skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're interested in education policy and research, the Festival of Education is a great event to hear many of the leading thinkers. This year, as well as this report being given out in hard copy, we had Dylan Wiliam (referenced in the NPR article), Carol Dweck, Ken Robinson and many others speak. A definite English flavour but plenty that's entirely transferable.

http://www.festivalofeducation.com/
I am a little biased because I have been using Drupal for a couple of years and recently started building very complex web applications using MVC frameworks. If you are building a website for content purposes, please use a proper CMS like Drupal. It is pretty well written and very properly documented.
There are still issues of regular human decency and courtesy.

How would you feel if a company interviewed you with absolutely no intention of hiring you, even if you did really well, and was just experimenting with their interview process or training interviewers?
Hopefully in a few more years they add a few more books to that list, the 90s and 00s are over. Unfortunately it's hard to think of a particular book that should go into the series.

ACM is awesome.
> Sector sizes are different between drives anyway.

Yeah, 512 bytes or, now, 4096 bytes - neither is a power of 10

The math is worse because the computer (address space) and hard drive are actually base 2 and vendors are selling in base 10.

This worship of base 10 in every aspect of our lives, even when it doesn't make sense and cheats us out of money, is sad. Computers are base 2, memory is base 2, and storage should be base 2 or else its just a batch of lies. I guess I should be glad the humanity didn't have 11 fingers.

The computer is showing you a number, calculating using base 2 will not be any stress on a human since it doesn't show every byte anyway.
Every answer you get here will be pretty much useless to you unless you describe the kinds of web projects you expect to do going forward. Your current stack may be perfectly suited, or you may have been using an inappropriate stack for a lomg time and making life harder for yourself.

"The right tool for the job" requires consideration of both the tool and the job.
It's useful on all kinds of transactional/bigger data, IMO (up to ~1e9 rows). It's also extremely useful as a prototyping language for complex mathematical ideas.
Right. I was just asking for confirmation so that I don't argue past the grandparent poster.

I also feel like a lot of people take that stance because they feel that those on the opposing side are claiming that it is only because of race. More often than not, we are merely saying that race and class are interconnected; they are neither completely orthogonal, nor exactly the same.

There are definitely cycles of racism, patriarchy, and homophobia that perpetuate class struggles that are difficult to break out of. There are also other class struggles that affect us all.
Ask HN: When did Chrome start auto-filling credit card and cvv details?
Within the past month, I've noticed that Chrome (v44.0.2403.107) has developed an integration with Google Wallet and will now prompt to auto-fill credit card and cvv (!) details on forms. Does anyone when this feature was introduced?
The article mentions a comparison of spending and effect on outcome. Establishing that there seems to be a decided minimum effort required to educate a child to any degree; but that past that point there are examples of other countries having /more/ success with less funding spent (than the US).

I think more granularity of data in that statistic would be useful; is this money actually being spent on the child or is it instead being squandered within a bureaucratic structure? Or does some externality that is a cost in one model but not the other left out of view?
Marvin Minsky's Home Page
Gavin Andresen, the current maintainer of the Bitcoin project is also very outspoken about the need to remove the block size limit kludge that was originally put in by Satoshi. You can read his series of blog posts outlining the arguments here: http://gavinandresen.ninja

If the XT fork were to succeed it would likely be merged back into the core project.
Ah, you want to take a look at https://angel.co/houslets which is looking at multi-story stuff with much the same design philosophy as the hexayurt (use whole panels, get modern materials deployed in sensible ways, keep the building process simple and so on) but pointed at urban densities.

I like this project a lot.
Here's how I explain "pure math" to people, based on my experience taking a highly theory-oriented linear algebra course and thinking that "this stuff couldn't possibly be useful." Boy, was I wrong...

I think of (pure) mathematics as exploring the structures generated by simple rules. You start with some system of axioms, maybe those of group theory or linear algebra, and you see where it takes you. Often, there are richer, but closely related structures available by adding additional axioms or constraints. For example, add commutativity to group theory and you get abelian groups. Add metrics to vector spaces and you get topology (sorta).

This is useful because the world is full of complex systems that emerge from simple rules. Therefore, when we observe that some system in the real world displays the characteristics of a known mathematical structure, we inherit a bunch of free knowledge about that system.

In practice, most math falls on some spectrum between the above definition and "applied math". Historically speaking, it's a pretty modern idea (although its pedigree begins with Euclid). Before the mid-nineteenth century, mathematicians had indeed been chasing puzzles like "how to find the roots of polynomials" and "can you square a circle using constructions?" for several centuries. And puzzles are certainly not dead, as the millenium prize clearly shows. Number theory also doesn't play nice with this definition. I intentionally ignored that - if I start thinking about the ontology of numbers I risk losing quite a bit of sleep :p.
Seems unlikely. Based on what he revealed, there are probably at least a few hundred possible candidates.
I wonder how much mental illness and poor decision making this culture has caused. Staying up days in a row or working 80+ hour weeks is not a recipe for good decision making.

Not even considering the human angle, this makes me very concerned for Amazon's future business prospects. Disclosure: I'm an AMZN shareholder.
If you work with this sort of data a lot, you might want to look at R.
I heard few stories from friends/colleagues who worked there

- There was a production outage once at Amazon and my friend's manager and her team (including my friend) gave a post-mortem to a large audience. Port-mortem sessions are open for everyone to attend. He mentioned, it was a free-for-all. Execs were hurling F-bombs every sentence and the team was publicly humiliated. The manager was in tears and was later demoted. I could see how my friend was feeling for her as a person/human being.

- One employee asked about possibility of providing free food ala Google/FB in a org level all-hands. Exec pooh-poohed Google for being highly irresponsible and that they can never sustain themselves spending so much on free food. Lazlo Block says it is one of the best things at Google.

- Frugality - I heard you don't even free get pop at Amazon. No paternity leave. Maternity leaves are much shorter compared to what people take at Google/Facebook out of fear. Poor health benefits and 401K matching compared to Microsoft/Google/FB.

- Sweatshop - People are over worked and are working on weekends/holidays a good chunk of time. 70 hr weeks seem to be the norm. Get only one day-off for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Many Amazon execs are probably laughing their asses off looking at companies in the valley one-upping each other with great pay, quality free food, extending maternity/paternity leaves, generous health benefits and 401K contributions. "Look at these losers in the valley, and look at us, we pay employees pea-nuts, treat them like garbage, don't give a fuck about their well-being or families but still get a ton of shit done. Our stock is soaring! "

A good chunk of their engineers who are willing to take this kind of abuse are H1-Bs waiting for greencards. All new college grads wisen up after looking at their friends from Google/Facebook/Mircosoft, jump ship after a couple of years. Only people who stay there for a long time seem to be people who really like this kind of confrontational/psychopathic environment or incompetent engineers who rose into management, and cling onto their jobs.
I'm glad I took the time to read this
Android kernel vulnerability and exploit with full source code
I follow the upgrade instruction every 6 months. Its really not that hard. If they throw a part of the base system out that I was using, then I install the port or convert to the "new way". So far, all has been good.

Frankly, my FreeBSD box has been a bigger pain for upgrades with the "solver cannot solve" for pkg on upgrades, and now with the 10.2 upgrade "pw useradd" is taking over 1 minute per run. Since I'm doing student enrollment right now, its getting to be a little much. Such is the price to use ZFS for home and group directories.
It's like saying Congress is not allowed to discuss or propose amendments to the constitution.

Bitcoin is designed to be fought over and amended, it's built into it. Software is never complete and XT is not an altcoin.
A permanent way to ensure the Greek economy never goes under ;)
I seriously doubt that everyone would pick the same teacher. Even in rigged elections, no candidate gets 100%.

Even so, there are lots of reasonable and workable methods of allocating scarce resources.

> Because it pushes people towards making choices based on internal details vs outcomes?

I don't see how it pushes anyone. Parents would make choices based on what is important to them.
>Do you think there is something wrong with the survey?

I'm not going to criticize a Pew survey, much, but, I do think that the set of survey participants may be distinct from the people who vote. I also think that when people are answering a survey there is very little emotion involved as opposed to when they are voting; where people are barraged with messages fully intended to stimulate emotional responses. Those are a couple of things that might explain a difference. I'd also note that it has a relatively small sample size (475). So, I don't think the survey is the last word on the matter.
> Any good books to recommend?

It's mostly literature from the 1970s and 1980s, usually in German. APL explained (basics, data structures, algos), APL applied to AI, math, statistics, etc. Nothing that beats Iverson's written works.
Not exactly the same thing, but I often use a tiny tool I wrote called shellql[1] that lets you just type in SQL like

cat foo.csv | shellql "select f1, count(*) from tbl where f2='thingiwant' group by f1 order by count(*) desc limit 5"

It has some limitations on the formats of CSV that it can take, namely that string fields have to be quoted, but you can see from the code that there's not much to it if you wanted to change that. It'd also be easy enough to take in multiple CSV files, join them together, etc.

sqlite's pretty badass.

[1] https://gist.github.com/ketralnis/8124b3ead9d94e00dcb2
30 cows
rot26 ftw!
> It didn't occur to me people would stay in Seattle after getting Google jobs.

It's actually pretty fantastic.
For non-terminating programs I use processes as described by Tony Hoare in "Communicating Sequential Processes". Procedures must always terminate in Albatross.

If I have more documentation on aliasing, I can give you hint. Could you provide me some email address?
Live fire demo of Russian-made quadrotor with 100 rnd AK
I don't see it as a issue / question of whether or not the forks possible success, but the way which the fork is being pushed without wide and near unanimous acceptance (assuming that was a core principal and vision).

If the original intent was to made it super hard to change the rules, but now the rules are being changed by a 'few in power', I could see how that would be concerning in general.

Regardless, this is rather interesting to watch play out. Especially for all the companies that have popped up.
I saw Evan's talk at Splash, and while it was good, I think the history is far more complex and nuanced than you can fit into a one hour keynote! When I hear CES I think component-entity systems (also popular in Clojure), but they have been rebranded as entity component systems (to not conflict with event systems), while Rx (Erik Meijer) would be more of where compositional event systems came from.

I have my own system that supports side effects with transactional semantics (see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/smcdirm/apx/in... for the latest). I try to keep my bibliography straight since the questions will always be asked (how does your work compare to X?).
> I'm referring to "the curve" when I say forced failure. Grading models at public and private universities require that x% of students receive a failing grade. The goal is not to teach the student to be knowledgeable of subject X but to rather weed out those who do not cross a subjective proficiency threshold.

This varies by university and department.

In theory you should always have a performance curve if you have a large enough sample size.

This does not mean that 1 standard deviation away has to fail.

It does mean that some students will do better than others. You can set performance targets however you want, if we desire to create an education system that supports students so that -2σ can still perform at a competent level, well you have a system that supports 97.6% of students. (Although I'd actually say that performance target is somewhat unrealistic for a country in which only a mid 80% of students currently graduate high school.)

Universities don't have the resources, time, or motivation, to educate 97% of the population, so they are going to put policies in place such as "more than -1σ and you fail out".

There is no need to employ that en-masse to all education!
This is a Hard Problem.

I could have taken the politics out in one of 99 ways, but I did not, and I'm willing to sacrifice 5 or even 10 years of hexayurt growth to keep the politics in.

The reason is simple: I want to politically organize the people who grow up in hexayurt refugee camps, getting their education over wifi and dreaming of a better, fairer world. So if I sell out my core values now to reach the refugees faster, I'm going to have a vastly less powerful offer of aid when I finally arrive there.

It's a very dark calculus, but the years of active sabotage that I've faced from aid organizations like UNHCR and Red Cross blocking the hexayurt's participation in testing programmes and similar bureaucratic interference have convinced me that the only way out of this mess is to disintermediate UNHCR and the Red Cross - to route around them as dark legacy - and to have refugees directly raise funds themselves over (say) YouTube and Bitcoin (or, hey, Ethereum) rather than hope for political change in the big orgs.

The big orgs need to lie that the status of refugee is temporary, and not tied to deeper political problems. But the average refugee is in the field for 15 years, and lying about their status being temporary is great for fund raising and locating host governments who are willing to have them, but absolutely horrible for the refugees: endless years in boiling hot / freezing cold tents, no services for education and long term health care, and so on. It's just garbage: if it was you in one of those camps, you'd think you were in a prison camp.

So we stand in defiant opposition to those lies: refugee is a generation-long or longer condition in most cases, and we insist on cycle-of-life support for the people who will be spending an entire phase of life in these camps.

In the short run, this insistence on truth costs me the short term support of the (hugely corrupt) NGOs. In the long run, I hope it buys me recognition and credibility among the refugees and former refugees that I hope will be the backbone of hexayurt deployments in the fullness of time.

I have to speak the truth as I recognize it today, in order to be recognized as not having been full of nonsense by the refugees when they are assessing where to put their support later.

Hard calls all round. Thank you for your thoughtful comment!
About a year ago Chrome started filling out form fields even if in the HTML they're set to autocomplete=off. Personally I think it's annoying, too.

http://makandracards.com/makandra/24933-chrome-34+-firefox-3...

http://caniuse.com/#search=autocomplete
Cool! Is there anything roughly equivalent for Vim? The closest I could find is vim-table-mode: https://github.com/dhruvasagar/vim-table-mode.
THOT- they hate on this (Proud Prostitute)
go to youtube.com and type in THOT- Armaan LaVette
I followed your interviewing guide. It is very useful.

But seriously, 50 to 100k more? That sounds like a huge differential. That means going from 100k to 150-200k.
I'm sure there'll be parents who pick the "easy A" teacher, and parents who pick the "hard but worth it" teacher, and parents who pick the "most charming" teacher, "has a knack for working with challenging kids" teacher, etc.

Not every student chooses the easy road. Some of them want to learn the stuff and not waste their time. At Caltech, some of the toughest classes were the most popular.
What searches set the Trend in Google and What do they say about us?
PS: we've got at least five or seven companies doing short run commercial hexayurts for Burning Man, and one start up in the UK doing different markets.

I bless all of 'em, without wanting to get too involved (for fear people will think I'm picking favorites - my political neutrality (ironically) is important!)
its a song about the life of a prostitute lol its comedy Gold
Dubai is building another seemingly impossible project
A 61-year-old hotel that has never had a guest
The fact that there's underrepresentation of various groups in SV is but a symptom of a much bigger problem, which is that for whatever reason, these fields and the programs they map to are unappealing to many people. I think the most productive route to take would be to figure out exactly what has gone wrong in our education system and society that makes STEM fields attractive to only a very limited set of individuals and fix it. If this root problem is neglected, making hiring more diverse for diversity's sake will end up being a bandaid on a broken limb.

I am not saying to put a stop to diversity hiring — it's necessary in the interim, because society and the education system can't change overnight — but it does not solve the actual problem and the longer the problem is left unaddressed, the harder it becomes to fix. We need to be putting serious resources into improvements in education and pushing cultural changes to how STEM careers are seen by the general public, and it needs to happen soon.
The comment you're responding to said

> I would be obliged to follow the laws about giving away data, so I would find out exactly what my legal obligation is, and follow that as best I could.

Of course, the law requires people to obey subpoenas as well as warrants, as the commenter would find out if they did what they said. The point is to follow due process, not that everyone has to become a lawyer and learn the fine distinctions between different types of writ.
These are different objections. I get the feeling the problem is you, you don't want to understand the science. And I can't help you if you don't state more precisely what your objection is. For example, you say "data and model are wrong" - which data and what model?

Predicting rate of change is a tricky problem, because it's nonlinear transition phenomenon. We can easily predict the resulting steady state, though. So for instance, in some areas, scientists grossly underestimated the rate of change - for example Arctic sea ice. But that doesn't mean they don't understand what's going on - the resulting steady state (what amount of warming are we going to get, called climate sensitivity) is actually quite well understood both from history and models.
thanks for the details! i bet it's possible to fix most the things by following along arch wiki. but I'm happy to know the trackpad is working.
This Is Why We All Hate Samsung Galaxy Note 5
From personal experience, 12.x on 4 completely different devices has proven to be far more stable, fast, and more efficient than 11.x was.

Of course these devices are Nexus 4,5,9 as well as OPO, so might be better supported.
My own mom also doesn't see spying as something that negatively affects her/our cohort, but she probably won't vote because she thinks it protects her from jury summonses. None of my family live in a swing state, and so I'll skip an election unless I care about some of the local candidates. My wife and I have started to take more of an interest in politics recently though and it even looks like my state could flip in 2018 or 2020, maybe even in 2016, but doubtful.
Did anyone say that they should be ignored or dismissed?
a) You are not a company. The incentives and the amount of relative power each entity has in this relationship is skewed.

A job to you is life changing. To a large enough company, you're just a conversion or churn metric.

b) That happens all the time. For instance, in order to get an H1B, a company has to document that they can't fill a given position in the local market. Which you accomplish by putting out hyper specific job ads.

If you want to be nice about it, don't pull that game on small startups but that's about it.
I just can't use it in my target environments for community reasons (space, AI).

Just in case, a good implementation (e.g. GNU APL, Dyalog) to recommend (performance-wise)? I also tried J years ago, but not on larger data sets or computationally expensive things. My experience and overview is pretty dusty.
Possibly the Funniest Post I've Ever Read
CIA Torture Tactics Reemerge in New York Prison
The blockchain is distributed, so "other blockchains" are alternate currencies like Dogecoin.
We've banned this account for repeatedly flouting the HN guidelines.

Doubly so because you ignored our request to improve.
> I think the more likely near-term result of a really smart car is that they do a single-core RMA for the mission critical systems and include a failsafe for when the non-hard-real-time AI system fails.

I agree with this. The question is what happens when you want to have features that require real-time AI. If we have cars driving themselves, they are (potentially) going to have to be able to make very smart decisions in a provably bounded amount of time.

> FAA mission critical certification (as an example) consumes a lot of engineer-months, and I expect automotive to start to move a few steps closer to that model in the wake of the Toyota issue.

In the long run, we may get a certified RTOS that supports dynamic priorities. At that point, dynamic prioties may not be an obstacle to assurance/certification.
Amazon: The implosion is near