skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> "It's top achievers that are able to become the best in their fields that create new industries and revolutionize old ones... not a population of passing achievers."

I wonder what's better for the economy of a country as a whole - a high number of moderately well educated people or a good number of extremely well educated people but a high number of poorly educated people.
'I'm Happy,' Says Man Whose Case Changed Europe's Rules For Google
Obviously completely biased. Well utilised hardware or dedicated servers can easily compete (and blow out of the water at cheaper DC's) on price with AWS (and then you actually get guaranteed resources).
I really enjoyed reading all of the replies! Thank you all for the input.

To be a little more specific, I want to know if the classes themselves were significantly more effective in transferring knowledge to students. Do the classes at Ivy Leagues have a measurable superiority to classes of other colleges (as in, do the students learn more because the classes are way better, or do the students learn more simply because they are smarter, more hard-working, more interested and engaged than the average student)? Why do the Ivy Leagues have classes if it does not seem to be the main value added? It looks to me that Ivy Leagues are great because they figured out a way to attract all the smartest people to a central place. Is it really the Ivy League that transforms people, or would highly motivated people turn out the way they are regardless of the formal classes that seem to go hand-in-hand with the concept of "education?"
Great machine learning resources
Refactoring code without tests is definitely scary. But those tests don't need to be unit tests.

(caveat: i understand "unit test" to mean a test which tests a single class, or sometimes a very small number of classes, with any collaborators replaced with stubs or mocks)

In my experience, bigger tests - what my colleagues call integration tests, which might involve 3-30 classes and often the database - give me a lot more confidence in my changes.

Tests are only a useful safety net for changes which are entirely confined to the thing they test. If you're changing the way some particular method is implemented, say from looping over a collection to mapping a lambda over it, then the change is confined to that class, and a unit test can help. But if you're changing the method's contract, say from taking a collection of objects to taking one at a time, then the change takes in that class and its clients, and the unit test is useless - it tests that the method does something that it should no longer do! Yes, you can rewrite the unit test, but that does nothing to reassure you that the overall behaviour hasn't changed. You're starting from scratch.

The thing is, in my experience, valuable refactorings tend to take in more than one class. Sometimes much more than one class. I want to be able to make those refactorings with a safety net. Unit tests can't give me that.
The Inequality Puzzle – Book Review by Lawrence H. Summers
I wonder how he would feel about vim...
It looks more like Desktop GL might move to mobile devices soon. nvidia seems to be pushing really hard in that direction. But it'll remain to be seen where things go.
Opera still doesn't ship H.264 support, except on mobile and some embedded products (TVs, settop boxes, etc.).
This is a non-relativistic description. The correct relativistic description assigns quantum field operators to events in spacetime, and operators at spacelike separated events commute--i.e., they give the same results regardless of which order they occur in. So there is no physical fact of the matter about the order in which the particles "change state".
> He’s actually quite active on Twitter

Oh, okay. Never mind the fact that the first thing you'd read if you open the linked Twitter profile (@GeorgeRRMartin_) is

> Not affiliated with GRRM

Let's not mention that Googling his Social Media habits would reveal a blog post mentioning he doesn't use Twitter or Facebook[1]. Heck, you can even read that on his Wikipedia article.

Is it just me, or is the amount of basic fact-checking being done by TechCrunch (and others) basically nil?

[1]: http://grrm.livejournal.com/197075.html
There is a distinct possibility that modern word processors or text editors actually would be worth the transaction cost, as judged by Martin himself, even though he currently predicts otherwise.
I just received 2 fraudulent charges on the 12th.

These guys claimed they emailed their customers on the 9th:

http://www.woothemes.com/2014/05/important-update/

I didn't receive that email. Wish they could have done more.

As far as the charges. These days it's easy enough to file a claim, a chargeback, and have your money credited back to your account.
Due North Analytics
Due North Analytics guides healthcare providers to maximize revenue through data based decisions. Our diverse team provides in depth analytical knowledge for various care settings, from large health systems to hospice facilities to physician practices. From a distance, Due North Analytics specializes in data manipulation and is able to give an organization new insight by transforming raw data into actionable information.
I saw the question and arduino quickly came to mind. I clicked here to see if anyone had other ides.

Sparkfun open sources just about everything they sell, and they are doing ok.
> Life is short (or so I’m told) so why waste it doing something dumb?

Ooh Aaron... :-(
"no distractions, no internet"

I know there's browser plug-ins to turn off specific sites or the web as a whole... it would be interesting if microsoft included the functionality in office. Would have made for much more productive nights writing papers in college!
Or dot matrix scrolls ;-)
There have been clawed hammers since at least 1514: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claw_hammer

Clearly, innovation is good - the modern (1514) hammer is better than the big stone our Homo Abilis ancestors used. But at some point, you reach an upper bound.
The things people want removed from search results
Good overview article, but for a better deep dive into modern OpenGL and 3D graphics in general check out the (free) book at http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/ This is a fantastic resource that describes the theory and practical knowledge of using OpenGL today, like how to set up the programmable pipeline, write shaders, etc.
Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck probably.

There is a joke here about DOS and 5 years per book.
Backups?

If you lose the outline of a character's life, just kill them off.
There may be instances where people stick with something inferior because of inertia or transaction cost, but QWERTY doesn't really deserve to be the poster child for this phenomenon; the often-cited example of market failure in the Dvorak case is not what most folks assume it to be.

Well worth a read (1996): http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors
Espionage vs. Surveillance
Isn't that just being lazy? You can turn off spell/grammar correction in all versions of Office and open source alternatives, can't you?
Google QuadraClicks
Ask HN: how to change words of android's default langs?
I'm using Spanish as primary language, and the bundled dictionaries just sucks.. Currently there are only two choices (es-US, and es-Spain) and none of these use the words we say --probably they work fine as a general approach, but we don't talk like that.

Also I don't want to change the keyword, it works perfect!

I have managed to inject a bunch of words into the "personal dictionary" but for some reason it keeps suggesting the ugly verbs.. so I feel a surgical approach may be better.

Are those words stored somewhere? and more importantly: is it possible to change them?
You know, I did actually start writing one recently [1]. It's both more and less complex than I imagined it. A basic caching resolver, especially in a reasonably high-level language is not a bad time. I think the complexity starts coming in when you start keeping a database of authoritative zones, etc.

If you are writing it in C... things are more complex. All DNS records are variable length, so you have be damn sure you don't have off by one errors, etc. Also, proper DNS works over both TCP and UDP so you have to architect it such that you can work with both. Not knowing anything about the code of BIND, I can say this would take quite a bit of careful planning to not get wrong. I can see a whole slew of buffer overflows happening in all these places.

[1] https://github.com/ipartola/pulpdns/blob/master/main.py

My idea for this code was to have a DNS server that keeps track of which domains are the most requested and in the background keeps a thread running to always keep them in the cache. I noticed that even with a pretty fast connection my DNS resolver on my LAN can take 100-300 ms to return a name not in a cache.
Because the newer stuff probably has at least a few features that will make him more productive in the long run, once he spends the initial time investment to configure the software for his needs.
Please note that RIPE archives everything and, as a result, the video is available: https://ripe68.ripe.net/archives/video/153/
What customer information will Apple provide to the cops?
> Sure, the user may want to access DRM-encumbered content, but we shouldn't promote such a thing.

You should support (not promote) doing it within Firefox if you want users to continue to use Firefox; you could even do so with a UI that provided security warnings associated with the use of W3C EME, which would discourage users from doing it, but not make Firefox an non-usable browser for people who do choose to consume that kind of content.
Is supporting a EME the same thing as promoting it?
Spot on. Outlook 2010 nearly cost me a job when it corrected an Indian colleague's name to "gang bang" during a paste. That and it perpetually corrects NuGet to Nugget.
Linux needs professional designers as it needs programmers. It remembers me to Enligtenment old themes, a genius programmer but horrible designer, the theme the KDE people are displaying is hideous, not consistence at all. The people that designed this thing has no training in visual arts whatsoever.

I have to agree that Unity looks better than this.

Where is Everaldo when we need him?
Wow, Facebook has been rocking the house lately with their JS contributions. Great work and thank you!
There was this[0] relevant post on HN a handful of days ago.
[0] http://strilanc.com/quantum/2014/05/03/Storing-Bandwidth-wit...
The problem of using PISA results for analyzing upper tail of U.S. student performance is that it's not clear how representative they are. How many high achieving US students bother taking the test, when it has no impact on their college acceptance, etc. ? Did Zuckerberg take it? What percentage of Ivy League incoming freshman class take it ?
Wasn't NIS+ also a Sun-only product for a while? Or at least, if it was available for other Unix systems, was it an additional cost? I seem to remember that we couldn't use it back in the late 90's because we didn't have an AIX version or something like that.
It's worth noting that the full explanation given here assumes that the many-worlds interpretation is correct, which not all physicists would agree with. But the "no-communication theorem" is true independently of which interpretation of QM you adopt.
Just to be a dick: yes, drafting pencils that are deliberately shaped to not roll off tables are nice, and probably not the absolute first version produced.
> So I'm a rebel. I still teach immediate mode. I'm well aware that this is The Wrong Way (tm), but my goodness, you can't throw profiles and buffer objects at people before they've even successfully animated a polygon.

OpenGL is a fairly low-level API. If your students just want to get something animating on screen without having to dive too deep then surely there are many libraries/engines built on top of OpenGL that will allow that.

On the other hand, if your students are learning OpenGL to write such libraries/engines on their own then what is the point of leading them into a dead end?
I agree that it's annoying how complex 'simple' examples are but am not sure the OpenGL standard is the right place to inject a beginner friendly interface. A lot of the complexity like managing buffers and graphics memory are a result of the more capable 3D hardware we have today. A better thing to do would be to have a nice beginning library built on top of OpenGL and which abstracts away a lot of the gory hardware details to expose a simpler immediate mode style or scene graph interface.
"Firefox is about empowering users, unless those users should be so bold as to do something that's totally bad for me–I mean, them"
I just glanced at the top post you have linked here (I'll definitely take a look at the others later). At first glance it reminds me of unix pipes, clojure's thrush operator, and F#'s pipe forward operator. (they're all different from one another, of course, but the general idea of threading data through pipes/filter/transformations to get what you want)

If I'm not totally missing the mark there, and that's the idiomatic way to do things, I'm glad. I really prefer dealing with scripting/command line stuff that way.

Really appreciate the information!
Show HN: glTF – the runtime asset format for WebGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenGL.
I like it. All the first pass '... but what if...' questions are answered in the simple intro. I'll definitely play around with this one a bit.
> even if Mozilla had the market share, if it were still funded (almost) solely by Google, these things would still eventually happen, since the power tends to follow the money in the end.).

This isn't supported by reality. Feel free to offer any evidence at all, however.

You could just as easily postulate that every privacy enhancement that google adds to their search page is because of influence by Mozilla, which Google is massively dependent on for traffic and therefore revenue, since power tends to follow the money in the end.

Depending on your stat source, at least 1/5 of internet users use Firefox, which means that the percentage of Google users on Firefox is probably that percentage or higher. The Mozilla Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation, but Google has shareholders. So who is more important to whom?
he might, but what if he upgrades his OpenOffice and there's a fucking bug that turns spell-check back on? or upgrades OS X and it starts forcing autocorrect by default into ALL TEXT FIELDS, like his irc client.

my grandfather used a dos machine to manage the family's finances for years, and in the 90s i insisted, after learning BASIC on that machine, that he get with the times. though i was a linux enthusiast, i just bought him a cheapo emachines at best buy or wal-mart, which my entire family called to pitch in on later. because hey, nothing says happy birthday like diluting your nephew's first and only substantial gift to his stand-in father figure.

anyway, that was a mistake. the new spreadsheet was terrible and actually would not just create new rows like the old one, so after he died i had to go over to my grandmother's house and make a number of new rows that roughly corresponded - whether i liked it or not - to how long i thought she would live. i created rows all fucking day and she unfortunately did not, as far as i know, run out again.

that said, i think george r. r. martin should give a linux box with vga console a shot. without my dos experience, i'd probably never have learned to love the console.
He started using a good tool. He came up with habits suited to the tool. With time, he refined his workflow. So, why should he change.

Writing is an art, the writer an artist. To each, their canvas and brush.
This is the same reason why I prefer Notepad++ over MS Word for note taking. Word keeps doing funny stuff with the indents / alignment / styles / autobullets and sundry garbage that I can't figure out without investing 5 mins per incident. Much easier to use NP++...stuff just works somewhat IDE like.
Network Neutrality
Yeah. This is going to be a great sales tool for when little shops ask why they should buy a 1/4 cabinet from me instead of going to AWS.
craigslist. - Looking for some used bikes.
More often than not, it's actually an ulcer rather than gluten intolerance.
I really doubt what's holding up the next book in Game Of Thrones is the fact that Martin cannot type fast enough.

His editor and publisher can still use the modern tech to do whatever it is you kids use these days to blog your books.
Their comparison sizes for instances versus physical machines is laughable. For a 12 core physical machine with 64GB of RAM they list the r3.2xlarge instance size as unit-for-unit comparable (10 instances versus 10 machines I had configured).

Yeah... no. 8 vCPUs are nowhere near as fast as a pair of 6 core Xeons. My rule of thumb in AWS is that you get about half of what they say you do: so an 8 vCPU instance has about as much power as a 4 core physical server.

And don't even get me started on what they have for hardware costs. I think they must have pulled list price from Dell or something. I can get prices about 2/3 to 1/2 of what they're listing from my VAR.
We're working on municipal fiber optic internet in Omaha and this is fantastic ammunition for a project like ours.
"stateless libertarian utopia(what ever that's even called?)"

Anarchism. [1] "Stateless libertarian" is by most useful definitions an oxymoron.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism - the popular conception of the term and the totality of what is lumped under that term are quite dissimilar. Non-disclaimer, I'm not an anarchist, only a libertarian.
Yeah, but willpower is still required. You can just disable the plugin.

You're depending on inconvenience to prevent you from web-browsing, and unchecking a checkbox does not count as "inconvenient enough".
The market has already decided on "both". The people who spend the most money on music are the same people to pirate the most music.
It was a separate innovation, followed soon after by a different innovation to combine a claw tool and a hammer tool into a combined tool.

But there are other things you can put on the other end of a hammer besides a claw, none of which made the original hammer a bad idea if all your problems really are nails that you don't need to claw back out.
Transition to '3x' iPhone 6 at 1704 x 960 Likely Smoother Than Move to Retina
Well, maybe it's time I finish my self destruct messaging app. Hrmmm.....
"No settings, no nonsense" is the default for the MANY programs that exist to serve the "distraction free writing" niche.

General wisdom in author circles is that you write THEN edit. Having spell check and other tools only hampers the creative process.

Darkroom/WriteRoom (and the dozen+ similar programs created over the past decade or two) http://jjafuller.com/dark-room/ offer zero nonsense, zero setting, zero hassle, text entry programs geared towards authoring a book. They get rid of pretty much everything on screen except for text and background. No UI, no features, nothing. Just the way it should be.

I've used them for NaNoWriMo for years and years.
It is just a marketing tool.

They conveniently leave out the 'real' competition which is 50%+ utilization on dedicated server providers. Consistent performance, significantly cheaper.
Its been running for over 6 months :), ended up being a side project. We are running tokyo tyrant (disk based), so that has slowed down over time. Will tune that up!

As for the breaks and paragraphs, planning to add more logic when lines are picked up from different para. Thanks for the feedback!
Nope, moved to Google Drive.
Mobile(Gym, bathroom), Desktop (Office Desk, Couch, Bed) - I do not use tablets. To me, they are useless..
Oh cripes, me too! And i'm glad that there's a genuine plurality of views.

Test scope has been talked about for years, but almost always in the form of sermons by fervent believers in unit testing, castigating those who dare to lean more heavily on system and integration tests for their dangerous heresy.

Occasionally, these sermons admit the existence of a "testing pyramid", but take note of the necessary shape of that edifice: it's unit tests, but with a decorative cap of other kinds of test inexorably dwindling in volume as they reach higher levels. I'm not interested in this all this alleged pyramid science. Talk to me about testing towers, testing dolmens, then we can have a genuine conversation.
Nope. I won't be back. Using unison now. Syncthing looks nice, too.
A lot of software is novelty-driven

Some of it is driven by available technology. It would have been very hard to have a great spell-check functionality on early home computers, like my 48k Apple II+, simply because of the hardware.

Did we ever need a v2 for the hammer, or drafting pencil?

Hammers did indeed evolve quite a bit from their stone age original form, though the general shape and principle have remained the same.

There is a modern claw hammer halfway up the left side in this illustration from 1514:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Melencolia_I_(Durero).jpg

Drafting pencils have been around from the late 1500s:

http://leadholder.com/main-history.html#leadholder_origins

It's arguable that truly modern ones didn't appear until the 20th century, however.
this is awesome. thank you for your work.
Or, why write books when you can just dick around and pretend to be an 'author'?
The pricing is still waaaaaaaaaaaaay off. They intentionally left it out because anyone with high utilization would find the dedicated servers cheaper.
Sure, there have been a few apps and new algos in this space over the recent times. Though, we firmly feel that we have something that performs better and potentially open to more improvements due to the underlying algo!
Are there any Lua libraries targeting openresty that makes it easy to use integrate with oauth2 services of Google, facebook, 4square etc ? Since everyone does oauth differently it would be nice to have a go to library for this.
And that's now done. Thanks.
They were old DB details, but anyway, I cleaned the file.
Physician here. I think the concept of having a personal device to perform biometric testing on is interesting. I support my patients having full access to their information and taking an active role in their care as a partnership. The physician's office is no longer the silo to store and withhold a patient's information from them.

My concern with Cue is both medical and practical. I'm a Rheumatologist, so I deal with CRP/Inflammation a lot. Its an incredibly non specific test, with large variability. It does have a utility in monitoring disease activity but usually in conjunction with a physical exam and other testing. A positive/elevated test with poor specificity has a poor positive predictive value. So my practical concern is, lets say you use cue to check your CRP, and its elevated. Okay, so what? What information did one just gain from this device. I think the same can be said from the other tests.

In the words of Horace Dediu, I'm not sure what the "Job To Be Done" is for Cue. What is someone hiring Cue to do for them? I really don't know.
Writing papers sans Internet would have been difficult. Online, searchable access to academic journals is a wonderful thing.
I don't know if Trevor Perrin is actually promoting this yet (he's been working on it for awhile). I point that out because one of the things to notice about this is that it was worked on privately and quietly for a long time in the hopes of getting it right.

That's a characteristic of good cryptosystems.

The wiki itself is highly recommendable; I learned a lot just by reading about how his design works. This is what "modern" (post-2009?) crypto looks like.
Netflix won't run on the Mono implementation of Silverlight because it's dependent on a closed source DRM module. That's a bit locked down.
And now know why it's taken him so long to write each book