skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel that would be really unnecessary and possibly harmful to the MOOCs themselves.

1 - Sign ups alone require nearly no resources from the provider.

2 - Attendance and therefore popularity could be much lower. While that could be a good thing (less people and more money -> more support to each student), it would probably never be enough to cover a course's cost.

In the end, people are learning. I haven't completed any course yet (attended about 4, attending one now), but I'm thankful for them and I don't think the resources I used harmed the MOOCs.
There's an R package for producing nice images like this. Example of visualizing Git contributions: https://andrew.kvalhe.im/easy-calendar-heatmaps-for-git/
Mjg59 – Intel Boot Guard, Coreboot and User Freedom
TiKL (YC W12) is hiring mobile developers
You're asking if the new jobs of tomorrow will suck harder than the McDonald's of today, and I really don't know. It's easy to assume that more essential, "useful", jobs will be better paid, but if you ask farmers you'll find out that that's not necessarily true. That said, while Notch may feel like he is king of the world right now, most indie game developers don't, I think.
Bombay Sapphire is a product of the 1987. I had always assumed it was some sort of old liquor back from when India was controlled by the Brits. I'm sure that was their goal.
For the record, the hosted files were daily builds of HEAD. Despite the domain name, these packages did not have "official status" anywhere and were not distributed outside of that site to our knowledge.

In fact there are very few users that we know of -- to the point that when the site went down, there were no reports filed or complaints made.

That said, when the service gets up and running again, the key will indeed need to be replaced.
Customs and immigrations everywhere provide official processes people can follow for living and working in a country. Enforcing this stuff happens on a country-by-country basis and detecting it can be slow and difficult or not even close to a priority but that does not make it a gray area. Here in Costa Rica they've made many steps in the last few years to address "perpetual tourism", it used to be easy to live here on renewable tourist visas and many people took advantage of that.

http://blog.therealcostarica.com/2009/08/13/the-new-costa-ri...
The problem I take with this mindset, is that it treats all value systems as equal.

At the end of the day, if your culture and economic system create a poorer quality of life for its people consistently, just because it wins out in the percentage of employed citizens doesn't mean a thing. You're treating the lack of disease as a measuring stick of health, when it's simply one piece of the puzzle.

I think the thing Sam has been trying to do for the last few years, is get others to think about the ways we can enrich more lives as a whole, without just slowing labor and progress in its totality- because while that can work for the short term, it can severely inhibit us in the long term to eradicate things like hunger, disease, or poverty.

The thing you also need to be careful of along the way though, is not making perfect the enemy of good.
> And you have no evidence that any of that code is more likely to be correct.

> You have no evidence of any actual bug reduction.

> Working deductively from the definition of Haskell is not empirical evidence for the claim that Haskell programs are more likely to be correct.

My deductive reasoning is not the evidence I'm citing here. We counted the total number of ways that a function could go wrong and saw that in pure Haskell code, the number is drastically reduced. We know that the bug types we eliminated actually occur in practice, so under the reasonable assumption that the distribution of bug types is relatively constant, those numbers do provide empirical evidence (observational, not experimental) that Haskell programs are more likely to be correct.

Yes, pure code can still be wrong, but it can be wrong in a lot less ways than the impure code that you're stuck with in other languages. That code is still doing useful work that is also bug-prone in other languages. Therefore we can be reasonably confident that it will reduce bugs.

If you absolutely insist on experimental evidence, we have that too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BveDrw9CwEg#t=1207
Net#: Introducing Microsoft's Neural Nets Library
Educated vs. Skilled

Lots of people have college degrees in fields where jobs simply do not exist. Bachelors in Philosophy, Women's Studies, or Underwater Basket Weaving are admirable but do nothing to prepare you to get a job. Most people who study in fields that don't directly correlate to a job end up having a career in an irrelevant field after on-the-job training.

Being educated and unemployed just means that you probably didn't need to go to college anyway.
The Unbearable Lightness of Tweeting
This economist disagrees: http://www.kc.frb.org/publicat/sympos/2014/093014.pdf
There's as much or little social scene as you want, including (to an extent) a choice of whether to hang out with tourist-friendly locals, medium-term Western freelancers/divers/hippies and travellers/holidaymakersof all levels of maturity

Those beach bars and boat trips can drive your monthly spend up quite a bit, but eating out certainly won't blow your budget.
Anti-Slavery Software to Clean Up Global Supply Chains
Show HN: All branches of science (Zoom out)
I read TFA. I still think that might ruin the atmosphere.
I figure that a degree in CS + some curiosity would give one the horizontal knowlegde, and x years of employment in a specialised field would give the vertial knowlegde.
`it's very existence means that it's easy to misuse it`

However, few people actually do: https://peerj.com/preprints/826v1
It is no dodgier than the revelation that spy agencies (along with many other organisations) create sock puppet accounts[0] to manipulate public opinion on sites just like this.

Looking at the form I see two boxes left un-ticked by default, requiring manual opt-in, which to me looks pretty good from a privacy perspective. I also see the full name, postal address, telephone number, and registered charity number just below in the footer.

Maybe my definition of 'dodgy' is different from yours, because the only dodgy thing I see is the illegal spying being called out.

It's a free country though, so you are free to be extra cautious and to do nothing and hope the problem goes away some day. Also, I guess I should point out I'm a paid-up member of Privacy International so not exactly unbiased here. So far so good, no drone strikes or black helicopters yet and I sleep well at night.

[0]http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...
What's worse is the fact that this would be more terrifying if this weren't an action to the NSA's credit. Chinese, British, and Russian governments also have the capability of developing intrusive malware at such a scale.

I see that this is confirmed as the NSA, but the world has been awfully silent on the intrusiveness of Chinese malware practices. You can not travel safely in China without your domestic devices being breached, yet we don't hear about large-scale projects from their government, which also possesses "near limitless resources" at their disposal.

I just think it's interesting there's so much attention on the NSA.
synthetic biology does exist, just look at this: http://www.genomecompiler.com/

Also look at this: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-...

It's only been since 2010 that we've known how to actually do it, but the technology exists. Pandora's box has been opened.

AI development isn't science fiction either. GPU's + convolutional neural networks have been enabling radical developments in the area.

I think both of these developments have a whole bunch of potential to make our society drastically better. However there's a bunch of potential threats they represent, and it makes sense to be thinking about counter measures for those threats at the same time we develop the tech.
One of the best criticism and analysis of public intellectuals I have read is in the Thomas Sowell's book Intellectuals. Ironically, being an intellectual himself a lot of his words apply to him as well.

One of the most common mistake we people make is to think of intellectuals as some higher beings. It is true than an educationist or economists will know lot more than an average Joe about their respective fields. But the probability that he will make wrong decisions is not drastically different because the real world is far more complex and the amount of stuff that we dont know is simple too large.

For example a professional shooter will be able to score much higher than an average Joe. But if the objective is to get a "100%" score then both Joe and the professional shooter are likely to fail with near same probability.
New rules governing drone journalism are on the way
Analysis: What are musicians making from Patreon?
Neat! It looks kinda like an updated version of the old C=128 that was my first personal computer as a kid. My dad picked that one up used from a guy at work along with a pile of floppies. I wasn't allowed to hook up the modem that completed the "package" so I didn't quite understand what a lot of the programs were for or why so many of the games had weird (but awesome) intro screens with flashy graphics and music better than anything in the actual games. That was my unknowing introduction to the world of BBSes and crack demos. Either way, that was a really fun computer to learn with. Came with a couple of massive manuals and booted straight into Commodore BASIC so I was making my own flashy screens and bleeps and bloops soon enough (god I loved that SID chip). Never did get the Amiga I wanted later on and by the time I could afford my own used computer, it was a beige box Intel machine running DOS.
>One of the most common mistake we people make is to think of intellectuals as some higher beings.

Don't worry, I can assure I'm not making that mistake.
The article itself is actually pretty boring.
I don't think your comment on whiskey fits in with your thesis. Whiskey is the answer to "what should we do with all of this left over grain?" throughout the Western world.
Same reason he jibed unintentionally. He doesn't know how to sail.
"Zoom out"

How?
Live entertainment and ever fancier dining, I suppose. Also pointless luxury goods and fashion. We'll find something to spend our money on and the jobs will move there.
Thank you. That's what I was getting at. A simulated world would contain suffering just as the 'real' (presumably) world does. Bringing 'conscious life' into a simulated world would be no more unethical than bringing life into the world we inhabit.
Given that they appear to have basically perfect ability to gather data, there's got to be some reason we keep having successful terrorist attacks.
Rise of the Micro-Tinders
Ep 153: Interview with Andrew Dumont of BetaWorks
Interesting that branded bourbon is an outlier, having some well established brands by the end of the 1800s (Forester, Weller, Grandad, Crow, etc)
I believe this is not the correct thread, but how can anyone sift through so much data, in general? Private companies need simpler things, like people you are likely to know in the real world, from the data they acquire. But intelligence agencies need actionable intelligence. That would require something way more intelligent than a simple spam filter.
Data mining algorithms. Remember, they're the world's largest employer of mathematicians.
Can anybody clarify what privacy I as a Bing, outlook, windows mobiles user get from this ? It mentions enterprise customer, does this means, these standards doesn't apply to users of above mentioned services ?
> The reasoning in the article is pretty garbage. "Software is destroying jobs and enriching a small handful of people...therefore, the 2 things that threaten society the most are synthetic biology and AI" ...what?

I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. He mentions those two things because they're problems that are rapidly approaching us. We've been able to avoid the problems created by past scientific revolutions, but we're hitting a point now where small groups of people with easily-accessible tools can affect millions, possibly billions of others. The two easiest ways they can do this, is via manufactured disease and possibly computer virus systems that can disrupt global organizational systems.

It's a problem purely created by modern advances, and we don't have a solve yet, and no indication that there is anyone even trying.

> He then proposes legislation and reforms as the fix. Yet, everything we know about extremely concentrated power is that it easily escapes, often even controls, legislation and reforms.

It does, but that doesn't mean you throw your hands up and refuse the imperfect fix because it isn't perfect. It means you do it, and try to fix the screwups along the way. The nice part is, what you gain is time to fix the screwups, where going without would see massive destruction of life, wealth, and livelihood.
There are alternative approaches that attack the problem of simulating the human brain with a smarter set of approximations, e.g. http://thevirtualbrain.org
The problem with this is that those cobbled-together SQL queries are precisely the kinds of things good programmers either replace or automate away; you can automate away an assembly-line job, but not as cheaply, and not as easily.

There might not be any such thing as a 100x programmer or whatever, but the value proposition for replacing a few sub-par programmers with one better programmer and a framework is a lot clearer than the one for replacing a handful of assembly line workers with a more complicated and more expensive piece of machinery.
You can't master something by switching games all the time, by definition.

"... switching games all the time..." is the key.

What does "all the time" mean? Does it mean not dipping your toe into new waters? Of course not; exploration also deepens your understanding of where you currently are.

Does it mean never changing your path? Of course not, but changes in direction should be done mindfully, not at the whim of the current front page of HN (or anywhere, or anybody, else).

"Spending a month 'learning' OCaml" is barely divergent from the path you're on. It will affect what you're currently doing, to some degree. A month is (essentially) nothing.

In any case, everybody is different. The real question is whether or not you're happy with the direction you're headed.
In the scope of factories in the industrial revolution, I think he's clearly referring to low-skill assembly line work, which made up the vast majority of jobs. You're referring to master craftsman. The problem with software is that there's no known way to create assembly-line-style software with lots of low skill labor. It can only be made by at least semi-skilled craftsman. Being able to cobble together an SQL query is nice, but what kind of useful product could you put out with a line of 50 people such low-skill people? None that I know of. Thus we're stuck with a lot less, higher skill jobs.
I said nothing about retail.
People would be angry even if they didn't know that Equation Group was part of the NSA.
I guess my startup experiences were different. In one startup I worked at, I learned A LOT about data, databases, JDBC, connection pooling, JVM tuning, etc, because the volumes of data and we were working with were just unheard of at the time and the traffic to that data was not cacheable. I had to disassemble a vendors JDBC driver and tell them why it crashed all the time for instance.

In another, it was lots of JVM knowledge (both threading and memory management/garbage collection), caching, distributing work which needed to be calculated, etc. We found several JVM thread locking bugs and worked with Sun to fix them. I worked with some really great people in their 40's at this one and learned a lot from them.

I suppose the majority of startups are different these days though? Mostly RoR and Node based social things. The biggest worry is if the Facebook Like and Share buttons work.

If you are working somewhere that is only a CRUD website at it's core and doesn't have anything else going on, I suppose there isn't much to learn on the backend side of things.
some more feedback: the response code would be bit more readable if you started off with a record type for the args to http_response.

also, a .ml file introduces an automatic module, so you don't need the toplevel module definition in most of your files.

the real world ocaml section on modules is worth reading: https://realworldocaml.org/v1/en/html/files-modules-and-prog...
Any links describing the management failures?
At the moment there is a mixed content bug in the place lookup, so it doesn't work over https. I guess it will be fixed in short order though.

There's also not much fuzziness in the search. For example, "Tolado Ohio" will not be found.
Panettone
Panettone is a type of sweet bread loaf originally from Milan usually prepared and enjoyed for Christmas and New Year in Italy, southeastern France, Spain.
Lean how to sell. When I was in college I got frustrated at not having software dev opportunities and only opportunities working at the mall (I went to college right after the dot com bubble). This curse ended up becoming a blessing because I learned how to empathize with what people wanted and what they were trying to accomplish.

A lot of freelancing is just being able to sell yourself. When you find a lead you have to convince them (aka sell to them) that you won't run away with their money and are trustworthy enough to finish what they asked. Each week/day/month you have to do a smaller version of this sale to convince them to continue to stick with you and pay you. Even at the end of the project you have to convince them (aka sell to them) that they should provide positive reviews for you.

Aside from selling you've got to be sure you deliver on time and perform the work asked. You'd be surprised how much of freelancing is more about soft skills (listening, empathy, communicating, saying no, etc) than technical skills.

If have any more questions don't hesitate to reach out to me at ryan at challengeacceptedhq.com

I write a newsletter on freelancing but have taken a couple months break to wrap up my book: The 7 Recurring Revenue Recipes for Freelancers.
Is this a company or a hobby? If it's just a hobby then have fun exploring new platforms and tools. If this is what you do instead of a full time job at someone else's company...

> Even if I had more revenue

A hard problem you will suck at most of the time.

> I would rather have ...

A fun distraction that you can easily, and enjoyably, work on forever. When you finish you can just invent new technical challenges for yourself.

> The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html
Google Cabs and Uber Bots Will Challenge Jobs 'Below the API'
This is exactly what the NSA should be doing. Everyone (rightfully IMO) complains about overly broad data collection happening within the USA, but here (as with stuxnet) you have the exact opposite, a targeted foreign activity conducted with care and targeting. I know it's not for everyone (not least because not everyone is in the states, huh), and it could be considered a bad precedent, but it's not like Iran asked our permission before they launched their nuclear program, or other states are actually waiting on the US's example to have their own intelligence services do their jobs. If you hold that something like 9/11 should be prevented, and that (actual) WMD programs should be stalled, then it follows that this is a fine way to go about it.
In an interview Richard Stallman, head of the Free Software Foundation, said:

Microsoft corrupted many members of ISO in order to win approval for its phony 'open' document format, OOXML. This was so governments that keep their documents in a Microsoft-only format can pretend that they are using 'open standards.' The government of South Africa has filed an appeal against the decision, citing the irregularities in the process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_...
I agree on many points but I think there will always be more to do. We don't see it yet because we don't even know what new innovations will come, we are basing it on today's knowledge.

We have barely inched into space, robotics, drones, the oceans, we haven't even seen more than 50 miles down in the earth, our bodies and brains are still big mysteries, nanotechnology and more. We thought computers would free up lots of people but it hasn't really yet, just made more work to do and solve with the machines. I think the same will happen with robotics, drones, and AI. They will create work needs we didn't know existed and much more than we expect. Who knows, AI or robots might be better than us at creating jobs.

Agriculture freed up people to think. Software freed up people to think. Good things are coming still.

For most jobs, people want more to do, more adventure and more challenges. I think the world is hungry for new challenges not the same old jobs. It is a strange thing indeed though for people to try to hold onto lifeless, horrible jobs just to keep the cadence when we need a new rhythm. We are held back by holding onto this. We could employ many people to build an electric car network like the railroads and interstate system but we don't. We could be looking to space more and focusing kids on that but we are pushing them to finance, business and service jobs.

The actual problem might be our monetary system and how we reward. I am a big free or fair market proponent, but part of the problem of baked in bad jobs that add nothing are because of this system. I think monetary and currency is one area where it may hold us back until we solve this. However there currently is no better system of paying for a service that you need or want down to the individual, the truest exchange of value.

The question is, how much does the customer know about what they want and how can we steer it towards the real problems of today? How wrong are we with our rewards systems? Do only the wealthy have the right motivations to create systems we need and employ? Have we got ourselves in a wealth backdrift? The innovation market and economic engine is tied to wealth, for better or worse. There are many things we should be doing, that are rewarding to us all and need lots of work, that we can't because there isn't tons of market value yet. Maybe the reward system needs refactoring or some new iterations.

It is a big game design / game theory problem in the end. We might need AI and robots to solve this problem for us.
> The British Standards Institute (BSI) has now independently verified

Yeah great, show your proprietary code to a third party company and everyone is just going to immediately trust you.

Plenty of other cloud storage services offer real reasons to trust the backing store, called the code is open. I can audit it, my neighbor could audit it, and every corporate user is liable to audit it. I have no reason to ever trust an arbitrary third party I have never had reason to trust in the past who is now trying to guarantee your cloud is secure, when competitive options are letting me do my own auditing, if I wish.

Is there anything else this is comparable too - where a company has the gall to say "another company looked at our black box and said it was good, so trust us alright guys?". When cars or houses or roads or food get certified for something you always have the capacity to reproduce the certification process yourself as a verification measure. You cannot do that to proprietary software, especially when its on some foreign server somewhere running who knows what version of it.
Gerechtigkeit (moral justice) and Justiz (the justice system). Recht is actually in a similar spot as justice: Recht can mean "law" (as in Rechtsstaat, "state of laws") or "right" (as in Menschenrechte, "human rights").