skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have no memory of the basic concept of coding being hard to learn.
I do remember thinking it was cool that I could make stuff happen by itself.
Multiple device support and history synchronization between devices really are table stakes to me, especially since I tend to spend a lot of time checking messages and chatting from mobile devices these days..

That distributed social network thing sounds quite exciting, and very much in a similar vein as Matrix. Does it have a website/github repo yet?

We've definitely found its not always easy to balance a philosophically pure/technically nice solution with one that actually has a usable UX. Although it sometimes seems that half the battle is figuring out what actually is a usable UX...
Indeed. It's hard enough to define curriculum around the world as it exists right now, so how are we to steer this big ship toward designing curriculum for the world to come?

The answer is that we (very probably) can't - so we should focus on preparing our young people to be resilient, flexible, and motivated.
The problem here is two-fold and also counter intuitive.

First, the idea is that most people learn more by doing than they do from rote memorization or even school lab experiments. If you want kids to be involved with the process of creating new food sources, have them start creating new food sources. Then they'll have a context for understanding how cells work and the value of organic chemistry and the other basic and advanced biology concepts. If you present it as just another boring thing that they're being forced a learn, a lot of creative and curious minds will shut down and just go through the motions of homework assignments and studying for quizzes. Many of us on hn are programmers not because we were forced to learn programming in school, but because we wanted to make a thing and set about learning the skills necessary to make that thing. That's what this article is saying, learn by doing.

The second issue is that not everyone can or should become a biologist. One of the other commenters mentioned that his son wanted to be an air traffic controller. Why make him sit through a biology class at all? It's possible that he'll be so intrigued by life sciences that he'll change his mind and switch his career path. Certainly wouldn't be the first 16 year old to do that. But our method now is to force young people to sit through dozens of hours of instruction on topics that they will probably never recall or use again in order for a small percentage of them to go on to advanced study. There has to be a better way. What we're doing now isn't just a waste of time and resources, it's actively turning kids against the process of education in general.

We need to allocate resources to hiring better teachers and to standardizing education across states and school districts. But pulling down even these low hanging fruit is highly politicized and controversial. The real core of the problem is to make young people excited enough about the process of education that we can't stop them from learning more on their own. Our current education system fails miserably at this. The one thing we don't need is more of the same. The only way to deal with the challenges of the future is to get the next generation so engaged and invested in solving them that our biggest problem becomes figuring out how to slow them down. Good luck doing that with a text book and homework assignments.
In my experience the biggest frustration when building microservices is the replicated logic across multiple languages/frameworks. For example if my microservices are in node/io.js and my app a rails app, then I can't replicate my model logic in my node services. Have you done anything in the jolie language to help this problem?
It's a small peice of the article and probably meant to be a throwaway line but it still irks me whenever I hear people write/talk about how we are reaching the end of our capacity to provide food for ourselves. There are some 7 billion people in the world right now and America by itself has the capacity to feed all of them. The fact that there are still countries where people are starving is kind of actually ridiculous. Another 2 billion people wouldn't even be noticed. They would probably still all starve because hey there's people starving now that we could feed but that has nothing to do with our ability to produce food.
Do you know why we drink milk after infancy? Because we evolved to. It was when man domesticated the Auroch (the predecessor to the cow) that it is thought they started holding on to lactase production farther into life. Milk allowed the humans to live better and fatter when times were lean. As such, there was an evolution towards continue lactase production. There's some really interesting work in this area done by McCracken out of UCLA. There's also some cool studies since then around the cultural migrations of lactase and lactose intolerance by Enattah and Tishkoff.

Pretty neat stuff seeing how evolution affects all of us.
What people hear MS will do and what MS says it will do doesn't really mean too much to me. It's the actions that count.

I remember when lots of people told me how great it was going to be when MS bought Virtual PC for Mac (from Connectix) back in the day...

After MS touched the code, it was the first (and only) app to ever give my Mac a kernel panic. Then, it got even "greater" when MS discontinued Virtual PC for Mac entirely. MS bought it and killed a great app for Mac.

Will Sunrise avoid getting borged and ruined by MS? I hope not, but I'm not counting on it, either.
"Ah, so you're one of those. I see logic is already out the window."

Please explain this line, I tend to think ill of anyone who uses the line "one of those" on another person. I feel disinclined to spend time gathering the youth stats versus minimum wage increases if ad hominem are your preference.
> having much more (all?) of the information right there to browse makes a big difference.

I think it's important to have structure in your consoles so you can follow a logical debugging path, such as starting at the entry point of our queries, checking each backend, finding the problematic one, going to that backend's console and repeating until you find the culprit.

One approach console wise is to put the less important bits in a table rather than a graph, and potentially have further consoles if there were subsystems complex and interesting enough to justify it.

I'm used to services that expose thousands of metrics (and there's many more time series when labels are taken into account). Having everything on consoles with such rich instrumentation simply isn't workable, you have to focus on what's the most useful. At some point you're going to end up in the code, and from there see what metrics (and logs) that code exposes, ad-hoc graph them and debug from there.

> Lots of lines on a single graphs helps you notice imbalances you may not have noticed before. For example if a small subset of your cluster has lower CPU usage then you likely have a load balancing problem or something else weird going on.

Agreed, scatterplots are also pretty useful when analysing that sort of issue. Is it that the servers are efficient, or are they getting less load? A qps vs cpu scatterplot will tell you. To find such imbalances in the first place, taking a normalized standard deviation across all of your servers is handy - which is the sort of thing Prometheus is good at.

> You have to shard that subsystem further by something random and arbitrary.

One approach would be to have multiple prometheus servers with the same list of targets, and configured to do a consistent partition between them. You'd then need to do an extra aggregation step and get the data from the "slave" prometheus servers up to a "master" prometheus via federation. This is only likely to be a problem when you hit thousands of a single type of server, so the extra complexity tends to be manageable all things considered.
Why would they offer him any plea worth taking? Would you offer more than a negligible amount off if you were the prosecutor?

> I'd had the impression Dratel was respected before this.

From reading the transcript, I get the impression that he's respected but also known to be aggressive and a bit of a dick; but maybe that's what a good defense lawyer is in a hard case like that.
As far as the potential sentence, the difference between $213 million and $1.2 billion is exactly nothing. The maximum sentence for drug conspiracy kicks in at levels less than 1% of either of these numbers worth of drugs.
Jobs at Apple-Search
Although I know nothing of phage therapy, I can offer a personal view on the history of misuse of antibiotics. The article suggests a 20 year history for this, but that's an underestimate. My Dad was a physician, and I remember him talking about this a lot during the '60s, when I was a kid. Maybe doctors of that era, many having taken up medicine after returning from WWII, had a clear understanding of the battlefield that is infection. The old ones avoided overprescribing antibiotics, but the new ones were succumbing to the "client" culture, handing out pills because patients demanded them.
Queue up the chorus of rumors (which are starting to seem non-rumorish lately) of Microsoft eventually enabling Android apps on Windows Phone (and listen for the wailing and gnashing of teeth of loyal .NET Xaml WP devs everywhere).
What you've described is a manager/supervisor->director->VP->SVP/C-Suite chain, but with different terms, (possibly) shorter tenure, and with a perhaps slightly more democratic allocation procedure.

It's a management structure, just billed as something else.
It's weird how everytime there is criticism of some country people pop up to say that the US is also bad in some way. It's a non sequitur. China is fucked up, full stop. Is the US fucked up too? Yes. That doesn't mean China should not be criticized for their fuckupery.
Ask HN: Resources for a fun programming competition
I'm trying to organize a fun competition at my company for one of our internal events.

It's just for fun, not recruitment or anything of the sort.

We make videogames, so obvious things would be a game competition (suggestions on very easy, very fast to iterate frameworks are appreciated) and a rendering competition (e.g. something like https://www.shadertoy.com/) or an optimization one.

Another fun thing would be something like Crobots or any of the more modern variants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crobots

But I wanted to see if it was possible to organize something more like a creative puzzle. First thing that comes to mind is a "CrackMe" but most can be quite daunting for a diverse audience, they are usually very technical for people with already some reversing background.

Any other ideas/tips/links?
That's an important distinction, thanks.
The condo comment was kind of a joke. It's a Montanan joke so I probably should've gauged my audience better.

My main point, which seems to have been lost here is that the main impediment to increased food production is economic. Whether the economic pressures creating the situation are born out of greed, over-regulation or something else I didn't speculate.

The land is there. The water is there. The equipment is procurable as well as the labor. It's a simple factor of motivation. Our semi-free market produces the current amount of food. A more free market would likely (but may not) produce less. A more regulated market could (but may not) produce more.
Evolving to digest dairy is probably what saved the people who migrated into the colder climates of Northern Europe.

For those of us with the ability digest it, a moderate amount of dairy is probably a good thing.

http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-1...
Sounds great to me. I'm not very price sensitive for beverages, and I'd drink more milk if it was lower in sugar. More protein is nice too.
Latest jobs in Pakistan
>It's already happening. Imagine delivery of high-value, light goods to remote locations

no need to imagine as there has already been successful POC of delivering Hellfire missiles into Yemen villages.
Can you put the yin bit into layman's speak please? How does it differ to empiricist?
That suggests to me that we might get better gains with purpose-built drone trucks (think "aircraft carrier") rather than leveraging existing (e.g. UPS) trucks.

I also wonder whether delivery trucks are in and of themselves as prevalent in China as they are in America, versus, say, bicycle carriers or other forms of delivery.
Alright, how is this different from the other attempts at this type of server-based system? And how is this better than Tox, which is P2P?
Wanting Me
I am really passionate and angry about this. Knowledge is everything in this world, and it is being withheld. I'm a well paid silicon valley engineer, and I think twice before pressing the buy button on Amazon, because the books I want run 100-200. I mostly don't push buy. I don't see how that helps anyone (some revenue > no revenue). How does anyone else afford it?

I'm writing a free mathematical book, and pretty much want to continue it in the future (tackle other topics). We need an open book movement. Alan B. Downey has been doing it, all of his books are free. Khan, of course, is doing it, but in video format (so far).

I'm not a fan of 'shame the publishers' approach. They are trying to make a living, and turning out new books does that. Plus, they are also responding to government - we have some new initiative, tons of new material has to be developed so students can 'pass the test', and if the textbook is only going to be around for 5 years they legitimately have to charge a lot to break even.

I think online, free books with cheap printed versions is going to (or should) change all of this. The whole idea of 'editions' is outdated. If something needs to be changed, make the change, and push it to the cloud. If you made some typo, push the change tomorrow, don't spend 6 months proofing galleries. The economics of dead trees doesn't work when I can get an email from a confused reader and push a better written explanation a day later.

It's already happening [1]. Let's make it happen faster. It's more important than the next jSomething interface, or 'like Waze but for dogs' app.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-tough-lesson-for-college-textb...
My only gut instinct is that we need to drastically expand our society's understanding of systems thinking.

If we could develop (even...barely...just a little) common understanding that what you do impacts those around you (and those who will live in this place after you) then perhaps we could regain some sense of common purpose, vision, or responsibility.
That's awesome I will have to start recommending that.

Thanks for the tip.
In War soldiers do not get the same benefits as civilians accused of a crime and we keep insisting we are at war with "terror". While I think that in most cases terrorists should be treated like any other murderer, classifying someone as a "terrorist" has very real effects on what rights they have. In the extreme example we have intentionally killed American citizens without trial or any sort of imminent threat (one of whom had not done anything significant) and justified it because they were "terrorists".
Could have seen that coming long long ago.
> They are retroactively estimating the number of bitcoins that passed through from February 2011 (when bitcoin was worth some $0.10 or something near there) but pricing the net total over 2.5 years as of the 2013 value.

Surely the bulk of the activity came later on in Silk Road's life though right? It's not like each day had the same number of transactions.. For all we know, the FBI looked at all of the transactions into and out of SR and did a perfectly weighted average pricing query.
I don't think it's a good thing either.

I also find the spread of autism terrifying. My wife works at a kindergarten and she has had to deal with children that have problems from the autistic spectrum, healthy enough to be allowed to integrate in a normal collectivity, problematic enough that adjustment is very hard - they simply stand out from everybody else. And she noticed an interesting pattern, those children usually come from families of engineers, mathematicians or software developers.

And maybe the sample is not representative of the general population, but it scares the bejesus out of me, especially since we have a son that is happy, loving, socially apt, smart and healthy, but that was a late talker and at 4 years old he still does mispronunciation for many words - this is another recent trend.

I have read a book at some point, can't remember the title, but especially in boys you have brain parts specialized for certain tasks and this happens when you've got certain parts of the brain underdeveloped, with maybe other parts overdeveloped. It usually goes away, once the child grows. Maybe this is just an evolutionary step, or maybe we are broken, I don't know.
If it was political his commission would be server cost and not 10% of every transaction.
You taught your son to walk by walking. He learned to walk because everyone around him was walking. That's undeniably the best way to learn: being in an immersive environment. That's akin to going to hacker school.

What I'm saying is 'just write something' doesn't help people who would ask the question 'how do I learn programming', It helps the people who ask 'how do I get better at programming'. You get better at walking by walking more. You get better at coding by coding more. You start walking by learning it from someone else, or by using something to pull yourself up (like a chair or a table leg). You learn programming by asking how and following their advice.

Your son didn't ask how to walk because he didn't know the question. Beginners don't ask how to deploy because they don't know what deploy means. "Just code" doesn't answer the problem of "how do I write a GUI app". It makes it seem like it's so easy that you shouldn't have to ask. And since you don't know the answer and no one will tell you, programming must be hard, or you must be stupid. That's what a teacher or a mentor offers. Advice. Not glib remarks.
Ever wonder why Jibo’s eye was designed as a ball?
It's hard for me to tell if you're actually "in the wrong" here. Innocent people are also captured and tortured by authorities, but it's a huge stretch to blame that on karma.

If you say people experience karmic responses for all of their actions that's roughly true within Buddhist doctrine depending on how you define these things. Many believe it's a purely internal process so there's no guarantee something bad will happen to you in the sense of losing your job or stubbing your toe.

If you say that when a bad thing happens to a person it's because they did something bad to deserve it then that's not what the Buddha taught. The world's a big place and your past morality isn't the only thing that determines your present situation. http://buddhism.about.com/od/basicbuddhistteachings/tp/The-F...
The part of cross-platform mobile dev that increasingly drives me insane is duplicating the persistent data model code across platforms. I'd be very interested if the Inbox people can share how they approached this (hint!).

Generally the SQLite approach feels quite lowest common denominator, mainly because on Android the SQLite wrapper is so clunky. Get over that and you're into raw files territory, which has made me consider things like building LevelDB for bundling in.
Led by Tinder, the Mobile Dating Game Surges
Your Free 4-Week Wellness Plan
This could explain the User-Agent "apple/0.1" that has started showing up in apache logs from IP addresses starting with "17."....
Something like that exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_grammar#Grammatical_s...

In most languages, word for word translation produces rubbish. In Esperanto it doesn't.

Esperanto has no particular word order, instead, suffixes denotes parts of speech. This alone makes it much more simple to translate literally between languages. It also has no gender, and is perfectly regular.

The language was designed so that one could send a letter to a friend who with did not speak it, and they could translate the entire document quickly using only a dictionary and a basic understanding of the grammar.
weird.
it's already in Atlanta.
it tastes alright, not my favorite by any means, but it's cheaper than horizon organic.
None at all. Once we can create pink polkadot tigers that fetch your slippers, who cares about the albino Siberian tiger? What significance does it have? Its whatever random species inhabited this globe when we came to sentience. Millions came before, and we're not missing them.
Future potential incoming isn't an estimate of market-price of goods. We are discussing the size of the drug business, not their potential gain as investors in Bitcoin (that would be investment income).

Sure it's not $0.10, it's $0.7 - and yes the price is mostly around $10 - which is my point; that the estimate they given is incredulous unless literally 95% of their transactional volume over 2 years occurred between April 2013 - July 2013.
Monthly Internet Marketing Roundup: January 2015
Tracking glaciers with accelerators
> Do you know why we drink milk after infancy? Because we evolved to.

"We" in this case being, essentially, Northern Europeans. Lactase persistence isn't really the global norm.
With respect to your CS prof at one of my favorite places (Go Cavaliers!), this is not an issue of discrete vs. continuous. If your structure can have either 9 or 10, but not 9.001, supports, it is discrete, not continuous, regardless of failure mode. And remove one of the 3 legs of your stool, and you probably wouldn't have 2/3rds of its support remaining, but whether you did or didn't would be an issue of proportionality, not continuity.

There are a lot of jumbled concepts here, most of which don't matter anyway, because what you are talking about is the phenomenon of graceful degradation. In the physical world, both natural and man-made, almost nothing at the macro scale is ever perfect, so the best designs tend to be those that remain good enough under the widest range of circumstances vs. a more common software goal of being perfect under perfectly controlled circumstances.

As software gradually moves out from the wall garden of a single mainframe to fill the world with interacting systems spanning diverse machines, sensors, communications channels, data types, etc., design for graceful degradation becomes more and more of a focus for professional software architects.

Coding in the gracefully degrading way is much harder than coding in the "if even one of your ten lines is wrong, you crash" tradition. The fact that even the latter is so hard for us humans means we will need more and more help from machines that learn what to do without being explicitly told by us.
Brian from Backblaze here. :-)
Should Bernie Madoff be let free? He's ruined more lives than many drug dealers, but never killed anyone.
Wearable Market Embraces APIs and the Quantified Self
Love this idea. Going to seriously consider subscribing.
First impressions on the Raspberry Pi^2
'premium' milk... in other words, more processed food. Which, of course, is generally something to avoid.

Maybe there is a market for a shared cow startup?

iMoo: a modern alternative for an old staple. The cow with the 'share' function. Kickstart a cow?

Or, just use your head for thinking before stuffing it with the next branded product. Buy unbranded fresh staple foods and prepare them yourself. Don't whine about your busy schedule which does not allow you to do this, see it as a challenge instead of a chore. You'll spend less money and end up healthier to boot. Invite some friends (real live ones) if you're single and don't like eating alone. If there isn't an app for that yet, maybe there should be: geo-located single hungry people who want to share their chow.
My favorite thing about Fairlife is that there isn't a speck of Coca-Cola branding on the bottle. It's like Coke's Goose Island!
I think it's more likely associated with Spotlight vs a web search engine