skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Meh, I'll let TokenAdult post the very long and detailed refutation of the statistics themselves and the validity of the questions being asked.

You seem to be saying that we shouldn't care about controlling for variables like this

I'm saying that those variables and the questions that this "expert" chose to put forth miss the mark on the questions that should be asked and the variables that should be examined.

But you don't tell us why, or what statistics would be preferable

I did tell you why. My guess is that if you thought that choice was important in education then my thinly veiled sarcasm about choice would have caught your attention.

Regarding statistics, the statistic alone that typically Charter schools receive less per student than mainstream public schools renders questionable every other statistic that this article mentioned.
> Whom should I be afraid of? My government possibly controlling a private company or my government?

FTFY
> because later on you can move out of San Francisco, sell that house, and get the money back again

You obviously didn't own a house in the US about 5-6 years ago...
That's great, but volunteering for adventure etc. should best be left to private enterprises. When NASA is funded by taxpayer money, the goal should be science and not adventure.
The best time to raise money is when you don't need it. Good move.
I was contacted by a recruiter. They wanted a Phd in machine learning from a top school, 3+ years experience in adtech, hadoop experience. $110k. In Palo Alto.
It's sort of a Russian tradition, valar_m. Even the most powerful were harassed like that, and even in Stalin era the police would just back off sometimes. It's not them punking out; it's showing contempt. "We are not in a rush, little one". The purpose is to wear the victim down.

"[General] Zhukov had always been notified about meetings so this impromptu one worried him. The night before the meeting, three men came to Zhukov’s home for a random search, but they had no warrant. Zhukov threatened to use weapons, forcing them off his property. After they left, he did not sleep the entire night, fearful of the next morning."

https://huhtaj.wordpress.com/scholarly-writing/power-struggl...

He pulled a rifle against NKVD functionaires and they walked away. Was it THAT soft under Stalin's regime? No, it's just toying. Cat and mouse. It's about sending a message: we can get you any time we want, even if you're a world famous general or Russian Zuckerberg etc.

American, or, in general, Western commentators often don't understand this type of moves because they belong to a different political vocabulary, so to speak. "Hah! They even had no warrant, how amateurish of them" - no, that's the POINT.

This could likely be part of some behind-the-scenes "negotiations" between Kremlin and the owner of VK...

Police brutality and abuse in the West (or probably anywhere, for that matter) is a fact of life, but this is not the same thing.
I feel like a lot of the problems OOP solves are working around inadequate type systems. If you can make a distinction between Int @@ CharacterHP and Int @@ WeaponDamage such that you simply can't subtract one from the other without going via the appropriate function, then the argument for having private member variables and object methods to mutate them (which is the controversial part of OOP, I think everyone agrees with having data structures and some form of polymorphism) goes away, doesn't it?
>>> NASA became paralyzed not by budget cuts, but by political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape.

My best friend's dad was a NASA scientist for almost 30 years. By the time the 90's rolled around and in the post Challenger era, he used to tell us neighborhood kids the same stories.

He finally retired in the early 1990's when budget cuts, in-fighting and the struggle to remain relevant were just too much for him to take. He' still bitter to this day about how he felt politicians ruined the agency.
I consider Twitter to be an open-source company. The amount of open-source work they sponsor and incubate surpasses that of most traditional vendors.

Their business model is also a lot better. They have a nice unrelated service they make money off of instead of trying to charge for enterprise support or licenses.
seems similar to CROSS APPLY and OUTER APPLY from mssql http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175156%28v=sql....
I don't want to draw the line simply because I think it's too much a matter of opinion.

To me, it's not about widely applicable ethics. I think companies should have the right to hire people from other countries and pay them low(er) wages. Or at least, they should have the right until there's some agreeable line that can be drawn (unlikely). I simply would lose respect for that company because I think the decent thing is to pay wages based on merit.

I believe paying wages based on where someone is from is on the same level as squeezing as many hours as possible out of your workforce. In my eyes, it's irresponsible and not respectable.
Why we're rewriting our robotics software in Swift
If the US wasn't $17 trillion in debt, I could agree. Pretty sure all NASA funding to date fits into that debt amount. Since it's a "nice to have", I'd say the average taxpayer has never paid anything to NASA, not even interest on debt since we borrow to pay that.
Monetarily? No benefits, or even negative benefit. Not unless the research leads to the ability to capture one of the thousands of asteroids which contain an upwards of $1 trillion in minerals.

A better question is probably, "What will the consequences be if we limit ourselves to Earth?"
I usually pronounce it that way as well, I'm American, and it does rhyme with Python that way for me.
MULTI – world’s first rope-free elevator system
I have never seen their announcements in the past. Between SpaceX, the global international space travel movement, and hey even Interstellar, there is a lot more buzz around space travel. Plus, we have landed a rover on mars, plus people have landed a rover on a comet. NASA has had a hand in space advancement. I don't give a shit if they have been wrong in the past, the growing hype around space travel is exciting, and I refuse to be a buzzkill about it.
Show HN: One simple button to get paid instantly
> It's the private sector. It does better than the government practically by definition.

I know that's a commonly repeated idea, especially in this forum, but I don't share that assumption and don't see evidence for it. I believe they are two different tools, each better at different tasks, with some overlap.

> If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks.

Three thoughts: 1) Government doesn't contract out every task; the U.S. federal government has over 1 million employees and a $2 trillion budget, so it does quite a bit in-house. 2) Government does contract out many things; when they do it right, they are contracting where it's most cost-effective without undermining justice. There is much research showing that much privatization loses money but enriches the contractor. 3) Many of the contracting decisions are due to politics: Lobbying, and who has what donor or has which jobs in their district, for example.

Consider that many privatization advocates and those promoting the supremacy of the private sector are lining their pockets: They are the ones who get the lucrative contracts and the politicians who support 'privatization' get the lucrative donations. Also, as government diminishes, the wealthy and powerful grow even more powerful.
If consumers of IT products were given the right to potentially sue for every bug that resulted in adverse situations arising for them, the whole industry would collapse in less than a year.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of a company/NGO that arose to fill in the abandoned niche afterwards. Would you be willing to take in a junior employee and let it do unsupervised work? Would the affordability, cultural fitness or "passion" of said junior employee make a big factor in your decision?
The Design Reference Mission calls for generating the fuel on the Martian surface, so you only need to drop a small amount of hydrogen feedstock to make the rest.

You need a huge launchpad to launch a 100 ton vehicle. You don't need it for something weighing only a few tons.
That is the whole point. The price IS going to go down overt time. So by getting you to commit to a price Amazon can more accurately predict their growth and you get a fairly decent discount in trade. 1 year terms are much wiser IMHO because of the constant price lowering.
I think there is absolutely a tech hiring culture that discards people who don't have the exact right experience. And it's awful. A good coder with lots of general experience can adapt. An awful, useless hack can sit in a sector and look valuable to a prospective employer while actually being a huge net drain.
Nigerian ecommerce firm does over $1.2m/day in Weekend Sale
AWS SimpleDB is an example of a product that Google would've likely killed years ago but Amazon maintains. It hasn't gotten any significant update since 2010 (http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-simpledb-consistency-...) and, judging from the fact that it only gets a couple posts a month in its AWS Forums, it's very sparsely used.
*An argument could be made, it was the autocorrect, too late to edit now.
Help build the future of StudentRND
It's a launch platform without clear future missions or funding. After the surplus RS-25 engines from the shuttle program are used (designed to be re-usable, they are heavy and expensive and will be destroyed by the launches) it's not clear what will power the launch vehicle. It's a very expensive big rocket with an unclear future in both engineering and political terms.
> What exactly is the incentive for the private sector to go to Mars?

Sponsorships, reality TV, claiming undiscovered land
Since this is aimed at new developers, I would encourage anyone who falls into that category and is reading this to also look at alternate programming methodologies. The key component of OOP is the mixture of code and data into "objects". This can be very useful for physical simulations such as games, etc., since the real physical world is actually made of objects.

However, many feel that applying OOP to software that is not for physical simulation has led to a huge amount of wasted effort over the previous decades. The problem is with code reuse. The only real form of code reuse that OOP addresses is direct object inheritance. If you want to reuse a piece of code, the way to do it is to make an object that is a 'subclass' of an object that has the code that you want to use. The actual relationship of these objects is often not that simple, and people often create baroque inheritance trees to force their logic into the OOP pattern. Worse, is that OOP is built into many languages, which leaves you no choice.

An alternate pattern is functional programming, where a program is modeled as a series of data transformations, instead of a universe of interacting 'objects'. To write the code, one looks at what data will go into the software, and what data will need to come out. After all, if the right data is coming out of the program at the right times, it works.

Instead of breaking code into objects, you write functions that process the data correctly, and assemble them into larger structures, often resembling pipelines. The nice thing is that a lot of these functions are very reusable across projects and within a project. Avoiding the messy mixture of code and data allows you to identify the common patterns in your code, and refactor and reuse more easily.

EDIT: Here are a couple of libraries which have really facilitated functional programming for me in node.js

- http://ramda.github.io/ramdocs/docs/

- https://github.com/dominictarr/pull-stream
Engineering Engineering Parties
The Hype Cycle: What’s Next for Google Glass?
Excellent, thank you for the detailed reply! I am looking forward to the evolution of this app.
> Alternatively, I would be okay with eliminating the lottery and giving visas out on the basis of the premium companies are willing to pay over the salary a domestic worker would be paid. If your company is willing to pay 2.0x foo for a position, then you will get the H1-B visa ahead of a company only willing to pay 1.5x foo. The floor would be set at something like 1.1x foo.

That would only help the largest companies, and would put the relatively new and smaller companies at a disadvantage...
Just came back from a remote location in Cuba. Go out on a clear night, look at the sky for about 2-5 minutes to get your eyes adjusted, and enjoy the density of the milky way before you.
Indeed. I needed some paperwork when I got married with a german. I'm from Sweden. I called the tax office in sweden that was taking care of the papers I needed to file for marriage certificate in Germany and the woman on the phone was laughing heartily saying "Then you know how byrocrazy feels!" :-) They happily sent all papers I needed in the mail to me in Germany, translated to English. The clerk in Germany was eying it suspiciously and asking some colleagues and took quite some time before finally putting down his stamp.
Hello everyone. Here is the link to my Brother Ezra's son Ryland's Memorial fund. If I know one thing at this time it was that my brother loved and wanted to provide for his son. Please help us do that any way you can. Please share via Twitter or any media or with friends who want to help out. Thanks for all the support.

http://igg.me/at/ezrazyg/x/2405939

Best,
Eli Zygmuntowicz
10 days to better design
The variances in fuel over that ~15 year cycle are really minor. Normally launch windows to Mars open every ~24 months.
Ask HN: Google Product Abuse
I am interviewing for a position with Google's Product Quality team soon, and I am trying to think of different ways of abusing Google products, or any other similar products for that matter. There's the obvious click-jacking, abuse of SEO, spam etc. But I would like to get some more ideas. What way would you abuse Google's products?
I've been buying 1-year reserved instances for about 3 years now. I think due to price cuts (which happen fairly regularly), this is economically the best way to go. Maybe someone has done a more rigorous analysis.
Incarceration is much more highly correlated to your parents income level than their genetics. Unemployment is primarily a skillset mismatch problem. Becoming a newspaper pressman looked like a solid career choice in 1995, not so much twenty years later when those 18 year olds are 38 and unemployed. Not foreseeing the rise of the internet is hardly strong evidence that their brains are defective.
> Sending a few people to Mars will be the first steps in becoming a multi-planetary civilization, which will reduce our dependency on a single-point-of-failure for all known life.

Only if we are able to make the Martian colony self-sufficient. This is quite a problem, as even major nations on Earth aren't really self-sufficient now. Any serious attempt at trying would most likely require tens of thousands of colonists and massive amounts of materiel to be transported to Mars and sustained there. This would require many, many orders of magnitude more resources than any plausible manned mission to Mars, which is already so expensive that nobody seems to be willing to do it.
Actually, funnily enough, the Constellation program got it's big funding push under Bush, while he was talking about all his typical Republican things.

Then Obama showed up, cut Constellation and privatized the launch industry, to cries of socialism and communism.
I also had this happen to me too, and I was pretty annoyed. On the bright side, with this announcement, if you can afford to buy the "All Upfront" instances, then at least when you want to resell them, you don't have to worry about the hourly rate dropping on their new announcements so the resale should be pretty easy.
The author should really consider some proper way of displaying code, instead of a textbox.

Also, for some reason, on safari the code is in one line, while on chrome it's in multiple lines, like it should be.
The L1A is better than the L1B because of the faster permanent residence processing times, mainly due to the fact that the L1A holders can file under the EB1C category[1] and avoid the long Labor Certification from the Department of Labor[2].

[1] http://www.immihelp.com/l1-visa/l1-visa-h1b-visa-comparison....

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_certification
I wonder when Hobby Lobby will go to Mars.
Unfortunately, the only theme you have looks about 2 or 3 years behind the trends (as does the site itself).

Best get those new themes out the door asap.
I was talking to a friend who started doing web development transitioning from game development. I came from a JavaScript background heavily based around Lodash and 'nearly' functional paradigm. I was discussing my interest in more purely functional languages like Haskell and Clojure. Kind of rattled of my distaste for OO programming and how it just doesn't make sense to me, it seems like a lot of fluff and boiler plate when our most common use case is moving data from a form to a data store.

He made a lot of good points that with game development OO makes a ton of sense. I kind of agree. OO works amazingly with game development but with application development I'm really finding the functional paradigm so much more logical.
If making a lifeboat is the real goal, then let's colonize the moon. It's much closer, and about equally inhospitable.

The best option is not screwing up our planet. If asteroid strikes is the concern, then funding a planetwide network of residents living in underground bunkers with supplies to last decades is probably cheaper and more effective than going to Mars.
Ah, but that's the whole point. Amazon wants to buy hardware and know that it's going to get used.
Many great voyages of exploration were privately financed, often by newspapers who got exclusive story rights in exchange.

Considering all the money corporations spend on marketing to create goodwill, I'm surprised none have financed a space probe for goodwill purposes.
No matter when, you are going to burn extra fuel to shorten the trip for humans. You can get down to about 6 months travel time before it starts being crazy to spend extra fuel to shave extra days off the trip.
Whoa.. is the full-text search per notebook or every notebook? Can I choose to search per notebook and every notebooks?

That sounds awesome!
> I suppose its true that the private sector doesn't have the traditional governmental incentives of religious persecution, exploitation of indigenous people, proselytization, and banishment of undesirables to encourage them to seek out and colonize new lands.

I disagree. Private sector has those incentives when they lead to making money. Both past and present is full of cases of companies committing atrocities.
"No Upfront - You pay nothing upfront but commit to pay for the Reserved Instance over the course of the Reserved Instance term". Presumably, you'll be billed each month (for 12 months) whether you're using it or not. Of course, if you close your AWS account entirely, they'd have to come after you if they wanted to collect -- but if you're not planning to go out of business, then you shouldn't expect to be able to just drop the instance mid-year.
The kind of mind that can produce such a false dichotomy.
> If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks.

There are other possibilities: corporate lobbying, the revolving door, regulatory capture, plain old corruption ...
The article you linked to mentions that the standardized testing organizations have such a lock on testing that schools have to buy their specific expensive study materials or else the students will do worse on the standardized tests.

I don't even know if I would agree that giving more money to all schools would solve this problem. What's to keep those standardization study materials companies from raising their prices to increase their profitability?

How about if we instead take apart the centralized institutions that allow testing companies to maintain monopolies on testing and standardized testing study materials?

Once again, this isn't a problem rooted in money for education. This is a problem of entrenched power structures that prioritize maintaining their power over educating children.
It's a year old, but I think this is still the rough roadmap:

https://whispersystems.org/blog/a-whisper/

(Just replace "Whisper" with "Signal" :)
A great suggestion, thank you so much. A couple of people told me that already, so I think I will add such a plan very soon.

By the way, if you were to subscribe for such a 'micro' plan, would you prefer to be charged for the delivery once a quarter or to get it distributed among the quarter’s months?

Thanks for the kind words about the design :) Cheers!
How would you enforce what market rate is? What prevents a company from saying that market rate is something absurdly low?
We put the aaS in your SaaS
That's a good point -- things are constantly evolving and current tech becomes outdated so quickly.

At the same time though, I think it supports my point that the training for these kinds of things should be faster than reading a big thick book followed by a bunch of trial and error.
Neither party is going to fund the previous party's space mission. A mission has to be too far along to cancel by the time administrations change or else it will get the ax.

If Apollo was still trying to put people in orbit in 1968, Nixon would have ended it to little public outcry.
> Going back as far as the colonization of the New World, high risk and expensive exploration has traditionally been funded by governments.

Lookup the British East India company
Any thoughts on making this cross-platform (Win7, linux)? I currently use tiddlywiki to keep a journal of all my notes but it's not as seamless to use. At work, I use Windows7 but at home, I use Mac OSX. I have it synced via Dropbox which allows me to jot down notes almost anytime I'm using a computer.
You could also think of it like a 25% to 30% discount on your ondemand infrastructure without anything other than a YES I will keep the infrastructure.
It upsets me that NASA is reusing "Orion". It's another, very cool project using nuclear bombs as propulsion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
Both, really - there's not really anything the Government can do that a large enough company or collection of companies can't - but the point is that you have no proof that this company is not either wilfully collaborating with or being forced to collaborate with the Government.
Probably. Wouldn't be the first time, won't be the last!
These MIT Tech Review articles, alas, emphasize hype: "No one had ever demonstrated software that could learn to master such a complex task from scratch," and "But until DeepMind’s Atari demo, no one had built a system capable of learning anything nearly as complex as how to play a computer game, says Hassabis."

I think the article must have overlooked significant activity in training learning systems to play games well. The glaring omission for me was Neurogammon (1987), later TD-Gammon (1992), developed by Gerry Tesauro and colleagues (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon).

Neurogammon was, at the time, a sensation at the same conference the article coyly refers to as "a leading research conference on machine learning." The paper has almost 1000 citations. A curious omission.
I'm really curious why weight and propellant are even an issue. I imagine in 5 to 10 years private corporations will be making regular trips to space very cost effectively. I would think the smart idea would to bring as much as possible and assemble in space.
What are you having trouble with in this instance? Pointers and structs? Both are very simple, well understood concepts. Their implementation in Go is also more syntactically clear than in C.