skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They pumped so much math into us all in college, I could easily teach high-school math. Easily.

I'm from Finland and we have bunch of such teachers here. In my school there's a teacher whose major is physics, but he also teaches chemistry and B (short term) math. I'm still unsure whether is it because of my school is so small (circa 150 pupils) or just because they can.

> Immediate implication: teachers are actually paid well over there. The job is actually desirable and respected.

The job is respected, but not as desirable or well paid as you might think. I can actually recall many teachers joking that if you can't do anything well, become a teacher. And in a way that's true: if you can't pick a profession you can continue your studies for practically free of charge.

Although teachers do not have hard time finding a job, the pay is pretty bad and only becomes worse if you decide to teach younger students. Although, teachers here get paid according to their best paying speciality, so it may depend on who you ask. For example, a former PE teacher said this to me: "Do not become a teacher if you plan to become rich". But since the respect between student and teacher here cuts both ways, it gives the sentence a bit more depth than you might think at first.
An hour after the 3D File announcement...cue unlikely/conspiratorial theories now.
I can't tell if this writer actually lived in Chicago, or just can't handle weather that isn't 72F and sunny.

"It’s as cold as the last circle of Dante’s Inferno in Chicago about half the year"

Um, not even close. And even when it is 15F, we don't sit and home and moan about it. Life goes on.
Know your audience. I love that pg uses distributed algorithms as an analogy of how to treat VCs (failure is the default state).
Seems to me like the bottom two are not really disagreements. For the second to last, if they gave you terms, you'd invest, right?

For the last, you presumably aren't deciding whether to meet with them based on the deck; it's just nice to be able to review it so your mind is prepared.
I find it far more likely that these cars will mostly operate in fleets, since most people just need auto-travel for short periods each day. So you will probably be able to subscribe to a car service that picks you up when you need it on demand, and moves on to the next subscriber when you're done.

He's also working on automated maintenance facilities that would allow a self-driving car to report for maintenance/cleaning. The car drives up, receives service and drives off afterwards to the next pick-up.
Github is down and their Twitter followers count increases every second.
> How long did bacteria and penicillin coexist?

In different places, not an issue. It's only when penicillin is directly applied to a bacterial colony is there any chance for bacterial evolution to take place.

> Then practically overnight the bacteria decided they needed to evolve

You mean, when humans applied penicillin to bacteria on a large scale for the first time? That changed the bacteria's environment, most died, except those naturally resistant. It's classic natural selection.

> I don't think evolution always works according to the popular "and then the next giraffe's neck was 1mm longer than its parents'" gradual change model.

But one can argue that evolution almost never works, on the ground that the vast majority of mutations aren't adaptive. But the argument misses the point that some tiny fraction of the mutations become the entire future species because of increased reproductive fitness.

Also, the "gradual change" you describe normally arises because of the odd beneficial mutation, which, apart from being very improbable, might require many thousands of years to manifest itself.
Major bummer when all of those open source projects go offline.. Does anybody do a mirror of github, either http or git-only?
Essentially, they lead you on. They seem like they're about to invest right up till the moment they say no. If they even say no. Some of the worse ones never actually do say no; they just stop replying to your emails.
Thanks, that's a real comfort to those of us who wanted to be scientists.
Tesla is trying to catch up to other manufacturers here: Mercedes has sold cars with lane assist (preventing drifting out of lane) since 2009 and Ford has a self-parallel-parking system for a while.
Apple's enterprise-focused iOS 7 announcement that never happened
NASA's Asteroid-in-a-Bag Recipe
*

1 point by ThomPete 0 minutes ago | link | edit | delete

As someone with more than a thousand moles and already one melanoma i am interested in knowing how to participate in such a thing.
reply
Cost of living is a much better way to compare salaries. They actually mentioned that:

"Moreover, the cost of living in Finland is about 30% higher."
It would have been good if you included your references instead of halfheartedly telling us the keywords why you maybe disagree. I still upped your comment, because despite your ignorance, you've developed your own views to things, which as I said, just lack the references. Have an open mind and go beyond the words, start with your own imagination. To me it sounds, as if you cannot reason Dennett, but you leave us unclear what "that" logic inaccuracy is, thus making you appear ignorant.

The missing links (please complete them, if there was more that you'd like to share):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain
SolidWorks seems really difficult to implement unless you're licensing a Windows server + SolidWorks software licenses or running wine and hacking up their dlls.. I would be curious to hear ideas on how to do it.
If you distribute a single source tarball with code files with different licenses, all of them apply. There may be different terms limiting what you are allowed to do with the file in each of the licenses, while the most restrictive license terms apply to the whole file.

Besides the real legal issues, this also causes unnecessary confusion for users and those creating packages for binary distribution. Therefore, using multiple incompatible licenses in a single source tree is usually avoided.
Not a bad guess, honestly. Pretty sure some past outages have been due to new services (such as the new Search), either due to bugs or potential security issues.

I'm not trying to blame Github though, they're awesome!
Oh I certainly agree. I added perceived because my broader point included perceived transgressions like poverty. Drug offenses are (generally) perceived transgressions that are justified; poverty and homelessness (generally) are not.
Seems to be one of the most severe Github service interruptions I've ever encountered. I can't even pull up the unauthenticated home page. I can't push, can't pull, can't do anything.
Both of these replies are speaking to the social issues. Yes, people can lose their jobs, and it does happen. My point was quantitative: it happens rarely, and so addressing it with individual savings is a poor choice for the same reason that we don't pay for catastrophic health care out of savings. "Insurance" is a better social tool, as it requires far less capital be tied down.

And that insurance is readily available in the market, if the duck on my television is telling me the truth.
Wow. Hipmunk is a great example, in my opinion, of how flat can be bad by removing so many visual cues.

The old one is easy to see, understand, and instantaneously "grok", because of the depth cues and shading. The new one is a mess of plain colored boxes, where you have to spend time figuring out what is a header, what is a row, etc. -- it's not instantly obvious. The prices are clearly clickable on the left, on the right I'd never guess they were (if they are). So much flatness just makes the screen to hard to figure out.
in other news, it must really suck to be github where your service being down is front page HN news.
Usersnap announces FogBugz Integration
3 Day Startup Austin
Yes, it's the output from a CAD tool and used for 3d printing but STL is a binary file type and not easy to edit. Committing STL files to a repo is analagous to commiting EXE files instead of source code or PDF files instead of TEX.
Github was down so I took a break at work to read some Hacker News. "Ooh 3D file diffs, cool!" Click the link to read about the new feature, and dammit it's down too because the blog is hosted on github.com!
Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014
I am curious. What are you using ZFS for?
It is conceivable (even probable?) that self-driving cars would be subsidized for the visually handicapped.
So many of these problems are IO bound to begin with. In fact, I don't think I have ever had a problem that wasn't ultimately IO bound. Hence the need to spend more time paying attention to the network infrastructure, and, ultimately, removing as much of it as possible from in between your storage and your compute infrastructure.
Because it's good?

There is no glibness here, just innocence. I like tomato juice, at least compared to other juices, tasty, not too sweet, not too bitter, but I'm generally not a juice fan.

I'd much rather drink coffee, water, beer, or wine. Now beer and wine will cost me on a plane (mostly), and I may want to avoid the depressant effects (air travel being harsh enough on the system), especially if I am driving soon after, or if I've gone more than a few hours east.

That leaves water or coffee. I've learned to manage my caffeine levels pretty well, so beyond a certain point/time, coffee is verbotten (unless they have decaf, ha ha ha); cf comments on alcohol consumption above, stimulants are avoided for similar reasons.

That leaves water.

The first few glasses are fine. The next few are boring beyond belief.

As for other juices, well, orange burns my stomach and irritates my lips, I might have one glass every year or two. Apple is insipid; maybe a glass or two a year. Other fruit juices are generally too sweet.

Soft drinks are too sweet. Period. Not a fan, haven't been since all night D&D sessions in high school.

That leaves tomato juice and sparkling water.

EDIT: Do people really order more tomato juice, or are you under the effect of the availability heuristic?
I think the article hints at a salient way to frame this discussion: think of the future victims of those whom we neglect to rehabilitate. Investing in more humane prisons is a way to avert future criminality.
The precautions taken against thieves who open trunks, search bags, or ransack tills, consist in securing with cords and fastening with bolts and locks. This is what the world calls wit. But a strong thief comes and carries off the till on his shoulders, with box and bag, and runs away with them. His only fear is that the cords and locks should not be strong enough! Therefore, does not what the world used to call wit simply amount to saving up for the strong thief? And I venture to state that nothing of that which the world calls wit is otherwise than saving up for strong thieves; and nothing of that which the world calls sage wisdom is other than hoarding up for strong thieves.
Well this isn't good. Our integration server runs an npm install which includes a ton of dependencies that are github URLs. I guess tying our integration/deployment step to github isn't such a good idea after all.
Is it a smart choice that the store feels like 1998 web applications? Given the size of their workforce and the amount of revenue they make, why can't they invest some time in making the interface any good?
On the other hand, at the morning(and that means MORNING :)) I am super effective for first 2 hours. So if I can go vampire until 1am and sleep until 8am or I can go sleep at 11pm and wake up at 6am, I choose the second one.

6am-8am >>>>>> 11pm-1am (in terms of effectiveness)
..And where your tax rate is up to 60% of your income.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/nov/16/sweden-tax-burd...
11. "The framework I found, which made the decision [to start Amazon in 1994] incredibly easy, was what I called a regret minimization framework. I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, 'OK, I'm looking back on my life. I want to minimize the number of regrets I have.' And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn't regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day."

Amen.
have you ever seen Cube 2, hypercube? They must have tried to go 4D
This is an attempt to pump the stock price (interesting to note that it was efinancehub.com and not a tech site that reported this).

ADAS isn't just about the self-driving cars that Google is testing. ADAS includes systems like:

- Warnings if you drift out of your lane (Mercedes has been advertising this for four years)

- Warnings and stops if the car predicts an accident may occur soon (Infiniti has been advertising this for years)

- Automatic parking (Ford has been advertising this for years)

- Blind spot detection (many car companies have it)

- Cruise control that maintains minimum distance to the car in front of you (BMW and Audi mid and high-end cars had it since 2010)

It really looks like Tesla is trying to develop those features for the Model S and future cars.
19:37 UTC - We are currently recovering from a database failure and have successfully failed over to a backup server.
Great article. They very clearly describe the state of research in computer vision. When I studied the field, I was very surprised at how shallow the field was, in the sense that, as they put it, computer vision algorithms "are generally only moderately sophisticated".

On the other hand, what they may not realize (and I know this as I have tried making computer vision algorithms both before and after reading the literature) is that while the computer vision literature may not contain a solution to your problem, knowing the literature can be very useful in helping to come up with your own solutions. There are a number of non-obvious themes in computer vision that provide a basis for new algorithms. For example, algorithms tend to be built from a pipeline in which the first stage is feature detection.

EDIT: you should really watch the video, it's quite funny and cool.
Yup, section 2 essentially grants that.
Do you have sources for any of that?
Github's awesome, but yah, that's the downside of having one place that hosts so much code. Having some outage or disruption is feeling like a bi-weekly event..
> I also see a lot of regulation coming from this. Imagine a world where anyone can go to a store, pick up an object, scan it at the store and then go home and print it on a 3-d printer.

Brick and mortar stores will cease to exist long before this technology becomes good enough to do what you've described. This technology is currently pretty awful in terms of accuracy. Btw, what would you actually be printing? A plunger? Easier to 3d model. A clock? You'll never measure it accurately enough. Some kind of cheap coat hook? Not sure the store is surviving off of cheap coat hook margins in the first place.

Btw, these kinect-like cameras work by measuring the displacement of infrared dots, so there exists huge discrepencies in first the infrared dot projector, then the camera that sees them, and also the surface onto which the dots are reflecting. If you're lucky enough to get decent input data, then you have to post-process the noise out, so that flat surfaces are indeed flat, and curved surfaces have a smooth curve. But at what point is noise actually just subtle features? Imagine trying to scan a diamond-plate floor panel. The diamond design pattern would be perceived as noise, and the optimizations would attempt to normalize the data to be a flat surface.

There's a long way to go before we have to be considering the dangerous power of this kind of tech. The current danger is in 3d printed firearms, which are getting better and better every day, and which have been 3d modelled by designers in 3d programs.
I kinda agree with this and it's applicable to many situations obviously.

For example if you are a (male) salesman then:

s/women/customers

(Keeping in mind not to spend more time with an attractive female customer with the hopes of scoring some non-business payback).

Of course any relationship decision you make is not the same as choosing investors although there are similarities.
I disagree. You have to be absolutely certain at all times whether you're holding on to a reference to a shared data structure or you have your own copy, unless the object is immutable. This is not just a performance thing.
I'd say most of these are arguable which is better.

Except for Photo Investigator. The before picture has readable buttons on the bottom. The after picture is pretty much completely unreadable.
just out of curiosity, does anyone find these HN postings useful?

wouldn't your critical shit break long before you go read about it on HN? otherwise, why not just rely on their human-friendly status pages that get served if such a thing occurs?

i don't understand why this is on the front page, since it's not an infrequent occurrence.
What about ASCII STL files? I'd say they're "pretty easy" to edit. I wouldn't want to write an entire one, but I've tweaked values in one before.
Wait, careful with the strawman there. Yes, USP is funded by taxpayers but the students themselves don't have to pay anything. The reasoning behind this choice is that the cost of a student in that University can be shared by everyone because the value of the knowledge produced there is also shared by everyone. People who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford college-level education are given the chance to study.

It's a decision that is aligned to the principles of social democracy. You could argue against it, take a more neoliberal stance, but that's not the point. My point is that USP is trying to do something different.

I wish I knew more about how private universities in US are funded. I have a feeling that aside from the tuition students pay they still receive some sort of aid from the government.

True, everything has it price. But it's also true that free market is not really free.
"Sometimes an investor will ask you to send them your deck and/or executive summary before they decide whether to meet with you. I wouldn't do that. It's a sign they're not really interested."
I can look at a deck before a meeting. I will sit down for 15-45 minutes before a meeting, ... more interesting questions and concerns during the meeting.

It sounds like you want a deck before a meeting, which isn't contradicted by PG. PG says don't give a deck before not having a meeting. In more straightforward logic don't give decks to window shoppers. If they can't spare time to meet with you then they aren't interested, don't bother giving them a deck. Nothing in that quote suggests withholding a deck after they decide to meet with you but before the meeting.
> Punishment is a legitimate role for society; it is not juvenile.

What's your rationale for this? Personally I can't agree. I can see the logic behind punishment-as-deterrent (but then it creates perverse incentives), but punishment as an end goal itself isn't an appropriate concern for society.
If it opened up "near" you, can you explain why delivery is fantastic news? I think I do grocery shopping different than most people living in the city that find these services useful. If a grocery store is five minutes away or on the walk home from the train, just-in-time shopping seems much more practical.
AAAAND we're back.
More meat for the AI warriors is found on Minsky's homepage: http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/
What about inheritance? I'd rather start with 'header ul{}', then continue with 'header ul.nav{}' and 'header ul.nav.main{}'
Let's throw a cold splash of reality onto the treasured fairy tale about Finland's "stellar schools." What do the data say? One place to look is at the standardized assessment tests designed to (among other things) make international comparisons. The National Center for Education Statistics relies largely on three: the Program for International Assessment (PISA), the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). For brevity, let's pick math using PIRLS, which is also nice because it breaks out some U.S. states separately. Cherry-picking the data, consider these scores for 8th-grade math students in 2011.

Finland: 514

U.S. White, not Hispanic: 530

Massachusetts: 561

Massachusetts Black, not Hispanic: 516

Massachusetts Hispanic: 507

"Stellar" Finland's 8th graders are bested in math by America's white 8th graders overall, by Massachusetts 8th graders overall by a wide margin, and by Massachusetts black 8th graders, and Massachusetts's Hispanic 8th graders come close. Why choose Massachusetts? Partly, because I'm cherry-picking one of our best-performing states. But I think that's defensible because it also closely matches Finland demographically. The U.S. has 300+ million people, Finland only 5+ million; Massachusetts has 6+ million, and it approaches Finland in terms of racial homogeneity.

Now, before anyone gets excited, I am NOT making a racial argument, saying that white kids are somehow "better." However, it is an unfortunate, incontrovertible fact that in the U.S., white and Asian kids outperform Black and Hispanic kids currently. We can argue about why that might be and long for the day when it's no longer true, but while we've made great strides and hope to make more in the future, we're not there yet. Given that, comparing tiny Finland with its greater ethnic and socioeconomic homogeneity to enormous and diverse America (with, by the way, 400+ years of institutionalized racism) is intellectually dishonest.

I am also not claiming these few data points to be definitive. There are other tests (PISA and PIRLS), other subjects (language and science), other grades, a patchwork of yearly coverage, and other measures. Certainly, on some Finland does come out on top. On others, the U.S. does.

I am also not criticizing Finland or saying we have nothing to learn from them. No doubt, they have some wonderful teachers, delightful kids, and some important lessons for the rest of the world. But we also have some wonderful teachers, delightful kids, and given our unique challenges we're actually doing quite well (though we can and will do better).

What I am claiming is that there is a myth about Finland's educational prowess that gets told and retold, that is much too simplistic, that evaporates when confronted with actual data, that probably serves the interests of certain "educational reformers", and that is not a helpful part of an informed, rational debate about education policy in the U.S.
Forgive my ignorance, but what does it mean for a founder to be "formidable"?

e.g. in this context:

> The founder who handles fundraising should be the CEO, who should in turn be the most formidable of the founders.
It's basically what w_t_payne said. It's amusing (in a sense) because it betrays such a lack of understanding of what's actually going on, and such a willingness to simply accept the "received wisdom" and not question it and think independently.
Use the home button triple-click trick for night reading.

http://lifehacker.com/5957534/invert-your-phones-colors-for-...

Another thing that really helps is f.lux for iphone:

http://justgetflux.com/ios.html

But this sadly requires jailbreaking.