skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having taught ~200 adults to program, a teacher should avoid the "difficult/easy" dichotomy entirely, which is closely related to the "stupid/smart" dichotomy. SQL is "easy" if you come from a job where you've used Excel all the time, but hard if you've never had to think that way.

Much more valuable is giving people the tools to (1) understand why something exists, (2) what problems it was designed to solve, (3) why it is designed the way it is vs. other possible ways, and so on. Everything is "easy" once you've viscerally experienced the problem yourself and spent some time tinkering with possible solutions.

Monads are "hard," for example, not because they're technically complicated. Their definition is not so much abstract as austere, as you point out. Rather, they're hard because the beginner doesn't see how they are an attempt to solve certain problems with side effects in a purely functional language which prioritizes referential transparency.

Both "easy" and "difficult" are dangerous words because the student quietly elevates them to statements about their own intellect. If this "easy" but I can't do it, I am stupid. If this is "difficult" but easy for me, I am smart — smarter than those other students who are having a hard time.

IMO, it's really the fixed mindsets we need to combat, not one particular axis of fixed thinking.
A thought that keeps me motivated when studying is this:

"Somebody somewhere figured this out. If I sweat it, I can too."

Of course, it won't work all the time[1] but the attitude serves me well I think.

[1]: I will never become a great painter because of: physical capacity, interest and willingness to devote my time to this.
The presentation was off. It does look like an analogy. It's intented as a question of how you'd respond if this happened with one of your coworkers.
A more valuable question is: how do you make yourself more productive?
Agreed, the title is a bit misleading since it's assuming you get a smartphone for free, or that it's something everyone has (not too far from the truth.) It's a £1 microscope accessory for a smartphone.

(If the process is commercialised, we'll probably start seeing lenses of this construction showing up in various toys...)
Let's put that straw man logic more realistically:

P1. If you want to have a good degree of health without requiring modern medicine, you should eat food that gives you a good degree of health without requiring modern medicine
P2. Successfully reproducing in an environment without modern medicine requires food that supports or does not tarnish a good degree of health
P3. Paleolithic humans successfully reproduced in an environment without modern medicine
C. If you want to have a good degree of health without requiring modern medicine, eating what paleolithic humans ate will support or not tarnish that goal

Of course the problems with your reasoning are numerous. That's why intelligent people who eat the paleo diet don't make them. And they likely wouldn't propose the logic I did here. That's why they use studies comparing the health of hunter-gatherers to neolithic farmers. That's why they discuss scientific studies in support of meat/fat, and in opposition to grains. That's why they get angry at people who misappropriate their views.
This is blog-spam of the re/code piece.Some other links have more context on the allegations and the response. EG,

http://time.com/78572/radiumone-ceo-fired/

The now-former CEO defended himself in a blog post Sunday, saying that he merely had a “normal argument” with his girlfriend after he discovered she was having “unprotected sex for money with other people.” Chahal denied injuring his girlfriend in the argument.

The whole thing seems bizarre. If the counter-allegations are true (and not just a smear) it may foreshadow credibility issues in any open-court prosecution. It may also explain a delay in seeking medical attention or documentary proof of injury.

Maybe someone can chime in if the victim or the police was on the hook for the evidentiary issue.

The BOD at some level may have been forced into a position to act simply because, no matter who was right, this looks like a bizzare and potentially compromising situation. Although I guess it would just be tabloid fodder if the injuries were truly non-existent.
Here's another treatment:

http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~norman/papers/Ordinals.pdf
"Marquess, a consultant for the Department of Defense"

Maybe I haven't been following this close enough but has anyone questioned whether or not it is perhaps a conflict of interest to be a consultant for the "Department of Defense" while also being a principal contributor to a project like OpenSSL?
Of course it does. I'm trying to make the point that one shouldn't even have to dig that minuscule amount to find out. It's as simple as adding a line to their landing page: Wagtail supports Python 2.7 and Django 1.6.2.
I suspect there is the confusion between what appears to be 'childish' and what is sophisticated. Things can be "childish" but also sophisticated, a la Adventure Time.

Ultimately, I have met a number of people who are so incredibly serious (and usually fairly young) that if it isnt a math paper, it's a waste of humanity. If only our brains worked like that!

Embrace neurally diverse experiences!
So, we agree on the accountability aspect.

Another part of my question, again without any position put forth on my part, is this: Was the method used acceptable, publically speaking out against them, and would that same method be acceptable if it was used on a rank-and-file or low-to-middle manager?
> those animals (birds) which do eat them could just switch to other insects

If those animals can switch, so can bacteria and virii switch their carriers.
> What about everything that relies on these mosquitoes as a food source?

Nothing in the world relies on mosquitoes as a food source. Some insectivores will happily eat mosquitoes if they can get them, but mainly feed on other species.

Mosquitoes also play a role in pollination in some areas, but, again, all mosquito-pollinated plants are more reliably pollinated by other local insects.
> Modern calculus doesn't depend on infinitesimals. The concept of "compactness" is the technical solution that lets you formulate calculus without them -- it's typically only taught to math majors because infinitesimals are less awkward to do algebra with: we can now prove that the shortcut works, so why bother with the long way unless you have good reason? They allude to this fact:

This seems to be an unusual claim, especially since the real numbers, the traditional domain of calculus, are not compact. To be sure, they are locally compact, but I'm not sure that I would say that this is "what makes calculus work". That honour seems better to belong to completeness.
My girlfriend is diabetic. Her mom is pretty stereotypical anti-GMO hippie type. To me, the irony is delicious.

Course, then I realize that my girlfriend's mom is essentially anti- her living and it stops being funny
Could you post your contact info please?
> However, I'm not sure what you say is correct; didn't Archimedes give a rigorous definition of infinite numbers as numbers that are greater than all natural numbers? (I.e., a number I is infinite if I > n for all natural numbers n.) And then didn't he define infinitesimals as numbers x such that x is not zero and 1 / x is infinite?

Without disagreeing, since I am not qualified to do so, I am surprised by this claim, which I had never heard before. Do you have a reference?
I disagree that ngmin is a full solution to the problem. It is a good and very helpful tool, but it's a hack and a pretty leaky one - I think it's often less of a hassle to just write all the explicit injection syntax myself than to fiddle with formatting to get ngmin to work and track down issues when it doesn't. Classy's solution seems much nicer to me.
I was lucky that one of the first issues of Compute! I got my hands on had a listing for a proofreader[1], a utility that checksummed each typed line of BASIC and displayed the checksum in the left margin. All listings in the magazine had these checksums printed to the left of the line numbers, so it was easy to catch typing errors.

This was especially useful without any kind of permanent storage. I had to type in my games every time. :-)

[1] Compute! November 1986 issue, page 94. https://ia600700.us.archive.org/6/items/1986-11-compute-maga...
//here's an AJAX request and a chain of promises
m.request({method: "GET", url: "/api/projects"})
.then(console.log) // log all projects
.then(pastItems) // filter past projects
.then(console.log) // log past projects only

The calls to console.log will not work.

You need to do this:

.then(function() { console.log(arguments); })

Or this:

.then(console.log.bind(console))
Where I'm from, the city routinely carpet-bombs the city with pesticides (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malathion). This is pretty contentious, especially since it's primarily for pest control and not actually for health reasons.

GMO tech that lets us stop breathing in all that delicious malathion is a good thing, in my books
People don't understand monads because they don't write code with monads. Instead, they read abstract tutorials about how a monad is like a burrito full of kittens, get scared, and then don't actually reach the stage of learning by doing.
It's a little late, and I'm not able to put time into looking into it tonight, but I imagine that towards the end of slavery, Northern business owners who claimed that paying free men to work would put their businesses under and that those same owners were looked down upon in their community. We may be looking at the same phenomenon occuring.

And, yes, the spectrum is huge. This covers everything from speeding tickets to domestic violence, and beyond.
Normally very scripted, but getting better recently.
Accused of beating GF? I don't know. Depends on whether I believed it and other factors. Plead guilty + police say he's on tape doing it worse than he plead to? Fired. Every time.

Political donations would never have an effect on my employees. If any of them are reading this, consider this my word. CEOs are different.
Probably Ruby. No other language makes testing that easy or fun.
It's the "in most cases" that'll get ya!
I write it fully acknowledging that programming language flamewars are pointless, but this article just shows that you don't even have to try hard to create a biased comparison.

Here's the essential difference between Go and Erlang: Go gets most of the things right, Erlang gets way too much wrong.

So what does Go gets right but Erlang doesn't:

* Go is fast. Erlang isn't

* Go has a non-surprising, mainstream syntax. You can pick it up in hours. Erlang - not so much.

* Go has a great, consistent, modern, bug-free standard library. Erlang - not so much.

* Go is good at strings. Erlang - not so much.

* Go has the obvious data structures: structs and hash tables. Erlang - no.

* Go is a general purpose language. Erlang was designed for a specific notion of fault tolerance - one that isn't actually needed or useful for 90% of the software but every program has to pay the costs

* Go has shared memory. Yes, that's a feature. It allows things to go fast. Purity of not sharing state between threads sounds good in theory until you need concurrency and get bitten by the cost of awkwardness of having to copy values between concurrent processes

So sure, if you ignore all the major faults of Erlang (http://damienkatz.net/2008/03/what_sucks_abou.html, http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2011/07/trouble-with-erlang-..., http://ferd.ca/an-open-letter-to-the-erlang-beginner-or-onlo..., http://sacharya.com/tag/erlang-sucks/) it compares very favorably to Go.

You just have to overlook ugly syntax, lack of string type, lack of structs, lack of hash tables, slow execution time. Other than those fundamental things, Erlang is great.
In Praise of EitherT
Update: I've emailed several times now with Matt, and he's definitely on top of the situation. I get the impression that he's being vague in his responses to respect OP's privacy (and the others involved). I appreciate that, and he's done a stellar job of responding in general.

Anyway, I think there is more than meets the eye here, and I should have given Freelancer.com a bit more benefit of the doubt. I do hope that eventually more information will become available, as this is a serious issue.
but they charge an upfront fees of min $9, any free alternative to flippa?
To replicate erlang, is easier if used the Actor model? Or can be done with CSP?

Also, what is need to made a soft realtime language/runtime?
Cody, I'm still sorry I couldn't have maintained the Android app for you. :/ I loved working on it but just balancing that out with school kicked my ass.
Does "ultimatum" and "raft of complicated last-minute changes" not raise anyone else's tinfoil paranoia alarms?

Those commits should get significant scrutiny, because it sounds like US/CA govt were given an indirect opportunity to push whatever changes it wanted AND rushed code isn't necessarily the best either.

(Also I'm glad FIPS mode is dead in LibreSSL.)
>> If this outbreak was happening in your country, hurting your family, killing your friends, I doubt you'd be so loath to support GM solutions.

That's an appeal to shame. It's true that people are generally selfish. And not only those in the developed world. It's also true that, when under physical duress, people can be made to support just about any immoral, illegal or just plain bad idea. Just because the majority of those opposing it are not the same people as those who most stand to benefit directly it does not follow that, in this case, using GM is fine.
Have you tried selling these on http://flippa.com
If your checklist says "memcpy is forbidden", and you encode that in a static analyer (test), heardbleed would be prevented.
for work: asp.net mvc, jquery, bootstrap, wcf services, ms sql server, C#.

for play: play (scala), jquery, postgresql.
I don't care how fit you are, almost no one is running a 10k in 45 minutes at 60% of max HR.

I'm sure in many cases more strenuous exercise is not detrimental, but of course the public health recommendations are going to play it safe.
Yes, but do you need the modern definition to do calculus, in a practical sense? I don't think so. The way things actually went, practical computations using calculus, by Newton and others, came a couple of centuries, at least, before the modern rigorous foundations were developed.

So if some other development had intervened, in the sort of alternate history postulated in the article, to prevent the practical computations from being taken further, that could have prevented the modern rigorous foundations of calculus from being developed. To put it another way, if other developments had not intervened, the next couple of centuries after Archimedes could possibly have seen something like our modern rigorous foundations for calculus being developed.
See the Wikipedia page on infinitesimals:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitesimal

In particular the first paragraph in the section "History of the infinitesimal" and footnote 4 there.
Homejoy, Uber, and the Marketplace of Labor
This is usually a small price to pay for guaranteed O(n) matching speed. (Kudos to the author for doing the Right Thing here.)
Is it just me or the author fail to explain all the Go's detrimental design clearly? Most of the points he listed there are pretty much personal taste thing and basically what he was saying is "Go has so many problems because Go is not designed as Erlang".

For example, he said

"But when it comes to complex backends that need to be fault-tolerant Go is as broken as any other language with shared state."

Why? Why shared state is so bad in Go? Isn't it taken care by Go's channel anyway?

Also, why Pre-emptive Scheduling is bad? Isn't Error Handling still pretty much just a matter of personal preference?

Why Introspection makes Erlang so much better? What's the practical key problem for Go that can not be tackled without instrospection?

And I completely failed to understand the point of "Static Linking".

I'm not trolling. I don't have Erlang experience, and most of the problem the author pointed out was not bothering me, so I honestly want to see WHY they are problematic in Go
Browse and build geo-fenced data bubbles in physical places and specific times
CodeDicks
Coincidentally, the Africanized honey bee fiasco started in Brazil.
Ask HN: Would an adult-oriented side project would cause employment issues?
Do you think an adult-oriented side project would cause employers to refuse to hire and/or fire an average developer?<p>I have a side project that makes a small amount of money [as in, it is profitable for a side project but not a replacement for a high 5 figure income] that I've been neglecting/let stagnate because I enjoy working on it and such but it makes me nervous.<p>Right now, I can make it disappear and disavow all knowledge of it with every little issue. However, if I start working on it again and try to turn it into a lifestyle business. However, I don't want to do this and risk tainting my ability to be employed in the future if it doesn't work out.<p>For the record, it isn't a porn site but since its adults-only and I'm not editing the content I'm sure [like imgur] it would have nudes on it.
Ask HN: Reasons behind renaissance of functional programming languages
I've been curious about the renaissance of functional programming languages like Scala and Clojure in the software community. Is this a byproduct of our evolving hardware where instead of clock speeds the focus has been on pushing out more cores, so to reap the benefits software developers need better abstractions to make their code easily parallelizable? Is there some erlang-esque promise of pervasive immutability which is vaulting these languages into more popularity? Or is it simply the fact that these newer programming languages have simply learned from other languages' paint points and amplified the good parts by bundling them together neatly? I don't have anything against these languages, I'm just trying to get a deeper understanding of what appears to be a trend in the programming language space.
I agree with you, and its hard for me to view carpet bombing a city with pesticides as somehow interfering less with the environment.
See this thread for estimates on the dV of the different stages of these launch platforms for a full-capacity payload:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=30685.0;all

It costs about 8km/s to get into low orbit from an atmosphere-less Earth. From our planet it costs about 9.4-1.0km/s because of aerodynamic and gravity losses. Those aerodynamic and gravity costs, and the Hohmann Transfer from groundlevel to orbit (trivial for LEO, more for GTO) are the only parts of the equation one can address while burning vertically to stay over the launch site.

Assuming 10, If the first stage only has to contribute 2km/s, it can address aerodynamic and gravity losses (while thrusting vertically), and then leave the second stage to boost for the horizon and achieve full orbit all on its own.

At 4-5km/s first stage contribution, it doesn't look like this is possible unless the payload is very undersized, leaving the second stage with enough dV to go from 'rising out of the upper atmosphere vertically' to 'circular orbit' all on its own.

The mass is a free variable, a greater vertical component is practical in GTO (and I don't have the modelling skills to say how much), and the second stage may launch fully fueled for F9R contra to the existing pattern, so I can't be 100% sure whether F9R will be a practical return-to-launchsite option for lightweight GTO payloads.
Other carriers aren't shared flying hypodermic needles.
Not really. What Backus is advocating is applicative-style programming (what we know as FP today); what Glitch is advocating is anything but! Some of the code looks similar (indeed, we are inspired by FRP and earlier reactive languages like Esterel), but Glitch keeps everything in the world of explicit control flow rather than bury everything in data flow.
Failure Before Success - http://youtu.be/PJKz0JbEZcw

I find this motivating, especially when I'm feeling down.
Yeah, the example couldn't work. Also, isn't this an example of partial application, not currying?
Thank you for including the original URL in a comment. I love the policy of updating the submission to the best URL, but its also nice to know what the original URL was. This is a great solution.
I completely agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I feel there is a difference between what I 'produce' and what I'm paid for. As you say, I'm paid to solve business problems, so any time that I dedicate to not solving those business problems or improving the business is essentially not productive.

I'm not suggesting we count lines of code, but I'm only actually producing when the code I write makes it into a final product. If I spend 5 hours writing code, and then throw it all away, I'm not productive. When I re-write a bit of code, was I productive the first time and not the second? Was I productive both times? Does it matter what has changed between the time I wrote them both, or why I'm making the change?

Using your example of refactoring 1000 lines of code, if the 1000 lines ends up doing the same as the 100 lines, how have I added value to the business? I may not have, and therefore, that time was unproductive, or I may have added value, and therefore the time was productive.

Interestingly, it seems the definition of productive may be up for debate itself.
Typed in Walmart, got an instance crash:

IndexError at /

list index out of range

Request Method:	POST
Request URL:	http://www.moredrunk.com/
Django Version:	1.3.1
Exception Type:	IndexError
Exception Value:

list index out of range

Exception Location:	/home/moredrunk/../moredrunk/views.py in PlacesList, line 117
Python Executable:	/usr/bin/python
Python Version:	2.7.1
Python Path:

['/home/moredrunk',
'/usr/lib/python2.7',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-linux2',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-old',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload',
'/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages',
'/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/gtk-2.0',
'/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtk-2.0',
'/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7']

Server time:	Sun, 27 Apr 2014 22:56:14 -0400
eh. a joke among friends. efficient is the enemy of economic growth. if you take 30min to write a script yourself to automate some file transfers, it contributes ~$0 to the GDP. otoh, if you hired some consultants to do it for $5k, taking a month to complete the project, thats economic growth..
The fact that you can flip the entire page into Coffeescript mode is BRILLIANT. Also, love the tooltips that come out of the code blocks.
any better editor which supports markdown aswell?
When people on HN stop using the fallacy of "Appeal to the Free Market", I'll give a shit about making cogent arguments.
As kijin mentions in their comment, maintaining your blog was a labor of love - personally I miss the old internet - the early days, when it was a wild wild west, when my internet time was still divided with my BBS time. Everything grows up, and as things become more popular, they become more mainstream and open up to wider audiences. I know those old days are gone (and very fondly remembered) but I also know that what was my favorite past time has become a great career - one I can wake up to every morning, eager to do my job. There is a lot more noise out there now as all of this has become common, and there are millions of blogs - but there are still great ones out there, worth following and consuming - and hopefully the noise learns to not be uniform and figure out their own identities, and appeal properly to the consumers. I am thankful for how things have evolved, even when wistful.