skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of my favorite books from the last few years is "The Smartest Kids in the World." The reporter visits three countries that do very well on the international PISA test, and talks about what can indeed work in the US and other countries.

She (and the locals) are very negative about South Korea, but very positive about Poland and Finland. And she points out that all three countries use a fraction of the budget that the US does on education, with much better results.

She also points to the fact that outside of the United States, extracurricular activities -- not to mention sports -- are not a part of the school curriculum. If you want to play basketball, then that's great, but don't expect your high school to care about it, because their job is to worry about your education, not sports.

I have a PhD in learning sciences (roughly "technology and education"), live in Israel, and have three children. And the way that the schools here run depresses me more each year. As the book points out, and as we probably already know, the forces in charge of schools (e.g., politicians, teacher unions, and taxpayers) are basically aligned against any real reform. Gimmicks such as technology look great, but are virtually useless -- a form of "education theater," as it were.

Israelis talk nonstop about class sizes, but I think that a much bigger problem is that we pay our teachers nothing, and give them no respect or power -- and are then surprised that the quality of teachers has declined precipitously.

From everything I can tell, we would do well to give teachers massive salary increases, then make it hard to become a teacher and easy to fire bad ones. Then give the teachers huge freedom to do what they want. And yes, this will cost money (which the taxpayers don't want to hear), but on balance it seems to work for most people, most of the time.
An interface being used for over 100 years is hardly an argument that it's a bad interface. The opposite, really. Can you give more of a concrete reason or example why something is wrong with TTY other than "messy/leaky abstraction"?
How so? Unless they take it out of your salary (but you already left then it is not part of your salary since you are well... gone). So you get paid at new job, pay taxes on it, then turn around and write a check to Jeff.

I doubt IRS will kindly sympathize with you and say "ok plonh, let's make that check a deduction to help you out".
I can't speak for performance, but both GNU APL and Dyalog have solved the "problematic keyboard" problem, so getting running is no longer a problem.
Pinaask, localized questions ans answers
> However, as the person responsible for Chrome's NPAPI deprecation, I just want to set the record straight regarding Unity.

Why? You have regressed a feature that your users want. I realize that plugins aren't sexy, but Unity is something that both developers and users want. Entire development studios are based around creating online games in Unity that have active user bases who enjoy those games.

For better or for worse you have removed the ability for people to enjoy using a part of the web. But hey, an idealized vision of software perfection won out over what users wanted, so you got that going for you.

I'm a bit bitter that those in charge of browsers have en-masse decided that being pragmatic is worthless in comparison to creating idealized castles in the sky. This just as much applies to Mozilla as it does Chrome. Mozilla's response to why they won't implement Pepper is just as "pie in the sky, who cares what users want" as Chrome removing NPAPI is.

Plugins are something that users want. Ignoring how Adobe has managed to completely drive Flash's overall quality and performance into the ground, plugins are useful. They may not be useful to Developers who are doing Serious Developer Stuff at Serious Companies, but for a lot of users, my mother, my grandmother, my nieces and nephews, they are very useful.

On the other side, browser developers have content developers as customers. Those content developers prefer alternative toolchains. Flash and Unity have far better tool chains than WebGL does. Debugging problems is far easier when you don't have to go through multiple translation layers. And less layers in the stack means less places for something to go wrong. If you are writing against Flash then Flash may have a problem. If you are writing against 3 different browser's implementation of WebGL and/or ASM.js you now have 3 different sets of bugs and implementation quirks. (Not that Flash works the same across all browsers, but at least it is from one vendor!)

But all of that is thrown away in the name of "web standards".

Users care about what works. As developers we have a responsibility to make users happy, our own sense of happiness is sort of not the primary concern.
I started at Amazon in 2005 and I can definitely say it's an intense place-- I spent most of my 20s at Amazon. Amazon makes you battle-hardened, jaded engineer the longer you are there. There's just no avoiding it. That being said I worked there as long as I did because there were aspects that I did like. For example I think the opportunities there in terms of work / scale are a lot bigger than many other big companies. They are more willing to take risks on people. For example I had no college degree when they hired me. Also there are quite a lot of very smart people working there. So it's not all bad. But intense? Yes.
I hate hidden search boxes and cannot imagine how anyone would think them better. Even expanding boxes are annoying.

Also, your results are sorta legit but would be more so if not opt-in.
This is quite helpful, but it does not answer the question of why they don't switch to larger blocks now if most of the devs are in favor of it.

You also have to get the users to switch, in particular miners and exchanges, so therein may lie part of the answer. But I suspect those people will generally follow what the devs recommend. I thought some of the big Chinese miners had said they would accept switching to 8MB blocks. So why hasn't the switch been made?
The "Sensitive Files" add up to 7005, while the total number of files is 18088392. In other words, <0.04% of them.
Bill Nguyen the Boy in the Bubble (2011)
Work will set you free.
Mozilla releases pre-beta version of Firefox with supercharged Privacy
An Amazonian's Response to the NYT's “Inside Amazon” Article
That's actually really freaking cool. I was hoping that the native file format would be just a simple csv/tsv or something, but no such luck. But there is an "export as tab separated" function.
These still work, and have been around for a long time as well:

http://www.filesearching.com/

http://www.mmnt.ru/int/

(I don't know whether it's coincidence that they're both of Russian origin.)
Perhaps, but drinking and driving is quite a bit more preventable than being stressed. Certainly people get distracted and accidents happen, but purposely driving impaired is in fact something different.

That being said, generally speaking, a drunk driver who happens to not do anything wrong on the road is extremely unlikely to have any legal issues. Mostly they are going to have problems when they start swerving or exhibiting signs of being impaired. A tired driver who is swerving wildly is also likely to get pulled over.
There are 1+ million anonymous FTP servers on the Internet (https://www.shodan.io/report/OY7YoHou) and it's usually difficult to determine who the owner is. I haven't yet found a good way of notifying users, the best bet is to send the data to the respective ISP or CERT and hope for the best. On a related note: there needs to be way more attention on NAS devices. Many of them are connected to the Internet, poorly secured and in the process exposing huge amounts of personal data (not just through FTP).
Morphis: Encrypted distributed datastore
Play victory music on resolving Git conflicts
This should surprise no one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Does it still phone home and give information to Google?
It also assumes he consumed zero dollars from then til now. If he wanted to have a wealthy lifestyle, and can you really blame him, these passive returns drop quickly.
Hello Guys! The company I am currently Interning at is looking for developers at all level. It's called Ceribell and founded by Stanford Medical School Professors. Our technology is a novel approach to EEG(Electroen-cephalogram）Interpretation which aims to make diagnosis drastically faster and accessible. We are at the initial stage and experiencing rapid growth now, if you want save thousands of lives and benefits millions of patients, please join us! (please pm me for more information or email to jchao@ceribell.com
The evolutionary origins of hierarchy
The amount is much higher as I have only tried a limited amount of keywords. There are many servers that have complete backups of the Windows folder 'My Documents' for example. Combined, I'd say at least half of it is not meant to be public, thus sensitive.
Several major classics are oddly omitted from that list:

- "The Art of Computer Programming" (TAOCP)

- "The C Programming Language" (K&R)

- "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (SICP)

- "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (AIMA)
Surveillance state is all about $$, it's an evolving industry where people have figured out how to make billions. I share the same doubts with OP here, they aren't as much of a Big Brother as they are just a bloated cash cow scraping by & keeping appearances. They aren't particularly competent primarily because they don't really care as much as we think they do.

Obviously it's still a terrible situation to setup this infrastructure given the potential for abuse, so I'm not defending it. I'm just saying I've been an American long enough to know $$ is at the heart of this, not control, and the $$ they're getting isn't dependent on how good of a job they do so don't expect a well oiled machined.
It is unfortunate they are shutting down, but if they were only using donations as a means of funding it seems inevitable.

Maybe a dual mission/stage program would have been better.

Use initial donations to buy laptops, rent space and pay for speakers to have a coding bootcamp type program for unemployed or disadvantaged people. If you wanted the primary focus to be on school age kids you could consider highschool juniors/seniors that were not planning to go to college.

Prepare them for a job as an entry level coder or designer. When they get a job hopefully they will donate back to the program and/or provide mentorship for the new sections.

If establish the older section (age 16+) first, you could have additional funding opportunities by having the students host, "How to use {software/product}" classes. Ask for donations or a recommended fee for those that could afford it. Also make it available for free to help other disadvanted job seekers learn the fundamentals of Windows, Office, Internet searching, etc.

Once you had some older established alumni or employees you could transition to the younger demographic by hosting coding classes and summer camps for a fee. Then use the revenue to sponsor under privileged kids to attend it as well.

The goal would be to have the kids attending for free eventually transition to junior counselers or teachers for the camps and classes.

It would take a few years, and could still fail, but would have a better chance of surviving with a revenue model that didn't focus solely on outside donations.
Sure dude, get a job in International finance and push that agenda. Until then the powers that be are going to try to work things out as if we all have to live together on a tiny little speck of dirt in space.

And the push the analogy further, they would force the uncle into rehab and get him arrested if needed.
Key System
OS X 10.10.5 kernel local privilege escalation
AI websites that design themselves
I doubt the actual name of the product is a "Broadcom 1570"; 1570 is just the PCI device ID. Compared to other webcams this does seem a rather hairy beast - looking through the source, it appears to have its own DDR controller that needs to be calibrated, and requires firmware loaded upon initialisation for it to work. Very different from the USB UVC webcams that are "set and forget" from the perspective of the host.
Also check out Google's Crush-tools

https://github.com/google/crush-tools
> That makes it fundamentally legitimate to regulate that activity, and the question then shifts to the efficacy of any particular sort of regulation.

A common issue with regulation is that the regulators cannot be trusted to act with wisdom or moderation or honesty. One of Washington State's own prohibition enforcement agents became its greatest bootlegger [1], for example. Roy served illegal booze to politicians, police, and citizens alike, and was treated with kid gloves when eventually arrested.

This dilemma -- of how to design a regulatory program to resist capture by the people entrusted to execute it -- makes it very difficult for me to understand how you can just hand-wave past the question of legitimacy.

Put another way: There is a train on the tracks that is going to run into one person. You could switch the tracks and save the person, but the train will then run into 5 people. What do you do?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Olmstead
Funny how Bezos has disdain for Microsoft, but then steals all their jobs titles. MS first coined the term SDET for that role.
I actually used to fear death adders more. Brown snakes 99% of the time hear you coming and all you see is them taking off at high speed away from you. Death adders on the other hand lie still waiting for their prey to come to them so don’t move. Since they are camouflaged that can be really hard to spot in the leaf litter. When I would go exploring in the bush around my home I would always take my dog and make him lead the way - he would bark and let me know if a death adder was up ahead. Of course there were a very high rate of false alarms (goannas mostly), but I would rather a 100 false positives than have one false negative bite me.
Seems like the blockchain is forking too...? What happens to everyone's bitcoins in the meantime? Wouldn't this practically destroy the system?
Of course I "admit" it - my whole point in the above post is, the first step in gaining "work-life" balance is understanding that the company will never do it as a matter of principle. It will only do it tactically insofar it helps the business. It will cut any resemblance of balance or benefits when it can justify. A company is not set up as a societal institution. It is property owned by someone. It sets up contracts between itself and the employee. It tries to trick the employee into thinking it has the employees best interest, it's a community, etc. which the employee wants to believe to feel like their work matters beyond making the company owners wealthy, their life is more meaningful due to said work beyond renumeration etc.

The first step to having a "happy" work life is to realizing work is just that -- work, and to expect nothing more, or less out of it, and to decide for yourself the overall importance of it in your life. The company won't do it for you. It's not a "community that cares about its members". All this propaganda of equality exists to mask the inherent power relations that dominate work life.
These days one can use org-mode tables for quite a bit of spreadsheet stuff.
It's been some time since Bitcoin has given me reason to break out popcorn, the next few days should be quite fun to watch. :)

I have no particular opinion on which way this should swing, however it's clear that XT represents far more than just a block size change (and the XT web site even makes this explicit): it is another attempt at gaining increased control of the project, which is also mentioned by the linked Medium article as one of reasons Lightning isn't great for Bitcoin either.

While Mike and Gavin have long been members of the project, in good standing, and with no obvious reasons to doubt them, it's still worth giving a few moments thought to how the project may be impacted in the coming years should this "change in administration" succeed.
Amazonian here. My experience has been nothing like what was described in the article. A few quick hits:

-In three years, I have never once seen anyone cry at Amazon. I've never even heard of anyone crying at work.

-In re: secret feedback tool -- Note that it isn't anonymous. I know the article doesn't say it is, but "secret feedback" seems to imply it is, at least IMO. It's little more than a form for submitting an email to someone's boss. I've only ever heard of a sabotage attempt happening once, and it backfired as predictably as one would expect.

-I remember hearing the phrase "climb the wall" once during my first week at orientation. Reading it in this article was the first time I've heard it in the three years since then.

The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff

Correct. Good employees do well. Bad employees are eventually weeded out. This was not invented at Amazon.

Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.

I legitimately laughed out loud when I read this. Cancer! Miscarriages! Literally the two worst things to ever happen to most people in their lives when they strike! And, of course, not a single shred of evidence to support the claim.

Well, unless you count "some workers" as a reliable source.
Is that...legal? I mean I feel like requiring employees to source hardware you need to do your job would violate some statute, somewhere.
If you buy a stock and hold it, you don't have to pay capital gains along the way. But if you buy a mutual fund and hold it, capital gains will pass through to you whenever the manager sells stocks to adjust the portfolio. There are "tax efficient" mutual funds whose mission is to minimize that churn, but no fund can keep it at zero. I don't know how many tax efficient mutual fund options there were in 1982.
Wow, didnt realise the division was that big.
By the way I 100% agree pendulum is too far towards capitalists. I just want to disabuse folks of the illusion that companies will willingly swing the pendulum / have the best interest of the employee in mind. It's like asking the wolf to shepherd the sheep. The sheep first need to realize the wolf is a wolf.
Short Black One Shoulder Dress
I'm just quoting what an OpenBSD dev mentioned to me. I guess there could be more.
As an Israeli what effect do you think the rise of religious fundamentalism has had on education outcomes? I may be wrong, but I am under the impression that a large percentage of school age children are born into fundamentalist families that do not value a secular education.
Two developers, nullc and pieter are against increasing the blocksize at a reasonable rate. Gavin, Jeff Garzik and Mike Hearn wish to increase it by early next year. Following some three months of debate, an agreement could not be reached, so Gavin and Mike are forking Bitcoin to the new Bitcoin XT. The vast majority of users, businesses and miners support Gavin and his bigger blocks, but blockstream, a relativley new for profit company which employs nullc aka Gregory Maxwell and Pieter as well as some other bitcoin devs and is developind lightning and sidechains which they offer as an alternative to increasing the blocksize has managed to stall this process, thus leading to a fork.
I have to agree. We're way beyond blocking 3rd party cookies for safety. As long as ad tech continues to be a source of malverts and intrusive UX practices, ad blocking is now a best practice.

Companies/publishers/advertisers probably already see that the writing is on the wall as users become better informed about the often shady practices of ad tech.
That's the new women's beach volleyball uniform they've been trying to adopt.
In all honesty, if you run an American school exactly like in the US, with American teachers, course material, homework etc, and put it in Finland and have local kids attend, guess what happens. You get much better outcomes than in the US and probably pretty similar to outcomes in Finland.

I do agree with you though, there's things that can be learned from these countries with respect to things like demanding more of teachers (master's degrees) and rewarding teachers more (not just decent, but great salaries which involves seeing teachers like you see doctors). That makes a lot of sense. Our requirements and rewards for doctors are a lot higher, despite the fact every single child is raised and educated for half of every working day's waking hours for more than a decade, teachers have absolutely insane levels of influence on something many of us value to extreme levels (children), in Finland resources are allocated accordingly, in the US not always. So I agree there, but I still think differences between e.g. Finland and the US have much more to do with your last point: making sure kids aren't in poor broken homes, which isn't a direct educational policy theme and requires mostly deep socioeconomic policy changes outside of education.
Some things about this are a mess.

For one, they claim that CompCert doesn't have a formally verified C parser, but it does, as of 2014. Instead of citing the CompCert release page, they cite a paper written in 2011 that says that CompCert does not have a verified parser.

The concerns about proofs in Hoare logic (they also don't get the notation for Hoare triples right...) are mis-guided as well. The way that type checking works in strong, statically typed languages, the conditions they worry about don't arise by construction. They say that isn't possible, but it totally is possible and is done in projects like CompCert, bedrock, and some Haskell frameworks.

Also, they say that Heartbleed is a parser error. I don't see how, because the heartbeat message is perfectly well formed, the size of the data requested is larger than the size of the buffer. How is this a parser error? The patch wasn't a change in parser behavior either, so...
"Unfortunately, due to the technical challenges being more difficult than expected by the team led by EnterpriseDB programmer Robert Haas, no parallel query features have yet been committed."

In the meantime...
self-plug: http://parpsql.com (free, open source)
Mike was never really involved in Bitcoin Core, and Gavin stepped down 2 years ago.
"From everything I can tell, we would do well to give teachers massive salary increases, then make it hard to become a teacher and easy to fire bad ones. Then give the teachers huge freedom to do what they want. And yes, this will cost money (which the taxpayers don't want to hear), but on balance it seems to work for most people, most of the time."

It may not be that expensive, if class sizes are not that important you can have fewer teachers. The problem (in the US) is that the teacher's unions are generally against performance based pay, teacher evaluations and firing bad teachers.
For those that want to know what Amazon is really like, please read my rebuttal: http://bit.ly/1DWkhgV. It's a long article, but it actually gives you facts and data