jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
The real problem is that Common Core tried to do several things in order to improve rankings against countries like South Korea. But instead of doing the things which high ranking countries have shown do actually produce high-level results, they put together an almost completely untested curriculum, then rolled out it out everywhere.

There's not really any evidence that the approach in Common Core will improve student's math achievement scores, and lots of evidence that it's been an abysmal failure. Instead of confused students ignoring the subject, we now have confused, frustrated, miserable students, a generation of which will now hate mathematics more than the one that came before them. The only thing CC has achieved is in alienating an entire generation of students from the critical skills of math.

The article makes the argument that the absurdity of the implementation of CC is a result of local standards overriding a national, well thought out program and that the CC creators are powerless to fix things. I call hogwash. Set up a textbook certification program: publishers have to pay some nominal fee to these guys to review the book and give it a seal of approval that "yes, this book fulfills what Common Core intends". Use that seal as a quality signal, books without the seal should be considered next to garbage and books with it are assumed to be better.

They should also have written their own reference K-12 curriculum, providing a gold-standard example of what it should look like. Publishers can license that curriculum and publish it unmodified or they can license it and add (but not subtract) chapters to handle local requirements.

That these things weren't done, on what's supposed to be a national educational reform that was "a lot of work" boggles the mind.

It reminds me of various specification-by-committee standards that are all over the tech world. They're laid out in document somewhere, with no reference implementation and no certification that some other implementation really is compliant and we end up with a decade of lost time while every developer tries desperately to get their image to line up just right in half a dozen different browser rendering engines, or get their query to work right in a dozen different SQL standard databases to work the same.
I still fail to comprehend why people celebrate that the Eath has made X rotations and then at a new cyclus (say a year) they all of a sudden whish the best to other people, make plans for the new cyclus and even stay awake deep into the night to celebrate it.
The Android Team needs to aim pass the IPhone UX if they plan to win. The Android platform needs to tighten their controls around the UI a little bit more. The very least they can do is make it so that when people look at a smart phone/device, they instantly recognize it as an Android powered device. I think that will help the brand a little bit.
UI redesign will most certainly take place on the homescreen, the launcher, the dialer, etc. In other words: in it's own seperate applications, this wouldn't conflict somewhere because it's done quite frequently.
Android is themeable quite nicely, so even changing the standard dialogs from one style to another _should_ work.
My own concern here is that some developers probably have written their own UI code and some custom hacks. But we'll see about that.
I really like how you can add a password in a non-intrusive way. I mean, it doesn't force you to use it but when you need it, it's really easy to add one :)

And by the way, when I want to save things for myself, I hacked a little snippet:

my-ip/whatever-category-1/category-2/whatever i wanna save
-> And it saves it. I can then access it on my-ip : )
I've been wondering for awhile if the JVM really has a lot of runway left; Java 7 has been amazingly slow in coming, and it'll be at least six months, and more likely a year, before even the early adopters can really use it in production.

Startup time is a very real problem, as is memory use compared to other, similar VMs (V8, LLVM).

With closures (lambda expressions), Java will be a lot more useful, but my money is honestly on V8 and JavaScript at this point. It's moving faster, and the node.js guys are very right that JavaScript is the language of the web.
I am not a druggie?
One of the two lights is always red (I hope!) so they won't be going that fast.
I can't count how many times I have heard different variations of "Don't expect to have any say over how the Internet works if you can't code..."

...Do you know what white light is? White light is an infinite whole made up of different wavelengths of energy...

Oh dear, she seems to have mixed up whats on the internet with how that stuff gets there. How embarrassing.

It would make each human a narrow frequency that can be tuned into, a transistor, if you will

Umm, no, I won't.
This is underwater remember - the weight thing is a solved issue, just include flotation along its length and its effective weight is as low as you care to make it.

There are few strong currents in the Gulf - it is a source for the Gulf Stream, but internal currents are fairly weak compared with those dealt with regularly in the oceans.
> I think there are far less risky ways to generate energy that could benefit from a sudden infusion of interest.

That's nice, but how about some evidence. After all, you're wanting to spend a lot of money.

> I do not agree that there is any way to put a price on the existence of an entire species -- which was your original statement -- and I doubt that you are going to convince me otherwise.

You're missing the point. It doesn't matter whether you agree with the statement, your actions "put a price" on the existence many species. You may not want that to be true, but it is.

As a result, the question really is "What is the price?", not "Do you want to put a price on it?"
Oil industry's had a few successes, notably a boatload of tax exemptions and subsidies that were started under the Bush administration.

Given that everyone's talking about the deficit right now, you'd think those would be on the chopping block, wouldn't you? Wonder why not.

Most of the lobbying is from people who are seeking an outsized return on their lobbying. Decisions worth billions to an industry can be influenced for mere hundreds of thousands.
Thanks. I was speaking about annual rate. BTW, a very instructional chart.

Can I rant a bit? Thanks again. It'll be about deflationary blips and deflationary spirals.

Have you ever noticed that the definition of a deflationary spiral self-contradictory? You know how it goes, people hoard money in order to spend them later, but when that later comes they do not spend them but continue to hoard even more in order to spend them later-later. Then later-later-later. Then... Well, the endgame is that everybody dies and zombies take over the earth. (Zombies are immune to hoarding, it seems)

Do people really act like this? Because if at any step of such an iteration the people will start spending (and the low prices and increases money balances will provide for an excellent temptation) then the vicious circle is broken, the spiral is no more, and we are contemplating here a deflationary blip. Or event if blip doesn't sound reputable enough.

Looks to me like a totally legit process. Exactly what the Walras Auctioneer will do in his search for a price equilibrium.
How does a retailer using Square manage PCI compliance?

Are retailers using Square automatically non-compliant? My understanding is that PCI Council has not approved mobile applications under PA-DSS, and merchants who accept card using software that is not PA-DSS are automatically non compliant on PCI-DSS.
This came up a while back, and I feel your pain. That Java job I told you about? All the Java and C++ code now belongs to Quest, who bought my employer. And I did some good work on ING Direct (USA), but I can't show that to you, either.

My wife once bought a bunch of postcards from a printer to promote her business as a photographer. Right on their price list was a charge for a credit waiver. basically, every postcard had to have a small "Printed by FooCorp 1-800-888-8888" on it. If you didn't want that, you paid extra.

I have reached the point where I feel the same way about the code I write. Naturally, nobody can see trade secrets. But if there's a portion of the code that is not a trade secret, perhaps a Rails or jQuery plugin that gets developed along the way, I want that open sourced. If the answer is "No, we want to own everything 100%," I need to make extra money to make up for the fact that I am going to go dark, just as that printer needs to charge extra money to make up for the lost advertising opportunity.
That's what i don't get.

I don't understand where or how you could encounter a circumstance where this would matter. This complaint seems to be an abstract theoretical point (maybe to support git alternatives? dunno) that even esoteric usage of a DSCV would never come across.

I dunno, maybe i'm not being creative enough in my use of histories.

EDIT: Okay this explains everything in a considerably more concise fashion than the article does: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2456529
There's all sorts of problems with this. Usually startups don't have enough money to hire good developers, so they try to pay people in equity. Most developers who aren't personally invested in the idea or the founding team aren't going to split equity with non-technical people unless everyone is clearly bringing something to the table (marketing, fundraising, etc).

Unless there's a clearly even split of labor in the early days of a startup, the technical members of a hybrid team are taking the majority of the risk. To get the company on its feet, they'll need to sink a correspondingly large amount of time into developing the product versus their non-technical cofounders.

Software is very expensive to build. Let's say that to take an MVP from zero to market will take only one man-month of effort (160 hours) -- which, when you consider billing systems, etc. is likely a low estimate. If you paid a good consultant $100/hour to build it for you, that's about $16,000. Many startups don't have this kind of cash sitting around.

So let's say you outsource the development to offshore developers to save some money. Let's say you start to get some traction, and you want to bring on a technical co-founder. It's going to be a really hard sell to get a developer to join your project after your product is already poorly-written. Developers hate maintenance. If a group of non-technical people approached me with a post-launch MVP, I'd assume their code was bad and run for the hills. (At a minimum I would ask to see it before agreeing to anything, which would likely just solidify my viewpoint.) If you're willing to throw out the MVP code and have the new cofounder rewrite it, that might be something you could convince a developer to join up for -- but be prepared to "lose" the money for the initial MVP development.

It's not enough to bring a "business that already has traction" to the group. Maybe if you were selling me the MVP, that might be interesting, but if you were looking for a partnership, I'd want to know what you'd spend your time doing.
I was able to convert it without noticeable degradation down to 7 bit:

http://geekhood.net/bitcoin-32bit.png

http://geekhood.net/bitcoin-7bit.png

(using my pngquant)
Did the iPhone change the industry structure by much? We still have two year contracts in the US. The price of plans seems to be increasing still. You still can't take a phone from one carrier to the other (at least not easily).

What did Apple change? Updates directly from Apple? As others have noted other phones did that before, including Nokia. Buying phones at the Apple Store? Radio Shack and Best Buy have long had huge sales centers for phones. An app store? Those long existed to, although generally carrier provided or via 3rd parties (like Handango). So Apple provided their own app store. That might be new, but it's hardly industry structure changing.

What Apple did show is that if you make a good enough product, people will suffer through worse service.

With that said there is a HUGE opportunity here for Apple. Apple has shown it knows how to work with Samsung and the likes to make great displays and hardware. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Apple ship the highest quality display available. Plus with their volume on phones/tablets they can probably use pressure to drive prices down on for a TV.

Next they integrate iOS into the TV. Then offer a subscription to iTunes content and AirPlay support. The cable provider is now completely out of the picture. They could charge $2500 for this TV and they'd sell 1M in the first week. 1M in TV sales for a single model, I'd imagine, would be a blockbuster.

In many ways I think this industry would be easier to take than phones.
For some reason, it has never occurred to me.

Probably your software is so inextricably part of your life that the thought of a world (let alone a blog post) without it never occurs to you.

It's a good post. The reason you're getting criticized ("spammy", "self-promoting", etc.) is that it breaks the informal conventions that have evolved for such hybrid (good content plus product promotion) posts. One is to give the reader a clear heads-up that the post falls in both categories.

In the absence of that signal, the flow for me went like this: 1. A blog post about improving productivity? Cool. I like productivity. 2. Hmm, this guy isn't an idiot. Guess I'll keep reading. 3. Some of these points seem useful, I wonder how I could apply them? (In the meantime, completely missing the first mention/link to your product). 4. Further down, dimly noticing the product name, but not thinking about it. 5. Recognizing the third mention of the product - what's that? Seems vaguely familiar. 6. Finally: oh, I get it. This is software he's selling and the whole post has (also) been about this. 7. I feel like a bit of a dupe. No like. Bail.

The only reason why 7 occurred is that the post didn't set my expectation correctly at the start, so I read it with a wrong expectation, then had the unpleasant experience of reality contradicting it. It's actually the fact that the content was good enough to absorb my attention that led to this; otherwise I would have noticed the other details right away.
At least WRT MIT's OpenCourseWare, no.

It's designed for educators, not students, so there are frequent gaps in the individual courses (in one I couldn't even figure out how it might be useful to an educator trying to use it for the basis of a class).

A number are crippled by copyright, or, rather, you'll need access to a research library to get copies of all the papers in the required reading list.

And there are gaps in which courses have been captured. E.g. first term inorganic chemistry is missing and OCW has no plans as of a year or so ago to address this.

There's also the not so minor detail of science laboratories. With a lot of work you could probably make do for physics but chemistry and biology would be right out; you'd probably need to find a college that would be willing to let you take just those labs, although at least in the case of chemistry they often aren't separate classes.

A lot of course require Matlab, which the last time I checked would require a non-student to pay around $1,800 for a copy.

All that said, a really disciplined autodidact can get a good education with the many resources on the web.
They did a great job hitting the big outstanding issues with the iPhone and pulling ahead in some key areas. When you combine the hardware refresh with all the new iOS4 features it really is a gigantic upgrade. It puts the last 12 months of Android/iPhone competition into better perspective. 3 months ago I would have said Google was outpacing Apple on hardware & software but I'm not sure now. What do you guys think?
You ignored the "watered down" and jumped on the "tall order".

For someone new to the industry (rather, 'scene') I think that booklist will take ~2 years just to grok. For an experienced hacker, specially one coming from systems programming, compiler hacking, binary analysis, emulation, or cryptography, specially one who spent his youth dipping into actual blackhat hacking and reversing, then the industry has absolutely no appeal. You can make more money writing an optimizer for an ARM processor for one phone model than you would working in the security industry.

My position is: security is not worth it, unless you're some government MCSE who ends up sent to seminars and conferences on Wireshark and IDA Pro. Infosec is churning out doe-eyed nobodies faster than Clown University. The people who actually matter, and make a difference, earned their stripes hacking out of their parents basement in their teens.
Two versions of the bitmaps - even scaling during run time - would increase the app image footprint by 4 as well. For a 10mb 3G download limit, making it that more difficult to fit the initial download in the small space they give you. Not to mention the high screen resolution doesn't give you 4 times the memory for native apps.

This will work great for the web - but when initial size is a factor (along with video memory that is still shared with the OS - is there more video memory in this version?) this actually creates more of a limitation as you could reach the ceiling quicker with no more functionality - just higher res images.

So two versions isn't likely - scaling down is time consuming, battery consuming, and a waste of space. For optimum distribution, you would need a 3G version, a 4G version, possibly an iPad (HD) version, and maybe even a lite version of all three. You now have six version on the App Store.

One compromise is to make a 3G version and a 4G retina display version - of which would probably look ok on the iPad because it has 78% of the pixels.

I've developed multiple graphical applications and games for the iPhone so my perspective comes only with experience. Textures were always a hardware/memory limitation (it also only accepts textures in the size of a power of 2 - meaning you will need a sprite sheet layer as well) which made development-for-delivery a little tricky.

I didn't hear anything about more on-board memory so despite my fragmentation comment this actually doesn't help much. a 300x200 transparent PNG takes almost a meg of RAM.
That only works while your cursor is inside the browser window though. Outside the browser, it stops following you.
There are many reasons companies by start-ups, and start-ups need to be aware of what they are offering or could offer to be a good acquisition target.

1) purchasing the team - I'd put friendfeed and summize in this category. Facebook could have built a friendfeed quite easily, and twitter could have built a tool to search their own databases. Both companies decided to acquire an outside company who had already done a great job and got traction in the space. If you look at the structure of Facebook these days, it seems that friendfeed founders are having a huge impact on the company. Also summize was absorbed into twitter, and I'm very surprised to see that FriendFeed still exists independently.

2) Technology/Patents - Apple purchasing PA Semi and HP purchasing Palm are both likely to be considered purchasing of technology which may or may not include patents (though I assume patented technologies increase the valuation of the acquired companies). HP wasn't in the business of developing an operating system from scratch, and Palm had already done that AND had a large number of valuable patents. Likewise, Apple wasn't going to start-designing chips from scratch, so they looked for a company that already had what they needed or had some of the technologies and purchased them.
This isn't to say that these companies don't also benefit from the people who are current employees of the acquired company, but as we've seen with some of the departures from Palm since being acquired by HP, there is no guarantee the most valuable employees will stick around.

Cheap innovation - as you say 'being a big company gets in the way'. Yes, start-ups can be a cheaper alternative to home-grown innovation. But the start-up needs to offer something competitive and depending on the market, may need to have market penetration. I'd say this is kinda the Yahoo! model of a few years ago when they were snapping up many start-ups and maintaining many separate brands (flickr, etc.).

Looking at the above methods, I'd suggest that there is likely a bit of each in each good acquisition. Take Mint as an example. Intuit purchased Mint.com for $170 million, and instantly got a great and innovative product (#3), that likely has very good technology (#2 I'm not sure of their patents or technology, so I could be wrong), and put the Mint founder Aaron Patzer as the VP and GM of Personal Finance at Intuit.

I'm sure there are other reasons, but those are the top 3 that I think of.
On GitHub: https://github.com/crislin2046/dosyrng

And an even simpler version (built with just base64 and xor): https://github.com/crislin2046/tarobox which I

haven't tested with SMHasher or PractRand.
Tesla is on sale for cheap? Nice.
Duty, according to whom?
Modules are "simpler" than vectors because they have fewer axioms, but they are also much harder to understand. For example, not all modules have a basis, which can make them much harder to work with.

For background on the math, see: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/137442/a-module-wit...
Wow this touches really deeply and closely - given I use social media all. the. time.

My love for the Web and freedom of discussion and how it would free us from the powers of authority. This was me imagining the future of information in the early 2000s.

I'm thinking this may very well be a lie: as Sasha so eloquently and comedically touches several points about how these social media giants (Facebook, Twitter etc) have developed algorithms to satisfy our most basic "monkey brain" instincts: we want information that is agreeable.

The comparison he made with "fake scientists" on the internet getting more attention than nobel prize winners really hit me hard.

The issue seems to be that with the internet we got rid of authority, but another type of hierarchy grew out of this: algorithm hierarchy. Where we don't have authorities in charge of giving us information, rather we have algorithms.

An obvious solution to this (from a programmer's point of view) would be to allow users to freely and openly (through an open source kind of movement) change these algorithms to fit their needs. For instance I want information that is "not biased" and I can quickly get the "non biased algorithm" from github (as an example) and plug it into my social media. If I want information from academica I would get the "academia algorithm" and plug in. And so on.

I don't know how something like this can help, but it seems we may need to stop thinking in terms of social media companies being the problem; it's the fact that we can't change these algorithms that is the problem.
Looks cheap overall.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that iOS was in no way, shape, or form inspired by Windows 3.1.
I'm glad they don't have jack shit on me besides my email, is there a list of their data source(s) ?
I would say that there are scenarios where blockchains are legitimately useful.
I think I was unclear. Of course you can figure out what the line does. It’s just that you have to figure it out.
For wealthy people who can afford multiple properties, and to up and move whenever they please, why would rising sea levels matter to them? Both properties could collapse into a sinkhole tomorrow and it would be a mere annoyance. The fact they own them is no evidence they aren't aware that they might not be around in 50 years. For someone looking for a second property, closing on retirement, worrying about inheritance for their children, the thought process is entirely different.