skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While yes, the Apple Watch does kind of throw out the notion that the worlds most elite and powerful are using the same (i)Phone as teenagers in school - the author of this article seemingly forgot that there are two other Apple Watches which will presumable be much cheaper - starting at $350.
What school? And is it for 9months or 12 months?
The reasons I've heard were to kill US oil exploration, and also to teach the high-cost producers (Venezuela, etc) in OPEC a lesson. It's common for these countries to "accidentally" pump over quota to make some extra cash. So Saudi just refused to cut the quota this time around. The Saudis could also be interested in messing with Iran, which has much higher production costs.
Mathematicians needed
Hello HN,

We are a Bay Area startup disrupting math education through our video game, Mathbreakers.

Our solution is fundamentally different from other math games because it provides a single, cohesive 3-D world where any type of math can be played with, in conjunction with any other type. (Alternatives do a good job of teaching math subjects one at a time.)

Our core product is up and running, and is restricted to elementary math. However, we have experimental levels ranging from statistics and probability, to set theory, to Turing machines -- and they all work together in our world.

We need your help! Math is a stupefyingly big field, and for us to "cover it all" we need to make intelligent steps that can be built on in the future. Part of our vision is also to make it accessible to teachers, mathematicians, and amateurs worldwide so that new math can be introduced without us.

Finally, the kicker is that kids actually love playing our game, so we have a perfect lead-in to turn young minds into future mathematicians.

This is an exciting opportunity to see what we're up to and play around with it! We have upcoming events for just this purpose. If you would like to join us or see what we're up to, please email me at charlie@mathbreakers.com.

Best,

Charlie
Show HN: Money
Can a Market Predict Political Outcomes?
As far as I'm concerned they diversified and funded another company to produce it. They don't hide it, it's there on their website:

http://www.molsoncoors.com/en/brands/signature%20brands/blue...

They also own Sharp's Brewery (of Doom Bar fame) which I never knew:

http://www.molsoncoors.com/en/Brands/Signature%20Brands/Doom...

In that case they simply bought the brewery which was already successful and produced a few award winning ales.
I was talking to a team a couple of years ago. This team had a bad reputation at the organization, and I was supposed to come help them.

So I did a day of light training. Then I offered some free books -- with the caveat that they email or ask me for them.

Nobody asked for the books. Out of 20 folks, 2 of them bought the books (instead of getting them for free). They didn't want the rest of the team to know they were interested!

I firmly believe two things: 1) just about anybody can become a programmer given the right environment, and 2) Due to social issues, teams get "out of whack" and suck really big time. And when #2 happens, the other programmers always blame it on technical skills.

At a recent conference, I saw a guy talk about "mob programming". Mob programming is where you take the entire team, say 3-7 guys, and work on one story at a time. There's one terminal. One guy is typing and everybody else is planning and navigating.

He said it created a huge training opportunity for everybody because everybody was involved in every little detail all at once. People got the chance to compare notes. Poor programmers got better. Good programmers learned cool stuff from each other.

But the really interesting part was when he described doing this in teams where not everybody was a programmer. He said out of several experiments, in every case within a few hours the noobs were picking up how to program in that language. Within a week they were able to actively and helpfully participate along with everybody else. It wasn't just that weak programmers got better, it was that most anybody could learn how to program.

I don't think most people in the industry are ready to hear that.
New Federal Bills Propose Income Share Agreements to Pay for College
Thinking about subroutines as code reuse is wrong. Subroutines are named blocks of code. When you're writing a program, you're building a language (or, I'd say, a series of languages) and subroutines are the basic building blocks for that. You want to split your function into a bunch of smaller ones if it makes the whole thing easy to read; reusability is just a (useful) side effect of a properly designed "language".
Voice? That's short-sighted. Voice is extremely inefficient.
Ah. I parsed that sentence incorrectly.

I read it like this:

> Your program produces output to be read by another (eg: a browser), or (implements a network protocol, and relies on the other party's software to be significantly tolerant to spec violations)

instead of like this:

> (Your program produces output to be read by another (eg: a browser), or implements a network protocol), and relies on the other party's software to be significantly tolerant to spec violations
It's probably the same chance of finding a bargain property in Melbourne :(.
I read a lot about the subject and couldn't come up with a satisfying answer as to why the Saudis are doing that. All I know is they are playing a very dangerous game and Washington is letting them do it.

People say,there will be no consequences for USA,but oil prices will go up again sooner or later. What then ? I don't believe shale oil is an explanation.
52, sw (pfSenee) dev (mgr), live in Austin. Not a lawyer, but quite familiar with contract and IP law. I've had a stainless Rolex for 25 years. I've hardly work it since 2007.

So, I don't get your point.
People will buy smartwatches because it adds value a rolex cannot: convenience.

Timex and Rolex have the same amount of information so they differentiate based on other aspects. Smart watches add convenience through serving more information. Not having to take out your phone, wallet, keys, etc. is a compelling selling point. The bet is:

convenience + decent design > timeless design alone
This bears repeating in any Apple Watch discussion: watches are socially approved jewelry for culturally Western males.

The classic and luxury appeal of jewelry is at odds with many parts of tech (eg elegance vs nerdiness, timeless heirlooms vs 1-year product cycles, etc). The Apple Watch Edition will be an interesting attempt to cross that gap. I don't see it becoming a first-tier competitor to classic watches, even in a short term wear, non-heirloom sense, but if the past decade has proven anything, Apple knows how to forecast (or shape) market demand for a product very well.
I can do that in Python ;-)

a = [7, 9, 2, 8]
print sum(sorted(a)[-2:])
The behavior is only well defined if the shift amount is strictly less than the width of the operand. If `size_t` is 32 bits, then shifting right by 32 bits is undefined.

I know of three different ways in which platforms implement shifts by greater than the word size.
Fyi, there's a mistake in your second solution - consider a strictly increasing list.
Ah, I see. Should have picked that up.

I guess there was no Wikipedia to have an article for HTTP back then, which has been an invaluable resource for me to understand some of the intricacies in my work.
A lot of templates and checking for noteworthy conditions. Seems pretty straightforward when you're interpreting a consistently structured set of data, just a lot of grunt work and polishing.
The student loan system allows more people from every social class to go to university and join the middle class. Loan repayments are linked to income after graduation so nobody has to pay back more than they can afford.
The truth is, they are never letting the populous get into space travel...

Which means...
I'd point out that some cars retain value, just like some watches retain value, but I think that's lost on you.
> There is also a place for functions that only get called from one location

Do it inline. If you need it to look separate from the other context try an immediately invoked function or at worst some comment demarcation. No need to spray functionality across a file(s) when you can do it all inline, especially if it is only called from one place. I'll admit I didn't come up with this 100% myself, but having tried both ways, I really like inlining.

http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...
I remember those days. Those days only two methods existed, GET and POST! ;)
I really look forward to when we, as academics, historically document and seriously examine the various phases of the internet, from a variety of alternative perspectives.

It's interesting while it's being built, but it's also interesting to look back and reflect on the bigger picture, outside of the buzzwords and technical terminology used to pull the creation through, and make it actualized.

I look forward when critics and theorists start thinking about the goal of the internet from a social perspective, a collective cultural subconscious directive. I look forward to all the kinds of art history theoretical methodology used to explain the significance of Picasso or Manet in their respective time periods, to use the same kinds of methodology to reason about the relation between the internet and everything that is not the internet.

It's interesting when some information gets washed away and other information is retained through time, and it isn't always the stuff that is indexed that is retained. The idea that art critics can even agree to call the same collection of works "cubism" or "impressionism" fascinates me, and I look forward to the same kinds of invented vocabularies being used to describe various processes, movements, and patterns throughout internet culture (way beyond studying memes and tropes - there are so many layers to the collective psyche of the internet, it is dumbfounding).

I don't know what geocities represents. I'd have to define it's 'kind' and compare and contrast it to other 'kinds' throughout time. I know this was meant to be a humorous comment, but I love to weave theories, and some of them even turn out to be descriptive of the nature of things.
I'm guilty and somewhat afraid of going there because of what I see. Most websites and web-apps are the opposite of ergonomics and I sometimes wonder if that isn't the result of the current state of UX field, that focuses on shiny things that you can sell easily instead of building tools that work. The trend I see in UX is that of dumbing-down your software and enforcing one, carefully-drawn user flow, that is pretty but not ergonomic.

I don't want to demonize the entire field - it's just a worry I have, from observation.
Aren't prediction markets illegal in the United States? (I am completely against making them illegal, but wondering how they plan to operate in the US)
You don't know that.

The world is really on the way of getting rid of oil.

Electric cars, bioplastics, solar panels getting exponentially cheap.

From my point of view the only thing that stops us all from switching to electric cars is the battery technology.

When it comes to the industrial use of solar energy, we already have the technology of storing energy - flywheel (google Beacon Power).
RedHat Enterprise Linux is both Open Source and Commercial Software. There are nothing prevent it being done. Android is another example.

Also, Linux is huge in server world.
I think you might be the nightmare scenario for Apple. I have a feeling they expect Rolex owners to buy the Watch Edition, and the regular non-watch wearing 18-35 demo to suddenly show an interest in wearing watches and buy the cheapest one. The real outcome ends up being that the majority, who doesn't wear a watch, will show continue to show no interest in watches when they're 'smart,' and the small demographic that does wear watches will stick to the "cheap," rapidly depreciating Apple Watch.
I was trying to paint a profile of someone who doesn't follow consumer technology closely.
What I'm trying to argue is that any justifiable objection Mike could have made would have failed.

Unjustifiable objections could have been made but screw those, because they would cause legitimate compression to fail.

Unjustifiable objections will pretty much always exist if the rules are written in English. That doesn't mean the rules are broken, it means you use judgement and follow the purpose of the rules.

Mike's fate was sealed when he allowed multiple files without an overhead penalty. He could have removed all the metadata possible, simply having the files exist as separate entities was enough to ruin him.
If you're looking more at improving readability than performance, I like Lisp's approach to that, with flet and labels, that let you establish a bunch of functions limited to a scope (just like let does for variables) - you can split your function into few named subroutines and then define them inside that function. So you still get readability, and can keep the code that's only called once near the place it will be called from.
Current P/Book values for oil companies now seem to reflect that the market is pricing them with oil reserves at current prices, not reported prices. If it bumps lower around Q1 and Q2 as actual oil price filters into the books then that would be pretty irrational, and likely reflects opportunity.
Exactly this, though I expect it is more hold value than appreciate with current watches. Overall, when dropping a large amount on a watch you expect it to keep value and be something that lasts a lifetime if not generations. Most people wont commit massive funds for something that needs replacing every 2 or 3 years. And even if they get the first one because it's exciting, I cant see people repurchasing on a regular basis.
Nice post. I studied with this notation too but I was not clever enough to connect it to my programming.

This is a good example of a situation where something like lisp's macro system would be very useful. But I don't understand what the author means by

On the other end of the spectrum, lisp is designed for its upper layer elegance. Its macros are structured all the way to the top. However, to achieve that, it limits its lower level representations. In fact, it takes work-around for simple switches and loops.

What's the work-around? Common Lisp and Clojure have built in conditionals and loops.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110816173759/http://fred.cambr...

and

https://web.archive.org/web/20110816173017/http://fred.cambr...
> most of them wash out.

Having taught a fair share of liberal arts majors in intro CS courses, I am absolutely certain that there is essentially no difference in skill between people who choose to major in CS and people who choose to major in the liberal arts.
It's definitely very bizarre. I used to work for a software company as a technical consultant, and one of my coworkers got poached by a prestigious private university in the area. They gave him a fancy job title and doubled his salary. We were talking the other day and he confided in me that the job is the easiest in the world and he doesn't do much.

I admit that part of me envies him. But I don't think I could do it in a position like that. Not only would I be terribly bored, I would also feel guilty for raking in so much money for so little work.
“Quite the opposite” ignores that people involved with GamerGate have actually SWATed people (see e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/13/gamergate-...) and has engaged in all of the other activities I listed. Even if true, a single incident doesn't magically cancel out half a year of real harassment no matter how many times GamerGaters have tried use that logic to avoid addressing bad behaviour by their fellows.

That said, you're linking to a post written by Mike Cernovitch, one of the more vociferous people in GamerGate, where he's making the popular argument that he's the real victim here.

Again, let's review the evidence: if you read more than the headline it's immediately obvious that there was no actual SWATing or even threat to do so and, more importantly, none of it was done by Zoe Quinn. The person who actually posted his address used the information which he'd listed on a business directory before removing it and apologizing:

https://medium.com/@ManfredVonKarma/mike-cernovich-based-law...

The key thing, of course, is that he wouldn't have been able to use a stranger’s actions to justify the anti-Zoe hate campaign. If you read it closely, notice how each claim in the article starts with something true but then adds unsupported insinuations that Zoe was masterminding it in an effort to shift the ire to her rather than the person who actually wrote the post.
WP & Google Scholar are the usual starting points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preterm_birth#Prognosis & http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cognitive+deficit+premat...
We're not talking about only hiring the top 0.1% programming talent at the expense of the top 1%. We're talking about the people that either can't program, or are very, very bad at programming.

Dealing with those isn't a "comparatively miniscule" task, it's an extraordinary drain on productivity and morale.

> We think that miraculously, good developers become good [...] never by practice within a big company. Then, one we hire them, their skill level freezes.

This is patently false. Are you familiar with the concepts of "experience", "promotion", "pay raise" or "bonus"?
You're saying things that are not even wrong, from an account created one hour ago with a name clearly tied to the topic. I'd say obvious troll is obvious.
There are still far too many obvious tells here.

"Apple’s holiday earnings for 2014 were record shattering."

An algorithm isn't going to use the slightly unusual "holiday earnings" reference (it would have said X quarter or end of year perhaps), it's also not going to understand (yet) that they were record shattering without human direction.

"Benner had a good game at the plate for Hamilton A’s-Forcini. Benner went 2-3, drove in one and scored one run. Benner singled in the third inning and doubled in the fifth inning."

That's maybe the easiest out of all of them. Repeating Benner that way over and over again, is nothing like how a sports writer would write.

Maybe another six to ten years of evolution, and it'll be nearly impossible to tell the difference. It's certainly a significant improvement over what you would have seen ten years ago in this sort of exercise.
Right? The whole article seems to be based on the premise that the markets are too stupid to have done the maths, and will need to have it spelled out to them, but somehow this Bloomberg journalist has discovered a huge secret
The efficient market hypothesis wants to have a word with you.
Thanks for the advice. Putting things in perspective should be something I should do more often. I'll try to find tricks to make me think of doing it.
Especially when you're aware of the difference between pure and impure functions, and when you believe in the importance of testing. I'd rather test a dozen small, mostly pure functions, and have the function that ties them all together be 'obvious' (and still integration tested), than to have one gigantic complex function that I need to try and test, and any related change causes a dozen tests to break.
Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go
When it comes to actually quantifying value things are still pretty crude as far as I've seen. I can't recall seeing much that is this aspirational yet. There's an interesting site/paper from 2013 (http://poetryassessor.com/poetry/) which attempts to rate a subset of poems on a amateur-to-professional scale.

Concepts like "amateur" and "professional" and aesthetic value are slippery even for those of us who really enjoy poetry. It's worth realizing that aesthetic judgement can break down into a number of sub-tasks, most of which take for granted that we mean something like, "evaluate whether or not it is statistically likely that a blood-and-bones human will like this poem."

I think that may be a trap. I think I'm far more interested in what poetry the computer finds interesting than in what poetry the computer thinks I will find interesting. The analogue in human experience is the difference between a poet writing poems they think their audience (be it end readers, or the slush readers at a given journal) will like, and a poet writing poems they themselves find interesting.
I'll point out that's not true with all Rolexes. Depending on which Rolex you purchase, it may very well appreciate over time.

Rolex occasionally tweaks aspects of its various models. For example, a 2015 Submariner has larger lugs, larger hour markers, and branded rehaut compared to a 2001 Rolex. This makes newer Subs look different and, for some collectors, makes the older models more desirable.

Pepsi Subs and the Paul Newman Daytona are both good examples of watches that have become collectable and whose value today greatly exceeds initial purchase price + inflation.
I have no idea what a linked list is.

Really? I knew what they were the moment I read the term, from the name alone, as a teenager.
I'm not sure I've ever interviewed anybody who can't program at all, but a large number of people I interview are shockingly bad.

My go-to question to detect this is to remove the odd numbers from a dynamic array of integers in-place, in their language of choice.

The ideal candidate writes an O(n) function, a less ideal (but still good) candidate writes an O(n^2) function, and if they're struggling I say that they can return copy of the array with the odds removed (this is worse, but they could easily make up for it later).

Not only can most candidates not do any of these, but most don't even know how to tell if a number is odd. I had one suggest that maybe he needed a loop (I don't know what he was planning, because immediately I told him he didn't need a loop to know if a number is odd).

This is for a game programming position, and most of these are people who have (or claim to have) programmed games. Every game has a loop like this somewhere. Most have many! I feel like all I do is iterate over arrays and remove things from them, and yet, this is one of those questions that over 95% of people don't get. It boggles my mind.
I certainly am not complaining about Unreal. The amount of resources needed to create and maintain such beast is quite high, so the chances of having something similar being open source are minimal. I'm fine with that license. It's already more open that a lot of the stuff out there.

Sure I wish we had Linux-like software for everything.
Norsk politi driver mobilovervåking i strid med loven
I would be really interested in seeing this data for neighborhoods. Which neighborhoods are undervalued for the area, or which are trending upward in terms of income.

I tried to do this a bit when I was house shopping, find a bargain in a mediocre neighborhood that is improving in terms of crime and income. I didn't find any great data sources besides the Cenus, and that was only really useful going back two surveys.
Who says simple things always yield simple results?
The new nuclear age