skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only reason I listed machine learning is that it is the trogan horse that gets programmers to learning stats.

Ah, that makes perfect sense.

To me, the appeal of machine learning is that it's challenging and respected enough that programmers doing it get the autonomy to work in any subfield of computer science, from the high level to the low. If you're a data scientist and you say you want to use Clojure or Haskell (a high-level concern) or that you want to do GPU programming or dive deep on assembly (low-level work) you can. Machine learning, 10 years ago, was extremely appealing because software managers were figuring out that they needed it, but most admitted they knew little about it, so they gave a lot of autonomy to individual contributors. (That may change, and "data science" may become thoroughly commoditized.)

It's the Fundamental Theorem of Employment: you're usually hired either to do (a) something your boss can't do for himself or (b) something he doesn't want to do. With (a) you get respect and autonomy and high pay; with (b) you get treated like a commodity. "Data scientist" (or software "architect" vs. "engineer") is, often, a programmer who's managed to learn enough of "the hard stuff" to move himself over to (a). It's the (b) category of engineers who get stuck on "Scrum teams".

I feel like some of the crowding of "data science" (and, as you noted, not all of the "data scientists" know what they're talking about) comes from the way that "Agile"-style micromanagement has made the rest of programming so braindead. There are people like me who enjoy the hard mathematical aspect, but others who've just learned that if they call themselves "data scientists" they get more interesting projects and don't have to munch on Scrum tickets. For them, the math is an impediment rather than a challenge and an attraction.

I mentioned the deep dive into the machine learning techniques as unfortunately most of the programmers I meet who call themselves data scientists, just aren't very good at stats.

There's a depth vs. breadth problem, because machine learning is a much, much bigger field than many people think. I've gone pretty deep on penalized regressions (e.g. ridge and Lasso with large numbers of features) but know only the basics about tree-based models. I can read the papers on neural network architectures (e.g. convolutional nets) and implement them, and I understand the theory that led to them, but I still lack some of the intuition (like why rectified linear units are more useful in image processing than regular logistics).

I feel like there are some people who pick up a lot of vocabulary and interview well (but not with you, because you actually know the field) but are really just playing around with parameters. I like the math, but "data science" is mostly bullshit and I hope the term will die; I want to see more machine learning and less business pomposity.
Off topic but for anyone that might have some of it, is the Minecraft lego worth what appears to be an exhorbitant price, even compared to the other themed sets? Youngest daughter is desperate for some but when Lego is about a close a real-world representation of Minecraft as possible, I don't want to shell out just to get the theme...
Here is a shameless plug for my own blog, [Math ∩ Programming](http://jeremykun.com/). The difficulty ranges in how much mathematical background you need, but there are also some primers aimed at programmers, starting from this [essay](http://jeremykun.com/2013/02/08/why-there-is-no-hitchhikers-...).

I'd really love feedback from you on what you found approachable and what you found unapproachable.
TaiG English version has releasedpangu8
What about OpenUI5 for business apps: https://openui5.hana.ondemand.com/#content/Controls/index.ht...

From my initial tests, it's very clean MVC (a bit verbose). Also the deploy story is not too good... (frontend code ships as a .war). Does anyone have experience with this, good or bad?
One of the worst combination of weather related road conditions I've been in -- fog and ice, at night, in the mountains.

A self driving car wouldn't have to work very hard here to do better than me.

* Check for weather conditions at altitude (not just start and destination points).

* Refuse to leave the house using that route if weather conditions are bad.

Oh well, lesson learned. On that topic does anyone know of maps software that does that for you -- i.e. check weather not just traffic?
FYI If you haven't seen it check out this github list & discussion about web business models: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8073732
Will AI Destroy Humanity? Siri, a Chatbot, and a Roboticist Have Answers
Yes in Safari I've sometime found that even though I'm using requestAnimationFrame, if the WebGL stuff gets too heavy, mouse events stop working on the page itself.

Definitely not against adding non-resort locations, if there's a good reason. Ping any suggestions to @pisteio. Crater Lake is one I'd like to add once I've got the US working.

Entering ski-mode let's you kind of achieve what you describe, although you are not stationary - I like the idea of lookout points
Neil Patel's best growth hacking tools
This is really cool and a nice start. One big thing we are dealing with in our internal app are responsive tables. We display some data in tables, but it almost always looks like crap on a small screen. There are a few different ways to solve this. Sometimes it makes sense to hide or abbreviate columns other times the table should neatly convert to a list. This is tougher.

I also like your search & filters design. I did something like this just last week, but I like yours better. ;-)

In some places you use semantic class names, like for messages, but for buttons you use colors. Probably better to just stick with a single convention for consistency.
New tech uses ultrasound to create haptics you can 'see' and touch
What will snow do?...
~$1.30 for 100 capachas, $50 for 10000 google searches per day, along with other search engines filling the same role.

probably the most damning thing is they are questions and answers from a database, unless you bother to make your DB unique (so no using openly available Q/A databases), everyone is going to have access to the right answers.

also, similar to paying people to answer capachas, you can pay people to answer questions
My favorite first-year calculus text by far is Michael Spivak's Calculus. When I was in school in the 1970s, he was by common consensus THE great and differentiated writer of math books -- but that was based on a small sample size, and Calculus is the only one that should be in this discussion.

There were a lot of other books back then that I think of as likely to have been the best in their time, but those were all more in the vein of texts for classes that I just happened to feel served me well.
> Microsoft even closed its music store (remember the Zune?), which resulted in total loss.

No, they didn't - the Zune music store is still around as Xbox Music, and any songs you bought via the Zune store will still be there (or mine are, anyway.) I believe you're thinking of PlaysForSure, which was not Zune related, but according to Wikipedia the closure of MSN Music did not result in total loss. Maybe there's some detail I'm missing?

That said, I agree with your larger point. All the music I care about is either physical or in DRM-free MP3 format and not synced to anyone's cloud or store.
Microsoft hacked
My son and two of his friends get a phone call from Asia about a Microsoft product spamming the internet the day after they each install xboxOnes.
Shouter- Notification Reader and many more.
How big is your online store?
Is nobody else on hacker news scared shitless of the convergence of militarized police forces, pervasive surveillance, and now legalized drugs?

Why is drug policy "liberalizing" now? There's no new information. We've known about the risks involved in marijuana and other drugs since it was first scheduled. Harm reduction is not a novel concept.

It seems suspicious to me that drugs are being released into the population, under the watchful eye of regulators of course, now that we're in a permanent recession/permanent war rather than, say, during the Clinton years when the economy was great and we were temporarily not locked in conflict.

Optimists say that ending the "war on drugs" will stop surveillance and overpolicing, but that doesn't seem like such a sure bet to me.
The price-wars between amazon, ms, and google are constant. They always tweak pricing to match the tweaks the other two make. Given this is no change to the norm, i don't see this as a referendum on google's position in the market. If revenue is changing, that may be an indication. But price changing by itself has little meaning at this point.
Probably they just grew too much. The Angry Birds franchise does well for itself, but there's a finite number of employees you can support off of a handful of good mobile games.

Still, thankful they made Amazing Alex. The Incredible Machine needed a re-make, and theirs is great.
Nicely summarized, indeed.

His bemusement at the reaction of C++ proponents made me laugh: "But I did not think at the time that this would be controversial. I was sure that even the most rabid C++ fans would agree with me that the C++ macro system blows goat dick...."
This is the correct interpretation. But it is actually slightly nuanced; I'm such a bad speller that, even as a native English speaking adult of 30 something, I had to look up no one. Wiktionary has noöne as an "alternative spelling" and I do like The New Yorker...
That's hard for humans to navigate, let alone self-driving cars. Besides driving very slowly, drivers will often estimate the lane position based on the shape of the snow and the quantity/size of lanes and shoulder they expect. If the snow is not too deep, rumble strips [1] can be very helpful.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_strip
Ask HN: What you think about differential unit testing?
Our website currently has little/no unit tests (we have selenium testing and manual testing). We would like to start testing more, but we're running into a quandary as how to start. Much of our code is not written in a way that lends itself to unit testing so to be able to start testing, we have to refactor, which might break everything.

One approach that's come up is called "differential unit testing" where I don't need to go in a write the tests - but I measure the inputs and outputs of different functions and I monitor if they changed after my code changes (at least that's how I understand it.) There's a paper about it at http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/publications/ast07-diffut.pdf. I first encountered a version of the idea at http://zachholman.com/talk/move-fast-break-nothing/ (their case they are running both in parallel so it's easier to check each case - but the concept would be the same if I had common input cases and output cases.)

Now it's question how I implement such an approach. One way might be put in certain waypoints in my code where I can run a stack trace and save it - then use those inputs to different functions as my test cases. I save a "baseline" and then as I change my code, I run the tests, looking for changes.

I can see several issues with the approach. It might test too many versions - I don't know which are important changes to test and which are insignificant (without manual intervention.) I might actually have a broken implementation to start - and I'm comparing agains that. maybe others..

I'm not try to suggest this approach would replace more traditional unit testing - but as a form of "canary" to detect when something is not how it use to be at a more granular and earlier level than doing full integration testing.

I'm curious if anyone else has tried this approach and what your opinions are?
The entry is misleading. We don't really do TCO. It's just a trampoline calling the loop/recur form until there is nothing left to produce.

Same solution clojure has, as the JVM dosn't allow for TCO.
SEEKING WORK - GERMANY, in the EU or REMOTE

Hey, my name is Basti and I've been a freelance web developer for 6 years. For the past 1.5 years I've been a nomad traveling through Europe. Currently I reside in Budapest.

My current area of work includes everything JavaScript (+CoffeeScript) and the rest of the crew: HTML + CSS.

Frontend:

* jQuery, Zepto

* Backbone, Underscore, Vue.js

* Mustache, Handlebars

* Stylus, LESS

* Foundation, Bootstrap, Semantic-UI

* Gulp, Grunt, Bower

Backend:

* Node.js, NPM

* Express, Koa, Hapi

* Socket.io, Websockets

* MongoDB, Redis

* Git, Ubuntu, Nginx

I am the creator of jQAPI (http://jqapi.com), have sold a jQuery Showcase/Blog/Twitter (http://usejquery.com) and I finished 3rd in the Nodeknockout 2012 in the category Utility/Fun. My current project is http://pairs.io - a remote control for the web.

Find my mail address in my profile.

Or http://mustardamus.com or http://akrasia.me or http://github.com/mustardamus or http://twitter.com/mustardamus.

Looking forward to your message!
Ask HN: Online Bootcamp..Suggestions please
Hello,

I would really appreciate if hacker news community can share their thoughts over whether its a good idea to go for a online bootcamp & which of them are good?
There are just too many out there and its just becoming difficult to figure out which one to join.

About me:
Employed as an Integration Analyst, currently consulting for a Fortune 500 client in Bay Area. I never recd. formal education in Computer Science and hence looking for something which helps me develop a good foundation as well.

P.S. I have tried learning myself, but didn’t really succeed much because of my unstructured approach. I believe that bootcamp mentorship will be able to provide me the needed ’push’ and ‘direction’.
On HN I frequently see comments to the effect that self-driving cars will be commercially available in a decade or two, and that they will be safer than human-driven cars. Personally, I question whether either is true, and I strongly doubt that both can be true at once.

Humans have a lot of shortcomings--emotions, sleepiness, distraction, the effects of drugs and alcohol--but humans have some amazing strengths too. We've got cognitive abilities in recognizing patterns and making decisions that were honed by millions of years of evolution, and directly trained by, on average, decades of actually driving cars. I think it's easy for technology-minded folks to overestimate the impact of the weaknesses, and underestimate the deep complexity of the strengths.

We barely have fully-autonomous self-flying planes today, and I don't know of any research showing that they are safer than human-piloted planes. And flying is a far less complicated domain to automate than driving.
The ConditionalWeakTable in .NET
Yeah, seeing a few spam links on a website is much more burdensome than free speech!</sarcasm>
Yeah every once in a while... a little bit of heuristics, a little bit of laziness.
(sorry, might be a little OT)

When I hear or read about "microservices", I always have some articles from Martin Fowler in my head (among others):

* http://martinfowler.com/articles/distributed-objects-microse... and http://martinfowler.com/bliki/MicroservicePrerequisites.html (IMO both a very important read)

I think most people are running into the issue, that they think "microservices" are something new and hip and they don't have a clue on how to break down problems a meaningful way.

PS: Another VERY interesting read, and also maybe a bit unrelated to container hosting is "Testing Strategies in a Microservice Architecture": http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservice-testing/. I'd love to hear some more thoughts about that and how services like giantswarm could help with that...
{ Shameless Plug } Its better if you can interest the main office in a collaboration tool, such as Sococo offers. It may improve your feeling of being included. It certainly increases the opportunity for communication. Sococo tries hard to remove friction from remote collaboration, without sacrificing privacy. For instance folks can see you are working in your virtual office, but your door is closed so they have to knock to talk to you.

I work with engineers in three states. We're all in a virtual office space, talking as needed (with webcam if desired) and sharing documents. Or just chatting on a variety of channels. I honestly don't know who is in which state, without asking.
You can laugh all you want but: (1) This is computer science dpt, not graphic design school website, so not really a story of cobbler's children with no shoes. (2) well, yes, this design _is_ bad but you cannot imagine how many times I wished for just dark grey text on white background, simple sans font, plain HTML tags, and minimum of images supporting the content. I just want to read the damn stuff, not to marvel at all these exotic google fonts, fixed headers, oversized stock photos and cutesy icons. I find that I press Readability's "read now" bookmarklet much more than I'd wanted to.

</rant>
If you have a US bank account you can sell it and buy another that fit your needs.
Mistakes AngularJS Developers Make: Overusing $broadcast and $emit
I'm going to agree with the critics - I think you may be confusing technical problem-solving with artistic awareness.

They're all interesting as technology demonstrations, but none of them improve on the original compositions, and some of them are almost completely unsuccessful as visual art.
Rovio does much more than just games. Videos and content delivery platforms, both promotional deals (NASA, movies etc.) and merchandizing deals need business dev people to make them happen. 800 is still a lot, but the difference in operations is obvious compared to your standard game studio.
My first assignment at my current employer was a short-term, fixed-price project where we had to create a rather boring internal web application that just showed some tables and sent off some pre-made requests to certain endpoints. The UX wasn't high on the priority list, and TBH I wish I had something like this back then, since we had to build our own, then send it off to some cheap designer that came back with shudder light blue gradients. I'd totally go for straight and sleek (and boring) like this project next time.
Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0 Preview
So... Changing the MTU didn't help. Even at the minimum of 1200 I still had issues. Sometimes pings (even small 60 byte ones) would be fast, other times they'd be upwards of one second. Not sure what's going on yet, as I've put working on this aside for now.
Feel free to share global coal mining and coal plant construction death numbers with all of us... that previous link (with lack of sources) doesn't talk about global solar installation, nor global coal mining (as the US has been a net importer of coal for decades) it's wishful thinking not to count mining accidents from imported coal, isn't it?

What you can't do is compare part of one value chain (just coal plant construction) which is 100% reliant on coal mining, and later compare it to solar which is then 100% operational. But feel free to compare apples and oranges, it just shows the value of your argument.

I'm sure coal mining + power plants accidents/deaths is orders of magnitude larger than all solar technologies.
More Java 9 Features Announced
Thanks for crashing my browser! Maybe try testing out with slower machines too and not make this kind of crap javascript. Took 30 seconds out of my life. Running Firefox 34 on a Mac Mini 2 GHz.
I think this is one area where we're going to see some changes even in the enterprise sector. Your average data-grids are pretty familiar to those used to working with spreadsheets, but pretty much everyone is used to rich list views, who also have the benefit of being a bit more responsive (not as good for editing data, though. Although with those gridforms, I do wonder...)

Granted, one screen isn't as heavy with data, but if you're trying to survey that much at once, you'd probably benefit from richer tooling anyways. I'd almost bet that a design that degrades gracefull from data grids to list views will have users resizing their browsers or picking portrait mode to get out of that.
links: http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~taoxie/publications/ast07-diff...

http://zachholman.com/talk/move-fast-break-nothing/
> I did read it.

So what do you think about clickjacking issue? I made an assumption about their algo and maybe I'm wrong and they do track your mouse, but there's exploitable weakness. My post is 1) your algo seems simple 2) here's a bug in it.
Direct link to the client is here: https://buglabs.codeplex.com/
http://iosdevweekly.com/sponsorship
Can't wait to get a good taste of this flavor of the month.
5k or so.
Exactly this. It's such a simple concept (spirographs themselves), but using this site put me into an almost trance-like calm. And clicking buttons to choose the "plastic wheels" was even easier than finding them in the box.
I did share (above); for mining its around 27/10,000/year. Which is commensurate with solar installation/construction/electrical. And roofing (for those in solar that do work on roofs) is near 40.

And yes, this is probably a red herring, since rooftop solar is bound to recede into insignificance and solar farms continue to grow in generation capacity.

Also, its weird to compare solar installation with coal mining (instead of for instance coal plant construction).
Yes exactly.

The author of that article (and their strange quotes) doesn't understand what Amazon just changed or doesn't understand Google's sustained usage discounts.

If anything Amazon just moved in the opposite direction of what Google is doing, not to copy it as the article implies.
There are sponsored stories and job ads in the newsletter.
+1. It will be a nice addition, maye an "advanced" hotkey?.

Very nice work! Congrats!
I think a good chunk of the images are captured by way of Google's Streetview vehicles [1]. I'm seeing blurry images of house and apartment numbers all the time. So I'd imagine there are always new images popping up that Google can feed into the recaptcha system that haven't been seen before.

[1] http://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/#creation-of-value
My Introduction to Data Science with F#
My great-uncle went pure math (he had an Erdős number of 1), a brief sojourn in industry, pure math.

From the stories I've heard the industry stint was purely about money. He had grown up very poor and had four children, a few years working on oil field and bond models was enough to supplement his professor salary for the rest of his career.

On the other extreme is someone like Simons who left pure math to found a hedge fund and is still at it billions of dollars later.
Removing the war on drugs is taking away one of the many legs that state surveillance and military police force rely on. Eventually they won't be able to stand up(or pay for fancy weapons).
pulse code modulation, pulse density modulation...

44.1kHz/100 = 441hz. But that's nonsense in the same way that saying that a signal at the Nyqvist frequency can be accurately encoded. @diroussle pointed out that you lose phase but there's another consideration, sync. If your signal at Nyquist is not in sync with the sampling frequency, then it's going to be represented as a signal offset, an out of phase line.
Authomatic: user authentication in Python made simple
Just drove about 8 hours and experienced heavy fog along the way. Visibility was reduced to maybe a hundred yards. The entire time I wasn't thinking "self-driving cars would fail here" but rather that a self driving car with it's multitude of sensors would probably do much better considering what it could "see" and also the reduction in "eye fatigue" as driving in heavy fog can wreak havoc on your eyes and perception of movement (not a problem for a computer).
they made it easier for users and for bots :)
If anyone ever needs authentication in their flask/django app, I highly recommend authomatic
Interesting. How do you market it?