skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like everything else - used right it is an aide, used wrong it is a negative.

If your goal is to pass tests you're missing out on the point of education. Which is to learn stuff (usually, at least).

The tests are the metric that we measure success with, they are not the goal. Confuse the two and you will most likely continue to confuse the two and you will find yourself writing extra lines of code or whatever metric you're going to confuse for a goal in your professional life as well.

Used right, this could replace part of the focus of tests and instead put the focus on learning. Which is way better. Used wrong, it could become another metric that people want to maximise, because they've confused the metric with the goal.

Metrics are indicators of success/failure, they are not success/failure, so if you try to optimise towards metrics you ultimately just screw yourself.

Use quantitative metrics to identify areas of greatest opportunity, qualitatively inspect and analyse to improve. Repeat. That's the most effective way I know of learning. Used that way, metrics are useful, and having more metrics is good, not bad.
Even if they produced the same amount of cars, it'd be interesting to see how many less people are employed, directly and indirectly, by Tesla than GM or Ford.

There are so many fewer parts - GM and Ford spun off so many companies who simply made things like spark plugs, air filters, mufflers, and all the little internal engine parts like lifters, pistons or camshafts.
I'm very satisfied with both https://dnsimple.com/ and https://getssl.me/

Very good prices, pleasant/informative websites, good buying experience. dnsimple sells certificates only if you have their dns hosting account.
Finding some 404s about the place.
Either way the limits are so far out from the computational capability of humans in the forseeable future (next few hundred years) that they're both massive overkill. When you really NEED that much security you have to worry about the loyalty of your nation's military and how good all those armed guards will be at keeping you from being waterboarded.
"So, point one is that this is not a battle of equals: it's a big-ish corporation being picked on by a Goliath more than ten times its size, in an attempt to extort better terms."

This is really a stupid way to put it.

The 1/10th size company is plenty big enough to hire top notch lawyers, lobbyists, PR people etc to fight this battle. The fact is this is really a battle where, past a certain point, size doesn't matter. We are not talking about a schoolyard fight.

What Amazon is doing is wrong (if as reported) however making out the underdog (if you want to call it that) as a "David" as if they are some small 10 person company being picked on by, say, google (and their algorithm) is just hyperbole.
As a counter example, I like many people did some 'original' research for my HS science fair. I ended up working with a geologist at my local school who was both willing to give advice and a little help for free. I saw plenty of examples where someone got access to either testing equipment or raw data. EX: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/search/ As long as you have the methodology down you can even get published.

IMO, the real issue is the vast majority of people both inside and outside the establishment don't have any ideas that are both original and anywhere close to correct.

PS: It tourneys out my idea was less novel than I thought but the journey was still fun.
Agree. I've done a large project last year on python 2 and wish i could go back in time and start with python 3 right away.
To me unicode support really was the crappiest side of python, and it's good to know that it's supported now.

The problem for me with python is more general as just python 2 vs 3. It's that python seems stuck in the purely dynamic typing side of PL whereas the trend now (golang, haskell, dart , typescript) seems to be that types are useful for many things.

But sticking with python 2 wouldn't change anything to that matter.
Same here. Rippetoe's book was fantastic for me, especially in helping to to have good form, but the Starting Strength 5x5 was the workout that actually stuck with me. IMO they compliment each other extremely well.
Branding problem, or a content problem?
You are right, this is possible. But I am assuming that the Krugman, Summers and other reviewers (at least somewhat) did their homework, and were correct in saying that Piketty's empirical work was unique and important.
Epic Hybrid Smart Watch
I'm not entirely sure on the specifics of what is allowed, but I know MathXL/MyMathLab has a button for printing when one is reading the textbook online through their site.

[Edit] Cleared up some confusing stuff in there.
Piketty's numbers appear incorrect

Er...some of his numbers appear incorrect. From this you incorrectly assume that this invalidates the conclusion. It may invalidate the conclusion if the errors are significant. However, what little I've seen so far does not seem to be all that significant.

From the fine article:

'Scott Winship, an economist at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and notable critic of Piketty's analysis, said the FT's allegations weren't "significant for the fundamental question of whether Piketty's thesis is right or not".'

So there seem to be highly qualified sources that say that the differences are not significant. That's not the same as "he said/she said".

Do you have any evidence that the errors are significant?

You also blatantly mischaracterize Krugman's point: he showed that inequality in capital income is going up, not (just) general income. Capital income has this property that it usually derives from capital (as the name says). So unless there is evidence that the top 1% or so systematically get significantly better returns on the same capital, an increase in capital income let's us include that there is an increase in base capital from which to derive that income.

On the other side of the coin, income leads to wealth, and unless you have evidence that high-income people save less of their income than lower-income people, then wealth will diverge. All the evidence I have seen so far (and common sense) say that it is the other way around: consumption saturates, so people with higher incomes actually save more and spend less, at least in relative terms.

So both sides of this equation quite trivially show the link between income inequality (especially for, but not limited to capital income) that you deny.

So both the FT criticism (= nit-picking in non-substantive details) and your criticism are unfounded, as far as we can tell.

Again, if you have some actual substantive evidence that the errors are significant, I'd love to see it.
Additionally, in 2013 about 12% of Tesla's revenue came from emissions credits rather than selling cars. That's going to do funny things to marginal profit numbers per car.
So pho is a gulp replacement?
Thanks to the answer. Looks like Murphy's law was in action that day.

So, that was by the client's demand. You got to save 20 machines with it, I'm impressed, and now I understand it better why you did it.
Mistakes? Improvements? Please share.

Few books in our industry have been more prescient.
No, it’s not Amazon that has the ebook monopoly
And the universities are charging how much for this "education" again?

Plagiarism software, auto-marks software, now this BS

Where are the real Professors? Where's the real education?

People are leaving "university" with nothing but debt.
Perl is an ex-parrot and Parrot won't change that all that much.

It's worse than that. Rakudo developers declared Parrot deprecated (in favor of a new VM which had yet to be written). That, of course, drove off all of the Parrot developers--see the decline in commits in March 2011:

https://www.ohloh.net/p/parrot/commits/summary

If Rakudo ever reaches a point of stable equilibrium where it's reasonable to think about creating libraries for it, P6 still faces an adoption cycle that's more difficult than that of Python 3. There's no plan for P6 to replace Perl (partly to avoid that adoption pain, for one, and partly because P6 has taken so long, there wouldn't be any Perl users remaining unless P6 had publicly changed its strategy).

Python's transition hasn't been quick or easy, but it's gone much, much better than the P6 fiasco.
I'm just trying to say that one should not neglect the importance of damping factors in dynamic systems. Our human environment is a complex dynamic system. No one can tell what would be the right amount of evolutionary progress without risking runaway phenomena. An example of which could be all the innovation taking place in Germany before WW II.
Google releases VirusTotal Uploader for OS X
Prime Minister of India
On statistical models
Bitcoin and Regulation: Lessons from the Early Days of Skype
You could write an article about digital resources adapting themselves to match individual students' ability and learning speed, allowing every student to receive activities most likely to put them in a state of 'flow' -- and most everyone would think the monitoring required to do that was awesome.

Like most things, it's not the monitoring that's objectionable, it's how that monitoring is used.
Accuracy in historical fiction: "The Borgias" vs. "Borgia: Faith and Fear"
"The Island", Peter Watts
Given the author's expertise on computing, I would be extremely surprised if there were any copyright issues prof. Spinelis overlooked.
Professional Node.js training
GitHub search of 84600 seconds, oops...
How can I tell, by visiting a site, what web server is being used?
are you aware that LINQ is not only about database access

Yes, I am aware. How is this relevant at all to the context of this thread?

The rest of your comment: You are simply wrong. A heavy use of LINQ is one of the surest sign that one needs to run from a project. It is almost always used and embraced by people who have no concept of the consequences, imagining that the conciseness of LINQ = programming goodness, when the opposite is generally true.
Hey there! Answered on our blog, but also wanted to post our response here as well:

Hi Matt! Great question. There was prototype code in both GO and Node.JS. The code written in GO was not fully tested in a "production" environment because we made our decision on quite a few factors early on.

GO is fantastic as faster development cycles and performing CPU-bound operations. However, there are places where GO just isn't the right choice for this particular scenario.

We use GO in various parts of our infrastructure where the piece is small and meant to process lots of information. However, provisioning zones is not so much a CPU-bound operation but an external operation bound operation. We have to wait for nginx to do various operations before control comes back to us. We're not crunching numbers, we're writing to the data storage for our provisioning information. This type of operation is further bound to external factors.

GO is also a language that doesn't have massive adoptability yet. There's a lot of 3rd party vendors where we use their technology and rely on their SDK's to interact. Many of those vendors may not have written a GOlang library. Sure, there's bindings to other languages; however, this is a small hoop to jump through. Is our provisioning dependent on such libraries right now? Not so much. However, you have to keep an eye on the long-term future.

We also isolate our backend systems at various levels and have them communicate via REST API's. You can certainly write solutions in GO to have a REST frontend; however, it's not the ideal case for GO, in our opinion. There's a fair bit more scaffolding to put in place which means more code to maintain. There are some some great libraries out there for this (check out https://github.com/ant0ine/go-... however, we have to compare the amount of code we need to write to support the environment we run in, versus the amount of code that focuses on the core problem we are trying to solve.

Also, it's pretty difficult to find GO rock star engineers to hire. We have a couple amazing ones here in our team and we only hire the best. By the way, if you ARE A GO rock star, we want to talk to you. Reach out to me.

So, what we really wanted to find was a replacement language that is quick to develop, does well with asynchronous operations, which are external operations and I/O bound, and is easy to maintain with our existing engineering team as well as future members.

When deciding what platform or language to use to solve a customer facing problem, you sometimes can't make the decision on numbers alone. In the end, node.js has the right balance of features to give us the ability to rapidly develop solutions that are I/O bound and has the support and maintainability to ensure we can keep developing the best customer solution possible for this specific use case.
Numpy, Scipy, NLTK.

These are really HUGE and I can not do my work without them.
There is one thing that Stross's publishers do for him that neither Amazon nor any other platform is willing to do: absorbing risk. They pay him upfront, then spend more money to polish, publish, and market his work. If it's a wild success, they give him a split of the profit, but if it tanks, they eat all the loss.

He is in the enviable position of not having to worry too much about whether his next book will sell, but for the vast majority of the traditionally published authors, this safety makes a huge difference.
for the young'uns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
Wok Mon Converts Your Home Burner Into a Wok Range
> the way they have largely ignored problems in other far more influential studies that were much more flawed.

From the FT article on the matter

>Nobel Prize-winning economists have heaped praised on Mr Piketty’s work. Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton University said it was safe to say the book “will be the most important economics book of the year – and maybe of the decade”.

It is something that clearly had been billed as an influential book, even the leader of the opposition in my country commented on it.

Clearly someone felt it was worthy of review. Meanwhile, I'm not aware of any of my nations political leaders basing policy on the Tol 2009 paper. Generally such academic papers don't reach as many readers as this book has/will/wouldhave.

I think the question of one investigation being a sign of a systemic bias is a bit of a moot point.
you shouldn't be surprised, FT and the economist have always had a deep right skew.
I would like to see any proof of that accusation of predatory pricing.
>I.e., my startup might grow 10-fold, but Facebook is unlikely to.

Yes, startups, an investment famous for attracting only small scale investors of small means…
To me theories of mind are like programming languages, there's room for lots of them and having one in my toolbox doesn't mean that I cannot have others...and if one is not suited for a particular task or just doesn't appeal to me...well that doesn't make the whole raft of them bad.

And I take the analogy between programming languages and theories of mind seriously. We don't dismiss programming languages because they don't describe the physical flipping of particular bits that happens on the computer and we don't throw out client-server architectural models when we are working with only one machine. Physicalism when it comes to computing is absurd in most contexts.
Sorry wrong bit. Relevant terms are:

"5.3.4 Customer Prices. To the extent not prohibited by applicable laws, we have sole and complete discretion to set the retail customer price at which your Digital Books are sold through the Program. We are solely responsible for processing payments, payment collection, requests for refunds and related customer service, and will have sole ownership and control of all data obtained from customers and prospective customers in connection with the Program. "

ie, the author gets to set the "list price", but Amazon sets the sale price. However, looking down the contract, it appears that they pay either a 35% or (70% - costs) royalty based on the list price for both choices. I'm fairly sure it used to be the case that Amazon applied the (70%-costs) royalty to their sale price, which they could change at will, unlike the 35% option, where you always got 35% of list. Either I'm wrong or they've changed this since I last looked at the whole Kindle contract set up.
What popular third party libraries don't have a port and don't have one planned for the next 5 years python 2 will be around?
Actually it is to an extent, if you browse around you will see many questions asking about c++ library for this and that etc. Give it a try.
Seeing Like SimCity
> Metrics are indicators of success/failure, they are not success/failure, so if you try to optimise towards metrics you ultimately just screw yourself.

True for the student, but true for the professor too... Why produce a bogus metric such as reading assiduity ?
Please compare Tesla to an Audi, BMW or Mercedes. A Luxury car with a thin market irrespective of innovations is still a Luxury car.
You would be surprised: the luxury models are often not making any money at all, sometimes the manufacturer loses money on every single car produced.

Some examples from different price levels: Bugatti Veyron, Ford Focus RS, VW Phaeton.

The reason why they produce these is because of 'brand image'. VW builds the Veyron so the company can claim that they make the fastest car in the world, but Bugatti could not sustain itself. Same for the Focus RS: it costs a lot of money to design and build a car with that level of performance, but they can't sell it close to the price level of an entry level Ferrari (even though the costs are quite close).

This is probably the most important reason why they limit the numbers -- they want the car to be on the front page of magazines, but they also want to make sure not to sell too many.
Historically, when the computing world only knew about English, a character was represented by a byte. That led to a string being essentially byte array. As such, the concepts of a byte and a char and a buffer and a string were often used interchangeably (in fact, the 8-bit-type in C is called char). With Unicode and the need to parse international text, however, a character can no longer be represented as a simple byte, and things have become messy.

Python3 finally cleanly separates the concepts of a "byte" (8 bits) and a "character" (which now is an abstraction). A String is now a collection of characters and no longer functionally equivalent to an array of bytes.

This change is normally welcomed by people who have to deal with multiple languages and encodings anyway, as making the conceptual difference between a character and a byte explicit makes dealing with text much easier. However, if you were used to thinking of strings as byte arrays and not as "the data type for text", you might have a hard time.
I'd be highly interested in knowing how exactly it goes about showing these metrics:

* By class: The defense would probably be that it helps the teacher get a better understanding of the class and how to change tactics.

* Per student: The defense here would probably be that it helps the teacher target a particular student for the purpose of individualizing the support they provide.

The 'per student' method is far more open to abuse in that it would also allow the teacher to pick out students that didn't match what they believed to be 'appropriate' studying. Both opens are open to abuse, though, as a 'by class' metric would show them that some students study in a way that does not align with the teacher's belief(s); they might have their opinions about some students slacking off or what have you and decide that they are the ones pulling down the stats and single them out as a result.

Either way, this amount of surveillance opens up the door for a good deal of abuse and there should be a good amount of discussion regarding it before it is thrust upon unknowing student.
How do you know that the strategy worked reliably if you never compared the results to the results obtained using a reliable method (which you presumably didn't, because then you could just have used the reliable method)? The larger the data you have to deal with, the more likely it is that corner cases will occur in it, and the less likely that you will notice anomalies, thus the more important that you are very strict in your logic if you want to derive any meaningful results.

As such, the two viewpoints really are: not really caring about the soundness of your results and solving the actual problem.

Now, maybe you really can show that the bugs in the methods you use only cause negligible noise in your results, in which case it might be perfectly fine to use those methods. But just ignoring errors in your deduction process because you don't feel like doing the work of actually solving the problem at hand is not pragmatism. You'll have to at least demonstrate that your approach does not invalidate the result.
wanna be the asshole nerd that ruins every conversation?

constantly remind people that it's pronounced "fuh", like the German "fa" as in "fahren".

met a lady like that last year, has been stuck in mind since then. grrrr.
WPHardening: a security tool for WordPress
There's a reason the Economist doesn't credit articles to authors, so it appears as received wisdom from seasoned economists/political insiders instead of actually being written by a 20something hipster intern. If you save a few issues they will contradict themselves every couple of months especially on articles about Russia. where Putin is the hero of capitalism in one issue then an evil protectionist Bolshevik in another. Europe's future will be declared as under the whims of Russia then a few issues later they claim Russia has little influence. It's a borderline tabloid rag, so is the FT.
Except for the parents, it's nobody's business what the children do after school. How can children learn about freedom when all their movements are scrutinized and analyzed all the time.

Plus it's really not a good metric. There are many ways to learn a topic. There's fast learners, those who gather information trough other sources, those who like to work in groups. Inevitably these approaches to learning will get hindered by myopic interpretation of this metric.
The 25% number for Tesla is from the most recent quarter, where they received no revenue from selling emissions credits.

Their profitability has actually increased quarter to quarter even as their emission credit sales have dropped to zero.
I think people are missing your point:
Human beings seem to be built based on hacks around incompetence, yet we've made it for quite some time, it's not a great point but nevertheless makes sense.
> As to the point that somehow we will run out of books to read, there is not even the slightest chance that I will read the best 1% of the books published until today in my entire lifetime. That's assuming everyone stops writing now.

That's giving far too much credit to the argument that Amazon will put authors out of business. Amazon may very well put publishers out of business (and replace them). They have no incentive to put authors out of business, because without authors Amazon would have no new books to sell.
There's no money for it and there probably isn't enough enthusiasm for it in Congress. The US economy is $15 trillion dollars. We spend $40 billion on pet food to give you and example of the money the US consumer has.

Perhaps, someday someone will figure out how to tap into that pile of cash for Big Science.
Mobile web moves too quickly to care about what was true 2 entire years ago :) iOS got position: fixed a couple versions back, and iOS users upgrade rapidly.

So, the advice not to use position: fixed on mobile may still be good, but iOS isn't the reason why.
Polymorphism and WordPress: Abstract classes