skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not saying the west won't win.

I'm just saying don't forget the cost. And incidentally, I'm not entirely convinced that paper wealth trumps natural resources in today's world.

Also, I wouldn't count on Russia having only "one trick up it's sleeve".
What it's like to own a Tesla Model S (The Oatmeal)
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thanks Itamar, and yes we are a game changer in many ways... but also its very early days for us... love the great feedback!
I've been commuting to work via motorcycle for six or seven years now, though I'm in Seattle not the Bay Area. Here is my generic advice:

Don't buy a shiny new bike to start on. You WILL lay it down and scratch the paint up - everyone does. But you'll stand it back up again and keep riding, because laying a bike down is not that big a deal.

No matter what you're intending to end up on, start with some fairly inexpensive ten-or-more-year-old Japanese bike, preferably a Honda. You want something simple and reliable, not something you have to tinker with, and a machine whose maintenance is cheap and easy, because it's all going to be unfamiliar.

The standard wisdom is that a beginner should start out on a small bike, 250cc or so. This is because small bikes are lighter, which makes them easier to handle, and because newbies often get in trouble by yanking on the throttle when something startles them, so you want to have less engine going crazy when you do that.

If you're going to be riding I-280 every day, though, I think you'll find that the low power of a 250cc bike will make life a little bit scary. Part of what keeps you safe on a motorcycle is the fact that you are faster and nimbler than everyone else around you. Cars rely on metal frames and bumpers and airbags for safety, but motorcycles rely on getting the hell out of the way. You'll probably want a 500cc-600cc bike to start with, so you have the option of flying away at 80 mph when you need to.

My current bike is a Honda Nighthawk 750 and I think it is probably the best commuter bike ever made. It is not exciting, but it is sturdy, reliable, and handles freeways with no problem. (Top speed is roughly 100 mph.) I've taken it on long weekend trips, too, and while it's not the most comfortable cruiser ever, it is certainly up to the job. But mostly I just go back and forth to work, and it just keeps on ticking, and life is pretty darn good. I'm not sure how it would work as a starter bike - it's a little on the heavy side - but if you're a tall guy it might work.

I get about 40 mpg. It is possible to do better, but I am a relatively aggressive rider.
What about bots (search engines, social media bots, etc.)? If a web app has both static content and dynamic content (based on data in the firebase db) how can bots see a rendered version of the page. Do you have a way / plan for users to install middleware to check for bots and if so return pre-rendered content. ( Middleware details: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8k8JuuU... ). Thanks in advance!
Stripe is by far, in over a decade, the simplest method of online payment processing I've ever run into. You can add it to your app in a trivial amount of time, customer service is great and the documentation is clear and easy to follow.

The only negative I can think of is there are cheaper options out there, but at 2.9% + 0.30 per transaction, its reasonable enough for most of the clients I've implemented it for.
What kind of useful metric could variable names and lines of code possibly provide?
> The idea is it would have only come onto the market slowly as companies were able to progressively utilise more and more of the spectrum in various areas. Ownership hence would have been more diversified from the beginning, preventing the development of a continental monopoly capable of buying it all, similar to how no monopoly has been able to buy up all the country's land.

But they have bought up all of the land. I mean not "all" as in 100% obviously (AT&T and Verizon don't own 100% of the spectrum either), but a small handful of large agribusiness corporations own the large majority of the farmland in the US.

And it doesn't really matter how it starts. A hundred years ago there were quite a lot of family farms that have since been subsumed into ConAgra et al.

Large corporations have economies of scale. All else equal, the rich get richer and large corporations get larger. Eventually they tend to become mismanaged and die, but not all at the same time, so their carcasses are eaten by their other large competitors, which makes them even larger.

Competition doesn't come from rational self-interest. Rational self-interest for powerful people and corporations is to get together and collude with each other. Competition comes from changing circumstances that modify who has power and create uncertainty as to who existing interests should collude with. People bet on different horses when they're not sure which is going to win. Nobody bets on the locally owned hardware store against Lowes and Home Depot.
Wow, a lot of experts on education here.

There are a lot of myths out there about (U.S. K12) education, such as all these "bad teachers" that we can't ever fire because of tenure, and how awful U.S. education is compared to other countries or compared to the U.S. in the 50s and 60s, and how charter schools or vouchers will solve all education's problems.

There is actual data and research out there on all this, buried under all this opinion. Did you know for example that tenured teachers are twice as likely to lose their job as non-tenured teachers? http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/the-m...

There is also a history behind all this. Before teacher tenure, teachers were regularly fired on the whim of principals or because of getting pregnant. See for example "Why Teacher Unions Are Good for Teachers—and the Public" http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/winter0607/ravitc...

And see the book "50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools" http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/...

As the authors state: "The mythical failure of public education has been created and perpetuated in large part by political and economic interests that stand to gain from the destruction of the traditional system."

Once you get past the myths, I'd recommend doing a little reading on how people actually learn (it's not just dumping information on empty brains). See for example the book How People Learn (free, pdf): http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368

Or for the more impatient, watch this beginning of this video Minds of Our Own: http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html

Or this even shorter video on the counter-intuitive nature of how people learn from videos (criticizing the Khan Academy videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8

Teaching is an incredibly difficult job, because learning is incredibly complex. A single phrase or gesture can have an enormous positive or negative influence on learning. If you tried spending even one hour in a typical K12 classroom, most likely you'd be eaten alive. It may not seem like many K12 teachers are getting fired, partly because most teachers quit within 5 years.
How Quickly I reply to offers
My approach was somewhat ugly. I went this this:

for (int i = 0; i < n; i += 8*16) {
__builtin_prefetch(&a[i + 512]);
for (int j = 0; j < 8; j++) {
__m128i v = _mm_load_si128((__m128i *)&a[i + j*16]);
__m128i vl = _mm_unpacklo_epi8(v, vk0);
__m128i vh = _mm_unpackhi_epi8(v, vk0);
vsum = _mm_add_epi32(vsum, _mm_madd_epi16(vl, vk1));
vsum = _mm_add_epi32(vsum, _mm_madd_epi16(vh, vk1));
}

The goal is to issue one prefetch for each 128B block of data you read. There are probably better ways to do this than what I did. I'm hoping the compiler did something reasonable, and haven't really looked at the generated assembly.

Also, if it indeed is that case that TLB misses are the major factor (and I think it is), I don't think you will have much success with by adding prefetch alone. Trying right now, I get a slight slowdown with just the prefetch. It may only in combination with hugepages that you get a positive effect.
It's a pretty crappy experience. I'm reading an article, suddenly the text decides to move left for 'no good reason' to create a narrow but empty sidebar.

WTF? I don't like reading things on the left side of my monitor, so I make the window wider to try and put the text back in the middle. Except now the demo area gets even wider (why? you don't use it for anything but tiny things?).

As I scroll, the various iframe loads create annoying jank, and to top it off, there's a bug at the end of the post where it moves horizontally for no good reason.

If you're going to do stuff like this, you need to polish it waaay better. This reminds me of the UI animations in the new Firefox. A good idea ruined by implementation, would've been better to leave them out.
Or any university hiring lecturers.
JavaScript one liners
I'm not in disagreement at all. This is a valuable purpose of the press.
I vastly prefer lectures to books.
these are great questions...I suspect they're looking at erp equivalents with heavy technical integration, not the basic project management app, which have switching costs, but nowhere near the complex, often heavily regulated, issues involved in a multi billion dollar company's data integration situation. Not saying you're wrong, just that in large installs the post is closer to true than not.

As for spending donkey loads of money on marketing, it's really hard to get that model funded today. Investors are wise to it. Not to mention, paid search isn't nearly as cost effective as it was in certain categories. So you're left to grow on only product, SEO, and content, hoping for a viral loop. investors only (should) come in when you can prove that $1 in marketing spend yields $3x in revenue.
Dean Kamen's "Luke Arm" Prosthesis Receives FDA Approval
> There is no need to outlaw that, as it cannot survive, except for very brief periods.

So 1400+ years is a very brief period? :)
I don't know a single faculty member who has positive things to say about clickers, even those who were optimistic.
This needs multiplayer so badly. Even locally so you can stand next to someone and interact with them.
"start a private mediation system in the West"

Oh, I may not have made that clear. I'd roll out outside the West and maybe enter the general US market, maybe not. The GDP of Africa as a continent is about $2T and growing relatively fast.
Hi everyone, Cheers Cofounder here.
We're trying to make the world a smaller place, connecting fans with those that make what they love, and enabling content creators. We'd love to hear feedback on our platform.
Cheers!
A word of advice: if you move from the .NET platform - C# - to the JVM, then Scala is your language. Java was your language for a very long time, and Java 8 is pretty close, but I still believe Scala is the right choice.

There is a ton of complexity in the type system but you don't need to learn it all at once. If you approach Scala development like you approach C# development you'll go far.
As someone who learns far better by lecture, I've always been bemused by the concept of textbooks. I've never thought that the several hundred dollars I paid for a book got me nearly as far into a subject as listening to the professor.
thanks for the info, i'll try to hack something with React for my next DOM based game and see if it works.
Get a few of them and use Ceph. :)

No quite what you want, but it'll do the job.
this is an accounting question. Rent is not a marketing expense and neither is health insurance. But salaries are. As is any SaaS you buy, from hootsuite, optimizely, etc. If you're on accrual accounting (and as a startup, why? no reason to do this until you're much farther along) you recognize the expenses in the month you have them, but the revenue is divided by 12. this is the math the post is describing and why SaaS businesses are so hard--early on the metrics look terrible because the revenue is deferred but the expenses are not.
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I wrote a comment pointing that out on the author's blog, but it appears to have since been deleted :/
Meanwhile:

"When it comes to cancer, no amount of alcohol is safe."

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/824237
I worked at one of the bigger MOOCs for a while and we knew that over 50% of our paying customers never watched any of the video lectures they subscribed to.

That's the huge flaw in MOOCs as they are now. You can put all the content in the world online for free or not and most people won't watch or learn from it. That's the critical flaw in the e-learning investments right now.
Various large enterprise one page apps mainly in ExtJs (i.e. 70KLoC per app), predating the many new Xjs libs. Admittedly, they are likely terser these days than a few years back. However, I like to stick to GWT now and write JS compiler plugins to get the JS I need. :)
You go to what station? The one a thousand miles away in California?

With an EV, you can "fill up" in your own garage every night, or even while parked at work.
"Cold" email advice for startup sales people
It's interesting to note that well supported public school districts aren't fighting to switch to charter schools and vouchers and the end to tenure. Nobody is saying "Sure our high school is among the best academically, but think of how much better it would be if the teachers were worried about not having a job next year." Then again, $100 million won't buy them off. Perhaps because it's not enough to cover the construction of a new high school.

In a place like Newark, a child's teachers may be the only people in their lives with stable employment. That doesn't matter when implementing free market Wahhabism. Teachers must fear for their jobs.

Tenure is an imperfect proxy for employee ownership. As the article shows, it may be a better model than venture capital rocket fuelled disruption. The tragedy, in human terms, is not the failure. The tragedy in human terms is that unjust means were rationalized for ideological ends and the result was still a failure...in human terms.

Free market Wahhabism just writes up all those charter schools and consultants and studies and threatened livelihoods to a failed "ability to think outside the box." The solution to the solution failing is always the solution.

[Disclaimer: my sister is a public school teacher. Tattooed and pierced, she does the Dirty Harry. She had the kid the who was afraid that the pictures wouldn't be there later if they closed the book - think video tape. She had the kid who was kept in a closet at home for four years before third grade. The kid whose mom called the school to say he wouldn't be in because the boy friend had just killed the baby brother - and that's how the police found out when the principal called them - that's one of kids whose improvement on the FCAT determined her bonus. These are the kids who stand out from the usual parents in jail or dead of AIDS or homeless or just coming to school hungry or sick because they don't have affordable health care. Why is she in the union? Well so that some born again Southern Baptist principal can't fire her tattooed Wiccan ass.]
A good lecture has elements neither book, nor video, nor homework, nor group discussion will have. It has the element of a knowledgable person disseminating knowledge in a quasi- Q&A format guided by his knowledge and experience.
4 simple ways to reduce your CI build cycle
The biggest problem I've found is that while theoretically frameworks should be easier to maintain (and if used right, they might be), in practice using frameworks are an excuse for developers to do something quickly, The <Framework> Way be damned.

The result of all this is code that is harder to maintain, even for those who know how to use said framework.

While I'm not against frameworks myself (in fact I argued in favor of them in this very conversation), I have become much more weary of them. In fact, after a brief affair with CoffeeScript I've even come to be more hesitant about using that or other 'transpilers', as I recently ran into the problem where I had to revert to plain js and I discovered that I'd lost some proficiency.

That said, it depends partly on the developers, and partly on the amount of structure the framework forces you into.

And that said, I suspect using a framework often serves more to alleviate managers' concern about maintainability than anything else.

There's one case where I would strongly suggest someone use a framework though, especially an opinionated one such as Rails. By following the Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl, I learned a lot about best practices that I wouldn't have learned had I cobbled together a bunch of libraries. So for beginning developers, a framework might help them get started with their prototypes and whatnot.

Then again, maybe that worked for me because I can't help but want to look behind the curtain... I've certainly met my share of developers who never seen to wonder what's behind the magic.
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Java(blue collar language http://dfjug.org/thefeelofjava.pdf) is easy. Scala is not(http://blog.goodstuff.im/yes-virginia-scala-is-hard). (I am a Scala fan.)
Show HN: Quickly find and reveal unsubscribe links in GMail
Have you used a vehicle powered by natural gas? I have. For safety reasons, in many places you have to get out of the vehicle while it is being refuelled (the cylinder gets really hot!). And that is a change from your 50+ years driving habit. It also takes longer than a comparable gas pump (even if it is measured in single digit minutes). The gas gauge also reads differently (my guess is due to pressure decreases as gas is consumed).

You can't really expect to radically change tech and have the entire experience be the same.

Not to mention that the only thing preventing one from filling up a tank the way they do with gasoline is battery technology. If they are improved (graphene capacitors?), almost nothing needs to change in the grid.

[EDIT: I am comparing the hydrogen gas stations (which are so rare that might not even exist) to the experience of refilling a compressed natural gas vehicle. It is the closest real world parallel I can think of.]
Scratch is really cool - my 6 year old daughter enjoys it a lot even though she doesn't grasp all of it yet. But I think it's a good start in that it starts introducing some of the concepts behind making a computer do things, and making things with computers. She has fun with it too, it's pleasant, which should help develop a positive attitude.
We have a work-in-progress HTML5 version as well: https://github.com/LLK/scratch-html5
It's predominantly an undergraduate freshman phenomenon. Massive lectures are a weeding-out mechanism as much as anything else.
There is a lot to love about Scala, but one of the hurdles is/was the compile time. I used Scala and I didn't love the tooling around it. Even installing and running scalatra, I felt like it was maven installing THE WORLD, just to build a very small thing. Then, once I got it going to have a very simple change, save, refresh to see changes loop in my web workflow was like 3-10 sec. Not huge, but I'm used to PHP or Ruby dev with instant refresh cycles. Then on the TDD side, it would take upwards of 10 seconds to noticed that files had changed to run my test suite in SBT. Again, I'm used to < 1 second to notice a change and run my entire test suite in ruby.

I'm not sure if that's Scala's fault or Scalatra or SBT, but no matter how I sliced it, as of 9 months ago or so, Scala didn't feel amazing to develop code in. Everything felt a bit clunky. The code itself I loved, but the way I got there felt worse.

Surprisingly when I tried Go, it was a much better developer experience in terms of the near instant compile, refresh, see change loop and also running tests was nearly instant. The "instant" feeling I get in PHP and Ruby was there, but in a compiled language. However, in Go, I don't have some of the functional and immutable concepts that I have in Scala, which sort of sucks.

At the end of the day I'm making tradeoffs somewhere and it doesn't feel awesome anywhere. I might check out Facebook's Hack simply because it offers type checking, performance, and fast refresh. Also maybe the latest .NET stuff announced with continuous compile might bridge the gap for C#. I really don't know.

I have yet to find the language that really feels amazing as a developer in sort of all areas. Every language seems to have baked in tradeoffs.
JointJS v0.9 released: smart link routing, Vectorizer and Geometry
Its not like people get fired every year based on whims, in places without unions.

Administrators still want good people even if there isn't a union backing them.

Public sector unions have no constraints against them until system collapse. At least private sector unions have some constraints in the sense that their place of work will go out of business if they are completely ridiculous. Public sector unions do whatever they want till the taxpayer base literally flees to another place.
This is really surprising. What are they thinking? Hydrogen fuel cells STILL have not been proven to be a viable power source for cars. Electricity has been validated time and time again - even before Tesla, there was the EV1. And now the technology is really starting to scale in production volume and performance, along with the infrastructure.

Even if they can make a hydrogen vehicle with equal, or even slightly greater performance than an electric of the same cost, then they still need to solve the problem of the hydrogen infrastructure. That's really hard. You can generate it on site, but the equipment to do so is expensive and complex.

I think Toyota just doesn't want to compete with Tesla.
StudyEdge (YC S13) is doing a great job with a similar service. They provide Khan Academy-style videos with a live support system (on the FB app platform). The videos + support system are meant to supplement university courses-- essentially acting as a web tutor. Their own supplementary question banks tend to be deep and well designed.

I used the service to get through Calc 2 as an undergrad. I liked it so much (went from a C+ to A student in math) that I went to work there the next summer!
It's hard to say what, exactly, you're referring to here. React, in many ways, is not so much a framework but rather a really smart template system. It's ergonomics, I've found, are quite nice.
> I once heard a professional investor say that if you're buying stock that doesn't pay dividends, you're not investing, you're speculating.

You're speculating either way. Nobody will guarantee you a dividend.
I'm sure more ideas won't hurt, but they just raised $80 million. How did that happen without vision? Do none of those investors have any ideas to offer?
True, and HHVM is awesome.

Where Node.js shines is Web Sockets and similar things. But one can use libevent with PHP (though not as easy).

I found some useful comparision benchmarks on that site: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9&hw=i7...
Agreed. Lectures enforce pacing and accountability better than I ever could on my own.
He is more attacking the person cult. DHH has an aura that shadows many other voices, so not DHH himself is the problem, but the reception of DHH.
Another point of irrationality. Nobody can show any correlation between having that masters degree, and being a better teacher. Its just more institutions included into the education industrial complex ... now the Masters accreditation institutions fight reform too ... because without this shit system, we don't need them and their deadweight either.
> it'll lose minutes of committed operations on unexpected stops.

Never noticed anything like this and I've been using Redis for 3+ years.