skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Math anxiety affects not only test taking and grades but also self-esteem and everyday computational skills. (How many gallons of paint for two coats of your living room? Can you convert a double-layer cake recipe into a triple-layer?)"

Is this really a thing? Are there adults (except for those in the < 2nd std dev range, who are near-but-not-quite-at mental disability-level) who cannot calculate the amount of paint needed to paint a room?
Minix 3 seems interesting. But for the foreseeable future C seems to be the language of choice for OS development.
Samsung smart fridge opens Gmail login to hack
What is your goal with this comment? I'm genuinely curious - so many ShowHNs result in a vapid comment such as this, and I always wonder what the person was hoping to achieve.

vasylslobodian - congrats on shipping, good luck with it!
I am glad you have vocalised this sentiment. I have been feeling vaguely uneasy about this whole thread, and honestly i had put it down to plain jealousy (“if only my childhood environment hadn't consisted of accountant parents but programmers”). I think it's more than that though, this morning i already had an offline chat with someone about it, and came to the conclusion that it was perhaps setting up unreasonable expectations for those kids who don't have rockstar and/or programmer parents. You've hit the nail on the head, in my humble opinion.

Let the kid decide. Maybe he wants to become an astronaut instead, or a penniless country musician. We'll see, all in good time.
Could someone put this into a pastebin or something please? Somehow I can't go beyond the "we decided to investigate this" first page, either through the 'One page' or through 'Slides' (and there's no 'next'-'prev' either anywhere).
South African team may have cracked small scale solar production
Why? Is pop quiz ability important for the job? I'd rather of prepared candidates. If it's technical questions they'll still need to work through the problem because showing their process is the important part of a technical question.

Anything else the employee is just going to Google if they don't know it, or it's a personal/goal type question which again preparation is better in my opinion.
I see this as an attractive way to establish an apprenticeship. At least for software engineers, it is rather common to move around every 2 to 4 years, which makes it hard to maintain and nurture a mentor relationship.

If I were to invest in a student, my advice and attention would help secure my investment and would probably be worth more than the principle to the student.

This type of Money and Mentorship scheme would be especially valuable for poor, minority, or first-generation college students that come from a community or family unable to offer them informed direction or advice.
Another thing is that even very basic math concepts can be hard to explain in a way that makes sense to kids. For example, if you have to explain why multiplying unlike fractions works one way whereas adding unlike fractions requires an entirely different procedure, lots of parents have no idea other than "that's just how I learned it."

The transcripts included in the research paper "Mathematics in the Home" (PDF: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicole_Else-Quest/public...) are really telling. Parents who are comfortable with math will tend to ask their kids questions and give little hints when they're stuck, whereas parents that are uncomfortable with math will tend to just blurt out the solution whenever things are taking too long, or encourage strict adherence to one particular heuristic for finding a solution. Over the long haul, the result is that mathematics will start to look like just one long arbitrary list of rules. Of course, that's no fun, and so kids of mathophobes become mathophobes themselves.

Plenty of help available, though, for people who do want to help their kids: "Help Your Kids with Math: A visual problem solver for kids and parents", "Math Power: How to Help Your Child Love Math, Even If You Don't", "What Can I Do to Help My Child with Math When I Don't Know Any Myself?"
Perhaps IHaskell (https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell) is what you're looking for? It seems to be available on Jupyter's demo website.
Sounds good but still not convincing. For example, R can do the same thing, too, or even better. And it can be integrated with other programming languages. I would never buy it either until somebody really shows it's worth the money.
The Efficient Market Hypothesis should probably be considered more like a Carnot engine than like a real internal combustion engine: some substantial degree of inefficiency is probably an inevitable result of operating in the real world.

That's a specious conclusion; the paper explicitly says that the inefficiency is due to the degree of management present in West Germany, which was significant.

It's not like the EMH says the market prices are theoretically perfect; it only says they're better than whatever individual or group can calculate. And the paper you cite provides evidence for that.

"To sum up, the unexpected similarity of overall deviance between actual prices and
eigenprices in East and West does not warrant the conclusion that East German pricing
behaviour was not so bad after all and more or less guided by relative scarcities. In those
sectors where market forces prevail in the West, East German actual prices deviate
significantly more from eigenprices. However, the similarity of the overall indicator
testifies to the fact that a sizeable part of West German GNP is not produced under
competitive market conditions. It obviously is the case in sectors with predominant public
ownership rights and strong government influence."

(Emphasis mine)

https://www.europa-uni.de/de/forschung/institut/institut_fit...
It's vague, it's expansive, its informal usage is frequently conflated with its legal usage. And all this is a feature of the term, not a bug.
IBM's investment in Linux was political. For decades, IBM's identity was as a platform company. It was becoming a regular loser outside of its enterprise monopoly. It was late to the party on home computing. It created the PC but still lost control of the platform. It tried to recover with OS/2. It was a pretty good platform but they couldn't get the details right. This was was fizzing as well.

Around 1996 they made a pivot. They invested heavily to recreate themselves as a company who sold services based on Windows NT. This was a desperate move, but it worked - by the late 90s they had reinvented themselves as a services business. One of the stories of the late 90s was the way that IBM had reinvented themselves.

Then, shrewdly, they invested heavily in Linux. At a time, FreeBSD was still a much better platform. But Linux had the GPL behind it. The GPL forces people to release changes. This sabotaged the commercial software market, which IBM had already lost. IBM could continue to charge for services and retain their hardware monopoly. This has hurt competitors who had strong footholds in software but who who were less strong in services (Sun, Oracle).
The body font size seems tiny to me.
When I first learned about CSS I was pretty intrigued by the
W3C Core Styles [1]. They were a pretty good illustration of the separation of presentation from the underlying markup.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/
>>I'm always annoyed at the invocation of the logical fallacy that the source of an argument renders it inadmissible. Not only is it a fallacy, but it's typically (but not in your case, especially since you're offering a specific criticism!) invoked by someone simply assuming that their own source is sacrosanct.

I didn't say it is inadmissible. I simply pointed out that it is significantly biased as a source, and proved it by pointing out the author's willful omission of important information and misrepresentation of facts.

Another issue with the AIE article is that defining the middle class purely by income is fallacious. Paul Krugman explained this wonderfully [1]. He makes the point that being middle class is really about two things: security and opportunity.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21841-paul-krugman-red...

So a $60,000 family with good health insurance, high labor mobility and job security can be middle class, whereas a $90,000 family with no health insurance and terrible job security may not be.

Economist Miles Corak also elaborated on the opportunity aspect:

http://milescorak.com/2013/06/18/income-inequality-equality-...
Yes. Not among engineers, of course, but among the general population? Yes.
It's just a keyboard. I thought he was going to do an entire typewriter-based user interface for VIM. The Culler-Fried system in the 1960s used an interface where you could turn the typewriter platen knob to a different line or between lines to type subscripts and superscripts. (Mice hadn't been invented yet.)

I restore old Teletype machines, as I've mentioned before.[1] Keyboard feel on these is interesting. When you press a key, it locks down, the keyboard driveshaft rotates once, and the key releases. Then you can press another key. Effective typing has to be done in rhythm at 5 chars/sec, like playing a piano. You can't press two keys at once; once a key is down, no other key will move.

Because this was annoying to fast typists in the models from 1912 to 1926, in 1930 Teletype put spring-loaded keytops on their keys, allowing about 1/8" of spring loaded travel before you blunted your fingers because the key lever would not move yet. You could then start to press a key before the keyboard unlocked.

The IBM Selectric had one-character type-ahead in an entirely mechanical machine. That was a very nice piece of mechanical engineering. There are Selectrics with electrical I/O, but they are quite rare.

[1] https://vimeo.com/124065314
I'd say eliminating repetition is meta-programming, rather than programming. It is one of the things that set experienced programmers apart from beginners.
Fantastic, I agree with everything you said and you didn't disagree with anything I said.
It's sad that I have to say this in 2015, but the cheapest way to deal with money oversees is to... use cash as much as possible. It's not as convenient (although, everybody takes cash, credit cards - depends on where you go...), but taking a wad of cash for trips <= 1 week or making weekly withdrawals for travels longer than that is usually by far the cheapest option.
As a Chinese, this is pretty normal. In fact I'd push him to perform in sports and academics as well.

On a more serious note, sadly the majority of Chinese/Asian parents i know would take the first sentence seriously.
Simply put, folks are lazy and do NOT care.

When 1/2 of your life is already on Facebook, email privacy doesn't seem like such a big deal.

Lastly, encrypt simply and GPG/PGP can not be used in the same sentence. If we want encryption to be universal, it need to be built into the system from the ground up, and transparent for the end user.

If I want to be "secure" email isn't really a system I'm going to be using any way. Maybe as a delivery mechanism for a already encrypted file, and even then that use case is marginal.
I think there's an aspect of morality that you're missing. There comes a moment when taking advantage of someone's lack of foresight, lack of intelligence, and/or carelessness becomes immoral.

I'm not sure where exactly that line lies, but I think I have a good staring place:

If you've created a system that takes someone's money -- even when that transaction was done with the person's prior permission in some way -- and that person says "Woah, wait a minute, this isn't what I thought I signed up for," that's a hint that you might be on the wrong side of that line.

If millions of people have that reaction, and legislators start making public inquiries into what you're up to, that's a REALLY good sign that you might be on the wrong side of the line.
> Well you could try to, step by step, experiment with different diets and regularly have a look at your fitness-level, your blood work, your weight, the composition of your body (%of water/fat/and so on).

A diet is a complex set of variables. I could look at it holistically, ignore individual variables, and try to make sense of it as whole but a) there's more to health than body composition (such as %BF); and b) I wouldn't like to assume that I can read a blood work panel and interpret it as a physician.

It's not that I don't do this: I work-out daily, I weight and measure myself daily and I also track everything I eat. However:

a) I won't stop getting checked out by competent professionals, so I still put my main trust in physicians; and

b) I can't assume that my "diet experiments" are innocuous. Our bodies, as systems, are way more complex than the systems we engineer. We can't really predict the interactions between all the variables we experiment with (and are subject to). What if I seem OK by now with my diet choices, looking at what you mentioned + my subjective well-being, but end up developing something bad in the medium/long-term? Then I won't be happy with my experimentation. :)

> Before that you could read a lot. Some studies, some literature. A lot will be on the strange to the bullshit-level. But the self-experimenting part will teach you, what is good for your body and what not.

I also do that, quite a lot. I also took a few MOOCs. But I wouldn't say I fully understand what I read, or assume I can interpret a paper in health sciences. It's research-level material, meant to be read by people from the field. I have a PhD in other scientific area: I wouldn't expect someone from other field to make full sense out of a article in my field, so why would I assume I could?

> But I would not recommend doing exactly this to everybody - it is something, that subjectively, anecdotally works for me.

My point is, although I can fully relate (because, well, that's what I do), I'm not able to say "it works for me". It seems to be working, but if I'm scientifically unable to say "it works" without some degree of certainty in my field, why would I do so in a field in which I'm ignorant?
I am not sure if i will use this or not. But anyways Congrats on the release of the product.

What i did not get from the site is sneak peek into the design. Do you have a link or something where we can see a demo template design.
What I mean is that the value or whatever of what vasylslobodian is selling is completely nullified as soon as someone uploads a copy to the internet, for free. Maybe I don't understand the business model, but to me it's the same as selling music, you might as well give it away for free and offer custom services around it.
The issue I see with it is transparency about it. If an user updates from Win7/8 who didn't have this explicit functionality, it doesn't know that it sends the queries online, nor is he immediately shown how to easily opt-out. I mean, where's a section in Control panel that's titled "Windows 7/Classic mode" ? FFS, I'd pay for that Service pack or edition.

At least now we know why they're offering the update for free.
Yeah, font-size: 14px is a bad idea. It should really, really be put back to 16px (just leave the definition out!).
Going head to head with Sketchdeck?
I think that when my great-grandmothers were alive (from the late 1800s up to the 1940s) food additives in use that are now banned included red lead, white lead, diethylene glycol, fishberries, opium, cocaine, strychnine, sawdust, vermilion, toxic copper salts (including cupric hydrogen arsenite!), and hydrogenated vegetable oil containing trans fats.

To quote from a 1909 book about one of the pioneers:

The latter part of the eighteenth
and the first quarter of the nineteenth century were marked
by international strife, political upheaval, and suffering among
the toilers. Cobbett, Burdett, and 'Orator' Hunt in 1817
were agitating for Parliamentary reform. Agricultural depression
was extreme, and commercial probity was at its nadir.
For threescore years the food of the people had been poor
and dear. Contemptible and gross adulterations of all
conceivable kinds were everywhere the rule. The dough of
bread was mingled with alum, carbonate of lime, bone ash,
potatoes, and beans. By eking out his sugar with gypsum
chalk, and pipe-clay, the sweetmeat-maker derived unholy
gains; and the pigments used contained lead, chromium,
mercury, copper, sometimes even arsenic. The unwholesome
hues of preserved green fruits and vegetables were due
to boiling in copper vessels, or to the addition of cupreous
salts. Cayenne pepper and curry powder were beautified
by the scarlet oxide of lead. Vinegar was fortified with
sulphuric acid. Canistered fish were tinted red by
ferruginous earths.

Now, some of these are still in use; gypsum "chalk" is harmless and an essential ingredient in many foods; alum is safe up to a certain level, and is an important ingredient in some kinds of pickling; sulfuric acid is perfectly harmless in sufficiently small quantities (it's GRAS, but I think still illegal in vinegar, and dangerously prone to pick up heavy metals); and as far as I know you can still tint your canned fish red with ochre, which is GRAS too. And bone ash won't hurt you, unless maybe it's infected with Mad Cow Disease. The others, though, are dangerous, and now they have very strict maximum permissible levels.

The situation started to improve during my great-grandmothers' lifetimes.

http://www.rsc.org/Education/EiC/issues/2005Mar/Thefightagai... talks a bit about the history of processing foods with additives.

Unfortunately, some of the less toxic preservatives are still in wide use, like nitrate and nitrite, even though these have been convincingly shown to cause stomach cancer.
Whether it was "over-interpreted" or not -- some stressors methylate genes, and those mutations are passed on to descendants.

Does surviving the holocaust count as a stressor? Yes. Would going through that probably involve a bundle of stressors, of which some are likely to produce epigenetic mutations? Likely.

The author of this article is in the business of writing papers that are anti-trans-generational epigenetic inheritance. The author either doesn't believe it is possible, or doesn't believe to have seen evidence for it yet.

It's a useful counterpoint to the majority opinion, tho it's very much the opinion of someone peddling a particular line that happens to be the line their in the business of writing papers about.

The most interesting thing in this study was that the descendants of those who had experienced the holocaust seemed to have become more immune to the stressors their ancestors faced. That's a pretty clear case of the genome responding by becoming more fit, the occurrence of which has evolutionary advantage.
For parents of kids who are getting themselves into troubling things (physical, mental, social: thinspiration, suicidal temptation, and dangerous "religious" indoctrination, to pick one example from each of those categories) are going to like it too - so while I see your concern I can definitely see why this was considered a good enough idea to implement.

Of course we are still in a position where most kids know more about what goes on inside the computer than their parents[] so many will find ways around this if they need to...

[] though I feel this is changing, at least here, as the 90s (and to an extent 80s) generation have growing families: they grew up with tech around them so were far more attuned to it than their parents, and to many kids these days tech is just commodity items so they can use them well but don't bother to understand them.
thanks a lot, mryan!
Agreed. That's what I've done for the past few years. If you get a good rate ahead of time, you're set. The main reason I do it, though, is I had numerous bad experiences with banks and credit cards blocking me over and over when I went to buy things overseas and I was sick of that - cash is king (if you can cope with the safety aspects).
I wonder what an similar survey of the genetics of Palestinians living under occupation for five decades would show - and whether the epigenetic effect not only makes people more "fit" for dealing with trauma, but perhaps desensitised when it comes to inflicting trauma on others.
World record: P85D driving 728.7 km, 452.8 mi on a single charge
I think I got lucky. This was a good 30 years ago, so my memory is a bit hazy, but I think what happened was that they deactivated my account, which incurred the charge. Since I didn't technically have an account any more, they couldn't do anything. I suspect that they weren't supposed to actually deactivate the account completely and screwed up. Back then banking systems were a lot less computerised so I think there were probably lots of errors.
I would fix the silicon problem last, if I were them. Once manufacturing begins, the company will be bleeding money and customers better not be waiting for something else before buying.
http://www.csszengarden.com/ is a neat example of that too: some wildly different visual designs with the same markup.
I wouldn't necessarily chalk it up to intelligence. I'm finishing a masters in statistics at the moment, quite a lot of math involved, and I'm mostly doing fine, however when I started the program after not having seen any mathematics in about a decade, I hardly remembered the difference between the circumference and the area of a circle. Now, calculating the amount of paint needed to paint a room might seem like more of a life skill than a math skill, but for some people it just doesn't come up, and when they do suddenly need math for something, they're not likely to trust whatever basic arithmetic they do think they still know.

For some people who are weak at math, it even becomes a badge of honor: "yeah, um, sure, we could calculate how we want to split the bill, but do we really want to be such nerds about it?"

Studies abound, too, showing that even grade school maths teachers often eff up when quizzed on pre-algebra.
Oh, that one does bring back memories! A proto-CSS Zen Garden of sorts, absolutely fascinating at the time.

We used to spend hours applying those 8 stylesheets to our pages and deciding which one we preferred... Really edgy types used two, or perhaps even three, different styles on their handwoven Web Pages.
I've found that cards get better exchange rates than converting cash. Sometimes several dozen percentage points better. However, if you pull the local currency out of an ATM, you get the card network's exchange rate, and at worst an ATM fee (if any).
Google Testing “Book an Appointment” Feature in Search Results
If you make your kids learn something from a very early age, I think it's reasonable to assume that they'll become pretty good at it. Look for example at Laszlo Polgar's daughters [1]. Most violinists that I know where also forced by their parents to learn the instrument.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r
hey, no. For now I'm just sell template and Custom Design option. Sketchdeck is more "design-agency" oriented service.
I wouldn't bother. You and your developer have more important things to focus on than browsers that are barely in use day to day.
> On the other hands, are we really governed by officials who plug their iPhones on secret networks?

The "secret network" is probably just their desktop PC which happens to have a couple of USB ports in the front. Which would allow for easy charging of your iPhone while working.

99% of people don't understand that it can be a bad thing to connect your phone to just any USB outlet to charge it.

The fear of running out of battery juice is enough for people to break those "stupid protocols" where they were told not to attach a cellular device to anything.
'Illegal combatants' would, of course, not be covered.
Mind giving a link to your project?
I'm going to assume that this is a compliment.