skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I teach a programming elective course to middle school students (12-14 years old); We meet three days per week for about an hour each day. Over the course of nine weeks the students come up with a the concept of a simple game, and implement it from scratch in python.
Most of the students have never programmed before, although some have created incredibly complex machinations in Minecraft or other creative building games.
I try to approach the course as not an introduction to programming but as an introduction to the idea that computers can be more than just consumption devices.
There are usually around 6 students in the class (with a much longer wait-list) and invariably there is at least one student who doesn't want to write code. So I try to aim them at designing the game assets (images, music) or coming up with _how_ the game should be played at a high level.

I am not a teacher by education. I do contract development work and have my own bootstrapped start up. I teach because when I look back at my own education, I wish that I had had an opportunity to get away from the mindless drudgery of being "taught to a test." I also teach because I am terrified of a world in which computers (and other electronics) are only seen/used as consumption devices.

I don't think that I am perfect teacher, but I think that this is how all teachers should be; Not someone who has an academic degree in teaching, but someone who has done the actual thing that they are instructing others to do. It is time to dispel the old adage of "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach."
"I don't understand how it costs $300-500 per credit hour for the undergrad programs, except to avoid devaluing the resident offerings."

In MOOCs thousands of people are enrolled at the same time, and support is provided by the community of students. It's incredible how this phrasing sounds positive - even to me - while it basically means that support by a qualified instructor cannot be guaranteed and is unlikely to be provided.

In (good) accredited online programs - BSc or MSc - there are 10 to 20 students enrolled per course and you have direct access to the instructor who will adapt his lectures based on the audience feedbacks and specifics. This costs money and therefore has to come at a price.

If the program doesn't offer the above, or if you are a passive student who don't ask questions frequently and interact with others, then I'm with you, "why paying this price ?".

By the way, I am not saying that MOOCs are useless. Personally I see it under this perspective : the Educational System is so broken that in many cases streaming a video to thousands of people without providing them dedicated support is equivalent to the experience they get in physical classrooms.
Does anyone know if there is any code available for this paper? Would be extremely interesting to see comparisons of the EM-algorithm mentioned with regular SGD in terms of speed and precision.
Indeed, and a vast majority of early stage biotech's will simply contribute nothing. But then you get a story like Pharmasset which made any semi-early investor realize unbelievable gains in a very short period. But these stories are rare and it's pure speculation and the playing of market dynamics.

But yes, it is expensive research and although these companies have been able to find funding in the public markets due to a healthy appetite of risk for these types of things, I fear that when this obvious bubble bursts it will be very hard to find funding and a lot of research will simply run out of runway.

RNAi had a hot streak years ago and then had "dark ages" for quote a few years before it suddenly got hot again. And really the entire sector has been on fire. But I expect reality to take over soon and biotech will have some dark days ahead of it.

But for now, the casino chugs along.
Yes, but there's a reason the US government won't let me drive an M1 to work. Which is unfortunate, because I would love to. I'm just saying, let's not make inaccurate assertions about the purpose of some of our tools.
This is a good step, but I think just the increase in overly political postings vs. tech oriented content has been a major contributor to the negativity.
pg's essay on "How to disagree" (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html) also serves as a useful guideline.

grep 'u r a fag' | rm;
The Adventures of a Man Living in a Tiny Trailer
Shouldn't the third be trivial, since thread::sleep_ms takes a u32?

Still building beta, but shouldn't this work? https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/24024
Plus, changing the mileage is already quite common (at least in Europe).
Exactly. And probably one that can stay airborne for weeks or months and drop ordinance autonomously.
Again, you like to believe that the P/E is somehow a necessary relationship between the company and the stock. Its not. Its just a number you calculated.

Take baseball cards, which are almost exactly the same thing as stock certificates except we believe different things about them. You have all sorts of stats on the back. But nobody believes they control the value of the card.

That non-sequitur about TESLA predictions and the price of the stock are more of the same witchcraft. Sure I believe the stock will go up if the company is successful, but only because other people believe it too. Not because there's any cause and effect relationship other than belief.
The shape of wearables to come
you're right, Russia has only about 1K of these, with 2K being the total production run so far (ie. another half was exported)
update: resume. http://registry.jsonresume.org/crisberrios/
Even the language we use to talk about arithmetic, algebra, and calculus had to--at one time--be agreed to and standardized, so that mathematicians could have a common ground on which to speak to each other about their ideas and how they reached them.

The program is not just "a tool". It's your proof. You may have written a proof in the paper, but that was just a practice run. It's the one you wrote in the code that is the real proof, because there is little garaunteeing that seasoned software developers write code that matches the spec, say nothing about" amateur" programmers in the sciences.

Now, that does not preclude innovation. People still invent new mathematical notation systems. It's usually with the express purpose of solving problems that can't easily or at all be stolved in current systems. It is the bleeding edge of the science of math. But physicists are still expected to use the math their colleagues will understand, or spend a lot of time explaining their new system (QM anyone?).

There is, of course, the issue that math is significantly less rigorous and specific than code. Math doesn't compile and doesn't run. Or rather, it gets compiled and ran by people. Part of avoiding new, arbitrary notations is so that your work is accessible for verification. That gives running code, especially coffee with a comprehensive set of unit tests, a distinct advantage over math. But that doesn't obviate the bed for verification.

If you are using any nontrivial piece of custom software in your science, it needs to be scrutinized just as much as the rest of the math in your paper--if not more so, since it does the actual work.

The first reviewer is almost certainly right. If they can't understand your code, then they aren't the equivalent of lay-users complaining about open source software. First of all, it is still an issue of much debate whether or not releasing source code to user's for software products is necessary. If you are writing code for your science, you have an absolute duty to open source that code (even if in a non-extendable way, we still need to see the code). You wouldn't make a claim without providing the math. And you wouldn't provide math other people couldn't understand, arguing "some math is better than no math".

I don't think that standard should be R, or that it necessarily has to always be the same thing. It can adapt over time. But until you manage to release a few papers on how Julia improves over R, in explicit detail... "when in Rome, do as the Romans."
Maybe high taxes on land area would encourage densification if they were sufficiently high, but I suspect the prices necessary would cause problems in other areas. Like taking arable land out of agriculture because the land is taxed at the same level as a dense urban business district. If the land taxes are high enough to discourage suburban housing versus urban housing formats, the farms would be taxed at the same rate, which would be ruinous.

The problem with a flat tax on land is that it provides no incentive to allocate land to the most productive uses. A flat land tax sufficient to encourage low-density suburban areas to convert to medium-density urban areas might still be low enough to permit vacant lots in high-density areas.
font-family: menlo;

Come on, seriously? Nice non-monospaced font for every single person not running a mac. Even just this would be better:

font-family: menlo, monospace;
There are countless ways you could bypass that and now we're talking about a type of DRM...and DRMs never work.

Plus, the idea of a car needing a net connection to operate is a non-starter (excuse the pun).
The best easter egg hunts aren’t downloaded
I would say instead that "own" is a diluted term. Most of the qualifications that apply to it are mostly the result of legal wrangling and the ambiguous property nature of information vs. physical items.
Actual, much less objectionable quote;

The Internet is a dangerous place for law-abiding citizens,
but because it’s open it’s a forum where criminals can get
at people and steal their identities or pass counterfeit
currency.

The internet has clearly made ID theft and wide distribution of counterfeit money easier..
Hey Dave. Thank you :)
Monument Valley was released one year ago today
From my own experience,

1) The market is quiet; that does not mean you cannot get a job. It just means there are not as many jobs posted.

Fortunately if you are good at cold calling and selling yourself you can still get a job in this market. It just takes a lot more work and networking.

2) The anti-telecommute sentiment is real so when your networking (or cold calling) you will get brush off. This is usually where I try and sell myself and my skillset to make them think twice. You might not get it still but we need to make them think.

3) Networking / Networking / Networking. It's very unfortunate but if you want to pay your rent on time (joking) then you must.

I would say don't forget wfh.io and other job sites but lately they are not worth the time (at this time).
I may just be very slow right now (it's late, a holiday, and I had too much to eat), but who, besides Google, are you referring to?
This is really friggin cool. It's all done in coffeescript on codepen.
Also, many R packages end up being written in cpp.
I made a little voxel game earlier. Faar from as good as voxatron but it was just a learning game. Http://voxlords.webgl.nu
At the risk of sounding inflammatory... I would be willing to believe that purely functional languages are the "one true way" if there were even the slightest bit of empirical evidence to support it. But where are all the successful large scale projects built with Haskell (or Clojure or whatever)?

The biggest FP project I was aware of was Twitter using Scala and they ended up completely backing away from it. Yikes.

The only other popular site that springs to mind is Hacker News, and frankly, it sucks. It's practically the Hello World of discussion forums.

The truth is, at the end of the day almost everything is being built with Java, Python, Ruby, or JavaScript. Can you really blame the product owners for being wary of writing their whole product in a functional language?
Yes, your point of making it unnecessary is really important. When you see patterns, etc. for the first time, it gets very tempting to over engineer stuff.
Which kinda violates the principles expressed by the writers of said open source project, but I'm all for it on the basis that if I never again have to use base reshape, stack or gsub then it would be a good thing.

I believe An Introduction to R specifically notes that one should use other software to provide R with appropriate data.
Ahhh, so this was one of those last-hour changes, specifically so this works out, iirc. sleep will take a Duration, sleep_ms takes a u32. Anyway, let's keep talking in-ticket.
You can do fixed delivery, variable features or fixed features, variable delivery. It doesn't matter which, the point is just to acknowledge that you can't fix both so you better understand which is more important to you.

That said, it's perfectly reasonable for customers to expect to have some promise about what they're paying for. That's where you trot out the idea of a minimum viable product: Make some tough decisions about what features are actually required, and then agree to a timeline that makes it a virtual certainty that you'll be able to deliver all of the required ones. When you hit that mark ahead of schedule and start burning through the list of nice-to-haves they'll be elated.
Show HN: React component for blurred backgrounds
I think some examples might be helpful. I would consider a gratuitously negative comment to be some variation of "That's a dumb idea" with no elaboration, or an ad hominem, and such comments are pretty much always downvoted already.
Lisp Machines did not run Lisp 'directly'. Lisp code was either running interpreted or usually compiled to machine code.

This is an example from a Symbolics Lisp Machine with an Ivory CPU.

(defun example-count (predicate list)
(let ((count 0))
(dolist (i list count)
(when (funcall predicate i)
(incf count)))))

The disassembled machine code for above function (for the Ivory microprocessor from Symbolics):

Command: (disassemble (compile #'example-count))

0 ENTRY: 2 REQUIRED, 0 OPTIONAL ;Creating PREDICATE and LIST
2 PUSH 0 ;Creating COUNT
3 PUSH FP|3 ;LIST
4 PUSH NIL ;Creating I
5 BRANCH 15
6 SET-TO-CDR-PUSH-CAR FP|5
7 SET-SP-TO-ADDRESS-SAVE-TOS SP|-1
10 START-CALL FP|2 ;PREDICATE
11 PUSH FP|6 ;I
12 FINISH-CALL-1-VALUE
13 BRANCH-FALSE 15
14 INCREMENT FP|4 ;COUNT
15 ENDP FP|5
16 BRANCH-FALSE 6
17 SET-SP-TO-ADDRESS SP|-2
20 RETURN-SINGLE-STACK

This machine also had C, Pascal, Fortran, Ada and Prolog compilers.
As much as Cuba's economy is nothing to aspire to, the WWF says that they're the only country on earth that has undergone sustainable development. That is, the have the 2nd highest HDI in Latin America and they've managed to achieve it with a sustainable ecological footprint. Of course, this doesn't outweigh the fact that people on the island have very little freedom, but it does say something about the power of central planning in developing economies that don't destroy the planet.

http://assets.panda.org/downloads/living_planet_report.pdf
If it was really a fear of being sued, wouldn't they push for laws that explicitly eliminate liability when such modifications are made, rather than making modifications illegal in the first place?
Isn't downvoting gratuitous negativity?

And who determines what is and isn't negative? And isn't this question shallow cynicism?

And isn't that policy shallow cynicism for thinking people can't control their own negativity?
This is a horrible idea.
The Panglossianism that will result from this is indicative of the bubble hype which will destroy Silicon Valley, Y-Combinator and Hacker News.
In fact, this is the worst idea I ever heard in my life.

So continues the descent of HN...
This just totally completely sucks!!
One of the most negative habits is in my opinion the failure to read a comment charitably (to make an effort to interpret it in the best possible light). Instead, people often tend to misread or miserunderstand what's being said, only to use the opportunity to write a "correction" based on that false impression. A worse flavor of the same problem is a misunderstanding that is then used to justify outrage or personal annoyance.

That's what I find worthy of being changed, and I will certainly make an effort to read comments more charitably as well.

Overall though, and I realize this is quite anecdotal, rampant negativity - especially about things other members of the community have created - seems to have gotten less common recently.
Isn't that the point - knowledge?
Great change.

I second the request for examples -- "gratuitous" is subjective, and until better moderation tools exist, it would be nice if the community has some standards around who to issue "gentle reminders" to.

It would also be nice to have the guidelines be in a more prominent spot than the bottom of the page -- it's hard to notice them as is.
Exactly. I would help me a lot to understand what they are aiming for, especially because I'm not a native English speaker.
> If you're doing science and you want people to understand your code, you use Python, not R.

Wouldn't that depend on which language "people" know?

> Its the PHP of Data Science.

Some might disagree with that statement. Some might even argue that languages where for loops are idiomatic and strongly promoted by the BDFL are the PHP of Data Science.
This sucks, just trying to pretend everything is wine and roses and everyone is happy, happy, happy all the time.

Couldn't help it.
> You are arguing that syntax equals mobility which is incorrect

No, I'm saying that the knowledge of the concepts of map and filter (as an example) is easily transferable even if syntax isn't. Once you understand those concepts, you can go look up the Ruby/Haskell/whatever syntax and you can reuse your new knowledge of higher order functions, and maybe learn about transducers, or maybe you can go look into point-free style, and the testability benefits of pure functions vs procedural style, etc, etc, etc. Not to mention that by knowing `.map`, you already know a great deal about the template languages for React, Mithril and Mercury.

In contrast, say I've learned about pipe operator precedence in ng-repeat expression clauses. Now I know I can write `x in (foo = (bar | filter: baz))` to memoize a filtered list for use later in that template. But only in Angular template expressions. But not in Javascript. Or Ruby. Or Haskell. And it's a terrible idiom to use in Angular anyways because [insert long rant about a bunch of unrelated topics].

Aside from the knowledge that operators can be recursively composed into god-awful expressions, what part of all that is useful if I migrate to Ember?

Or, say I learn about directives, and transclusion and the ngModel attribute micro language, and $compile and priority and the ngModelController API and ...

These are most certainly not syntax-related concepts. What does learning that get me?
In all the negativity of the article, you could easily miss the fact that Cuba has higher life expectancy than all the countries you mention except Chile, and lower violent crime rates by far, universal health care, and universal education.

They also have suffered 50 years of a trade embargo by their main natural customer (they were a huge Sugar exporter to the United States before we cut them off).
The 2 currency system is a mess. The fact that Cuba is abandoning it after 20 years of failure should serve as a warning to the Greek leftists who want SYRIZA to leave the Euro and adopt a 2 currency system.
It's interesting how they list targets that have "practically become a convention", yet they're missing "all".

I'm also intrigued by their claim they used @ in the recipes, yet they never did.
Consider the possibility that DNT does more harm than good:

1) Since it's not default, it makes browsers more unique and thus more trackable.

2) It gives many (perhaps even most?) non-technical users a false sense of security, making them less likely to take more effective measures.

Weighed against what miniscule good DNT might do (I think it does next to none), these two reasons alone make DNT harmful.
It seems that people lost because they were either speculating blindly or had an algorithm that was working poorly. I don't see reason for these algorithms to be outlawed.
Not to operate (I'd never purpose such a travesty) but it could work sort of like carfax. Go to buy a used car, Oh it's never been synced with the cloud in its 3 years of existence? I find that rather suspect. Knock off a couple grand.
Managing your psychology as an indie dev
it is much easier to look at an after market part and determine if it was cause of the failure because it is a physical object. Software and the state and sequence of events are much harder to look at and conclusively say "yes, this was the culprit".

It's hard for me to pick a side here. I want that freedom, but the auto makers have a compelling reason for wanting to stop it (getting sued, warranty issues, etc). I'm 60/40 on the automaker's side.
Depends on how broadly you interpret "etc." For example, iPads are not legal to jailbreak. Also, while jailbreaking an iPhone is legal, performing a carrier unlock without the carrier's permission is illegal. (This is all for the US. Other jurisdictions may and certainly do vary.)
I don't think negativity is intrinsicly bad or harmful.

Obviously there's a line where a comment becomes predominantly mean.

The only concern I have is that one day it takes too much cognitive overhead to post an insightful comment that happens to be negative.
Great to see this. Fortunately those sorts of comments usually get downvoted here. Also this is one reason I stopped following so much of the developer community on Twitter. So much of it is full of snark and piling on others mistakes for a quick retweet.
It's not just a good idea for HN. It's a good practice to apply in one's everyday life, generally.
I think the downvote functionality is holding back the utility of HN more than anything else. It is grossly overused and very rarely for guidelines violations like it was designed for. Most people use to show they disagree with a comment. It's an awful experience and is the main fuel in a negative feedback loop that travels with users from thread to thread.
That's OK, disagreeing with the hivemind (critiques of Google come to mind) gets you downvoted into oblivion anyways.
Feels like the conflict of interest of a general news forum being run by an investment firm with PR interests is beginning to rear its ugly head.
Senator Feinstein Says We Should Censor the Internet
Not to sound overly cynical, but this looks like another "naive reporter discovers how the sausage is made" story. It's always good to get some perspective on these things, but to this forum it doesn't seem like it will be a revelation. Tech manufacturing is an enormous and enormously dirty industry. We're all complicit, of course.

Separately, I'm not sure I like his usage of "dystopian."
Bulletproof Offshore Hosting and Servers
Does this story tell us more about R as a standard, or more about the refereeing process? I've dealt with referees for a long time and I'd have to go with the latter. This is to me yet another case of a referee viewing his/her preferences as the only correct way to do things.
Just a word on safety - if you hit something, that heavy object in your passenger seat might actually kill you flying unrestricted around the cabin. All items in the car should be positioned in such a way that they don't turn into flying bricks upon collision.
The Effects of Backtest Overfitting on Out-of-Sample Performance (2014)
Here's a few examples I know of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015734

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8938409
I suppose adding the guideline can't hurt, because it might at least make people more strongly consider their comments before posting them. Unfortunately, reasonable people can disagree about where the threshold is between appropriate skepticism/criticism and gratuitous negativity. Since "gratuitous" means unjustified or inappropriate, it by definition should be avoided. The trick is figuring out which things are inappropriate. Hopefully most of you judge this comment to be on the good side of the fence. :)
Is this the new Rick Rolling?
Its appropriate to use a marketing term, since it is political marketing.