skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "downvote if you disagree" has gotten to a rather stupid point here lately.

In nearly every submission I read the comments of these days, I see numerous perfectly fine and valuable comments in gray text.

Since so much good content ends up in that state, it renders such styling pointless. Gray text no longer means that the content is very likely commercial spam or otherwise without much value.

I even go out of my way to read all of those comments. With so much good content being downvoted these days, they often have some of the more insightful remarks.
Not really. The differences aren't very large, and there are pretty obvious causes.

Clearly the big variations in gender enrollment rate (and the likely different pass rates) and presumably the different pass rates is almost certain to be the biggest cause.
Coq is first and foremost a proof assistant, you can construct theorems in types and inhabitants of those types constitute proofs of theorems. it's based on a much more advanced type system called the Calculus of Constructions[1]. Coq is not suited for writing programs, though some people do use it to extract formally verified code in some highly specialized cases.

Haskell is a general purpose high-level language suitable for writing any kind of high-level program.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_constructions
It seems to do a search requests instantly after you type a key (ie. in the middle of entering a word). Not surprised this has load issues.
Math gets a lot of attention and therefore a lot of criticism from people who think math education is substandard and from people who think it is overemphasised to the detriment of creative thinking and such.

I think that overall, our math education is surprisingly good, possibly better than any other subject. Especially if you consider the level of proficiency a high school graduate at below average achievement has. Reading, writing and arithmetic. Those are still the things our education system is best at.

I don't mean that the average person will use trigonometry confidently, but they will use basic algebra. That in itself is an achievement. The same cannot be said of foreign language education, most science classes or anything else that requires cumulative learning. Most people that learn a foreign language (apart from english) for years in school do not come out with even a basic ability to communicate in it.

I think part of the reason is the very long tradition of teaching the subject. But I think another reason we're good at teaching math is the sort of fundamental property of the subject. It's unforgivingly right or wrong, which helps cut through the cynicism of a youth that doesn't want to be in that class. The problem with the "holistic" (scare quote intended) approach to subjects is that it opens the door to nonsense of the bikesheding type. It's hard to distinguish nonsensical but enthusiastic from genuinely thoughtful.

The hard right-wrong distinction in maths gives kids a feedback loop of positive and negative reenforcement. At the end of the year it's glaringly obvious if the student now has ability that he/she didn't before.

I don't disagree that the ability to reason is important. But, I don't think teaching "hard" maths is debilitating to developing that ability.

I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this. Maths gets a bad rap. Teaching kids "real world reasoning" within the fake world of school is hard. No one broke the kids. They are just reacting to you changing the rules.
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I disagree with your claim that what the teacher wanted the students to do was not really math. Instead she was claiming that they (and apparently you) have a narrow conception of what doing math involves.

The "right answer" consisting of a valid proof is very different from the "right answer" to a numerical computation. The thinking and communication process is surely more relevant to the former than the latter. And if anything, as you say, the former is what math is really about.
Not only must you get array indexing right, but also pointer dereferencing right, avoid dangling pointers, be mindful of the interaction of aliasing and mutation, etc.

All those things are just part of the logic of the program, which must be correct in any case. Even in safer languages, you still have to write correct code, and if you believe that humans can't reliably get simple things like array sizes correct, how would they do any better with the more subtle kinds of logic errors?

What if you are very sure that your code is correct, but five months later someone modifies code elsewhere in the program that aliases to this array and reallocs() it?

It depends on the specific case but I would tend to believe that someone is not modifying the code correctly (e.g. failing to update the associated size), because they have not understood it.

The mentality of "bugs are normal, and we should restrict languages as much as possible because people might do the wrong things otherwise" is what irks me the most, because proliferating the assumption that perfect code can never be written leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Pulley logic gates
Great job! I know need not to worry about font color just pick one that reads fine for a given hue.
You're not the only ones: http://davesmechanicalpencils.blogspot.com/ -- granted the man has almost no perceptible taste, but he does make a decent Exhibit A for the propelling-pencil side of the argument.
Shameless plug: I just implemented a simple refined type-checking algorithm. It can statically prevent division by 0 and Heartbleed (if functions are given the correct contracts) and is much simpler than I expected. It uses Z3 to prove that the code is correct.

https://github.com/tomprimozic/type-systems/tree/master/refi...

Edit: I submitted it as a separate story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826175
Personalised Emails Are Critical For Startup Campaigns
Well, the problem there is a lack of available $QUALITY courseware content as there are tools to do this sort of thing (Moodle, XO Server) and free content (moodle.net, Khan Academy, scorm modules) available in small quantities for some topics and languages.

I would advance the theory that the art and science of developing useful and effective courseware is new and we (humans) haven't at all figured out how to do it yet.

Various people I know are exploring this from different directions with their projects, EG:

* AST is running with the free BBST courses

* while the original authors of that free content have built a company around expanding and maintaining the curriculum commercially.

* a friend is putting together work for hire 1000x level class material as part of her instructor position

The economics of motivating class creation, much less improving $QUALITY or availability under free culture licences are ... well quick the thorny thicket.
Linux Mint 17
SaaS Onboarding: I Bet You're Doing It Wrong
We're actually working on solving some of these problems at my non-profit, http://freelawproject.org:

- We've built https://www.courtlistener.com to provide a powerful search system with millions of opinions and scrapers for lots of jurisdictions.

- We have the RECAP project that ingests content from PACER: https://www.recapthelaw.org

- We'll start collecting an archive of oral arguments soon (just got funding for that, if all goes smoothly).

Everything we do is open source and open access, so hopefully if we fail, people will take our code and content and keep it alive.

You're right that it's a big challenge, but I think we're making some headway.
Has it? Sure, no one writes code by hand any more, but we all take notes on paper at least some of the time -- even though I've mostly shifted to an org-mode-based workflow for notetaking, and I now work at a company whose roughly every third wall is a whiteboard, there are still times when nothing but pencil and tablet will do.
> Since when calculus and algebra are boring?

After reading your post, it sounds like it's pretty boring until you start hitting differential equations. That's a long time for most people to be bored with calculating before they get to the good stuff.

> Calculating is at the heart of the subject

As long the emphasis is leaving students with an understanding why it works and giving them the tools to create new methods that they can prove work.
Both have to do with open data, but otherwise, there are significant differences.

The Github @unitedstates Project, is an open, relatively decentralized directory to find tools and data related to the United States. Based on the organizations involved in its birth, I'd say its ethos is, broadly, about civic-minded issues. The tools mentioned vary and have different user experiences.

Enigma is a login-required, commercial offering (with a free option, at least for the time being) providing a web application interface to public data, worldwide. It is, at its core, a search engine that lets you drill down into data rows from a common user interface. Its ethos seems to be "find the data you are looking for, whatever your purpose: academic research, business analysis, civics, etc.
> We should be looking at NameCoin

Take a look at dnschain [0], which allows you to query Namecoin domains using standard DNS or HTTP:

$ dig @dns.dnschain.net otokar.bit
[....]
;; ANSWER SECTION:
otokar.bit.	527	IN	A
109.190.29.155
[...]

[0] https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain
Here's how I think of it: there are things humans are better at and things computers are better at, and whenever possible we should let the computers do things they are better at. One thing computers are better at is keeping precise track of a bunch of minutia threaded through a bunch of different contexts. Array indices are precisely that sort of minutia, and we should let compilers (or interpreters) take care of it for us to the extent possible.
If manual cars were comparatively more expensive then psychology might come into play and people would be reluctant to go for the more-expensive manual option.
I must have been taught critical thinking by my parents as even as a child, I could see that the education system was mostly about regurgitating not even the "correct" answer, but the answer expected by the teacher. If you want to see who "broke the children," you need not look much further than that. I am glad that teachers occasionally realize that there is value to being able to reason about a problem rather than just returning the answer by rote. It is rare that grade school teachers even notice there is a problem.
When I was a kid I used to love solving the same problem in multiple ways. I remember during a written test in high school, I solved some pre-calculus problems in 4 or 5 ways within the allotted time. The coolest part for me was seeing that, no matter the approach, they all led to the same answer. I didn't need to wait for my grades back from the teacher to know if my calculations were right. I got confirmation by simply comparing the answers that each method I used provided. I admit that at times periods in Trigonometry provided a two second scare when the results were equivalent but appeared different on paper. Once I had to get my teacher to change my grade precisely for this reason.

Anyway, getting the answer right and seeing which different angles I could take to get to those results were entirely part of the reason why I loved math. The answer wasn't per se the number at the end. The answer was, for each method I employed, the right sequence of logical and mathematically sound steps to that final value.

I would have never really been so fascinated by mathematics and related disciplines if it weren't for that sense of absolute, meritocratic, objective wrong or right.
The problem with ALL of these images, virtual 3d tours, interactive maps - it just does NOT show scale! What does a person look like in these images? I have never been there, but I have no sense of scale of these images. Can a person be seen from these?
After reading most of the replies in this thread everyone who thinks that maths is about answers needs to read A Mathematicians Apology: http://www.math.ualberta.ca/mss/misc/A%20Mathematician%27s%2...

Mathematics has nothing to do with answers. It has everything to do with the most sublime and subjective beauty there is. The fact that this purely aesthetic system has says anything about reality should be more shocking than if we lived in a world where playing Beethoven's 5th symphony made it rain food from the sky:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
I remember that. High quality sharpening, but required a lot of skill.
Want to become a better developer? TAKE A BREAK.
What we should use are local DNS resolvers such as dnsmasq [0], and share the answers on the LAN.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnsmasq
Yes, "mathematics" is a relatively narrow concept, even if it embodies a great deal of knowledge.

When it comes to mathematics, the exact form of the outcome isn't very important. Maybe it's a valid proof in one case, maybe it's a specific number in another case.

It's the degree of rigor that's important. Rigor is what separates mathematics from other fields of study.

Thinking and reasoning about abstract concepts aren't without value, of course. But if this is done without an extreme degree of rigor, it probably should not be considered to be mathematics.
That is unbelievably classy.
The Internet's Hidden Infrastructure
Which is then followed by:

> Why Constructing a Viable Argument and Making Sense of the Reasoning of Others is Crucial. This may seriously be the most vital mathematical practice.

Where the emphasis is on developing an understanding, a viable one (ostensibly leading to a correct answer).
Sure, but it would be useful. I for one would back a bounty.
A good post on the subject: http://lesswrong.com/lw/iq/guessing_the_teachers_password/
Since the sidebar stuff or 'recent entry' links are not really important for SEO, couldn't you just load those from one static file using a bit of javascript? That's what I'm thinking of doing...
> Who or What Broke My Kids?

From the OP, sounds like heavily that teacher did. Let's see why:

> understanding that all probabilities occur between zero and one

Better would be, "a probability is a number between 0 and 1 with both 0 and 1 possible".

Try not to use "occur" here because if event A is "it rains" and it does rain, then we say that "event A occurred". So, it is better wording to say that a probability "is" than to say that it "occurs".

> differentiating between likely and unlikely events

Using the word 'differentiating' here is not good because (1) it is crucial in calculus where it has a quite different meaning and (2) it is just too long for the simple concept of, say, 'identifying' likely and unlikely events.

The worst is,

> The basic premise of the activity is that students must sort cards including probability statements, terms such as unlikely and probable, pictorial representations, and fraction, decimal, and percent probabilities and place them on a number line based on their theoretical probability.

I have no idea what is intended here! Probability theory was the main foundation of my Ph.D. in engineering from my research in stochastic optimal control, and I can't make much sense out of the teacher's statement. Calculating probabilities of poker hands would have made much more sense. Or, just for a start:

We shuffle a standard deck of 52 cards and pick the top card. What is the probability

(a) the card is the queen of hearts?

(b) the card is a king?

(c) the card is diamond?

(d) the card is a spade?

(e) the card is a face card?

Suppose that first card was none of (a)-(e),
and we pick the next card from that deck. Now what is the
probability of each of (a)-(e)?

Or:

We flip a fair coin five times. What is the
probability we get Heads exactly three times?

> where they can solve any computation problem with technology with no issue.

I wish that were so! I guess the teacher has not
heard of the problem in the set NP-complete and
how common such problems are in business planning and
scheduling.

> the probability was 50% since it would either rain or not

Uh, can we place some real money on that!!!!!!
Show HN: Simple refined types implementation that can prevent Heartbleed
I am not so sure you are talking about about the same thing as the article. Usually, when "proving your answer," I found there was still an expected procedure for you to follow, and you would lose points for deviating from that procedure even if what you did was mathematically correct. What the article talks about is learning how to reason about a problem even if your reasoning is questionable and even if you don't arrive at an answer.
2) Startup depression. When you most need help, you're the least likely to get it.
Something tells me you've never sat in on an algebraic topology class where the teacher draws a donut and a pair of pants on the board, along with a line or two, and calls it a proof. A key characteristic of mathematics is that it can be made rigorous, but we certainly don't work in full rigor day to day. A look at Principia Mathematica should demonstrate simply why that would be infeasible.
Re: "Spending a little bit of time to make sure your data is clean can pay off big in the long run."

Clean data is better, sure! But who spends just a little time cleaning their data? For data of any significant size, that's pretty optimistic, if not laughable.

Sure, for a new startup with maybe a few hundred sign-ups, this sounds possible.

To be fair, the above quote is in the context of customer names. Any suggestions for validating customer names? In the abstract? Matching against real names? In the US? Worldwide?
it was probably the other way around: it got votes and into the first page and because of that and the traffic it got "HN'ed"
Tom Lehrer on 'New Math':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA

Enjoy the 'octal' bit.
I've really enjoyed watching Everest: Beyond the Limit, which is available on Netflix and gives a lot of context on the route.
It's easy to point fingers, but I think any library which handles strong crypto over network sockets is going to be pretty hairy. I bet that if I showed you a random 100 lines from the "LibreSSL" code and a random 100 lines from the "OpenSSL" code, stripping out all identifiers, that you wouldn't be able to tell which library is which by judging quality alone.

That sounds like a fun experiment, actually. Someone should go and make that.
The Mystery Man Behind the Most Disturbing Internet Meme in History
I don't necessarily, I'm just curious if there's anything in the architecture that would benefit applications where 64 bit addressing isn't a requirement.
Hi, co-founder of Champion here.

We're located in Bangkok and I can really recommend it. I've not been to Chiang Mai so I cannot really compare it, though I would guess Bangkok is still more startup friendly.

To address the current political issue with the military coup, I have just one thing to say: The media always exaggerates. I've been here through the protests, the curfew and now the coup. And I've never felt threatened or had any issues what so ever. I would invite my own mother here and not be worried.

We are currently sitting together with another startup in their offices in the part of Bangkok called Ekkamai. Previously we rented some desks at the co-working space Launchpad, which was also a really great experience and a way to meet a lot of other like-minded people.
The crucial difference, as others have pointed out, is that if you start with a dynamic site and add caching, there are a lot of likely gotchas like infinite url's that all load a slightly different page (pagination, tag combinations, etc.), as well as potential security issues when a page is not cached yet, or the cache is busted.

On the other hand, if you start with a SSG, your initial state is that every page is cached and works, and you have to think carefully of adding some kind of pagination mechanism.

As the quote goes, "There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." The big benefit of a SSG is that you 'solved' the cache problem, and will immediately be aware of issues there.
I'd love a list of big corporations that are actually great to work for. It seems like Google is in this camp (I know, not for everyone, but it seems like most people have positive experiences there), maybe Facebook. I hear mixed things about Microsoft. What are the top ten BigCorps to work at as a developer?
When I was a kid, each subject had its own attractions. The notion of a "right" answer was one of the things that I enjoyed about math. It didn't make me any less inquisitive. I often tried to come up with unorthodox ways of arriving at those answers.

Naturally, there's a side of math involving getting an approximate answer that's good enough to be useful. One thing I've noticed as my kids progress through school is that most science being taught is qualitative or descriptive.

Adding some quantitative science to the K-12 curriculum would be a way to teach a more fuzzy approach to math. Naturally, science has its own notion of "right" that could be learned through the formation and testing of quantitative hypotheses.

There were many courses where I could get an "A" by writing a mountain of drivel that anticipated the teacher's social biases. I was thankful for the boost to my GPA, but the "no right answer" aspects of those subjects frustrated me. Oh well, different strokes.

One thing the standardized tests might be doing is to focus too much on memorized algorithms. And it may not be necessary. My son had a teacher in grade school who didn't even teach the standard algorithms for things like two column addition. Instead, the kids spend time trying to come up with their own methods. Yet his students get excellent scores on the state tests.
Hey, I get that regexes can be a bit "dense" to understand. I've actually had to scale back my use of them at a prior job for the sake of the team (I was the most expert regex guy by far, but you can't have code that only 1 person is able to modify...)

I love them for some reason because 1) they're like puzzles, 2) they're extremely fast if you know what you're doing, vs. doing the same things in interpreted code.
How to land a programming job in Europe (not only) for Indian foreigners
Nobody broke the kids, they were doing exactly what they were taught to do.

I'm not a fan of the education system in the least bit, but something about this rubbed me the wrong way. She's probably exaggerating when she said she had a "meltdown", but all the same, what are you supposed to think as a kid when your teacher has a tantrum in front of you because you're doing what you were trained to do? To the kids she's just part of the institution, and in this particular case the institution is sending them very conflicted messages. "Think for yourself! As long as you're thinking what you're supposed to be thinking."

In any case, I think the real problem with the education system is it's constantly trying to bullshit kids into "learning" things they really don't need to learn. (And they don't really learn it. Quick sanity test: what do you remember about high school trigonometry? But you "learned" it right? Or did you, really?)

Most kids aren't stupid. They're naive, but they're not stupid. They can tell when their time is being wasted. They're out to give the right answer and not think about it because when you're literally trapped in a system like that, the most logical thing to do is minimize effort and not make waves until you can make your way out. So that's what kids do, and then pompous teachers are surprised that kids aren't "passionate" about these things. Well no kidding they're not! Why should they be?
I go to a university in America, and I've had a few tests there given on Scantron.