skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are probably right. Simply throwing money at the problem and obtaining money to throw in the first place might not be working.

One has to come up with a business model that is sustainable while providing free internet access. Sort of like Zenefits (http://www.zenefits.com) gives away their SaaS HR platform for free and makes money through insurance brokering.
If you want to read the full book, or any other original sources on European martial arts, there is a well known wiki where to find them all:

http://wiktenauer.com/
I think StackExchange's "reputation" system is probably the most accurate discrete measure available

I would be very hesitant to rely on any metrics coming out of SE. Consider their great programming survey this year, they say the average age of a programmer is 29. The US Department of Labor says it's 49.

There are a vast number of people out there, well over 90% of the programming industry I'll wager, who come into work at 9am, do good, solid work all day, on applications that run the real world, then go home at 5pm and get on with their lives, who never interact with SE et al at all.
There are different areas of skill.

Some people can refactor a messy chunk of code into something more organized. Some can create a rough sketch of a large system that is well-organized and loosely-coupled, others can optimize an algorithm for efficiency.

Some can write code that is easy to read and understand. And some can write code that is extremely abstract and expressive.

It's rare to find all of these skills in one person. Depending on the project goal, some of the above are crucial and some are nice to have.

All of the above can be learned, and for some experience is the best teacher, while for others a CS background helps a lot.
The hills of Nepal are crying but why aren't we listening?
There are a variety of sources of lithium wear, cherry picking the most attractive is just disingenious.

The results of an Idaho National Laboratory study released in March found that the test LEAFs lost 22-26% of their initial capacity after just 40,000 miles.

http://www.torquenews.com/2250/how-long-will-electric-vehicl...

Real world wear is pretty bad, especially in places with hot summers, which is most of the US.
Indeed, I hope you feel overwhelmed by the sort of guilt that only purchasing a subscription can dispel. Inspiring such feelings was my motivation for posting the link in the first place :)

(I'm the lead editor of LWN.net).
Why not he release Microsoft products for free! Instead of doing like US govt (Killing people on one side and doing charity on another side), he could do something best he could do in his field.
I like the end result. However, it makes me wonder just why it's so acceptable that simple programs like this even compile down to a 160KB executable in the first place.

The actual active code is essentially some text and an interrupt. That much, at least, should be language independent. Are modern compilers incapable of discarding unreferenced code, or am I missing something?
The British Election Pits Newspapers Against the Web
The 10 Challenges of Securing IoT Communication
There are situations where CSV is the appropriate solution. Our applications read and write CSV data at 1-1.5 million cells per second, and the process can be scaled out at will (there is no central data server, all data is stored on Azure Blob Storage).

I'm not sure we could afford the skills and software to achieve these speeds with SQL.
But, to look at one example: neural networks. Neural networks may have been inspired by attempts to recreate the structure of the biological nervous system, but the way in which they are used commonly, e.g. "learning" via back-propagation, is really just a statistical regression for a gigantic equation with many free variables.

My preferred term is "predictive analytics," which I feel kind of straddles statistics and machine learning, and also serves as a nod to a common difference -- "statistical" methods often yield understanding, while "machine learning" methods are often opaque to human insight but yield predictions.
There's certainly a use for automatic transmission (on motorways or on heavy traffic roads for example) but in most other situations I'd rather have manual over it.

Tesla cars do not have 'manual' or 'automatic' transmission as commonly understood. There is no 'gearbox' at all because it is not necessary. The electric engine drives the wheels directly. For slower speeds, it just uses less power.
>The economies of scale apply here

You honestly think mega manufacturers like Panasonic don't have the proper scale for lithium-ion? I'm not denying Elon can cut costs by uber-specializing and cutting out middle-men, but we're looking at maybe 5% or even 10% or so, not 70-80%. Which is what you need to be comparable to ICE cars.

Heck, panasonic is literally making the batteries INSIDE HIS FACTORY. So don't expect big cuts:

"According to the agreement, Tesla will prepare, provide and manage the land, buildings and utilities. Panasonic will manufacture and supply cylindrical lithium-ion cells and invest in the associated equipment, machinery, and other manufacturing tools based on their mutual approval."

http://www.teslamotors.com/en_AU/blog/panasonic-and-tesla-si...
I am well aware that there is a considerable range of ability among those who program professionally, but it never occurred to me to think of the distribution as being bimodal. I have also noticed a preference among programmers (or rather, more likely, a vocal minority) for reducing all issues to simplistic dichotomies (e.g. the methodology wars.) Perhaps this is just another straw man, distracting from the real issues of how to raise levels of performance incrementally and generally?
I'm not familiar with taxation in Germany. How are taxes on electricity and on gasoline? Maybe without taxes the costs are not too different, and taxes could be shifted from gas to electricity if gas cars usage plummets (they have to get taxes from something...)
I think you should reread the article. It was mostly tackled the distribution of programming skill.
Remembering Dave Goldberg…Truthfully
I think there is a matter of degrees and a matter of return on marginal "talent" for lack of a better word. Being a concert pianist (or Lady Gaga or Floyd MayWeather) is competitive in such a way that the return on being the 1-in-a-thousand is way better than 1-in-ten. Way better.

Most things are not like that. In fact very few programmers even pursue that. Most science is not even like that. If you are a zoologist studying marsupial reproduction, you are not in a winner take all contest, you are in a 'do thew job' situation. You don't have thousands of eager marsupial reproduction researchers biting at your heels. There are plenty of marsupials to go around.

Most things are like this. Even pianists once needed to attain an achievable level of mastery in order to be pianists professionally and entertain aristocrats before the invention of the Zune. The availability of aristocrats did fluctuate and so did (I imagine) their interest in music, but it's not the same as trying to be the best pianist on earth.

The realistic version of this is that output, especially creative output varies by person. Also throughout ones life, by context (is this fun for me today?) and lots of other ways.

Some kids hat math. Some of them wouldn't if the teacher or method was different. Most can do pretty well.
Samsung has solved this with their Smart Remote [1] which is a kind of hybrid between a normal remote and a mouse.

I've only tried it in passing, but it's definitely a big step up from the standard remote.

1: http://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-smart-remote-hands-on-with-...
A 10x programmer is one who teaches the rest of the team all of his skills, not one who is necessarily better than everyone else.
It's not just speed. It's everything. They're not just faster -- their code is cleaner, faster, more elegant, and better according to most metrics you could think up.
Actually, it's the former: 7.5% of energy. It's 15% of electricity.
No, it is not just a matter of flavours. It's a deeply ingrained and institutionalised bias that happens all around the world. You see it in Mexico, in India, in France, in China, in Nigeria: white is pretty. Sweden and Norway are widely regarded as the ultimate in beauty.

I wish I knew why this happened and how to fix it. It's a giant problem that should not exist.
From his following tweets:

I’m leaving @nytgraphics to work full-time on visualization tools!
I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to work with such amazing people on important (and sometimes silly) topics. I will miss you.
Why? It’s hard to go beyond incremental maintenance of open-source projects while publishing on deadline. Long thoughts take time.
And there’s still lots of room for improvement in visualization tools, particularly for discovery. Need less arcana, better interaction.
Don’t have the answer yet, but it’s what I want to focus on. So, here I go. Adventure!

I am excited for the next revolution!
This school looks like a terrifying extension of Snow Crash's "living-in-a-storage-container" lifestyle, combined with training on how to be a perfect worker drone for the new tech/service-based economy (they're even teaching the kids to clock in and out!).

If this is where private/public school is headed, I'll stick to homeschooling/unschooling my kids, thanks.
I may be being overly cynical, but given the blog is dedicated to showing how high technology solutions cannot work and has articles about PV generation leading with the claim that solar can be often worse than coal, before you drill down and realise that they are not talking about generation, but have segued into running the figures on what happens when they are glued to the casings of laptops and mobile phones ( http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/03/the-ugly-side-o.html ), I think they are trying to find numbers to back an established view, rather than adjusting the viewpoint to the numbers.

---

edit - Actually, to be honest, I do not think in this case I am being overly cynical. The article I linked to, titled "The ugly side of solar panels" starts with:

"New research shows, albeit unintentional, that generating electricity with solar panels can also be a very bad idea. In some cases, producing electricity by solar panels releases more greenhouse gases than producing electricity by gas or even coal."

This claim is then not really addressed till right at the end of the article, where we find the following:

"For rooftop and ground-base installations, the eco-friendliness can be good or doubtful, depending on the solar insolation and the life expectancy. But if we consider solar panels mounted on gadgets like laptops or mobile phones, solar energy becomes a plainly bad idea.

If we take a life expectancy of 3 years (already quite optimistic for most gadgets) and a solar insolation of 900 kWh/m² (quite optimistic too, since these things are not lying on a roof), the result is 1,038 gram CO2 per kWh in the worst case scenario (high-efficient mono-crystalline cells produced in the US). That means that it is better for the environment to power a gadget with electricity generated by coal, rather than by a solar panel."

So, if you buy a laptop or mobile with a solar panel on it and then throw it away after three years, then it is worse than coal.

Which is obviously a completely rational point to make on the subject, given all those masses of mobile phones and laptops sold everywhere with solar panels on them.

Then it gets even better:

"All this does not mean that PV solar energy should not be promoted. For one thing, it’s much better using silicon wafers to make energy generating equipment instead of energy guzzling equipment (like computers, mobile phones and car electronics)."

And by this point I am not sure if this is satire, or if the author thinks their website is hosted on a steam powered abacus.
Dumb 'Smart' Gadgets: The Bubble Is Set to Burst
This does not appear to the case in PHP 5.6, even for most strings with '==' gotchas:

<?php
if ('0e24') echo 'true'; else echo 'false';

outputs:
true

As far as I know the only strings that fail an if check are "" and "0". (Which is still a pitfall, but not one you'd hit with an MD5 hash)
Burger King did it a decade ago, then wound up doing a complete 180 and now they serve some of the crappiest fast food out there. Maybe there isn't a lot of money in serving better than average fast food to everyone.

McDonald's could regionalize their menu in the US but I don't see them doing that to serve more discerning customers.
FCC Website Spam
In a REPL environment, for a 1GB file, this can be the difference between "wait three seconds" and "let me get my coffee".
Police use GPS to foil credit card skimmers at the pump
Apologies on possible tone misunderstanding. I did not mean that point one was bad or at all incorrect. Just stating my follow on point that there is open research as to how something like that came to be.

More, I think something like this can not really be attacked at the point where we are looking at people being hired for a job. The causes for a bimodal distribution in ability will likely stem much farther back than that and will have to be addressed as such.

Consider the mythical patient that says it hurts to bend their knee. First, yeah, stop bending your knee in a way that hurts it. Second, lets find out why you can't bend your knee that way.
The Model X is a luxury SUV. ("Estate," in the british isles.) The next model is supposed to be the "Model 3." They can't use Model E, because Ford still has that trademarked or something along those lines. Otherwise, they could have models S, E, and X.
Show HN: Color drop animation
(FYI, you can skip the paywall and read the entire article by clicking from the WSJ Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/wsj/posts/10153356713378128 )
I find this idea that there are lots of fake programmers kind of nuts.

Presumably, when you do a resume sift, you look for people with either a qualification or work experience. Either they somehow faked it through those, or your test is bad. Fizzbuzz actually tests if you know what % does. Is that critical knowledge for a webdev?
Most people can't draft a portrait in an interview for a programming job. Most people interviewed as portrait artists would, as would quite a lot of people in related trades (such as graphic designers).

The fact that programming interviewers give this kind of test and it's widely failed shows what a bad state objective evaluation of programmers is in.
Very good point. A transaction involving a user's money carries a great deal more weight in terms of reliability, accuracy, etc.

That said, the resource difference between these two companies is considerably large, and the tech in question (e-commerce) is not exactly an area of unknown innovation. From a technical standpoint, that's sufficiently a solved problem.
>You have to do a complete change of the engine lubricant how often?

Usually not very often. I only need to do it once every 10,000 miles. There is a widely held myth that you must do it more often but its just that - a myth. Modern cars can go very long time without an oil change, check the owner's manual for your car to know how long.

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4209/is-it-neces...
Now, let's take this a big step further, and try to see how ridiculously outmoded, destructive and dangerous the entire setup of using cars for routine personal transportation really is..
Crazy Things That Women Put Up with When Dealing with Men
For me, StackExchange's 'reputation' is inversely correlated with that.

Don't want to attack the contributors, but honestly, the higher levels of reputation just either show me that he either has too much free time outside of work (valid, but doubtful) or they spend work time answering questions, which for me goes against the 10x productivity programmer mantra.
Interestingly, no matter how rich your family is, you're still worse off in the West.
Not quite... when I run into an issue with my Linux machine, I can trace the code all the way down to the kernel.

When I run into a problem with my Windows machine, I have to resort to random searches and hoping that someone else has seen it.
VMWare's biggest competitor was itself and it's EMC linkage. IMO, moving towards IaaS t-shirt sized VMs makes it easier to architect around high cost stuff in the datacenter, like SAN.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smug_Alert!
I pretty much always drive with the radio off. My car is a 3L diesel. Purists might scoff, but I've always liked the noise it makes. I was sold pretty much instantly on the test drive and four years later I still love it. Once you're on the move, it's very relaxing, like an ambient music track, with a cheeky whirring noise in the background that becomes more evident when it gets going.

When you're sat stationary with the engine idling, the gear knob and foot pedals shudder, and there's a slight juddering through the steering wheel. Some might think of this as unrefined, and possibly even agricultural, but I find it actually quite comforting. At such low revs the engine also sounds rather clattery... but I don't mind. At least you know it's still there.

(I had a courtesy car a couple of years ago with an engine that was undetectable while idling - and I ended up not liking it! It was so nice to have my car back, with its reassurring vibrations and its clattery engine sound. People are weird.

(But maybe if I'd have been given a Tesla, with its panoply of toys and its space shuttle-style acceleration, I'd have got over it.)
Inline::Perl5 is just some glue to communicate to a Perl 5 interpreter from Perl 6. It's a simple form of inter-process communication between Perl 5 and 6. It's not that you can continue writing your Perl 5 program/library in Perl 6.

This approach is not only really bad for performance, it's also very limited. For example, you can't just share data between both interpreters, however you can send some basic datatypes from one to the other.

This has been done for other languages as well, for example, check Inline::Python [1]. It's an interesting thing, but not very useful for production.

[1] http://search.cpan.org/~nine/Inline-Python-0.49/Python.pod
Who are smartwatches like the Apple Watch and Android Wear really for?
The legal complications around malpractice and malpractice insurance are unfortunate, but they only reinforce the already perverse financial incentives that doctors have for ordering more tests and procedures.

The theme for the article was that doctors need to slow down and spend more time listening to patients. If anything that should reduce the legal risks of inadequate or inappropriate care.
Under Internet.org, none of us activists would have that voice anyway. It's a carefully curated walled garden, not the internet. It doesn't include YouTube, email, or any videos at all.

We are agitating to ensure everyone else gets the full internet, not just Facebook. It's not that hard. The government already collects 5% of all telco revenues for a "universal service obligation fund" and has not spent it. The money sitting in that account alone could give everyone internet access.
> But I think if you gave the average unconnected Indian a choice between no internet on ideological principles, and free internet, but restricted to Facebook and a few other services, they would choose connectivity any day of the week

Sure they would. Does that mean it is good for the ecosystem on the whole? No.

80% of internet.org users are users with existing data plans. How hard do you think it is to get someone switch over from free to paid? Even for a person of privilege, he will prefer a free meal over a paid meal unless there is a huge difference in quality of a free meal (e.g. bread) vs. paid plan (e.g. steak). Considering that only well capitalised companies can provide free meals, you have just made the uphill battle that startups everyday fight against BigCos into a vertical slope.

It doesn't have to be like this. The Delhi Government is going to soon roll out a free neutral Internet covering large parts of the city. There are many models of free Internet implemented all over the world.

We'll get connectivity to the millions, but it won't be on Facebook terms - it'll be on the terms as decided by a democratically elected nation.
honest question: what on earth are people ordering at mcdonald's that comes to >$8? For one person?
That's a good question. We're already playing that game a bit. Virginia, for example, introduced an extra registration tax on hybrid and electric vehicles, with the rationale that they're not paying their fair share of road maintenance from fuel taxes. It was subsequently repealed under the theory that the benefit from not polluting so much outweighs the tax losses.

My random guess is that we'll go to plain old mileage reporting. Fuel taxes for road maintenance may have made sense a long time ago, but fuel use and road wear are fairly weakly correlated now even among gasoline cars, since efficiency can vary so much now.
David Goldberg Died in Mexico, Exercising During Vacation
So you would literally go to these people and tell them they are going to continue to not have any way of communicating with one another or others throughout the world because what they're being offered isn't the "real" Internet?

You would tell them they must continue to live isolated from one another and the rest of the world? You'd deny them access to the single greatest invention humanity has ever come up with because it doesn't fit your ideology?
Real world facts:

The results of an Idaho National Laboratory study released in March found that the test LEAFs lost 22-26% of their initial capacity after just 40,000 miles.

http://www.torquenews.com/2250/how-long-will-electric-vehicl...

Frankly, I'm burned out by the bullshit EV enthusiasts push out on these forums. EVs suck now and there's nothing on the horizon to say otherwise. Tesla is losing money hand over foot and no one is buying EVs. Sorry guys, time to call a spade a spade here. Building our non-ICE dreams on Lithium-Ion just doesn't make sense. We need a better fuel/storage source to compete with ICE.

I like how I have to provide sources yet the people making EXTRAORDINARY claims like "omg affordable EVs will be here in 12-24 months" are never, ever called out on their bullshit. Its been 12-24 months out for years. The sad fact that I provide real proof and skepticism leads to -5 downvotes shows you how immature and silly HN forums on are many hot topic issues, which EV seems to be here.

edit: to the guy below me who wrote ""EVs suck now" not even close. Full disclosure: I own a Model S. It is the envy of everyone I show it to."

Yeah, $100,000 cars tend to be impressive, but why am I paying for YOUR car via increasing my tax load? Take away the tax breaks and lets see Elon try to compete.
One can say, with absolute and unwavering certainty based on what we know about practice, that folks who spend every waking hour thinking about and learning about some specific skill will tend to display a higher level of competence than those who don't.

Obviously there will be folks who practice incorrectly, and there will be folks who hit a skill ceiling, and there will be a myriad of folks who aren't maximally benefitting from their practice for one reason or another, but if you take a group of people who study and pit them against a group of people who do not study, the group who studies will be more proficient at the given task.
> 99% of the software that actually matters - medical devices, air traffic control, credit card processing, phone switches, you name it - is written by people who work 9-5 and don't think about their jobs outside work.

I don't believe that, you have some evidence for this claim?