skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the end of the semester, students who enjoyed the course should just tip their professors. Adding a real free-market incentive would increase class size and teaching quality, right? Let's let the invisible hand of the market decide; it is certainly more motivating than course evaluations.

I have taught at two higher-ed institutions. In one, each student was given a 20-question evaluation. Of those twenty questions, two were of any importance to the instructor: overall instructor and overall course. The other eighteen were frequently ignored by administration and had absolutely zero influence on tenure, promotion, raises or retention. Those two examined scores were averaged over all course over the entire year, but not weighted - you'd have a six-person course count as much toward your final average as a sixty-person course. The scores were from 1 (bad) to 5 (good). You needed an overall average of 3 on each scale to avoid being fired. Higher scores yielded no tangible (or intangible) rewards. Every faculty member taught enough grad-level courses (PhD in particular tend to yield all 5s) that nobody ever really worried about their evaluations from an enforcement perspective. Those of us who cared about actually improving our practice had better ways to get honest reflections from their students. Personally, I tended to get low-ish evaluations from students expecting an easy A ("Professor __ expects his students to work really hard and learn" "He thinks he's the King of Science" etc etc), and high evaluations from students who wanted to learn the stuff the course was about.

Of course, I also got better over time and so did my course evaluations. I also got better at gaming the system. Add too much reading to the syllabus, and remove an assignment or two so you can be "responsive to student needs", for example.

At the other institution, course evaluations were ignored entirely. They played no role whatsoever in anything. On the other hand, I had a better time teaching those students, and according to my evaluations that had no impact on my career, I was doing a better job of it to boot.

Of course, anecdotes vs data, etc etc. Still, I think tips are the way to go. We already know mean course evaluations can be predicted by the grades students expect to get [1], so let's just flip that around a little.

[1]: https://stat.duke.edu/~dalene/chance/chanceweb/153.johnson.p...
Were evaluations mandatory? Did they have any required length? I've done plenty of evaluations in the past which only asked for written responses but was generally disappointed to hear from classmates that they either scribbled gibberish to make it look like they were filling it out or, if the teacher was good, just writing things like "Thanks" or "Great class" in each area.
Yeah, I said as much (even calling them duals) in a sibling comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8375910

Method calls don't need to be fixed either. Just because C++ stores virtual methods in a fixed-sized table doesn't mean Lua/Javascript/etc can't store them in hash tables. And a list of hooks is sort of like an extensible switch statement, but bare switch statements like you were describing obviously don't have that kind of runtime flexibility.
Scientists conclude that black holes are mathematically impossible?
Url changed from http://developers-beta.slashdot.org/story/14/09/26/1330228/p..., which points to this.
I heard the other day that in Japan the employers routinely pay a percentage of a man's salary direct to his wife such that that portion money remains outside of his control. Maybe someone with a better idea of Japanese society can weigh in with some analysis.

Here in China, I don't think the problem's quite as bad as they make out in the article... only in government and some big businesses (eg. probably airline flight attendants).
The systemd promotion brigade has invaded hacker news.
Compelling python-based competitor to sed/awk/perl
A quantitative analysis of the graying of Barack Obama's hair
Autodesk's 123D Catch has been available since 2012. This is just the phone app interface. All the real work is done on Autodesk servers.

It's reasonably good if you take an organized set of pictures for it. A clean background behind the object of interest helps. The object has to have lots of edges for the algorithm to match; sculptured surfaces like cars may not match well. For some purposes, projecting a pattern of dots or lines onto the object is helpful. (The original Kinect did something similar).

Programs for this have been around for years. Most of the improvements have been in doing a better job of guessing about areas where matching edge info isn't available.
Think about any other race trying for ESL jobs in Asia. One of my teachers was very upfront about it and asked me if anyone has ever spoke with me about being asian and trying to teach in Asia.

Never ended up doing going. It is marketing, and it's perceived to be much better to know American English than British English.

Resume info from other countries are also very different as others have mentioned. Mandatory pictures, age, gender, marital status, children, passport, driver's license, etc are all expected. It's scary to think how easily identities can be stolen.
> yacc: generating .go files from yacc grammar (.y) files

Go has its own parser already[1], and who still uses yacc? Don't people use Flex/Bison?

[1] http://golang.org/pkg/go/parser/
And nobody does that. They write for sh, that qll those others are compatible with.

This means you can swap one part and expect things to work, rather than having to swap the whole engine because you want to swap one part.
“All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.” (Strange Loop)
I have been using JSON types in postgres 9.3 for several weeks now. It's nice. It just works. I love being able to mix relational logic on static columns with undefined documents on dynamic columns, all in the same tables.
Awesome homepage and video! Bloody well done. All the best. It looks quite useful and easy to use. Have good export functionalities and handle different OSes and you have a winner!
Not the kind of laptop the link I posted is talking about, which is x86-based. And I found the HN comment where the idea was mentioned BTW: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7079053
The Wikipedia page is worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achi...

Particularly this quote:

The Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch discussed the paradox in The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958), where he argued that the paradox showed that "the actual process of drawing an inference, which is after all at the heart of logic, is something which cannot be represented as a logical formula ... Learning to infer is not just a matter of being taught about explicit logical relations between propositions; it is learning to do something" (p. 57). Winch goes on to suggest that the moral of the dialogue is a particular case of a general lesson, to the effect that the proper application of rules governing a form of human activity cannot itself be summed up with a set of further rules, and so that "a form of human activity can never be summed up in a set of explicit precepts" (p. 53).
I dunno... 70lbs doesn't seem that much, given some of the backsides I've seen in the US. Just sayin'...
If you have control the code.
> Please note I didn't throw out add(3,4)==7, but instead pointed out it's terribly inadequate as a test. Additional testing tools must be employed; unit testing alone of this kind is not enough.

I don't follow what you are saying here at all... It's an API test with no external integration points, what other kind of tests besides unit tests would you have? Your `add(x, y) = add(y, x)` are still unit tests.

Also, you said that you would "rule out testing specific values such as 3+4=7". You have to test specific values; the contract of the function is:

f(x, y) = z

Where z is the mathematical sum of x and y.

Specific value testing is the only way you can verify that claim for a given set of inputs.

>> The only thing that static typing provides, in regards to test cases, is this [example]

> This assertion is wrong. Static typing done well provides a lot of things "for free", such as restricting incorrect behavior.

This was taken out of context; this was in reference your to "generator" of test values for X and Y. The type signature alone is inadequate to generate test values.

Regardless,

f :: [a] -> a

Is no harder to test in a dynamic language.

let r = f([...])
assert(r, correct_value)
assert(r.type, correct_type)

It's up to the contract of the function to determine what, if any, validation needs to be done on the input. This is true regardless of type system. The only question is this: do you also check the type.

Again, type is only _one_ of the constraints that get applied to parameters. In the add function example, the other constraints are:

1. x <= TYPE_MAX (for free in a statically typed system)
2. x <= TYPE_MAX - y
3. y <= TYPE_MAX (for free in a statically typed system)
4. y <= TYPE_MAX - x

Plus the similar for TYPE_MIN. In the `addbase2` example, additional constraints are:

1. x power of 2
2. y power of 2

In this example, we still need to add verification for two-thirds of the constraints.

On the flip-side, with generics, especially with the type of generics we see in Swift (using the `f :: [a] -> a` example), you'll probably need to model constraints of the collection, the element type of the collection, and the type of indexer that is being used if you wish to make your function actually work.

And then your implementation only works for those that rigidly adhere to the type conformance, where as the dynamic one can work for any type that conforms to the protocol, whether loosely or explicitly.

This flexibility is very powerful, is not hard to code safely around, and requires significant less code gymnastics before you can even get your code compiling.
There is an interesting parallel between Mr Carmack's "inlining" observations and one of the sessions I went to at Strange Loop this year. Jonathan Edwards was trying to beat back "callback hell" (i.e. unpredictable execution order leading to unpredictable side effects) by radically simplifying the control flow of his programs and keeping the execution model dirt-simple. Both would appear to argue that it's best to arrange heavily stateful code in a simple linear sequence, and use a top-down execution model, so that stateful effects are clear and easy to predict.

That being said, I've seen procedures that followed this sort of approach that were thousands of lines long. Even if we could have cut down on the ridiculous number of conditionals in that code, most of the state at that scale asymptotically approaches an undifferentiated mass of global variables. The result is testable and maintainable only via heroic effort. There have got to be limits to this kind of approach. (For Mr Edwards the solution was to break the whole thing up into a sequence of composable views, or lenses, with the interface between each stage being well-defined.)

I wonder to what extent Mr Carmack's pivot to pure functions is simply an acknowledgement that there were much better ways to refactor the code than the mess of one-timer procedures that probably seemed like a good idea the first time through...
I realize a lot of people use docker for a lot of different reasons.. But the technologies seem more geared toward(and seeing as dotcloud and not docker are PaaS companies) solving deployment concerns..
Here's how I remember my part of the linked story (I was active in Apple II development in those days).

After my program Apple Writer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer) became a best-seller and the IBM PC was about to appear, IBM called me up and asked if I would write a version of Apple Writer for their machine.

At the time of IBM's call I was making well over a million dollars per year in Apple Writer royalties. I asked IBM, "What royalty terms are you offering"? This caught the IBM people somewhat off guard, unaccustomed as they were to speaking to programmers who had any business sense. They replied, "Well, you get $100,000 in royalties, after which we own your program."

I thought for a minute, and replied, "I don't know -- right now I'm making that much from Apple Writer every two weeks." The IBM people realized I wasn't a likely candidate for their standard deal.

I heard the next chapter of the story third-hand, and I can't verify its truth. It went like this -- they next called John Draper and offered him the same deal. He accepted. The result was somewhat mediocre and IBM wasn't terribly happy. According to the story, Draper said, "IBM wanted a $100,000 program, and I gave them one."

It might be myth, but I heard it from several sources.
I am; they've added it to our enriched flour breads since the 80's and it blocks iodine receptors. Look up iodine deficiency, said to affect 70% of Americans, and this is alarming. The deficiency has been linked to thyroid problems and cancer, especially breast and prostate cancer, as iodine helps regulate hormones. I have NO trust for our "food system" or "safety regulators." It's all about how to make a buck. You can hardly find any food without unnecessary and harmful additives. Soy lecithin - an allergen is everywhere as is whey (dairy - why do I need this in my chicken apple sausage??), maltodextrin (gluten), MSG (migraine central). It's pitiful. Yes; bromine is one of many scary elements we over-use.
> - no remote access to the console if ssh stops working

That the depends on what you install, obviously. But more importantly, this is an intel cpu, so there is remote management, and:

> - no possibility to remotely power it down/up

Again, intel cpu, see below...

> - if the hardware dies, no possibility to restart on a different hardware remotely

That also depends: backup and automation is orthogonal to it being "cloud" or not -- not to mention with vtx support, one might set up the actual services as vms, even if just running on a single physical machine -- you would have to do off-site backup -- but then again you should be doing that anyway...

But, back to the intel remote management stuff: I recently scared the willies out of myself, by setting up remote management on my laptop. Full console and serial access, optionally with dial-out over wlan support. Just from running an intel chip/bios on my laptop. That's this stuff here:

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/active-management-techno...

http://blog.yarda.eu/2012/09/intel-amt-quickstart-guide.html

http://www.howtogeek.com/56538/how-to-remotely-control-your-...

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno...

(etc)
> "99% of apps run on single core."

This really isn't true. A rudimentary "Hello World" app, maybe, but all of the common apps that are being run are heavily multithreaded.

Even an app that just uses stock/fairly common libs (like AFNetworking) is going to be multithreaded by virtue of those things alone.

Multi-core performance is critical in the iOS ecosystem, single-core is hardly a concern anymore.
I wonder what language that makes it easy to keep data in linked lists he might have had in mind.
Only problem I have with JSON on Postgres is you can't update a property of a JSON object like so:

update table set jsonCol->propertyA = 42;

You need to write an extension for that. Easiest to do so using Python but sadly Heroku doesn't support python on postgres since its unsafe.
I have been working recently with a PHP application whose installation instructions are "Run this VirtualBox image inside your network, and without a proxy in front of it because we are not properly configured".

This PHP application is not trivial, but also not very complex. Yet its developers do not provide this application as a PEAR package, and replied that this kind of things are superfluous these days, VM are simpler.

People like these developers fail to understand that there is a lot more in a VM than just their software (from the kernel to all the exposed services) and that by distributing a VM they are also becoming the maintainers of a very complex set of dependencies. Not that they care: it took them two months to release a VM not vulnerable to heartbleed. Let's see how long before they release a VM not vulnerable to shellshock.
How could bromine be a bad thing? It has "bro" right in the name!
The first break is ignored?
The only time I've heard that quote is by Clay Shirky, in his first TED talk.

It makes a lot of sense to me, btw - it's kind of like natural selection at the organisationa level.
Except the reference implementation uses a JIT and is really fast.

Still waiting for PyPy to eventually replace CPython as the reference implementation. Even though they still have a bit of catching up to do.
There were reports over a decade ago of people successfully challenging such requirements through the legal system

http://www.economist.com/node/1011419

is one, there were others but it doesn't seem to have brought about significant change.
Aren't there caps on AWS preventing such type of spikes without user intervention? Like with a credit card where I will get a call if I all of a sudden make a huge purchase.
You can get some nice gear too if you buy Hint brand flavored water!
I believe that the Silk Road was built on the CodeIgniter frameowkr for PHP.
Quote: "But new research claims the star would lose too much mass and wouldn't be able to form a black hole"

1. It's not research, it's mathematical speculation with no empirical evidence.

2. This theory leaves the supermassive object at the center of our galaxy unexplained:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~ghezgroup/gc/pictures/orbitsMovie...

We should all remember that scientific theories must agree with observation, and if observation contradicts theory, the theory is wrong.

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." -- Richard P. Feynman
Native mobile SDKs would be fantastic. We often have to develop mobile apps for clients where there is a need for a relational db in the cloud that the client can maintain with data. The app has to access that data to displayed, as well as add new data.
Being led down the rabbit hole is one of the reasons why I love Wikipedia.

I had searched 'What the Tortoise Said to Achilles' on Google, and ended up reading about the arrow paradox's rebuttals, which were really interesting.

But more to the point of the original article, it shows that there are definitely gray areas within morality, and it's impossible to use boolean logic to try to categorize humans.
Humans are prone to generalisation, reducing complex objects or states to several numeric parameters is extremely useful. Full of errors and generalization errors, but nevertheless usefull.

Humanity will just have to build more complex models to quantify complex, dynamic objects, such as courses. There is nothing special in human interaction data that inherently prevents its quantification. We just need more data and more efficient algorithms.
Probably if you'll not put the 6+ on your back pocket you should be good. Is taller and thinner and so weaker, easier to bend.
With AWS and shell shock, it's an interesting time to have just started working for a managed hosting company, nothing like being thrown straight into the deep end of being on call!
Is the point here that the very structure of syllogism itself can be denied? That however inexorable a "If A and B, then C" argument is, someone else could always argue that it's not quite valid yet? It kind of reminds me of the point made (turgidly, but still) by Yudkowsky in The Simple Truth[1] - sometimes you just have to throw up your hands and declare the counter-arguments specious.

[1] http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth
> What if existence is a PLL?

A what? A phase locked loop? That's just a very reliable way to lock one oscillator to another, it's not a method to produce repetition. More here: http://arachnoid.com/phase_locked_loop/

> Has anyone ever pondered the idea of living the same life over and over in different ways?

No, but nature has -- she calls it evolution by natural selection.
I'm fairly sure the point is not to make AOL the only root cert but to have them, use the root cert they have for something useful.
Obama-Master of the Pause
Galaxy Note 4 Release Date and Unboxing Video Emerges
Oh, nice, I suspected there was a better way :-)
The breakthrough is in design (and in basic science), not construction. The linked article's author didn't understand what he was reporting.
Dunno why you don't believe me but I spent plenty of money on CFLs already and plenty of time researching them and i am still not happy. I have a whole cabinet full of lightbulbs as a result. More than I'll probably ever be able to use. I do and did understand lumens and color temp but the actual results suck in practice. Yes I currently have three 32 watt CFLs in three different rooms.
This article is an industry puff piece. The author writes

This highlights an unavoidable problem for the chemicals industry - much of
what they do is still a learning process, and it often takes many years for
the long-term risks inherent in a particular product to emerge. Yet it is
also important to get these risks in perspective. So far, there are no known
cases of brominated fire retardants actually causing anyone major health
problems - they are being banned because of the potential hazard they pose.

Well, yes -- you have to basically be an idiot to take a bioaccumulative lipophilic chemical that, after all, is unnecessary (we can still build flame-retardant materials without them, and somehow pepsi still makes pepsi) and use them without incredibly thorough health testing. We know some of these flame retardants disrupt thyroid hormones and may impair neurodevelopment. The risks outweigh the benefits, and I decline to be in the experiment pool.
No power like this is temporary, it becomes normal in short order and eventually considered as foolish to no have had long before... All built on a foundation of lies "temporary" only in name.
The ultimate in global open source systems
Please do an image search for "iphone5 bent".
An example:
http://www.barnorama.com/iphone-5-can-bent/

Anecdotaly I also seen it first hand.
How would you explain the benefits of functional programming with an employer who absolutely refuses to believe that OOP is overvalued? Lot of job requirements will say experience with OOP and then be asked to recite from memory what Singleton patterns look like or draw a Factory pattern as a yardstick of developer efficiency.
Americans throw out more food than plastic, paper, metal, and glass
Yep. This was probably the first actually interesting unboxing video I've seen: http://youtu.be/uIf9GdCzY_Y

(unboxing Z3 under water)
I once had to travel with a vial of bromine. Besides sealing it up pretty tight. I had a plan if I was caught getting on the plane - tell them it was cow's blood, which shouldn't be very terrorizing. If I was caught getting off the plane I'd tell them it was bromine because cow's blood would be disallowed by customs.
> The proper thing to do is let the financial system self-regulate.

> Of course at this point, that's like saying the proper thing for the Soviet Union to do when it fell was to suddenly become capitalist. Doing the right thing here would require an (additional and probably worse) period of sickness because we've been doing the unhealthy thing for decades.

Please explain to me exactly how the financial system will self-regulate. Also explain to me how the consequences of "creative destruction" will be borne by the people that are extracting the most value (i.e. "the 1%") from said system instead of the people that are just crushed beneath it?
Since when MongoDB is considered as a database comparable with PostgreSQL?)