skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How far along as a programmer should one be before attempting building a language. I am a novice (very, very much so) Rubyist, and don't think I am anywhere near being able to attempt it, but I do know that, when I was still in school, the process most likely to make a complicated subject click with me was to understand it all the way to it's origin (the starkest example was actually the quadratic formula - I had tons of trouble understanding it and how to use it until I had a teacher who made us actually derive it, and all of a sudden I was one of the best in the class). Building a programming language seems like it might have the same kind of effect on me, and, being a firm believer of living outside your comfort zone, would like to know if it's possible for someone who is nowhere near being able to call himself a programmer to eventually build one.
You are what you document
My guess is that the cited problems are almost completely the fault of bufferbloat at or near (on the ISP side) the home router level. Pretty much all consumer hardware in existence seems to be configured with way too high buffer sizes.

Switching to fiber might help somewhat though, because a higher data rate translates the same number of bytes of packet queue into a shorter actual packet delay. So it slightly mitigates the pain of bufferbloat (at least until people start configuring the buffers to be even larger to "optimize for our faster networks").
Fine if it's in the bezel.
EMC World 2014: Pivotal and Isilon Take Hadoop Prime Time in the Enterprise
There does seem to be a perception that Walmart is cheaper. Certainly that helps them in many regards.

However this study from late 2012 found that Walmart was not cheaper in a survey of 150 items across a region:

http://www.businessinsider.com/target-is-actually-cheaper-th...

Granted, this study was from late 2012 and I don't have personal anecdotal experience to compare as I don't live in the states anymore.
Point 1 is only true for a proper subset of mathematics. This subset tends to be the only mathematics that are taught in high school (or even in undergrad unless you're a math major), which I think is a huge part of the problem. I can't recall the last time I did a proof of something in abstract algebra, category theory, or algebraic topology that actually involved a calculation of any kind, so clearly a facility with basic calculations is unnecessary for those proofs. Instead what is required is a facility with understanding rigorous definitions and abstractions, which is extremely valuable and important, and of which the average high school mathematics education provides essentially none.
Intelligent carpooling matching platform
I would recommend the Racket tutorial, especially, the section on using Racket's macro system to implement a slight variation of Algol 60. Working through this tutorial would give you a foundation on building your own DSLs, as well as giving you a solid foundation on using Racket and its macro system itself.
I'm in this camp. Target is also a little closer to my house and easier to get to, but the shopping environment is much nicer even though much of the inventory is identical. After I shop at Wal-Mart I feel like I need a shower. Not so much at Target. K-Mart is similar, but while Wal-Mart just has an air of bone-cutting industrial cheapness, K-Mart is more sad, it's more like the dilapidated shanty, leaning to one side, with ten kids playing in the yard.
I don't disagree with the order of teaching, in general, but with its pacing. Arithmetic shouldn't be given 6 (K-5) years. Algebra shouldn't be 3-4 years (6-8 or 6-9). We bore students with the same material slightly stepped up each year for years at a time until they get to high school. Then we try and hit the accelerator and make them jump from the most rudimentary concepts in arithmetic and algebra and get them through trigonemetry or calculus in 3 more years. The concepts of trig, calculus, probability and stats, linear algebra can all be taught earlier. Students are capable of this, but the curricula aren't designed around it.

I didn't even realize until college that Algebra II was linear algebra. The notations used in college linear algebra would've been difficult for me to grasp fully at the time, but they make solving those systems of equations so much easier. And learning the notation [in high school], getting to the courses in college they'd be far less intimidating. We have 13 years with students before college, plenty of time to introduce notation and higher order concepts slowly rather than dumping it on them freshman year of college.

EDIT: Clarification on time of something
Your assumption is incorrect. On iOS you can turn on or off location (and several other permissions) for any application at any time, since day one.
I'm imagining it would have to be. A raw near-IR spectra isn't going to be much use unless you can try and match it up with a database of near-IR spectra of known materials.
Was about to say the same. Uglify would clean it up as well.
See, these great ideas will now come to market, save numerous lives and improve quality of life for people, and you're going to get nothing.

I have an idea. We come up with a shitter station for you since this is where your great ideas come from. We'll serve you up with food and fun. You just make the business you do.
You can do the exact same thing with disks to arrange data sequentially though.
Do they fuzz systems like this, or do they just ship it as soon as the test suite passes?

It seems like there's a whole world of hurt waiting to arrive if people can start to inject data into these systems.
Purists, Pragmatists, Iconoclast, egotist
Building algorithm intuition through stories: introducing Basil and Fabian
Sony warns of battery fire risk in new Vaio PCs
Show HN: I'm writing a book to teach beginner Django web app programming
I'm writing a book which teaches Python/Django web app development for non-programmers, and fundraising on Kickstarter (passed minimum funding, 2 days left):

http://hellowebapp.com

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1868398473/hello-web-app-intro-to-building-web-apps-with-djan

It's basically the process I used to teach myself programming as a web designer a few years back, which I then launched a small web app (infant-version of WeddingInviteLove.com), which has grown into my bootstrapped startup which supports me full-time (WeddingLovely.com).

Most tutorials/books assume some amount of programming experience, or start out too advanced even if advertised as a beginner book. My goal is to assume nothing, and really break it down and make it super simple to get a basic web app launched, which hopefully will make it easier to transition to those other more advanced tutorials.

I also have a GitHub page for the public materials (like installation instructions, which'll live here rather than the book so I can update them quickly if needed): github.com/limedaring/HelloWebApp

I'd love any feedback on the project or any suggestions HN has for the book's materials. Thanks for letting me share!
The article: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/5-year-...

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7333998
I tend to use the royal We as well, but I'm not a good enough man to actually call that out anywhere.
Introduction to React Part 2
Don't apologize. This is hilarious.
Kids deal with abstraction every day. The very idea of "color" and "number" are abstractions of concrete experience.

Teaching kids basic group theory is very possible. You can play games with shapes in the plane to learn about dihedral groups (without ever using those words). Graph theory, as the author says, is another avenue.

The problem is that what students are practicing isn't math, any more than running after the ball when you miss a swing in tennis is practicing tennis. And you improve at what you practice.
Also, in your example, the recursive call is not in tail position. You would first need to rewrite it to use an acumulator parameter.
Google Launches Delivery Service in LA and NYC
Hmm..Not such a idea. It makes us sloppy if there is too much automatic correction involve. I am already having problems remembering simple things like my phone number as I can look it up on my smart phone. I would even suggest that my capacity to remember things would have been a lot better if I had lived before the invention of smart gadgets. My spelling has also suffered as a result of this automatic correction.
I'm sorry, is this the OBD2 dongle-dependent app or a different Automatic? I dug around the blog looking for a link but found nothing obvious.
4-way stops exist in Sweden. Quoting from Wikipedia at http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stopplikt :

> Vissa korsningar har en stoppskylt vid varje väg, ett så kallat flervägsstopp. Det innebär att alla som kommer till korsningen måste stanna, oavsett vilken väg man kommer på. Tanken är att man vid flervägsstopp ska ta ögonkontakt med medtrafikanter för att på så sätt komma överens om vem som ska köra först.

Or my translation "Certain intersections have a stop sign at every way, a so-called multi-way stop. This means that everyone who comes to the intersection must stop, despite which way they come from. The thought is that people at the multi-way stop will make eye contact with their fellow drivers in order to come to an agreement on who shall drive first.

(Apparently the actual law says "ömsesidig hänsyn" - "mutual consideration.")

That said, they aren't anywhere near as common as the US.
Hyper-VVV on Windows
How to Build Front-End Web Apps that Scale – FutureJS
Sorry to hear that! Our goal is to make Optimizely so easy to use it just works. Clearly we've failed in this case. I'd love your feedback on what we could have done better to improve your experience.

FWIW, two weeks ago we launched our Optimizely Academy to help folks like you go from zero to hero: https://learn.optimizely.com/hc/en-us
I wouldn't go as far as to say they are "real" yet - they are still working on the prototype: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hellobragi/the-dash-wir...
I love it. I find that a lot of the swiping motion stays on the home row. But, it is a lot of back-and-forth. It would be interesting to see a mobile keyboard designed with swiping such that frequently used letters are clustered together, and less frequently used letters further away.

Meh. Having the Dvorak keyboard on my phone is also an awesome conversation piece. To each their own. :)
There's three t's in Automattic.
Yes, it is. And yet there are two Samsung phones in my home that come pre-loaded with it. Ergo, free.

It honestly never dawned on me that someone would pay for Swype.
It's possible, there is a company called Valencell (http://www.valencell.com) that has been working on this for a few years. There a few products using that technology that are out already, not sure how good they are right now, but promising technology for sure.
Agreed but not even a passing reference to the clear basis for his argument makes me question what else he is regurgitating.
On iOS you can disable any permission at any time for any application and it's plainly explicit in the API. I've never seen any application do what you describe.

The typical example people make is Facebook, which they assume would block you if denied your location but instead works just fine when you remove access to location, camera, photos, and contacts. I don't see why they would behave differently on Android.
The NYT's piece on unwatched ads contains not fewer than four below-the-fold <div>s containing display ads from which the paper will likely receive no revenue.
If anything, this story calls out the sensationalism of a tech press that just sucks up anything it can find and runs with it as a story. We've seen unsubstantiated "reporting" of Apple rumors like this for years, and these stories never add anything valuable to the discussion. I'm glad this fake rumor got so much traction. Maybe enough people have egg on their faces that we will do better in the future. But probably not.
> They needs millions of very accurate distance measurements per second to drive.

I was with you up to there.
This is probably the most important stat about drugs, however, it falls victim to a pet peeve of mine. For cigarettes and alcohol and drugs of abuse (the ones without accepted medical applications - street heroin, cocaine, etc.), the analysis is pretty useful. However, with prescription drugs, simply counting the number of deaths is misleading. ADR's are tragic, and we should be doing all we can to learn more to prevent them. However, a correct analysis, at least when attempting to optimize the way it seems he is trying to, is to total the number of deaths caused by drugs, and then subtract the number of deaths prevented by these drugs. All optimizations should be addressed through that lens. I think the author would agree with this, I just didn't see any mention of the fact that while drug deaths are tragic, there are also many deaths prevented by current application of drugs, and ignoring the opportunity cost of changing drug application (potentially reducing the number of lives saved) is potentially dangerous.
Show HN: Yeller – An Exception Tracking app built for speed and scale
Simple iOS Activity Indicator View
Sadly, I would take data collection w/fiber over Comcast anyway. If I want protection than I can just purchase a VPN account.
Refactored PHP engine makes Wordpress 20% faster
Automattic (Matt as in Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress) is the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet, etc.
Wobleibtmeinhonorar.de is worldslongestinvoice.com for Germans
God Helmet
sole founder here - happy for feedback/criticism
By showing the work, he's busy proving himself instead of learning. This demonstrates that, intentionally or not, public schools have become primarily credentialing institutions and not teaching institutions. I offer a thought exercise...

If you could be given a magical amulet that let you teach students better, more quickly, and more permanently than ever before but at the expense of never being able to test them to see exactly what it was that they learned, or you could be given a magical apparatus that let you test them perfectly so that you knew exactly what it was that they learned and did not learn but gave no insights or help into how to teach them those things that they failed at, which would you choose?

Which would your local school administrator choose? Which would your children's teachers choose? Which would the legislator writing education policy choose?

Everything else is post hoc rationalization. Having decided what it is that we want public education to be, we need to have some sort of justification for it even if it doesn't make sense.

Do you know what people who don't show work do when they move on to more difficult problems? They start scribbling it out on paper, without any prompting. The more difficult problems are interesting enough that they want to get them right, and when they notice that basic mistakes are interfering they strive to avoid those.

Or, in some cases, they just don't bother. When you solve the Poincaire Conjecture (spelling? didn't want to cheat and look it up) no one gives a crap whether or not you "showed your work" because most of the other mathematicians can also "just see" the boring details, and are interested primarily in the truly insightful portion of the proof.

I suspect that we're actually selecting for accountants and not math geniuses when we harp on "showing your work". How many Perelmans did we discourage and how many math stooges were praised last year in public schools?
(Fair disclaimer, this analogy is borrowed from a much better writer, Paul Lockhart). And the words "Paul Lockhart" are hyperlinked to http://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart-MathematiciansLament.pdf which Typhon already pointed out several comments up-thread! Your reading comprehension needs a tune-up.
Microsoft Readies a Virtual Assistant for the Corporate World
I've been talking about this for years with friends. I bet on Singapore. (I lived there 2.5 years and know the place a bit).
It sounds like a combination of two rather common startup mistakes: Not making something people want (enough), and spending raised money too fast. Side note: I think the font size is way to big on this page.
Interesting that Silicon Valley believes that going to NYC is "going international"!
In your example I would say body=car.
The motion of the car would be life. And that is indeed a channel of gas from the fuel station. The car is needed to channel it, but the car is not it. There is an active component.

I agree with the rest of your post. Talking about the "meaning of life" is masturbatory in my opinion. Not that there is anything wrong with a little self pleasure. It just doesn't produce much.
Target is designed for women - clean, nice colors, lighting, friendliness.

Source - My dad is a retired sales rep in that market.
Show HN: SpacedOut, a three dimensional CSS3 Sidebar
The simpler alternative is VWO: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/

Sadly, I don't think paraschopra posts here on HN much anymore, though.
The article reads like an excerpt from Foucault's Pendulum if perhaps a bit less sinister.
How can it be bad to stop remember everything by thought? It makes total sense for me to have my phone number written down so I don't have to remember it. I value my brainspace more than that.

So stuff that can be automated should be, so you can focus on what matters, the content of your words. Not your spelling of those words.
With draconian CAFE requirements coming (49 mpg average [1][2] for vehicles the size of a Honda Fit), manufacturers are really ramping up their efforts to be compliant. Automatic transmissions now can deliver 1-2 better mpg than a manual, plus sometimes faster shift times. You're also seeing a lot more CVT transmissions vs. conventional planetary gear ones these days because they typically deliver 2+ mpg better economy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAFE#Agreed_standards_by_model_...

[2] I'm not saying the days of the V8 are over (like in Mad Max 2 -- "The last of the V8 Interceptors. A piece of history.") .. but if you want one, you might want to start thinking about buying one to keep.
In the case of the second student, I feel there's some missing context there. My guess is it was an alumni recommendation, which would explain the circumstances.

For student #3 - I'm unaware of how popular the practice of having a test per university is (or how practical it is to take them as a prospective applicant). Maybe this is restricted to certain universities or majors, or works similarly to EA or ED in the US?
>> prescription drugs, many of them probably prescription painkillers, kill hundreds of thousands of people every year.

But how many lives are saved by these drugs? To be clear, I am totally open to this number not being nearly high enough to justify the deaths caused, and very much believe our prescription drug system should be reformed. But the fact that prescription drugs actually save lives, and are not simply causes of death, gets ignored far to much for me. I want to know the true net cost of prescription drugs (an intentionally absurd analogy would be something like airbags kill 7 people a year with no mention of how many people those airbags saved).
Hey Pud - we were avid GWO users and became converts to Optimizely and/or Visual Website Optimizer where more appropriate.

Happy to walk you through a 5-min real-world tutorial.

Drop me a line @ profile email if you like.
Can a VC or a money guy please explain why a company that is so critical to web valued less than Tumblr ?
If your only exposure is analytical lab work (where by definition the work is difficult), you may not be familiar with the breadth of field utility of near-IR.

Some application examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699186

> And how the hell does it determine the ripeness of a avocado through the skin?

eg: http://ucanr.edu/datastoreFiles/234-347.pdf and http://www.aseanfood.info/Articles/13004404.pdf

[edit: removed LMGTFY link - sorry, that was rude. But please don't pull the expert card outside your area of expertise: NIR has been used to assess fruit ripeness for decades]
They probably had the tech working, and some patents registered than(i've seen something similar in disk drive tch).Probably didn't release due to commercial reasons.
That's not really answering the question I asked.

And writing an API takes up a small proportion of my time. Usually its generating database queries, and spitting them out as web pages, and presenting the data in a way that non technical users can understand.
Some do, others don't. There is an interesting dichotomy: much of mathematics does appear to be completely dissociated from reality, and yet in the other direction, reality appears to be entirely mathematics. I think to reach a unification, it is absolutely essential that we have people working in each direction. You aren't likely to develop a theory of (∞,n)-categories by working backward from reality, and yet it turns out to be useful to have done so once you start exploring e.g. topological quantum field theories.
> Why should where I'm standing right now affect what words are in my dictionary?

Since Swype has do to a lot of inference from your gestures, it seems reasonable that it may perform better when inferring proper names with some location awareness.

For example, if I am in a particular city, and wanted to type the name of a street where I am.

I am not saying that's a feature I find compelling; it does sound reasonable though. Letting the user chose this behavior (and the permission), would be best.
I wonder if these cassettes are susceptible to 'stretching' that pained older cassette storage media.

As the tape began to wear out, it would 'stretch' and subtly change the frequency of the data stored on it, causing issues.

Anyone have any further details on this?
Very interesting merger of social and e-commerce here. I'd expect other players in the space to follow suit, or at least discover new ways to engage their clientele via social channels.
CLI interactive text selection utility
Architecture Issues Scaling Web Applications
Pleasure is the only thing that is inherently valuable to a conscious organism. It feels good.

There would be no reason to pursue the things you desire if pursuing them and/or getting them didn't make you feel good.

If pursuing them and/or getting them does make you feel good, there is a reason to pursue them. But the reason is because they make you feel good---because they bring pleasure.
This was obviously fake because measuring blood pressure isn't something you can do via the ear canal in a non-intrusive way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_pressure#Measurement

Kind of sad that even a single person believed this. Why is everyone so willing to forego scepticism?
The author is french, give him some slack.
That is actually a pretty interesting nugget that I missed on my first pass. I'm surprised that hasn't become a libertarian/anti-drug warrior rallying cry to convince those less moved by the "victimless crime" approach.
Show HN: Fitbay – Discover clothes that fit
Thanks maj!
I have two use cases in mind:

(1) Delivery-bot. A car that drives itself to drop off a package and only delivers on non-rainy days. (if you need delivery on a rainy day, you pay extra for a person-driven delivery service. Otherwise the package waits at the warehouse)

(2) Transport option for people who can't or shouldn't drive themselves - too old, too blind, too young, or physically impaired. The self-driving car takes them where they need to go when weather permits, otherwise they have to call a cab or van service as a backup option.

(Much of California only has a couple weeks of rain per year.)