skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Robotics for a 5+ year old?
Hey Guys,
My 5 year old has been doing lots of talking about robots lately and how he wants one that can do stuff that people do. I love his amazing imagination when it comes to this stuff and I would love to get him into it this Christmas. I'm looking for small robot starter sets that we could use as a first step learning tool. It should be one of those projects that gets a quick first result, even if very rudimentary and then build on top of that as time moves forward. My initial thoughts were a Raspberry Pi robot as that would probably be the most flexible moving forward, but might be a little over his head and he would be dependent on my free learning time to keep things moving forward. Any other options out there that might be good for a kid his age?

Thanks.
Goldman Sachs Invests in a Company That Could Replace Analysts with Algorithms
It's about $4 a pound (£5.60 per kilogram) in my local supermarket - way less than smoked salmon and about a third of your price. Note that this is not on sale!
Entirely true, but I think the consumer's version of simplicity conflicts with the developer's view of it. Simplicity to the consumer often introduces a complexity to the developer on a whole new level of discomfort when compared to snazzy technical features. Technical features are for people that know how to communicate what they want to the system, but simple features often mean inferring what people want, without them telling the system and without even being able to communicate it at all.

The sprinkler use case above (tonyarkles) is an easy example, because there is a knowable science to healthy lawns. The light dimming is much more complex. How do you infer if someone wants the lights to brighten when they walk into the kitchen momentarily for a snack, even when a movie is on and you normally want them dimmed?
Pretty sure that shellshock doesn't involve any manual invocation of bash....
The usual maneuver by which mathematicians leverage that formal notion to capture the arguments they, and all their colleagues, regard as proofs is to say a proof is a finite sequence of assertions that could be filled in to become one of those formal structures. It’s not a bad approach if the goal is to give someone a general idea of what a proof is. The trouble is, no one has ever carried out that filling-in process. It’s purely hypothetical.

False.
What is "hypothetical" about this formal proof that the reals are uncountable? http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/ruc.html

Each step is clickable, and just a few clicks take you back to the axioms. For more, see chapter 1 of the Metamath Book (http://us.metamath.org/downloads/metamath.pdf)

How is it that Devlin is unaware of logical systems like Metamath? It's at least 10 years old. [Edit: Maybe 20 years? http://us.metamath.org/copyright.html says "The name "Metamath" has been used publicly by Norman Megill since 1994 to refer to a computer language and related software."]
>> Every dollar taken as corporate tax is not paid as dividend, not invested in hiring another worker, not spent on buying supplies or services.

Sure it is, just not spent by the corporation. The government will spend it - they can't seem to help themselves. The only thing taxes change is who gets to control where the money goes.

One can just as easily say "tax corporate revenue" and not paychecks, since it's allegedly circular with money going back and forth between people and companies (people all the way down). I'm not advocating this of course, but we're living in a time when your assertions about profit going to hiring, supplies, and services are clearly false. It happens, but it's certainly not a given.
Exactly! A common SSL that works on all ARM SOCs that you can get for 'free' from ARM is critical to the security of distributed smart devices. If done well, this can be a huge win.
It's not really very hard if you know the basics of C, the only weird part is having to deal with a bunch of Py* functions and types to interface with Python's.

The official docs are nice: https://docs.python.org/2/extending/extending.html
So how are the ptrace functions implemented? Is the "hack" of inserting invalid instructions used even for single stepping? (Though hardware breakpoints are probably easier?)
The Final Countdown for NPAPI
Have you looked at those different Lego construction kits? Double present I would say :)
Sounds like amateur hour.
"This sentiment is the reason we need to publish things like this."
Slack's New Arbitration Policy
Show HN: VUE – Mobile Analytics Your Entire Team Can Use
Lego Mindstorms
DocuSign, with $230M in funding, why are you copying HelloSign?
Very nice talk! I've used that formatting too, and while it can be very useful when running a presentation by yourself, it's not so nice for slides shared with someone who doesn't know it.
I don't think it is that. ARM doesn't make the crypto. The SoC makers put their own crypto cores so it wouldn't help ARM that way.

I think just like they bought Keil (a dev tools maker) this is a strategy play to make it easier for end devs to add SSL or other crypto to their products. One shop solution.
Cover pages are common in magazine articles too, why would they be disrespectful?
No.

You don't factor in switching costs and opportunity costs.

Human professional development is path dependent. Starting to code earlier means you start to get monetary or psychological utility out of it before you learn other marketable or self-actualizing skills. That creates a positive feedback loop that is not available in most other disciplines for a young person.

As soon as one invests significant effort in becoming a marketer or a banker or a physicist, the opportunity cost of spending time on learning programming is so high, most opt out of it. While in the long term, skill combination might exponentially increase monetary utility, happiness utility growth doesn't have the exponential curve.

So yeah, it's really important to start as early as possible before one is invested in his or her primary field or picking up computer science could be an irrational choice.

While one could certainly learn CS in the later life stages the probability of doing that is quite lower.

If you agree, consider to tell this o parents of young kids you care about.
> imagine the quantity of drugs that could exist if something like this could be bootstrapped.

That's an incredibly optimistic assumption. My mind instead immediately goes to imaging the kind of horrors people would go through if it were easier to put drugs onto the market than it already is.

We already live through people dying or developing lifelong disabilities due to medication going onto market with side effects that were not properly understood. If the barrier was lower this problem would only be worse.
When teammates post or update their status within Flock, we post it into the Slack room/channel. We actually use HipChat quite around our office.

Fo us, we like having the standup content all in a place that can be searched (by date) easily, discussion around the standup then occurs in HipChat.
No video was recorded on the occasions I gave the talk. I'd apologize, but actually, you should probably thank me. :-)
Fifa 15 Keygen PS4 PS3 XBOX Free Download
The most contested aspect of this is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
> I think that people assume the job of startup founders is solving domain problems, when in reality it is about selling solutions to domain problems

Well, really, the job of startup founders is to sell an entity that itself sells solution to domain problems, but there are three parts of that that the company needs to do:

1) being able to build a solution to a domain problem,
2) being able to build a company that can sell it,
3) being able to sell people on the ability of the company to sell the solution to the domain problem.

Ultimately, #3 is what startup founders are about, but the people they are selling to really want proof of #2, and the market that will determine whether #2 succeeds wants #1 to work. Sure, you can build either #2 or #3 (or both) on smoke and mirrors without having the basis that they ideally rest upon, but then you are hoping that no one catches on before you've cashed out. All other things (including sales skills) being equal, you'll sell better with a real product -- whether that product is the domain solution or the company that sells the solution.
One sure thing is that having a child and a startup is a hell more difficult. I applaud founder moms/dads.
Excellent, thanks for sharing! I found particularly useful the explanation that dF = SdA implies that the tensor S must convert the area vector dA in a force vector dF and that vector can have any direction.

But something that I miss is a visual representation of what kind of change of directions tensors do. I can see in my mind how a vector multiplication works, but I haven't the same intuition for tensors. For example, if I have a cube of marble and I put a heavy weight over it, qualitatively how the tensorial space in the cube? What kind of values I would see near the top? Which ones near the bottom? What's the direction of dF if I chose a dA parallel to each side of the cube? which one if I chose an arbitray vector, say one at 45° of one side?
Nobody says Google is the answer -- that was just one small example of a situation where someone upset the incumbent and caused decreased price and better service purely through competition with no additional government legislation.

We need more of that from more companies.

Perhaps a better solution is to government fund small ISP's (they exist, look for them) and help them develop their own infrastructure in major cities. It will not be an overnight solution no, but it's far better imo than permanent legislation that might just kill the innovation you seek to spur.

Look at the state of DSL. It's delivered over POTS lines and falls under the legislation governing said lines. If an ISP runs lines to provide DSL service, they are required to lease the lines to whoever wants them (other isp's) for cost (not much profit made from this transaction). Suddenly everyone abandoned DSL in favor of Fiber and Cable services, and we've seen speeds exponentially grow in this area.

POTS lines already exist to every home in the USA, why not use them? DSL2+ has greatly increased the speeds, but still few ISP's use it. It's because of the huge legislative hurdles they have to jump over just to provide the service (I have a friend who is a WISP in the bay area of CA, and this is the reason he gave me for why he's not currently also running DSL to homes in his service region).

We risk doing the same if we regulate all internet carrying lines.

I really think it's better to somehow grow a lot more ISP's that operate in great competition. I don't know the perfect solution or how to go about accomplishing this -- but I do know free competition almost always trumps legislation. What we don't have right now is free competition (we have monopolies/duopolies).
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery published a good overview of the factors contributing to the high costs of drug development in 2010, along with some suggestions of how to mitigate cost increases. It's a good read for anyone interested in the subject.

http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v9/n3/abs/nrd3078.html
"This world is a strange madhouse, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political affiliation." - Albert Einstein.
From the paper:

Sentence A: "unlike the latter, UMMs are
fully deterministic machines and, as such, they can ac-
tually be fabricated"

Sentence B: " no experimental realization of
such a machine, (...), has ever been reported"

Do you think it might be possible, given sentence A? Such machine would own quantum computing, wouldn't it?
Google and Facebook Rewire Internet as FCC Dithers
See also this (opinion) piece in the NY Times, which disputes this calculation: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/upshot/calculating-the-rea...
Mercurial is impressive for making Git's UI look intuitive.
I don't see why "entrepreneurs" of any kind should receive special visa prioritization over all other categories of entrant.
False dichotomy. Mathematics is also a human language. Code and mathematics are more similar in many respects than code and Spanish. but they all share common features of being cultural, mutable, consensus-based, imperfect, and historically embedded.

Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics might be interesting to you. His description of calculation as a linguistic process should settle the issue if you buy it.

Edit: just found this related item on HN, a math prof examining the nature of a proof: http://profkeithdevlin.org/2014/11/24/what-is-a-proof-really...
Somehow "fp in industry" seems to be a code word for Haskell. More about the business model would have been interesting.
I don't see any obvious reason for you being downvoted but maybe you should elaborate on this: "mathematical limitations of our biological pattern matching apparatuses".
Boosting startup revenue in Q4's final weeks
The idea was just to show that, contrary to many people's expectations, OOP is not the only widely used paradigm in business programming.
Yeah I've moved here 6 months ago :)
Very weird, clicking this link in MobileSafari on iOS8 simply shows a downloaded .webm file and an offer to open it in VLC-for-iOS, which does work for playback... Trying to navigate back briefly flashes something that looks like a blogpost and then just shows the .webm download file window again.
At least you WILL know that your system is in an inconsistent state and you know something wrong happened and you should take action.

Plus, there are modern features in kernels that allow you to audit your kernel panics, figure out what is wrong and, hopefully, everything should be automatically reverted back to how it was thanks to backups and journaling on the file system (to prevent corrupted images, that is).

Of course this won't automatically fix your problems for you or finish your un-taring of config files, but that's why we have sysadmins, isn't it?
I disagree. A PL is not a "natural language" by definition (it's eminently artificial). Although PLs do evolve over time, they seem to be essentially different in structure from natural language, in that they have a precise syntax and well-defined semantics, unlike natural language. And, I disagree that fluency -- in a PL or a natural language -- is more easily developed as child than as an adult. Children just have a more powerful learning environment (total immersion).

Having said that, I do think that learning programming young is a good idea, but not because it's "easier" for children. Instead, they simply have a much longer time to get used to the "logical way of thinking" (I don't know of a more concrete term for this, but hopefully you know what I mean).

I would not expect someone who started at 10 and is now 20 (10 years experience) to be a better programmer than someone who started at 20 and is now 30, or even someone who started at 50 and is now 60.
Interesting, in the comments is a link to this Doctors Without Borders response, arguing that this figure is grossly overstated. They claim a number closer to $186M (taking into account cost of failures) http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/article/rd-cost-estimat...

I don't know anything about this area, but would love to know whose figure is closer to right on this.
That's what I don't understand. If the auditor couldn't understand the investment then they should absolutely not give it a stamp of approval.

When in doubt, throw it out.
The standard argument against immigration is that it "takes jobs away" from local applicants. A successful business will typically generate new jobs. Thus, allowing in people who create jobs over those that take them is seen as a net positive.
While it looks arcane, this comes in handy enough when grepping through history that I actually have "cat-file -p" aliased to 'cf'.
It appears that GCHQ have used this too. Maybe they've shared some work (via BAE Systems Detica?) after all?

Who names this stuff?! ANGRYFERRET? (Probably no relation to FERRETCANNON; whoever named that one is clearly a Sluggy Freelance fan.) SQUEAKYTOY?
Friend made a list of top internship offers
All the more reason to use memory safe languages as far up the stack as you can go.
I migrated my single player world (dating back to Beta 1.8) to a server so some of my coworkers at the time could play too. It's not really huge, but I am strangely emotionally attached to it. My server was down for a few months (and I wasn't playing at the time), but I recently brought it back online. Minecraft seems like one of those games that I'll play forever, like Super Mario Bros.

http://minecraft.cgore.com
Is there any highly specialized policy decision that this isn't true of?
An equally impressive and amusing tour de force. I'd like to see self-proclaimed "full stack" developers pull this off.
> there is a full redstone railway system with automatic switching so you press your destination button and enjoy the ride.

Oh man, I remember building one of those on my server back when Redstone was a lot less functional, so I guess it was even more impressive than building the same today with all the new goodies. It had 4 different stations in total, though only the one at our central base was capable of choosing different destinations (the station was pretty big, I recall having a warehouse of NOT-NOT gates to make the proper delay I needed).
This is a great achievement. Though I am a Vishy Anand fan and I really liked the way the contest was fought, I do think that Carlsen deserved to win. World chess championships, with their rich history are our treasure!
Don't drive your app users away
Ask HN: How long are you on the internet?
Nobody holds public sector employees responsible.

Atleast in the marketplace, if you mess up - you go broke (or you should, don't even get me started on the idiocy of 'too big too fail'). There's some incentives to hustle, but also to not ruin your firm in the long-run.

At the FDA you know you are on an Imperial Star Destroyer, and that whatever happens - worse case scenario it takes like 5 years to fire you.
> I'm not aware of any large ISP that has throttles or bandwidth caps

Really? I've heard countless stories of US ISPs doing deep packet inspection to throttle torrents and other peer-to-peer traffic. If they've stopped that, my googling suggests it's primarily due to FCC regulation.

> You're forgetting that it's by default on, and that one must call their ISP and "opt-in" to seeing porn.

Ah, incorrect. All major ISPs (a) ask during sign-up, and (b) provide a web-based tool for turning it off. There's no need to ever talk to anybody.

> Social stigma aside, how can you realistically and with 100% accuracy block only true porn websites?

You can't, but there's already products on the market which claim to provide content filters which block porn. Net Nanny is a personal one, a good many companies implement one.

> And who's to say a website is illegal or not - I for one certainly don't want my government telling me some download sites are legal and others are not.

Your Government actually decides that more websites are illegal than any other country, delisting them from the .com DNS space for everybody, whether in the US or not. Perhaps you should fix that before worrying about an optional content filter that nobody in the US is currently talking about creating.

> Not to mention who's to say I intend to break the law simply by visiting a website?

Nobody. It's an optional content filter.
To further the point, most Universities have real police departments that can ticket and arrest you. Not all Universities are government run/funded.
If your router supports Tomato[1], dd-wrt[2], open-wrt[3], or similarly featured firmware, you might have a feature to restrict access at certain times of the day based on MAC address.

This would allow you to work from home, while restricting access for your children.

The only issue I might see with this setup is if your work-from-home PC is the same as the one the rest of your family uses to access the internet.

[1]: http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato

[2]: https://secure.dd-wrt.com/site/

[3]: https://openwrt.org/
Interesting point! Let's say you start a company that creates 5 jobs, you are classified as an entrepreneur. But let's say you invent/propose something as part of a bigger company or university, and that generates 5 new jobs, it would be unfair to call one an entrepreneur and not the other.
That's well known. But if you have >$1B you don't simply put them into an S&P tracking index fund in the same way that if I had $1K I would not even be permitted to buy into some of the better performing index/mutual funds but if I had $25K I could.
Take a look at the graph in your link.

Almost 75% of that budget is on sales reps and free drugs. Having face-to-face conversations with physicians doesn't come cheap.

Also, don't forget that drug companies are only allowed to promote to FDA approved indications.

I don't see why drug companies advertising is such an issue. Despite what most people think, great drugs don't sell themselves.
Zapier now integrated with Aha
Author here, thanks for submitting! This post was a lot of fun to write, having been an iOS users for 7 years now. Hope everyone out there is enjoying it as well :)
are you talking out of experience of being in a founders shoes? asking just to get some context
Grad Potential
Mercury.js: a modular, fast, virtual-dom, functional-reactive frontend framework
I've been coding since I was ~13. I can understand why people who haven't might have valid reasons to wish they'd started earlier. I'd just say: beware self-fulfilling prophecies and selection bias. Lots of really excellent software people I've worked with got late starts. Lots of people who started early coasted or are still coasting. In the 25 years I've been coding, only a few years worth of that time really grew me as a developer, so what you work on has just as much impact as how long you've been working on it.

Work with a bunch of different enterprise L.O.B. developers to get a sense of what I'm saying here. The average age of a backoffice developer is higher, meaning they have more experience. Hiring in enterprises is regimented, meaning that they tend to come from CS backgrounds. Are they uniformly high quality developers? No. In fact: there's a stigma attached to coming from a long stint in enterprise development.

As a lever for getting more women engaged with startups, the idea that an early start is important makes even less sense. Much of the day-to-day work that happens even at companies with difficult problem domains is rote and uncomplicated. A few years experience is more than enough to lead a typical web project, and, more importantly, to have a sense for whether a dev team is firing on all cylinders and to authoritatively manage it.

Obvious subtext/bias here: I do not believe that starting women in software development earlier is going to resolve the gender gap. By all means, start early; there's nothing wrong with that. It's just probably not the root of the problem.
This is part of something I hope takes hold in CS education: ontogenous education. Ontogeny is the study of the development of organisms throughout their lifecycle. Technology develops in a way that often makes the present as dissimilar from its roots as a caterpillar and butterfly. So by starting at the beginning (or a beginning at least), rather than the present we give kids a full grasp of why things are the way they are rather than the millions of other ways they could be.

For many learners technology is a turn-off because it seems 'arbitrary'. It is, in the same sense that a biological organism or historical event is arbitrary. It's only with context that these things start to become intelligible. So ontogenous CS education is about giving a historical context to modern technology.
Dateparser: Python parser for human readable dates
The irony is angular was going to be the framework I learned the next time I had free time. Now I am not so sure.