skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that disagrees with me: yes, schools should teach a general understanding, rather than drilling a narrow toolbox that works on one specific test. But then:

- As I said above, you would need to cite which test question are game-able, and which encourage this narrow teaching, which critics never do.

- If the problem is that teachers try to satisfy this goal by trying to game the tests, then the problem is with this way of teaching, not the tests per se.
I know plenty of people that jog/hit the gym during lunch or what have you. I run almost daily after work.

If your work is busting your ass so hard you feel it's literally impossible to move at any point during the day, get a new job. That's not SV as a whole.
I started bike commuting for exactly this reason. It takes me a bit longer than driving would and isn't an option for those with megacommutes, but now I look forward to my commutes as the highlight of my day instead of the stressful, boring time-suck they used to be. I'm riding about 100 miles a week now.
Odd choice using the older JSON dataset when an up-to-data dataset was released literally yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502

I did an analysis of titles a year ago (http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/ ). There are a few formatting choices which make the charts very hard to read. Ordering weekdays from Monday-Sunday instead of Sunday-Saturday hides the boundary conditions. Analyzing topics by # words instead of # characters may not give the best results since a HN titles tend to be idiosyncratic, etc.

From my experience and analysis a year later, HN is much, much more luckbased than Reddit, but the new repost rules alleviate that.
Wait... So you're saying a government program that pays well allowed you and your family to move out of poverty?
Japan's Yakuza Cancels Halloween
I've been a long-time Navicat user, but it has a lot of trouble with any Postgres-specific features. I kind of recommend Postico, even in its incomplete state, for wrangling Postgres.
Unbundling Reality
Is Dubai the Next Silicon Valley of the Middle East?
Counterexample: FTP Software (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTP_Software). A group of friends decided they wanted to start a company, they realized that with some effort they could turn an IP mostly stack for PCs into a full featured TCP/IP stack and did quite well for a while. Then again, the messes discussed in "Fate" section could be see as suggestive.

Additional details on its fate: the company's sales function got so screwed up people started contacting the president to get a copy (and don't laugh too much, this put Xerox in dire straits and improving this was a if not the most important goal of Mark Hurd when he became HP's CEO). And I was less reliably told that at one point they completely lost their source code repository.

But the idea certainly wasn't forced, full TCP/IP on MS-DOS was a killer app at the time.
I had a hacky implementation of this in a previous analysis: http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-top-submitters.png

I can sorta recreate it with this BigQuery:

SELECT author, COUNT(author) as num_submissions,
ROUND(SUM(score >= 10)/COUNT(author), 3) AS perc
FROM [fh-bigquery:hackernews.stories]
GROUP BY author
HAVING num_submissions >= 10
ORDER BY perc DESC
LIMIT 100

Which results in this output: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EHqYvvAh9zUSUSrn_6t9...
Brothers and sisters only share 1/4th dna. brother A gets 50% of dad's genes. Brother B also gets 50%, but not (necessarily) the same 50%. same process on the mothers side.
I should state here that I am not the one who made this blog post, so you might want to contact the author himself for further analysis requests ...
Why I use py.test
Taking this discussion in a bit of a different direction, we recently released our episode on the tech scene in Dubai, and whether we're seeing a new frontier like Silicon Vally in then Middle East. Would love your feedback! kerningcultures.com/episodes/uae-startup-scene
That depends on the industry, can you be a bit more specific?
Indeed, there is absolutely no modern startup that's still in that stage that I would wager any sort of long term reliance on. Especially with this common shamelessness: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
Those comparisons are misleading because they don't control for the demographics of students coming in. The United States does a decent job for affluent students but we have a relatively percentage of lower class students taking the same tests, which means that the effect is significantly smaller once you compare demographically matched students from different countries.

The elephant in the room is poverty: that's well known to have massive educational drawbacks and most of the countries which outperform the United States have much higher social safety nets. It's hard to study when you have untreated medical problems, are hungry or perhaps not sleeping in the same place every night or even having a safe place to sleep at all. That's a familiar litany to many U.S. public school teachers and it's something which, unlike standardized testing, has been the subject of ongoing cuts for decades.

I think that this is something we should address for many reasons but I do want to note that poverty doesn't directly explain the entire gap, although I suspect that the problem is exacerbated by the social instability caused by multi-generational poverty which is harder to directly account for:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/assessing_the_assessments/201...

“Even the OECD authors of the PISA test acknowledge that PISA results are due to a combination of variables, including but not limited to schooling, life experiences/home environment, poverty, access to early childhood programs, and health. In 2013, the OECD wrote in one of their reports that poverty explains up to 46% of the PISA mathematics score in OECD countries. At no time did OECD claim, as Duncan stated, schools' performance on the test can be blamed on low expectations and complacency.”

http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin...

“If U.S. adolescents had a social class distribution that was similar to the distribution in countries to which the United States is frequently compared, average reading scores in the United States would be higher than average reading scores in the similar post-industrial countries we examined (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and average math scores in the United States would be about the same as average math scores in similar post-industrial countries.”
True, but few people would argue watching TV for 6 hours every day is part of a healthy, active lifestyle. Physically, that's about the same as writing software.
Congratulations, you've been through a lot and came out nicely.

I believe that people take for granted situations that are not... Granted. A a 5-year old who lives in Bronx and his mother sells drugs for a living, doesn't have a choice. By the time he is 15, his future is already seriously broken 99 out of 100 times. Of course there are exceptions, but it's like startups... For every team that succeeds there are 1.000 smart, interesting, extremely hard-working team that fails for a huge variety of reasons.

IMHO having a parent that will teach you how to face problems, life, etc. is more valuable than money per-se.

You had your mother who was too proud, so she fought. Now you seem to have the same stance towards difficulties. Other children do not have mother like yours.

Maybe we owe more to the society than we like to reckon[1].

[1] http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2009/10/cla...
I think "time on the front page" would be a better measure of popularity.

Even better, "total site-wide HN comments made while the article was on the front page" as a proxy for the number of users being online and thus having seen it.
Ask HN: When will we stop writing UI by hand?
Designing UI is complicated. You need to think about your users and the context in which they will interact with the software. You need to support many different form factors, input methods, preferences, accessibility concerns, locales, etc.

Then, you need to implement it on a bunch of different platforms, all using their own UI framework and tools. It can easily take months to build the UI of a simple app across multiple platforms.

At the end of the day, you end up with a mostly static UI that only supports cases you could predict in advance. Even if your service is top-notch, people might go with a competitor because you don't support their language, or you don't support collapsing discussion threads.

When you think about it, most UI is 'one size fits all'. People got used to that, and most people accept a mediocre user experience because they don't know how to build their owns. The few that are able to build an app that fits their needs, quickly discover the chicken-and-egg problem and end up being the only person using their app and service.

When I talk to people doing UI, nobody even considers that such a thing could be automated. All they look for, are tools that make it easier for them to build their arbitrary UI by hand. This saddens me.

How come isn't UI automated? How come don't people complain about how mediocre most software experiences are? This seems so much obvious that I suspect I might be missing something.
EverythingMe closes down despite raising $37.5M
> the primary culprit is a diet high in processed carbohydrates and sugar.

Isn't sugar a special case of carbohydrate? The way I see it, most common carbs are sugar and starch.

I'm not trying to be nitpicky but I've been reading nutrition articles and I'd like to understand the proper terminology. I understand there are complex carbs (starch) and simple carbs (aka sugar, such as glucose and fructose).
Containing loaded dice and an abridged password lookup table.
Uzair Baloch skipped bail in Dubai a few months ago and disappeared, likely to Afghanistan where he apparently has warlord friends.
I've found it easy to live healthy here (for 2.5 years so far). I expect with the right choices you could be healthy in any normal place. But there are some aspects of silicon valley that make it easier to be healthy compared to much of the US:

- better pay, so it's easier to eat a healthy diet

- better weather, so you can easily exercise outside every day and don't need any exercise equipment

- better public transportation / bike lanes, so living without a car is feasible.

- lots of amazing geography and ocean nearby, so I've been going hiking / surfing on days off and rarely spend my free time indoors.

There are cities with better public transit, and there are places that have nature even more accessible, but I can't think of anywhere else in the US with this combination of pay, weather, public transit and nature all in the same place.

Of course, if you have a job that requires you to spend many more than 40 hours at the computer each week, and doesn't provide healthy food, it will be more difficult to keep healthy habits.
You may want to teach your brother how to guess, because a solid educated guess is also an opportunity for you to assess his level of understanding.

A student guess is an opportunity for you to learn what they understand and what they still need help with. If a student makes an attempt on a well-written multiple choice test, the attempt can show the teacher exactly what the student does and doesn't understand.

The right approach to guessing can communicate a lot, and partial credit may be justified if, for example, the student correctly factors a quadratic equation but fails to remember how to compute the intercepts from the result. That would tell a teacher that the student remembers part of the lesson but needs help with the rest.
So the kernel parts?
Dunno.
CFI (mentioned in the paper) is already being worked on.
See https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=469376 et al
Is there a gzipped CDN version? The [URL](http://cdn.quilljs.com/0.19.10/quill.min.js) provided in the readme is not gzipped.
Not give up.

Give it away.
Probably.

But the ratio of FUD to credible sources in that thread is annoying.
Unfortunately that's a) impossible to see in historical data unless you had a huge number of snapshots and b) the algorithm changed very recently so that wouldn't help.
The number of times I've felt threatened by a Luxe driver behind the wheel in SF is unacceptable. I've seen them do burnouts in customer cars, drive aggressively through parking decks (including the one that I pay $275/month for a privilege of parking a car in), and generally be poor members of the community. Not to mention packs of them on scooters on sidewalks.
Avg karma was highly misleading so it's no surprise it was removed.
Ahh, yes it's described in a different section. Cool!
Indeed. When I'm doing a technical interview, and I ask a question, I want the person I'm asking to tell me if they don't know the answer. If they tell me that they don't know the answer, I'm more confident that when they are stuck on a problem in the real world, they will come and ask someone, or look it up, rather than just trying to bullshit their way through. In the real world, guessing can be considerably more dangerous than admitting that you don't know something and thus taking the effort to actually find it out.
Yup, filtered replication supported by pouchdb + couchdb - http://pouchdb.com/2015/04/05/filtered-replication.html.

There are also other models, sharding individual databases per user or some other application logic. There are definitely some use cases we dont handle amazingly right now, but its all heavily being worked on.
Hey HN - project creator here. Pleasantly surprise to see Quill picked up again on HN. We built Quill to because my previous company needed a modern editor with an API to manipulate the contents (our use case was collaborative coauthoring). Before I left we open sourced Quill and I have been working on it since. I recently posted about Quill’s 1.0 roadmap: http://quilljs.com/blog/the-road-to-1-0/. AMA.
I am one of the original CouchDB folks, and a cofounder of Couchbase. We have spent the last few years quietly building an enterprise-class suite of Couch sync compatible databases. Everything we do is open source and Apache licensed.

Couchbase Mobile is native on iOS, Android, and C#, and compatible with PouchDB and Apache CouchDB. http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile

Here is an example of how General Electric is using our open source platform to power the Internet of things. http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-resources/presentations/offli...

[edit] we've been able to do this, funded by the success of Couchbase Server. Which looks like a high-performance NoSQL database, not an offline mobile database, but it uses many of the same data structures.
Yeah, whatever. Let's see the US run out of oil, then let's wait 30 days or so, and then you try telling me (if you're still alive) that it's not a national security issue.
New wealth is literally created every second of every day.
Quite an involved discussion.
I feel I'm a little less sedentary when working remotely. I find it easier to take a 15 min break to walk around, do my laundry, lie on the couch to read. At the office, I'm more often sitting at my desk for long period of times.
They sure know how to offload their costs to society, while reaping the benefits.

I'm looking forward to the day when this "fat client" strategy will have lead to a "decentralized Uber" (based on open-source technology, etc.).
Ask the Anglo-Saxons how well Danegeld worked out for them.
>> This appears to be simply saying that version numbers are misleading; what is important is not what version number is being used, but what contracts that version number corresponds to.

Indeed, the version number is just an attempt to draw a big circle around a whole set of statements about contractual compliance and give the set a meaningful label. As such they are often wrong, and really don't transmit much in the way of useful information.

I was surprised not to read more in the piece about the role of automated tests as an enforcer of contractual compliance.
We wouldn't need these crappy launchers if we didn't need so many apps.

Sadly, people have been brainwashed into believing that they need different apps to do different things, and this only reinforces the application paradigm.

One day, hopefully soon, there will be a single app (probably the OS) that will be used for 90% of tasks. Shopping, setting up a meeting, reaching a friend and requesting a cab will all be done through a single interface.
Very similar experience with my grandfather who passed this summer.

It's hard to pinpoint which stage of the disease is "the worst". Is it the very early onset where the patient is still largely "there" but knows of the inevitable decline, the middle stages where your function is so degraded that you can't live fully alone, but you recall what it was like just a few years ago to be able to live at home and you have no particular physical infirmity to suggest that assisted living is right, or the end stage where you can only recognize a few people and display significant concern/fear/mistrust of the nursing staff who are doing their damnedest to help you?

Each stage is terrible in its own right, and the disease progression proved to me that there are indeed medical fates far, far worse than death.
> Have to assume driver phones can be compromised which means the data must be made tamper proof. So all the data is encrypted on the phone.

> In the background the Replication Service encrypts the data and sends it to the Messaging Service.

> The Messenger Service sends the backup to the phone.

As long as the phone can't ever read the encrypted data this is probably secure, but shifting costs onto the driver through using their bandwidth to store encrypted backup blobs seems unethical. The uber app on the phone isn't using this data to the benefit of the user, it can't as it is encrypted.

I don't think you should use a person's device for anything other than serving that person. This is the kind of thing though I would totally expect from Uber. Based on what the media has reported in the past, the whole company's culture seems toxic and dishonest from top to bottom.
I've expressed the same desire to leave tech for this very reason. I'm curious, what are some alternatives that you and your colleagues have come up with?
Standing desk? I mean there may be easier paths the health than leaving the industry.
Its huge. Takes a couple minutes to start on my Android phone. Having Spotify in there is the very definition of bloatware.
Agreed. I'm gonna hazard a guess and say that they do it in order to avoid the cost of supporting older versions of their internal APIs. Interesting contrast to Facebook's engineering team, who maintains mobile apps for at least two years after their release:

Backwards Compatible: In a world of deployed native mobile applications with no forced upgrades, backwards compatibility is a challenge. Facebook, for example, releases apps on a two week fixed cycle and pledges to maintain those apps for at least two years. This means there are at a minimum 52 versions of our clients per platform querying our servers at any given time. Client-specified queries simplifies managing our backwards compatibility guarantees.

via https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/05/01/graphql-int...

I didn't know they had such a liberal backwards compatibility policy until I saw this GraphQL talk, which is a pretty interesting overview of why / how they do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQLzZf34FJ8.

Makes me wonder how much money / how many users Uber loses by not supporting older versions.
Pretty much all of that money comes from selling stuff they are only able to sell because of previous government R&D.

For example, without the government leaning heavily on integrated circuits in the 60s, would Microsoft and Google even exist today?
Twitter chief shares £128m of stock with employees
Xen live patching prototype (xSplice)
Military jobs are anything but fictitious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
And most of this anti-testing stuff ignores the reason the whole regieme was established in the first place: too many schools weren't even pretending to teach their students the most basic of things, including the 3Rs (heck, phonics vs. "Dick and Jane and Their Running dog Spot" is still being fought 60 years after Why Johnny Can't Read was published).

I'm certain it's being taken too far without caring about the consequences (which we could point out as another example of how dysfunctional our public schools have become, see above, in the latter half of the 20th Century they simply didn't care if their graduates could read), but graduating from high school in 1979 I was at the edge of the beginning of this in Missouri. And the test was simple (well, after the SATs and College Board achievement tests :-) and covered entirely relevant stuff, things you really should be able to do to earn a high school diploma.

This in fact has a lot to do with out current insane college finance regime; the high school diploma became an entirely worthless signal, so when combined with Griggs v. Duke Power, the non-free for the student college degree has become the new signal of minimum competence.
Inner city public schools are some of the most well-funded in the county. Washington DC is almost entirely "inner city" public schools (I.e. Almost all the student population is low income) and has the highest per student spending.

The wealthy suburb of DC where I grew up spends $13,500 per student per year. That's a lot less than DC or Baltimore or Chicago, all of which have 70-85% low-income students, and only moderately more than Philadelphia, which is also almost all "inner city" schools.
So you are arguing that we as a society need to lower our general education standards? Is this not the exact opposite of what we need to be doing? Math in particular is so important whether dealing with personal finances or simply thinking abstractly. What happens when the hypothetical taxi driver job goes away? If society didn't care enough to try and teach that person some general education when we had the chance, are we now going to do it in retraining?
Consuming vs. producing, even if sitting still, is different physiologically.
On the surface, Desk workspaces seem very similar to tmux sessions. I'm curious why one would choose Desk over tmux to manage multiple workspaces in the shell? https://robots.thoughtbot.com/a-tmux-crash-course
Which is a shame because the actual boots on the ground are usually very kind, clean, and courteous, and the ride is far, far superior to cab experiences. At least anecdotally, here in Philadelphia, PA.
Taxi groups unite to fight Uber
Thanks, that's now fixed.
Unfortunately, I can't really be more specific other than to say it's in the software industry.
Websites. RTEs are a necessary evil there. If you want to post some text on your website (an announcement, press release, anything), your options are plain text, RTE, or non-WYSIWYG solutions such as Markdown/HTML, which are far outside a non-technical user's comfort zone. Lots of clients (well, their secretaries) copy-paste articles from Word (sent to them by marketing, sales, legal, press teams) into the website, and that requires an RTE with:

* basic HTML markup (headlines, paragraphs, lists...)

* HTML tables

* images (data:// URIs are good for handling pasted images) and an image/file browser, complete with some image processing that rejects or shrinks down giant images without ruining the image quality, because people will upload giant JPEGs straight from their phone if you let them (naturally, file uploads come with their own cans of worms like server security, disk space, file permissions, growing backups, etc.)

* black magic to cope with Word's markup

Don't forget to make sure that the end result looks consistent with the rest of the site without the users having to manually set the font family/size on all their text... and that the editors can't turn off the RTE and post raw HTML with malicious intent... and a million other things.
Why don't you start by describing how your theoretical UI generation would work?
Graphemica