skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a huge factor in the UK's tradition of multi-million pound fuckups.

There's a definite bias against people, especially clever people, who get stuff done. You're not supposed to do that here - you're supposed to get on by knowing the right people, talking a good game, and being above it all because of your social connections and money.

Actual hands-on development work is for the little people.

Occasionally one needs to say important-sounding things in public and hustle a little. But that's as practical as it gets.

The irony is that the UK has world-class engineering talent, and a long history of real innovation. But the UK is the only country to have had - for example - its own working satellite launch platform, and thrown it away to save money.

We genuinely have some of the worst political and business "leadership" in the developed world.
Well, I'm glad I have a git repo of all my solutions, so I can get back up to my original 102 problems solved. And then go back to not doing it again because it is too hard now.
It seems tempting to have a single unambiguous notation for mathematics. But
In constructing such a language, one will quickly realize that doing mathematics becomes an intensely arduous task.

This is not unlike recent discussions about the conlang Ithkuil on HN.

For better or for worse, math notation has for the most part been optimized for writing on paper or a blackboard, using context to eliminate "inessential details". Local edits are generally easy, and pieces of notation are not always so tightly coupled. (For example, we can put a "for all x" at a distance from some equation.)

Have you ever attempted to write Lisp on a blackboard, then needing to insert an expression in the middle? It's extremely difficult because you have to perform a quadratic process (erasing everything after and reindenting) to make the Lisp readable. At least this is what I've noticed in interviews. You can sometimes patch your Lisp forms with lines and arrows, but it's the quickest way to get spaghetti on your blackboard.

RPN is similarly useless for the task. RPN is exceedingly easy to write, but not so easy to read. Also, higher level mathematics becomes unwieldy in RPN.

Sussman and Wisdom in their book "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics" did take a different approach to math notation in order to make it unambiguous for that relatively small sub field. It looks like regular math notation but written in such a way to make things more easily computable. I'd say they were successful, though their work would be difficult to generalize.
Python. Just pick it and move on.
"As we've used all the letters of the Roman alphabet, and the Greek one too, I'm just going to write these letters really bold; take notes carefully, there are no distributed notes nor textbook for this freshman analysis course."
The 'Internet Of Everything' Will Generate $14.4 Trillion Of Value
Glad to see them back!
Dystopian sci-fi is making us fear all new technology
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8178978
Code and coffee: Innovative projects at the CERN Webfest
I don't "like" videos on YouTube because I don't know what that function does. Is it going to repost that "like" onto my G+ profile? Or will it show the video on my friends' YouTube main page? I want to give some props to a guy showing me how to replace the brake pads on a Mustang without spamming my friends' pages, but I don't know what "liking" does, so I don't do it.

I once make a Public post to a YouTube video someone had made of a game I made back in high school onto my G+ page. I put a short paragraph explaining what the video was about so my friends would have some context.

That paragraph turned into a public comment on the YouTube video! What the hell! It was worded super awkwardly, too, since it wasn't written in that context.
Relevant:

Imagine for a moment that you are the owner of a popular restaurant located on a street with many restaurants. You do your best to provide the best experience to your customers while staying ahead of the competition by keeping your prices down. You try to avoid spending too much on labor, and do as much of the work yourself as you can, often putting in long hours. Although there is a good wholesale market nearby, you drive an extra hour to another market just to get your ingredients a little cheaper.

One day a wealthy patron who is a big fan of your cooking announces a new idea. Because he wants as many people as possible to enjoy your food, he is going to pick up the tab for most of your customers. You can just go on doing what you always do, but when the check arrives for many tables, this wealthy patron will pay the tab. The next day, your waitress complains that there are too many tables and you should hire more help. What would you do?

Normally, you would try to find a way to avoid hiring another person as it would eat into what little profits you make. But now you realize there is another solution. You can just raise prices. Since most of your patrons are not paying for their meals, your place will still stay popular and you won’t have to worry about losing business to your competition. So why not hire another waitress? While you are at it, why not hire a manger so you don’t have to be there all time, and stop driving to the further market?. Whatever increase in costs you suffer you can make up for by raising prices more and more.

Now imagine all your competitors also have wealthy benefactors picking up the check for many of their customers. You can all raise prices constantly without losing any sleep – or business.

This scenario is effectively what America’s higher education financing system has turned into. There are many reasons why college tuition is rising faster than virtually anything else, from more applicants than ever to state budget cuts for public universities, but all of those factors are allowed to persist because often times the person getting the degree is not the person paying the tab – not for today anyway.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-09/why-tuition-keeps-r...
Point on public universities. I just don't know enough about the US.

>WRT regional colleges: I think that physical presence of full-time faculty is a pretty substantial benefit. You'd need higher-quality, full time faculty and really good technology to compete with even a mediocre but physically present tenured faculty member (tenure as a signal for "has experience teaching" + not ad junct/over-worked).
For this reason, I think that online programs which aim to compete on price without sacrificing quality face a pretty substantial HR problem. Training isn't enough -- faculty have to be available for office hours, need time to develop new curricula, etc.. This is probably not possible without hiring high-quality faculty as full-time employees.

Most Physics postdocs don't get faculty jobs. Neither do most Chemistry or Biology ones. The Arts have an equally massive over supply of wannabe academics. Math,CS, Economics,Finance,Accounting all of these have lovely alternatives to teaching but lots of people like teaching as well.

As you pointed out the coast snobbery is bullshit. Academics move anywhere for tenure or a chance at tenure. But Minerva will take you if you're close enough to the right timezone and soon they'll all be close enough. WGU has shown that all online faculty can work though they don't have an all seminar system.

I don't know, it seems close enough to the Oxford/Cambridge tutorial system that it can work given cheap enough inputs, easily. Live in Thailand, teach students in Hong Kong, live in Coast Rica, teach in San Francisco. And the star faculty can't last. But you can get really good adjuncts without being as attractive locationwise as Minerva. Re:curriculum, office hours, remember, Minerva can actually tell their staff what to do.

I don't think there's much actual disagreement here,I'm only slightly more optimistic than you, eh?
CSS “position: sticky” – Introduction and Polyfills
It seems like they need to follow the exterior path of the current 'blob' as well as the destination shape as it's being formed. If they all moved at once, it'd be pandemonium!
Mayharm - He was quick to pull the trigger on most anything. I can't get into too many more specifics without identifying people, other than to say he gave people good cause to get lawyers.
Did you actually _read_ the article?
It doesn't really matter, but Python is a good choice. It's intuitive, has a great ecosystem, and lots of different practical applications.
>White communities- is segregation? Seriously? Black people are more likely to pick/stay in high crime neighborhoods full of mostly black people, isn't this the same?

No, it's not the same. That's because they can't afford to live elsewhere. And also because racism doesn't let them integrate in other communities. Heck, even when they had money and tried to move to white communities, real estate agencies and locals didn't let them, to avoid "lowering the value" of the place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

>Difference being, successful, hardworking, decent, honest black people will move away- usually in a primarily white neighborhood. Ask them why... they don't want black neighbors.

No, they just don't want the kind of neighborhouds a legacy of opression, racism and poorness has made of those other blacks. The richer blacks would have tried to move just the same even if they lived in a poor latino or white area. So it's not about not wanting "black neighbors". White people didn't even like black middle class families, or even doctors and lawyers living next to them.

Again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
For those whom don't have facebook: http://jsbin.com/rerezi/1
Bitcoin Falls Out Of Its Trading Range
last couple of years, the 3beards have been pretty good at organising tech events like 'art hackathons' and hackathons with companies in London.

think a tech scene doesn't need to be exclusive to students.
There is something very powerful when something about a robot's behavior looks animal, at least from the perspective of an animal. It feels like proof we're going in the right direction.

Another really good example is a video of one of those boston dynamics animalbots losing its balance on ice and then regaining its footing. It's hard not to anthropomorphize and ascribe an emotion. Even worse when it's deliberately kicked off balance by a human. Bad person! Poor robot.

These things move like organic life.
Last time I saw a font with a slashed 7 and 0 was on Genera for the Lisp Machine. See it here: http://www.eurogaran.com/downloads/lispmfont/screenshot.jpg
Also: People might pay for reddit, but reddit without content is nothing. And I might pay $5 for reddit, then someone links me to a site I've never seen before. Now I have to pay $5 to that site in order to view what everyone else is viewing. And the next link down is another $5. And there might be 10 unique links on the front page at one time.

Sure, I could get by well enough to only pay Reddit and Imgur, but how much of Imgur's content is ripped from another site (and if their money is directly on the line, the other sites might actually put a stop to that)? If I can't link a site to someone and have them see it without having to convince them that it's worth it to pay, the entire Internet breaks down. Facebook is now worthless. Reddit is worthless. Hell, even HN is worthless. Small sites would never convince anyone to pay for their content, since they are unknown.

Everyone would subscribe to CNN, Fox News, and Wikipedia, and that's it. That is the entirety of the Internet with a for-pay model.
It's a very interesting article. But it's done in old journalism/academic paper style where it takes 5 pages to get to the point and has huge multiparagraph asides that the reader is often uninterested in. I already know the history of esperanto... most people won't even care about it. I don't care at all that George Soros learned it as his first language, it's unrelated nonsense. Tell me about the topic of the article. If you want interested people to be able to learn more about Esperanto, link to a side article. We can do this today.
To the point that Microsoft even introduced 32to64 porting tools in the Windows SDK, because not everyone made proper use of platform agnostic types and helper macros to start with.
Geograph’s Effort to Get Photos of Every Square Kilometer of Britain and Ireland
There's lots of development in this space all of the sudden. From Oracle there is also MySQL Fabric.

Fabric also provides sharding + failover, but does so by using modified MySQL connectors rather than a proxy.
Initially I used the ListView, but found performance problems on every device. I then rolled my own using a layout in a ScrollView, and it's better, but still troublesome. I'll compare what I've done to what you wrote about and see if I can improve matters.
The combination of email address + password (even hashed in some way) isn't quite as public anymore.

Not having any personally identifying information doesn't protect your Project Euler account, it protects your other assets.
Just completing Real Analysis and an interesting addition to your point is the decision to even call zero a natural number.

It's really opened my eyes to just how much of the definitions around the math I group up with is due to convenience more than anything.
And yet Snapchat took over messaging by reverting back to arbitrary usernames, AOL styles.
I didn't post it for its conclusion. : )

Wow. Cutspell looks interesting. Bonus because it makes everything look Scottish to me : )
Unfortunately, applying an effect separately to sprites versus background layers isn't as useful as it sounds; a lot of games use non-animated sprites to touch up the grid-like nature of background tiles (so treating them separately would look weird), or use multiple sprites to make up a larger character (so treating sprites individually would look weird). I think one of the NES MegaMan games even has a boss battle where the boss is actually a background, and the platforms MegaMan stands on are sprites.
It is disappointing how few people realize the cost of attending college, and most families who make >$150k will never know how much other people pay to attend school. The financial aid system is actually very good at most schools. Two examples:

1) I currently attend Boston University (as a grad student), and a good domestic undergrad gets a nice aid package. For families that make $40k-$80k/yr the middle 50% of aid packages ranges up to $56k per year against a $60k room and board cost.

2) The horrible Ivy Leagues are often even better. When my wife attended admission was need blind, and then after filling out your FASA the school gave the students a grant to cover the part of the cost that is supposed to be covered by student loans. Do you have two kids that are within 1-2 years of each other? The additional cost of sending a second kid can be as low as $0/year because the total contribution that the parents can afford doesn't change just because you have two kids.

One key to this article that is easy to glance over is that the target market is mostly foreign students. They do not get the same aid packages and end up paying full price at most schools.
Playing with Mahout's Spark Shell
I started reading this 4-5 years ago when I was an investment banker. It's a genuine source for information and I like that.

Since then I've taught myself to code and founded a startup.
1 Awesome Business Idea Everyday
What's interesting is people are claiming there is little to no accountability yet, within the hour of the initial report, local news stations reported the whole thing had been transferred to outside agencies (county and FBI) for investigation. So there was immediate accountability to two outside agencies.

This sounds to me like an incident of one officer going ballistic for his own personal reason. Obviously that area has other issues but, as I said, I'd bet no one here knows the background of the issue as to why the kid was stopped in the first place.
Our inability to predict an outcome doesn't constitute an argument against determinism, only the limits of experimental measurements.

I'm not sure how to square that statement with the paper: The paper does sets the equations of motion for an object, equations that completely define the objects motion, but that cannot predict when the object will move. This has nothing to do with the quality of measurement.
> Do you honestly think that in 100 years, people are going to be deploying games through Steam, or worrying about cross-platform OS support? If so, you may want to rethink that. If not, then why wait 100 years?

In 100 years most of my plans revolve around being dead. The best tools for delivering AAA-quality games right NOW are native binaries on Windows and dedicated gaming consoles.

And yes, JavaScript and WebGL "suck" for AAA gaming development. JavaScript is a dynamically-typed, garbage collected language that can't deliver the performance of well-written C/C++ code, and WebGL is a subset of OpenGL, which by definition makes it less powerful than the full OpenGL that's available. And on Windows, the biggest platform for AAA games that also runs a full web browser, WebGL is just a wrapper that sits on top of DirectX, which means an additional performance hit.
c#是我第一个学的语言。
I would have to disagree. It all depends on how you learn JS. I really liked the book JavaScript: The Definitive Guide 6th Ed. which at many points talked about the differences between JS and C. As someone who learned JS as a first language, I find the syntax is close enough to C and C-Like languages to make picking them up fairly easy, but I'm still a novice and while I know JS pretty well I've only dabbled in C, D, and Rust as lower level languages. I found these languages to be almost like "extended" JavaScript because I didn't have many issues reading simple functions, and that's why I think it's a good language to start on, you can learn how to actually read and understand code with C-like syntax which, for me, made understanding lower level C-like code seem a lot easier.

Plus I think JS is fun to use because of how fast you can see your work "come to life". JS is also in high demand.
The article answered those questions:

First, all the robots are put together in an unformed blob and are given an image of the desired shape to be built. Four specially programmed seed robots are then added to the edge of the group, marking the position and orientation of the shape. These seed robots emit a message that propagates to each robot in the blob and allows them to know how “far” away from the seed they are and their relative coordinates. Robots on the edge of the blob then follow the edge until they reach the desired location in the shape that is growing in successive layers from the seed.

The algorithm had to account for unreliable robots that are pushed out of their desired location or block other robots performing their functions. Nagpal’s team overcame this challenge by implementing strategies that allowed robots to rely on their neighbours to cooperatively monitor for faults. They also avoided relying too heavily on exact positioning within the shape boundaries.
Teaching The Art Of Negotiating Business Deals
Slightly against the flow here: I chose Python (and Django) when I learned to code (and built our MVP for www.gmbl.io, still a few rough edges - plug, plug) Python's GREAT, no doubt, and Django is also very good.

But I've repeatedly found myself wishing I'd gone with Ruby/Rails (it was basically a coin toss.) because I've ended up in an environment where everyone else is working in Ruby for their pet projects - and it would be great to be able to tap their knowledge.

So, have a look around, what are people you know using? It's probably really useful to choose something that your friends know (if any of them code), or that you know there's a decent support for in your area - but beyond that, it doesn't really matter. And Python's really nice.
Coding for the Customer
A Writer's Awesome Guide to Empower Google Searches [infographic]
His principal interest is almost certainly that they are giving him money.

Serving on a board doesn't have to be a big job, especially if the company is interested in having you on the board to get access to your connections and influence.

He might also be getting eugenic jollies from it.

(To be clear, I think this is a more cynical story; buying influence is a lot more likely than an aging eugenicist having the awareness and position to get himself on board with a biotech company that might create vastly better predictive medicine.)
It's a bit of a shame that WebGL settled for the lowest common denominator (i.e. OpenGL ES 2.0 capabilities).

This was probably to enable WebGL on mobile devices that would have otherwise been locked out, but it heavily restricted things on the desktop which for the most part would have OpenGL 4 capable GPUs these days.

However given that WebGL on mobile still mostly sucks anyway, not sure if going for the lowest common denominator was the right decision.
Vitess is too huge for me, I can't fully understand it.

I don't think mixer can be the direct competitor to Vitess.I develop it just for fun and only want to solve some simple MySQL sharding problems.

Btw, Vitess is awesome and I use some codes from it.
I can recommend his book.

The Search for the Perfect Language - Umberto Eco - 2010
From the TC article, "The recent narrative around bitcoin has been roughly zilch... The price of bitcoin, which is correlated to media and public interest ... its downturn isn’t letting up."

No comments on if this is really a downturn or not, but do they see the effect of reporting on BitCoin if it is, as they say, correlated to media interest? Maybe someone at TC has invested in BitCoin and needs to liquidate :-)
I remember that a respected West Coast newspaper contacted my tiny retail store about doing some advertising with them in the mid 90s. The sales person actually said it that if I placed a certain amount of advertising with them, I would have a reporter come out and do a human interest story for the local section of the paper.

Talk about native advertising!

Since then I've learned to expect that at least 80% of the stories in papers are planted stories. That is they are stories whose ideas and information is provided by PR firms.

The best ones are the ones where it is not obvious.

A recent crazy but is it? example: national quasi-public radio here in Eastern Europe has been running reports on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investm...

They sent a reporter to USA to interview what seems to be overwhelming pro TTIP sources.

A public radio station struggling for funds sending a reporter on a month long junket? Something does not vibe right here.

I am hoping the financing comes from some EU public fund and not something even more nefarious.

This reminds of the time that US paid journalists if they run anti-drug stories.

Here's a very leftist source but I assume the facts are correct: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/01/will-j13.html
Ask HN: How to learn design as a hacker?
I'm a full stack web dev and hacker by heart. However, all my front-end designs just can't compete with anything delivered by a (semi-)professional designer. Are there any CodeAcademy-like resources that provide actionable advice on how to do better UI design? I'm getting tired of hiring freelancers.

I tried hackdesign.org, but figured it was way too high-level and since it's only a blob of links to blog-posts it didn't create any continious learning experience for me. I'm looking for resources that help me with practical problems like whitespace/margins, color schemes, font-sizes etc...