skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience both as a learner and as a teacher in a variety of settings from teaching upper-undergrad level science courses to whitewater kayaking, the 'easy' vs 'hard' distinction is quite important on two fronts:

1) How easy/hard things are to learn or do the first time, or the first couple of times, or whatever.

2) How easy/hard things are to do even when you know what you are doing.

Very many tasks are easy or hard w/r/t (2), and are often referred to this way by the teacher. This may be quite different than whether they are easy w/r/t (1). As a student, it's important to use context to determine if an 'easy' task is supposed to be an easy (1), an easy (2) or both. As a teacher, it's critical to be clear about this.

If something is an easy (2), it may be a hard (1), because it's abstract, poorly explained, one has improper expectations or training, or it's just plain tricky. I think this is what the article is referring to.

In this scenario (easy (2), hard (1)), it's important to describe the task as such: If it keeps being hard for the learner to do, it is a good indication that the approach is wrong, and he or she needs to step back and evaluate things, seek more help, etc. Rolling a kayak is like this. It doesn't require a lot of physical effort to do, just proper technique; so if the kayaker is using a lot of strength and it's still failing, s/he needs to work more on being smooth, keeping his/her head down, and so forth.

Contrast this to something that is a hard (2): If a large amount of effort is being expended, this isn't an indication that things are on the wrong track. And it may be that if it seems really easy, then something is actually wrong.
I know where you are coming from... but I have started interpreting the word "trivial" (and I don't mean the math meaning of it, e.g. "empty set is a trivial solution") to be a canary of sorts. Once you encounter it and the statement that is supposed to be "trivial" isn't, that means you should backtrack and figure out what insight you are missing to make that statement trivial.

Of course, this kind of depends on the level of the author - some authors don't fully manage to put themselves in the shoes of the reader and take too much knowledge and experience for granted.
This is very nice/useful. Good work
How can I get in contact with you? Alternatively reach out to me (email is in profile)
Hello

I am the Chief Executive Officer of Freelancer.com and I have personally investigated this situation.

While I sympathise with Dustin's situation, he has failed to complete our Know Your Customer (KYC) process, which involves the provision of bona fide photo identification. We take the security of our marketplace and the protection of our users very seriously and have robust checks and balances in our anti-fraud procedures.

I have looked at all the details for this case, and our support team have done exactly the right thing in this instance.

We have decided to refund all funds associated with the project back to the employer's credit card (who is also located nearby in New York) as well as all fees associated with this. The employer has been called and informed that he will need to pay Dustin directly.

We will also be investigating the nature of this project further.

Thank you also to those of you that took the time to email me to bring this personally to my attention. My email address is matt@freelancer.com and I am happy to receive emails about any issue, even if it is to just drop me a note saying hello.

Regards
Matt

EDIT: Let me add that we accept driver's licenses as identification: http://www.freelancer.com/news/articles-verification-309.htm...
Jamie Fenton, Game Designer, 1982
That definition of trivial is not the one in regular usage.

> A common joke in the mathematical community is to say that "trivial" is synonymous with "proved" — that is, any theorem can be considered "trivial" once it is known to be true. Another joke concerns two mathematicians who are discussing a theorem; the first mathematician says that the theorem is "trivial". In response to the other's request for an explanation, he then proceeds with twenty minutes of exposition. At the end of the explanation, the second mathematician agrees that the theorem is trivial. These jokes point out the subjectivity of judgments about triviality.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triviality_(mathematics)

Trivial doesn't mean easy. Just that it has been shown before or that new information won't be derived in the proof.
Just have a look at the comments about the CTM book in c2, and the links to LtU:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ConceptsTechniquesAndModelsOfComputer...
I'd believe the key difference is in the possibility. Like, if I'm peacefully watching a sunset while a kid drowns on the other side of the world, then it's not shameful in any way; but if I'm peacefully watching a sunset on a beach while a kid is drowning next to me, then people should be judgemental.

It's perfectly understandable that most (perhaps even 99+%?) of the global population won't have any non-local influence, and that's okay, it can't reasonably be much different. However, there are things that scale, and they have a disproportionally large effect. For example, politicians are a particular group who can have huge long-term impact even as unintentional side effects; so are public NGOs. And many of them are intentionally doing things that cause delay in much-needed technologies or increase risk of us killing ourselves - I'd say that this is equivalent to [mass-]murder, even if the deaths are not specific, named individuals but "just a statistic"; and not today but a bit in the future. Perhaps we should be more judgemental about that, instead of agreeing to disagree.
Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," in a Lot Less than 696 Pages
Precisely, bread-boarding circuits with wires is why I prefer female connectors. Once you have something working and want to take it beyond a one-off prototype then you're going to want to build your own custom circuit board anyways, so I really don't see reliability being a huge issue for dev boards.

And having an ADC on board for non-critical stuff is still super useful for many projects. For example reading a thermister or LM335 to check the temperature of a water bath in a DIY sous-vide setup would be a great application of a cheap ADC on a Linux-based dev board. You don't need a crazy 24-bit ADC with precision voltage references, etc. just to measure if water is 140 vs 150 degrees F. A simple 10-12 bit ADC is great for many uses.
Strongly disagree. When it is honest, I find calling something "easy" is a great way to set the bar for the reader.

Regardless of the subject, If I am blown away by something labelled as "easy", it is most likely one of these two:

1) I thought I got it but I didn't
2) I don't have enough background to understand it

"This is easy" is the nice, red sign that is basically telling me "don't go further until you understood this" - and I'm quite happy to stumble upon it. Yeah, it usually means more research and thinking, but it is the only way for you to know that you actually mastered the topic, when it will eventually look, well, kinda easy indeed.
Yes, you are missing the point.

In Go, iteration order of keys was always non-deterministic.

At some point it was changed to be also random i.e. iterating the same hash the second time would produce a different sequence of key/values than the first time.

This is exactly what the article says, except using more words.
"Faster" versus "Fast Enough"
Amazon Prime Pantry
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Turn your phone into a remote control for the web. Works with:

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I've got a decision tree/random forest implementation as well. [1] I originally hacked out go code to analyze forests from other programs but have ended up finishing it off and optimizing it to learn faster then other libraries I've tried for my use cases (wide data with lots of categorical and missing values).

The language and tooling (pprof, go fmt, go doc) are great and make it quick to write and optimize stuff so it is well suited for my (largely experimental) purposes.

I also really like slices for writing efficient code as they let you pre optimize and reuse arrays and not have to keep track of the ending position.

Matrix libraries would be nice but you can call c ones via cgo. I am hopping for efficient pure go ones to be developed eventually so you can use them on app engine/nacl/exacycle or other untrusted code environments.

[1] https://github.com/ryanbressler/CloudForest
As a side note, and out of curiosity, is there a mechanism on HN I've missed? Soon after I submitted this link, it was around #3 on the front page, but when I refreshed 2 minutes later, it'd dropped to #25 and didn't rise again even though it was still quickly gaining points.

As an example, right now, this post has gained 199 points in 5 hours and is at #49, but the submission directly above it at #48 was also submitted 5 hours ago but has only gained 6 points. What am I missing?
I was so excited when I got my own vt220 on my desk and didn't have to go into the raised floor computer room. We used a VAX 1170 then a Micro vax to compile C for Motorola 68000 and 68020 processors. Then you'd download the code to an EPROM burner.
check out NSQ, designed for (in part) exactly this use case (and also written in Go)

http://bitly.github.io/nsq
The best talks I've ever heard on the SaaS business which I know are publicly available:

http://www.microconf.com/videos-2013.html -- no individual hyperlinks but you want the three of them: Rob Walling's, Jason Cohen's, and Erica Douglass'. Jason's is the best if you're pre-product, Rob's if you're in "OK, so the SaaS clearly works, how do I scale it" phase. (There are another few I would recommend from Microconf 2014 but they're not up yet.)

Long Slow SaaS Ramp of Death: http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-... <-- single best talk about running a SaaS business I've ever heard

I also like the Mixergy interviews. My favorite ever is Andrew's interview with Team Wufoo. I don't believe it is publicly available anymore, as Mixergy archives are available to paying subscribers only. (Well worth the money, though I have to watch selectively because apparently Andrew can record them faster than I can find downtime to watch/process them.)
What about when you want to get those motors, switches, actuators, etc. accessible over the internet? Linux-based boards are fantastic for this use. There are options to get an AVR or similar 8-bit micro onto a network, but if you do anything non-trivial (like parsing web service responses, trying to communicate over SSL, etc.) you will quickly hit the resource limits of the processors. Linux + realtime microprocessor is a really great combo. Right now the Beaglebone Black and Arduino Yun are some options, but it would be nice to see more.
Thanks. Changed from http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/04/how-i-used-heartblee....
This seems to me like a pretty random communication pattern to jump on, and not at all likely to be universally 'right'. Maybe it's a personal issue for the author, and others.

I've been teaching computer science to laypeople for decades, all the while saying it's easy. I feel confident in saying that, because I feel confident that I can make it easy. Explaining complicated topics in simple terms is one of my favorite things.

For myself, anytime I have to go to someone at work and have them explain a system that makes no sense to me, if they start with "oh it's simple, here..." I'm fairly sure my reaction is "Good! Please show me the simplicity!"
4k in sales a month with NO ADS in the past 16 months*

I own Facebook.com/strapbacks Strapbacks.com and it is starting to get boring!

Looking to get out! I have an awesome supplier in NYC and LA.
I am not afraid of GM stuff, but does anyone else think this idea is potentially really dumb? What about everything that relies on these mosquitoes as a food source? I am not an expert... but trying to just kill off an entire species sounds like a TERRIBLE idea...
Cornoholio has captured my meaning well. Though to be fair, I do partially think that a barter economy in some cases could e better option. To tsotha's point then, I think this is especially true because of the technology that we have.

In the original barter economies, it was difficult to find someone who had something you want in exchange for something you had, but now there are much more efficient ways to streamline that search process.

As to the potential value, to tsotha's question, this is very philosophical. Some will see it as valuable, others will be terrified. For me personally, I like not being too abstracted away from what I'm producing or consuming.

Gambling uses chips because chips are easier to give away than money. Using that logic, at least for me, giving away money is easier than trading something, especially if that something I have created and poured my energy into. The transaction without money then forces me to think about true utility and value, and would greatly discourage conspicuous and contrived consumption.
Always great to read these stories.

My dad worked with punch cards to crunch numbers in Fortran as a young statistician. Initially the university had only one big machine. Every day at 5PM there were long lines of people delivering their decks of cards with source code to the computing center. At night clerks fed all the jobs to the machine, and at 9AM there was another line of people getting their job output back.

The output cards were stacked in boxes on the wall by user name. You could tell the height of the output decks from some distance, and if a box only contained one card, you knew instantly it was a syntax error and someone was going to have a bad day. So apparently at their start of computing, they immediately had a nice analog build status visualization.
The bit on the left of 0004 says something like:

"On trouve j'ai la ___ ancienne ____ unité d'Iolchos et de Pylos."

In legend Neleus (another son of Tyro) was king of Pylos, and he was raised in Iolcos.

But these French bits are only the reason the unknown script is "likely French" :)
cynical HN comment.
How about a Kickstarter for buying coal plants and turning them off.
Me too, just came from that Raspberry PI thread and thought, oh no my browser has corupted. Good chuckle.
Thanks Elle. I have responded in this thread.

Regards
Matt
Ask HN: How do I become a great programmer without a CS degree?
I've been programming professionally for about a year, but I feel like I'm going to hit a wall in my personal development if I don't take some steps to fill in the gaps that I'm missing without a CS degree.

Having no formal math or CS background, what steps can I take to walk, talk, and program like someone with a strong CS education?
A passport is not required.

We accept driver's licenses as identification: http://www.freelancer.com/news/articles-verification-309.htm...
This is incorrect.

If you can supply me your username I will be happy to personally look into your issue.
There is no analog I/O on the Raspberry Pi. You can do PWM output on a pin, but otherwise no analog input or output. There really isn't much to drop from the model A--it's just the processor and supporting passive components with some headers, connectors, etc.

edit: I guess you could drop the analog video and sound output, but that would probably just save a few cents for the connectors.
Many of the students in the class got through those prerequisites with, say, 70% on the final exam. That means they have a very tenuous grasp on much of the content, and so teaching with at least some overlap with the prerequisite is useful.

The prerequisites may have been taken 6-12 months earlier. Without constant use, a lot of the concepts that were learned in the prerequisites will be lost over that time period. Many classes will indeed start with the first lesson or two as a revision of the prerequisites for this reason. It possibly annoys those who have a firm grasp, but not everybody learns mathematics (or language, or anything else) the same way.
Why most Crockford32 Implementations are Wrong
Hi there. I am the CEO of Freelancer.com.

We accept driver's licenses as identification: http://www.freelancer.com/news/articles-verification-309.htm...
This really is not trivial. Firefox OS runs on the same fork of Linux as Android but does not have any of the Dalvik bits.

There is Firefox for Android, you can go to https://marketplace.firefox.com to test most apps. There are some apps that only specify manifests for Firefox OS.

The everything.me launcher may provide some of the look and feel of Firefox OS. http://blog.everything.me/2014/02/06/mozilla-and-everythingm...
Ok... my browser in Linux didn't handle them well and didn't even suggest a program to open them with.

How well does Windows handle them?

Does one really want to save an image to disk first to be able to view it? Would imgur have been a success if all their images were in TIFF?
And, as the article points out, killing off this one species may not even halt the spread of dengue fever:

"Then there’s the possibility that as Aedes aegypti mosquitos are killed off, other species will just take their place.

Phil Lounibous, an insect ecologist at the University of Florida, says getting rid of Aedes aegypti won’t necessarily solve the dengue problem.

'The so-called Asian Tiger mosquito is (also) very abundant all throughout Brazil,' Lounibous says, 'and it ... is also a vector of dengue.'"
I'd guess that "unité" should rather be "__ cité d'Iolchos et de Pylos".

Which would make more sense since "cité" is the french word for "city" and both Iolchos and Pylos are cities.
zackman8000@gmail.com
Time Traveler – The Man who Built a Time Machine
The Piketty Phenomenon
This is a great thread, there is an idea in matching these with marketers as vice versa they're usually looking for great ideas to sink their teeth into.
Hacker News For Coins - http://coinspotting.com
I think context matters here. Let's take two different use cases as examples:

Case A: The student has a genuine interest in the material. The student wants to be successful, and has worked tirelessly to configure and/or understand a given problem or task. The last thing the student in Case A needs to hear is "It's easy". Obviously the problem, to said student, is not easy. This can hurt overall student moral.

Case B: The student has not a complete devotee to the material. The student is "trying it out". The student thinks the material could be achieved without professional education or training. The student in Case B may need a bit of convincing. Telling that student that something like this is "easy" could be beneficial in this case. The student will believe that understanding of the material is at least achievable.
http://the.wubmachine.com, an automatic music remixing web + mobile app that I built a couple years ago. Still gets anywhere from 20-40k uniques/month. Has native iOS and Android clients, as well as the web app. Ads + in-app purchases generate a couple hundred bucks each month with nearly-zero maintenance, but I'm not sure I have the free time to keep it running indefinitely.

- Costs under $50 per month to run

- Generates anywhere from $200-$1200 per month, depending on the season (it gets big each December for some reason)

- 20,000-40,000 uniques each month

- native iOS and Android apps have ~10,000 installs each

If anyone happens to be interested, shoot me an email at hi@petersobot.com.
Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
The other day at work we had a debate about being productive and a few people were surprised when someone said "if you work with computers it's nearly impossible to have your brain wired in productive tasks for more than, on average, 4 hours a day" :-)

Definition of productive hours for this poll: time spent on researching, designing, debugging, testing, coding, supporting, refactoring or any other technical task directly related to these which makes you get in "the zone" or totally focused on a problem.

Exclude: time spent on meetings (no matter the subject, as they can be productive for the team but not for you), managing people (only indirectly related to technical stuff), lunch time, coffee breaks and browsing the web (decompressing) and other minutes not spent on solving problems with computers.

Consider: a somewhat long time span, not just the current week or month.

...and have a happy monday :-)

PS: related poll on how people feel about their working hours at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810289
1 to 2 hours
2 to 4 hours
4 to 6 hours
6 to 8 hours
I only feel productive when doing overtime or putting in extra hours
I've stopped worrying about it, I do what I can when I can
I don't really feel I have productive hours
http://viddyjam.com

Pandora for music videos.

~40k/views
Cool! I just spent a good 20 minutes playing through some of the playlists. Some really catchy music on there, and the production on some of the videos is amazing. Nice job!
Could you post your contact info?
backend stack: macports, apache, mysql, php, silex, doctrine2
thinking about using: nginx, hhvm, postgres

frontend stack: vagrant, ubtuntu, node, npm, bower, gulp, angularjs, bootstrap,
thinking about using: puppet

version control: git
http://www.gofootwork.com
Show HN: IMQuickSearch – filtering your NSArrays of NSObjects like a boss.
Purescript looks too good to be true. Does anybody know of any small projects that show it off? Don't see anything on GitHub...

I understand it's a moving target but, besides that, do any of the other languages in its niche really compete?
That's not "opposite" that's the other side of the same coin. Don't say things are hard or easy, just teach them.

Saying things are difficult sets up negative expectations, saying things are easy means disappointment when we have unrealistic expectations.

I still think it's fine to say that most people seem to find X harder than Y…
I Miss the Old Blogosphere
How do you manage nesting from callbacks and matches and such? Inlining short functions like _ + _ is fine, but how do you organize more advanced operations?

(I'm just constantly looking for ways to make my scala code more accessible.)
there's many ways of measuring speed, but for a two watt computer i find the speed more than adequate.
in addition if you wish to use it as a desktop the long awaited wayland port should mitigate gui performance issues.

i can't see the competitors being less convoluted than a debian install.
if your hardware is unreliable you should make a repro to make it fail(i ran a performance benchmark in a loop on one i had trouble with til it crashed) and send it back to the manufacturer.

the rpi's popularity, and low power consumption are it's selling points.

i wonder what utility an android tablet provides than an rpi could be expected to.
3D-Printed Lens Turns Smartphones Into a £1 Microscope to Detect Diseases
> The biggest problem I see though is if you want to save a reference to the unregister functions of the $watch callbacks.

This is a valid criticism, thank you. I will try to put together a nice solution for this.

Of course you can always register/de-register watchers the normal way inside of the init method.
>>I don't get what Go has that rust hasn't for a "better c"<<

Go has a stable version. Go has a sane syntax and especially a sane approach to concurrency. Go is so simple you can learn it in less than a week. Go is already proven in several significant projects and having several recognized names (and unofficially a big brand behind it) helps with credibility. And so on.
I wrote DJPad for Android. OpenGL, C, SDL. Generates about $200/mo for last year with no updates, and really unoptimizable ads (just admob). Would sell to someone who could keep updating it.