skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If diversity in language diminishes a little bit, while humankind enjoys better health, longer lifespans,[1] and other benefits of increasing worldwide prosperity, I will feel wistful about that, because I am curious about all world languages, but people should be at liberty to decide what languages they use, and when.

And who's to say that having less languages in the world is a bad thing? I mean, from a cursory view it seems like people are equating the diminishing of multiple languages as a bad thing. Is it? Do we weep for Latin, or do we just celebrate the variety of cultures that had spawned from its ashes?

It's easy to be initially emotional about the potentiality of having some languages lost in time, but it's just a tool with history. It will eventually be completely wiped out by a new language, or evolve into one that barely resembles it. I personally don't think this is sad. I think it's just the reality of space and time.
LG Smart TVs Leak Data Without Permission
I bother for two main reasons. Firstly, I vastly prefer the hardware of iOS devices over the competitors. Secondly, the software openness isn't that big of a deal—I still prefer stock (non-jailbroken) iOS to stock Android (I confess that I haven't extensively tried Windows RT or any other alternatives).

Jailbroken iOS is just icing on the cake. When there's a major iOS upgrade that causes me to lose my jailbreak, I lose a few niceties (the biggest of which is the ability to "try," as in pirate, applications), but it's not a big deal.
> Some people are happy to trade 20 minutes away but I am not.

Do you step out of your flat each day, take a cab, bus, walk short distances? Cross the road?

The death risk in all of theses activities is many times higher than dying on an airplane because a mentally unstable passenger manages to stabs you with a knife he deliberately brought on board.
>* ... but you are not being critical. You're just being obtuse.* //

I disagree. One is being critical.

If however you try to use that as an excuse not to perform the calculation then you're definitely being obstructive.

It is absolutely right for a student performing such calculations to realise there are issues with it not being realistic. They should understand that it's an approximation and understand that even in a perfect, flat, frictionless world it's still an approximation [relativistic mechanics are not being used] but that nonetheless it's a useful model the result produced by Newtonian mechanics is useful.

Indeed I'd say the realisation and ability to express the limitations mark out a student as capable of analytical thought.

>it actually makes it easier for the students to practice and internalize the concept they're learning. //

I fear you're making the calculation the end in itself (we have computers for that!) and not the subject of critical analytical thinking which IMO defines mathematics.
I really value understanding that unit tests are not a waste of employee salary time in these cases.

IME, strong (or, more to the point, static) typing doesn't eliminate the need for unit tests. Correct types don't guarantee correct values.
You remind me of the people that use Excel to do desktop publishing, or mocking up GUI screens.

God bless your special breed.
I'll admit being skeptic at first but every time we asked @jberrebi for help in my previous Kima-backed company, he was both smart and fast. Impressive feat with so many startups in the portfolio+pipeline.
I would imagine there's a significant selection bias at work here. This is not a random sample of students, and I don't think it's super odd that many of them get As.

Perhaps more get As than should, but I'd look at the grade distribution of a less discriminating institution if I wanted to get huffy about grade inflation. Especially with no meaningful data in the article about historic grade distributions at Harvard.
George Poste on Science and Innovation in the US
The Open-Source Data Science Masters - Curriculum
> Copyright © 2013 Jason Evans

I think you could forgive people for not knowing that Jason and Julia are the same person? (that's what you are implying, right?)
A Day's Shopping Delivered by Airplane (1919)
Amazon Prime 30 minute. 100 years ago
I would think anybody who hands over $150k gets the courtesy of an hour phone call a week. Considering that you wouldn't have to spend weeks / months doing the show-and-tell to dozens of potential investors, I think that's a small price to pay.
Old joke: What do you call a guy who gets straight C-minuses at Harvard?

A Harvard Graduate.

Harvard is effectively graded pass/fail. I'm not convinced that's actually a bad thing.
Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries
> ... Apple pulled them all from the store because they have mobile payment ambitions - and one doesn't let predators into ones own garden.

And yet Pingit is still in the app store.
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/barclays-pingit/id496552142
Timepiece: The future of watches
And I'm sure innovation in general is even harder to monitor.

Well I still stand by my observation that the top rated countries are on average more monocultural and collectivistic (which would lead to better safety nets I'd hope).
I'm aware it's inefficient, I was trying to suggest something that would currently be accepted as a standard transaction. I wasn't aware of the three key limit that's mentioned elsewhere in the thread, though, so my suggestion wouldn't be standard anyway.
The problem with putting everything in Evernote is that it becomes stale. I think that's what has prevented me from getting into it.

Some examples of items I would not put in Evernote, from the article:

- Some sections of my server's log, containing all the information I need to troubleshoot my most recent problem

You copied some sections of your server's log and put them in Evernote, so that you can troubleshoot a problem? How is this useful? Why not troubleshoot it by looking at the logs directly? Why do you want to store stale logs? Or, are you saying your server automatically refreshes the Evernote note? That would be more interesting and worthy of an article.

- A web clipping from an article on the best VPN providers, since I'm installing a VPN on my home server

Aren't you interested in whether the list of best VPN providers changed since the last time you searched? And why store something that's a google search away? How often will you need to review this stale list of VPN providers?

- A web clipping on how to install OpenVPN on my home server, since I don't remember how to do it by heart

Same thing. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+install+openvpn How often do you install OpenVPN?

- A web clipping on setting file permissions, since I need to give my girlfriend access to my server's files

What about just learning how to set file permissions, if it's something you do very often? Or, "man chmod".

No offense intended, I know people think and work differently. I just still don't get it.
Security research is my primary reason.
Well look, all math problems have a numerical answer. I've been doing them for 8 years so far and every time they've had an answer. These problems are also very silly. But I can confidently state that every math problem has some words and numbers and you are expected to perform some kind of calculation with the numbers based on the words around them.

The problem I see right now doesn't have an immediate connection between the statement and the question parts. I have the numbers 125 and 5 and the question "how old is the shepherd?". I can see that the answer must be a person's age. The numbers refer to how many sheep and how many dogs are in the flock, which isn't really related to the shepherd's age. Still, there's probably some lateral thinking involved, or there's an omission, because I must obviously answer with a number.

If I add, subtract or multiply the two numbers in any order, I do not get a number that is plausible as a person's age. However, if I divide them, I get 25, which is totally a possible answer.

25 is also the number of sheep per dog. Assuming that that's a normal ratio for a flock, we can say that the shepherd's flock contains 5 flock-units. So if the shepherd started at 17 years old (very plausible in a rural setting) and was given a new flock-unit every two years (obviously as you get older you get to take on more responsibility), at age 25 the amount of responsibility would have grown to 5 flock-units.

This answer has a nice symmetry to it. Math answers have some sort of nice symmetry in them, so this sounds plausible. With the information given I can do no better.

Answer: 25 years old.
It's also due to the fact that easier grading brings more positive student evaluations of profs, which are taken into account with salaries and tenureship.
I always hated this about other schools. While I will be the first to admit that I could probably have tried harder in school, I blame this practice in Ontario for part of why I could never get an interview for medical school. Waterloo engineering was definitely one of the tougher programs, and an 80 average was actually tough to attain. It seems that my friends at other schools or programs had an easier time getting 80s and 90s.
I used this book [0] for my C++ course at uni a few semesters ago and found it rather easy to follow and Weiss does a good job going through the differences between Java and C++.

The biggest difference for me from Java is the fact you have to manage your own memory as there is no garbage collector to clean up after you in C++. This book covers memory management, operator overloading, and functors quite well.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Java-Programmers-Mark-A-Weiss/dp/01391...
The telecoms
> Types are generally a hindrance for a small scale app.

I don't think that's true. I think that the ritual incantations to the type system required in, particularly, C++/Java-style languages are a hindrances that outweighs the benefits of static typing on very small projects.

And the limitations of limited static type systems can also be a hindrance.

But when you have a richer type system and/or type inference that reduces the necessary incantation, the size of project on which static typing becomes a net positive drops.
4 years ago what was the only decent tablet option? The iPad.

Apple's solution for running business apps and distributing them outside the app store is actually not that bad.
You're overestimating and underestimating a lot of things at the same time. $150k is not 'tiny' by any measure, raising this much from family alone would mean you have a pretty well-off and trusting, loving family to begin with, not all developers reside in SF, U.S.A to demand or even need such a yearly salary etc. etc. I don't want to start tearing too much into your argument because I kind of like it that people are still able to think so...rosily on average.
Too bad nobody cares what you think.
amazon prime 30 min. 100 years ago!

*as long as you live near a golf course
It kind of looks like Lifehacker read "Learning to Love Evernote" by Bradley Chambers [1] and decided to write an article off of it without crediting it. Or maybe Lifehacker developed the same uses and techniques independently. Anyway, the Chambers ebook is great.

1. http://chambersdaily.com/learning-to-love-evernote/
A lot of expensive work done around Central Park. Not surprising considering there is probably a high demand and higher income residents for that area.
This is kind of bad to do in a kernel. It is up to you to map the pages of your own stack. Once you have higher level concepts like a process, it's fair for the kernel to look at that state from a privileged position and say "OK, I will allocate more stack pages as it faults, and kill the process if I fail or it goes too far". But for kernel mode code, that last part could lead you to a scary place. IMO it's better to just use a few pages for stack and not go crazy with recursive functions.
Preferred admission to kids of alumni at top private school. And easy As that will pave way to other grad schools.

I don't want to believe US is a class based society but ...
http://www.neowin.net/news/valve-co-founder-windows-8-is-a-c...

Steam
is a basically a middleman for games taking 30% cut of revenue. Of course they're and should be
terrified of how Apple eliminated middlemen with the App store and the
30% cut of all sales inside the app. There are things like Xfire for the
social gaming features.
I think the main reason behind this is that student loans are unsecured, and the people they are making the loans to generally have little to no collateral to put up. In order to incentivize lenders to make the loans, they need to have some sort of guarantees, otherwise there would be little incentive for everyone not to declare bankruptcy after graduation, take the hit on the credit score for a few years, and then emerge with a basically free education.
Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path puts forward the notion that this is really an allegory for the adoption of the phonetic alphabet. Prior to this, all the different language speakers could communicate with a symbolic system of writing, but once the phonetic alphabet was adopted they were no longer able to communicate in writing without knowing the reader's language.
there's no relationship between "Jason Evans" and "Julia Evans" =) That's a coincidence.
The 10 Best-Selling Cars of November 2013
November is a big buying month for American consumers, but they’re usually taking home TVs and sweaters from Black Friday sales – not new cars. Still, the new car market was strong last month with most automakers reporting modest increases in year-over-year sales.
You say that some form of repression is needed. It seems there is a divergence here. To put it in the words of another:

"If we anarchists are utopians, we are so as a tension towards quality; if democrats are utopians, they are so as a reduction towards quantity. And against reduction, against the atrophy lived in a dimension of the minimum possible damage for them and the maximum damage for the great number of people who are exploited, to this miserable reality we oppose our utopia which is at least a utopia of quality, a tension towards another future, one that will be radically different to what we are living now."

The need for repression obvious if you are a member of the emergent cybernetic bourgeoisie. Black hat hackers, terrorists, computer illiteracy, government regulation, and anarchists all threaten your material conditions for existence and your quantitative conceptual framework. The cyber-liberals will support political projects as long as they don't interfere with their business or threaten their position of power and privilege. John Stewart summed up this attitude when he said of Occupy:

"Look, if this thing devolves into throwing trash cans into Starbucks windows, nobody's going to be down with that..."

tl;dr - It's not about creating a perfect society, it's about destroying the shitty one we have. Of course you're not down with that if you wanna be the next Steve Jobs.
Former Evernote user here, too. I now use alt Notational Velocity, and markdown (sometimes) with Drop box. It has the advantage of my content isn't locked in to a proprietary system (last time I worked with it, I could only export HTML versions of my notes from Evernote). Also, I can use my OS to index and provide search capabilities into my files, if I need.

It's also led to a system where I take better notes on the things that I need to remember.
I have an idea for whenever I'll have my own kids. I'll buy them as toys as many measurement devices as I possibly can. This will show them, I hope, that numbers are not an abstract thing. They are everywhere. Not visible at first glance but with proper device you can see them.

I think the fact that my grandfather (electrician by trade and self-taught carpenter, shoemaker and general DIY guy) owned and used vernier scale, micrometer, folding rule, voltmeters and ammeters contributed to my ability at mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science and being a reasonable person.

Surely I used a vernier scale as a makeshift futuristic gun, micrometer to squish my fingers, folding rule as kind of pretend switchblade but later also for seeing numbers in the world.
Should we all use the same programming language as well?
Yes, but the Harvard degree comes with a lifetime of Smug.
Interesting, thanks. I went back and found the article I had read about this awhile back and I guess it was specific data about robot arms and probably wasn't entirely comprehensive:

http://hcri.brown.edu/2013/08/29/could-your-robot-hurt-you-p...

Edit: one of those are a stretch calling it a "robot" A conveyor belt is a robot? Also, 33 results for robot, but 108 for Forklift and 11 for microwave, is it really all the much more dangerous than any other equipment? Should we ban microwaves (deliberate hyperbole, I realize those weren't deaths)?
One of our companies FormLabs raised $19M after our seed round ;-)
You can imagine the kind of valuation they got...
Pret d'Union, French Lending Club clone raised $5M
Sparrow has been acquired by Google

Very difficult to compare both programs and it's not the goal to compete against anyone.
Sounds great to me! My girlfriend's Windows 8.1 laptop does about 50% of what I want from a desktop. My work provisioned MacBook Air and OS X does about 70% of what I want from a desktop.
Cold Brew Experiment 2 - Tea Bags in a Jar
oh man that is the kind of bad idea that I love. I'm definitely going to try implementing malloc that way and report on the results =D
> Actor model as a library is a design pattern. Design patterns are merely patches for missing language features

In the sense in which it is accurate to say that "design patterns are merely patches for missing language features" -- that is, design patterns that are applied as code templates -- anything that can be implemented once as a library is not a design pattern in the language where that is possible.
Law enforcement, a non-geeky use for Google Glass
That's what creators tell themselves anyway. More likely this individual had a more concrete and financial reason to do so.
You're right, any bleeding edge Linux can be unstable.

But I'd put an app into production on any of the ones listed over Mint.

Either way, the fact that Steam doesn't work on Mint is Mint's problem, not Steam's...
I'm sorry, it is over the top, I'm just so tired of npm libraries I depend on going dark or changing things without updating the version.
I have to imagine that the long-term solution for this is for employers to find better criteria to judge candidates on than a GPA. There's too much variance in schools and classes to really consider it an accurate judge of ability. It's a measure of how well you did in school, not how well you will be able to do your job.
All the projects submitted to Kima15 since the launch 3 hours ago are more than a prototype.
Real products with customers already...
PhD programs are well aware of grade inflation at different universities and take this into account when conducting admissions. No idea if med schools do the same but I'd be surprised if they didn't. Your difficulty getting into med school could also have been because engineering not a typical "pre-med" degree.
4 kets to establishing your brand
30 arguments for net neutrality
I do not think the GMAT is a good indicator for civil service positions. Certainly no better than any of the state civil service exams and at the federal level the civil service exams were deemed to cause problems with affirmative action policies. The military has the ASVAB and I can't imagine anyone saying the GMAT is superior to the ASVAB. The small "d" democrat in me finds exams for public office abhorrent and I would hope that they would run into many legal challenges.

I scored a 720 on the GMAT. I do not think you should make any assumptions about my performance in a government position from that test result. All that the 720 indicates is that I am a skilled test taker.
Intuit Agrees To Acquire Small Business Document Startup Docstoc
* I had my laptop out and had all the kids looking over my shoulder watching the two launch attempts.*

Yep, same here!

Thank goodness for Kerbal Space Program. It's a marvelous backup.
Similarly, lack of a Harvard degree comes with a lifetime of hating on people who went to Harvard.
I taught an upper-level undergraduate course in math (combinatorics) at Stanford a few years ago. There were 18 students, and I gave all of them A's or B's.

They deserved it. I was inspired by what they accomplished. I would have felt uncomfortable if I had been asked to make sure the average was around a C. (And all of this is very typical of the experience of people teaching math at Stanford.)
The experience of the dot com bubble suggests the general shape of how much salaries can increase and requirements decrease. [1]

As we're not remotely approaching either end of that envelope, I'm not too convinced that any hard limits are coming into play.

I mean, we're not talking about whether anyone can hire couriers to write web services for six figures. We're talking about whether employers are willing to hire people with 5 years of experience with Technology X at X% more than their last comparable hire, as opposed to waiting around for the posting-perfect-match outlier with the requested 10 years experience, but who'll accept essentially the same wage as that last 5-years-experience hire.

[1] Much of that might have been arguably unsustainable, but not all. And again, we're talking about degrees and trends: are offers going up at all? Are employers budging on requirements at all?
Sort of. There are two other numeral systems I know of that are still being used: Chinese (used in Chinese, Japanese, and to a lesser extent Korean) and Khmer (used in Khmer/Cambodian, Thai, and Lao). Literate people in places that use those numeral systems know and use Arabic numerals too, but the Chinese and Khmer numerals are in no danger of dying out anytime soon. And even in the English-speaking world, we still use Roman numerals in certain contexts.
"but ultimately it was the education that got them out of poverty"

How? What is your economic system wide reaction mechanism? I think the problem is confusing macro and micro. On a micro level yes one individual can rise above others in that way. However, on a macro level diverting capital out of productive enterprises into merely increasing existing underemployment stats makes the overall situation worse for everyone, not better.

I'm not saying education is worthless, or underemployment should be 0% (or maybe it should?).

Think about this analogy. Maximum productivity resulting in maximum wealth for everyone involved happens when a factory produces 1000 cars. I know, lets produce 1500 cars, and also increase prices 10% per year, then having those unsold cars sit on the lot will make society as a whole wealthier because ... err, I guess it makes society as a whole substantially poorer. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying producing 1500 is a disaster therefore producing 500 would be genius, that would also be pretty bad. I'm also not making any moral or ethical or environmental value judgement about manufacturing cars.

Its basically the economic broken window fallacy.

Another way to look at it, is if you know about control system theory, taking an unstable system and pushing it hard in an even more unstable direction is not going to work well.

WRT the Korean example, as a cheap hobby or time filling past time, there's nothing inherently wrong with education, it didn't hold them back as far as I know. Nobody was spending money on liberal arts professors instead of spending the same money on welding robots and conveyor belts. Not that there's anything wrong with the liberal arts and making life worth living, just that it is orthogonal to economic productivity.
I wonder if Amazon would have existed today if Bezos had waited another 2 years while he worked a day job to scrape together $150k.

Time = Money