/search/handmade?q=tutti+frutti+beach&...
vs.
http://www.wholesaleboutique.com/wholesale/monogrammed-items...

http://www.etsy.com/search/handmade?q=black+toiletry+bag&...
vs.
http://www.wholesaleboutique.com/wholesale/monogrammed-items...
Regarding:

http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings/#4,3,0,1,3,1,1,2,0,2,3...

looks like there's a bifurcation diagram buried in there somehow: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bifurcation+diagram
It's not even a Go problem, you can be equally stupid by putting "package": "*" in npm's package.json instead of, say, "package": "1.2"
In addition to the sketchy mathematical foundation, there's another reason to not draw too many conclusions from this observation: your company, product, and customers are probably quite unlike Southwest Airlines. For starters, airline customers care almost exclusively about price.

Joel Spolsky was wise to warn against doing what this article suggests (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/11.html):

In one of Gerald Weinberg's books, probably The Secrets of Consulting,
there's the apocryphal story of the giant multinational hamburger chain
where some bright MBA figured out that eliminating just three sesame
seeds from a sesame-seed bun would be completely unnoticeable by anyone
yet would save the company $126,000 per year. So they do it, and time
passes, and another bushy-tailed MBA comes along, and does another study,
and concludes that removing another five sesame seeds wouldn't hurt
either, and would save even more money, and so on and so forth, every
year or two, the new management trainee looking for ways to save money
proposes removing a sesame seed or two, until eventually, they're
shipping hamburger buns with exactly three sesame seeds artfully arranged
in a triangle, and nobody buys their hamburgers any more.
If it's disk failure -- then replication is best backup ever.
You're comparing things that are different. When you install a package with apt-get:

- it comes from a repository that has been signed by the distributor.

- the package has been tested and has a good level of integration with the system (ie different distributions may package things differently).

- depending on the distribution, there may be a commitment to API/ABI stability (ie. Debian backports security fixes most of the time).

That said... running "go get" is very convenient if you control the code repository where you're fetching the code, but it's not a good idea when using 3rd party software that is in active development.

EDIT: formatting
There was an tiny anecdote on a TED talk about the speakers grandmother working at a telephone switchboard in India. She regularly heard conversations she shouldn't have, including conversations with Nehru (the then president of India).

http://www.ted.com/talks/raghava_kk_what_s_your_200_year_pla... around 09:00.
http://net.tutsplus.com/
It's part of what you're buying, so why not factor it in to your purchasing decision?

Because one hallmark of a civil society is the ability to have vigorous disagreements in the political sphere and yet continue to live and work together as a community.
It sounds like it's even worse than that - the developer was maintaining a fork of the upstream projects, but didn't put it in version control. That is, he/she used Go's github import mechanism to get a copy of a project onto their own machine, and edited the locally cached copy. So of course, when other people tried to build, the libraries didn't match up.

The real issue here seems to be that this was a half-finished project, at a very early stage of development, and the developer probably never intended their local scratch copy to be used in production [http://www.joystiq.com/2012/10/24/haunts-anatomy-of-a-kickst...]
What?

The way the Arbitrary class works is only possible thanks to typeclasses. Without typeclasses, you would have to explicitly specify which generator to use. Thanks to the typeclass system, Haskell can just infer this.

On the other hand, none of the Arbitrary machinery is particularly tied to algebraic data types per se. It would work as well if you had OO style constructors instead.

Just take a look at the OCaml version of QuickCheck to see what I mean. OCaml obviously has algebraic data types, but it's still far more awkward to use QuickCheck there.
Top 8 website operation laws
Youtube is down
long live youtube
The latter. It's probably a combination of breaking the UX by redirecting the user to his/her banks' website and the crappy forms the banks made for this.
Newtype in C, a touch of strong typing using compound literals
PHP is my favorite language. Problem?
This course will not help autodidacts, since a BS is required for enrolling.
v1.1. Thanks!
Since "dribbble.com" appears to be "taking a timeout for maintenance" I can't at a glance determine what, exactly, they do. So maybe they're a bunch of hobbyists. But if not ...

I don't understand how a "real" company, even in todays overheated environment of soon-to-fail hipster startups, doesn't do (at least) one of these two things:
a) have competent employees on staff that are intimately familiar with their critical infrastructure and how to support it
or b) pay, yes, gasp, pay some other company for professional support services. A glance at the Wikipedia entry for Postgres shows some possible companies that do that. Or, as already mentioned, there are mailing lists.

But twitter? Really? That's support? For someone other than a hobbyist running a website in their spare time?

Go ahead, flame me. But my first impression is "amateur hour". My apologies if dribbble.com really is an amateur effort.
and yet somehow the actual result is for customers to look elsewhere.
Check out http://www.awsnow.info/.
Another limitation of quickcheck that's often overlooked is that simply using quickcheck for testing your function does not guarantee complete coverage of your function. The coverage may also differ between runs. So while it's good for doing a "quick check" of your function it's not a replacement for unit testing.