skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Traditional Public Schools" aren't really that old... the schools resembling what we have today as K-12 in the US is only about a century old, and then in Urban areas mostly. Parents that could, would teach their kids, and those that could afford it, there were private tutors and schools.

Our K-12 system is relatively new, and even then has changed a lot since even when I was a kid, let alone what my parents and grandparents had. My great grandmother was a school teacher, and the English textbook that 5th graders were taught in the 50's was harder than anything I had through graduating 22 years ago.

We're spending far more time on "computer skills" and "soft skills" and "self esteem" and less on core english, math and communications skills... those skills with which you can learn anything else.
Find something you're interested in and go do it.
Misleading? So new Linux distros aren't operating systems to you?
The enterprise fizzbuzz does exactly what is asked of in the spec, allow room for expansion, split all responsibilities into modules which could be concurrently worked on by many different people/teams, and the testing ensures that miscommunication doesn't ruin a code base. In my books, that's clean.
Each page could contain a small feedback area in which the actual product user can specify what feature he/she would like to see improved.

Changing color of text is not much improvement, unless the text was unreadable or same color as background.

No amount of data driven can replace what the actual product user says.
As usual, if you have to ask, the answer is no.
I have not tried it, but PriceRide aggregates transportation providers based on price http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/mobile/uber-ubers-app-compares-r...
Ask HN: What is the difference between a program that is “correct” vs. “safe”?
The two terms seem thrown around a lot in similar contexts, and I'd like to know what you all think.
It's not the fault of the schools or politicians or teachers. It's the parents.
This article is excellent, both in the way it's written and in the underlying genius of using tenure as an indicator for credit for each paper.

One interesting point is that a women-only or woman-solo paper gets more credit (9%) than a mixed-gender paper (8%).

I'm wondering why they rounded single-digit number, it's 15% imprecision (8.4% and 8.5% aren't significantly different, whereas 7.5% and 9.4% would be a great gap).
Age doesn't appear to be in the pdf. A surprising omission.

http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sarsons/files/gender_groupw...
Yeah, its age is showing, truth to be told. That's why we have now AGPL for network programs, and LGPL for libraries.

About the ambiguity - my feeling about it is that they (Stallman and the lawyers, I suppose) leaned towards the usual way these documents are done, to make the licence more general - which irks us, the programmers. For a lawyer, "the code" is a good enough term.

I agree with you on having a new copyleft licence - but I'm afraid is hard to get something even to match GPL, and worse - you can step in the same, or other subtle traps as the initial versions of the GPL did - that tivoization stuff was nasty as hell. If only some of the licenses would "die" eventually, but the process reminds me of this comic - https://xkcd.com/927/
Ask HN: What were some of the more devastating PHP exploits?
I am re-writing an old website of mine in PHP. I am curious what some of the worst PHP security exploits are that have been found in the recent past.
"A 'reference man' (one who is 70 kilograms, 20–30 years old and 1.7 metres tall) contains on average about 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacteria"

The numbers are a bit at odds with the title, aren't they?
http://imgur.com/mHNm6ai
You could have given her a 50 dollar android phone too is my guess. FirefoxOS never had a future. It was unsupported, laggy, without any direction from both thr developers and Mozilla, had no unique selling point that people cared about. I'm glad they killed it because that project would have destroyed Mozilla.
You can get the BART problem although, where you have to get 3-5 counties and 25+ municipal governments working together to make a unified metro transit system. In the BART's case, only 2-3 counties did and now there are big transit gaps everyone regrets today.
That joke went really far above your head...
>most of the "data-driven" marketing and analytics is basically marketers bullshitting each other

Most of the ones you hear about. You know, the ones who were SEOs or content writers or programmers before waking up one day and deciding to be marketers.

Marketing degrees have mandatory statistical courses. The good marketing programs take them very seriously. However a lot of schools focus on the communication side of marketing, which leads a very significant chunk of the marketing analyst positions to be filled by people with economics and accounting degrees.

The Internet is actually quite new and has just begun maturing. A lot of people working in digital marketing do not really understand what marketing is. When you meet somebody on the street and ask him what marketing is, he will describe advertising, or more precisely mar. communications. So when the internet became this giant medium for doing all sorts of commerce, big companies and schools couldn't fill the skill gap fast enough, so the gap was filled by self-learners coming from all sorts of backgrounds. When they wanted to build up their "marketing skills", naturally they defaulted to learning about marketing communication instead of the economics-orientated part of marketing. This is why digital marketers obsess with their site and drool over a/b tests and such. The web site is a communication medium. They've put themselves in this box equating marketing and communications.

Too bad for them, because graduates nowadays are digital native too, so they have no problem navigating the internet and learning html/css.
>> This article appeared in the September 17, 2009 issue of Rolling Stone.

Six and a bit years ago. That was before operation fast and furious came to light. We now know that the DEA had several informants. They were paid and seemingly informed on rival cartels. So many assertions in the OP were probably incorrect even at the time.
I'd just like for mine to finally ship :(

(I'm a december backer)
They're not _new_ operating systems.
You See It Coming and NO WAY to Avoid It,Brutal Car Crash Compilation 2016
The 7 most important things CEOs need to know about presenting
I still predict that the first major adoption of driverless tech will come for long-haul trucking, not the every-day commute.

Think remote flat desert highways. Trucking companies have strong economic incentives to make it happen, having a person in the driver's seat that has to take frequent legally mandated breaks is slower and more expensive than a machine.
> the mistakes should be easy to fix and minimize the time you're spending fighting with the type system

In Haskell you don't fight the type system. It fights your bugs.

[Yes, yes, this isn't an absolute truth, but it is a relative truth when the point of reference is C++'s, or even Java's, type system.]
If I write a program that's supposed to kill somebody and it does, it is correct, but certainly not safe.
Lies, damn lies and statistics ... I have yet to find a person that does not do its best to find a data presentation that suits the agenda.
Related, from earlier:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10867279
As long as I had no reason to think their ability to work was less than a non blind programmer, then probably yes. My first assumption given all other indicators were in line would be that you were better at programming than people with sight because your condition forces you to think through your code more carefully. On the other hand, I guess I would want to understand more about the way you work on other people's code. Finally, I would have some concerns about legal risks I'd be exposing myself to, should things not work out.
Why not both. I bet carriers would love LTE in a subway metro. I use it for BART it works pretty well most of the time.
Ask HN: What happend with the Free Springer books?
11 days ago many books before 2005 were available for free as PDF: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10810271
> and the field of statistics has devoted extensive effort to the problem of getting good answers out of bad inputs.

You are talking about measurement bias. Social bias is not measurement bias. Social bias may be a real statistical distribution; it is called "bias" because it is caused (in the sense of physical causality) and reinforced by biased human perception and the actions that follow. When we talk about "fixing bias" we don't mean "offset measurement errors", but change the actual distribution through action.

> Mandating specific outcomes is just a way of ensuring that the predictor can't discover certain facts.

Exactly. And neglecting feedback from the equations mandates a specific (conservative) outcome. See my reply to barry-cotter for examples of dynamical systems where conservative assumptions can lead to empirically valid yet mathematically wrong results, by failing to detect other stable states: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874683

If your dynamic system contains feedback, it is quite possible (and very likely) to come up with a model that may be completely predictive, yet quite wrong, and then use that mistake to justify conservatism (what's worse, it is ironically a mathematical error that helps paint a political view as a neutral, "mathematical" one).
Strapless Court Train Sheath Column Chiffon Ivory Evening/Military Ball Dress
Probably just like end users - ie. not at all, until SHTF.
10 Inside Tips for Nailing Your First Board Presentation
It's not unthinkable that computer-driven cars will be so much safer on the public road that it'll become illegal to have human drivers, as they are much more dangerous.

Maybe not in the immediate future, but it'll probably happen at some point.
I'm increasingly convinced all statistical analysis performed by non-PhDs is no better than a coin flip. Maybe even worse.

My favorite example is still the quite popular Page Weight Matter posts. I wonder how close they were to abandoning a 90% reduction in size. I wonder how many improvements the world at large has thrown away due to faulty analysis.

http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
There's no way any of this will remain "free" though. Established players won't allow it, you'll have to license their patent portfolios to make anything at all.
Without experiment there won't be progress. New technologies should be adopted to aid learning. Not talking about giving ipads, but about using internet to help with accelerated learning. An analogue to this would be that we can't learn basics of programming or become experts in them just by reading it. You have to practice. Using internet materials to help explain things would do great for both teacher and student. There are many wrong articles about stuff out there, so things will have to be curated though.

Also currently there is a situation where not everyone is able to follow what they truly like. That situation will change when there is a "place" where anyone can learn about anything authoritatively(learning by oneself with internet is very tedious and you never know if you are in right path).
Correct: works exactly as intended (specified)

Safe: Correct and does not have unintended and undesirable side effects.

So, in my opinion being correct is a prerequisite for being safe.
Oh crap, that typo makes me sound like a Young Earth crackpot :)
A "cofounder" title is totally meaningless unless it comes with proportional equity and voting rights. You should give them out like candy if it will benefit you.
I would assume it's so future drivers see the bad rating and, while not knowing the underlying reason, will give preference to someone with higher rating(more likely to tip).
It seems to me that the whole article is about proving this point.

Relevant quotes:

> The secrecy of the algorithms further pushes people toward conformity. If you are worried that the US government will classify you as a potential terrorist, you're less likely to friend Muslims on Facebook.

> If you know that your Sesame Credit score is partly based on your not buying "subversive" products or being friends with dissidents, you're more likely to overcompensate by not buying anything but the most innocuous books or corresponding with the most boring people.

> Uber is an example of how this works. Passengers rate drivers and drivers rate passengers; both risk getting booted out of the system if their rankings get too low.

> Many have documented a chilling effect among American Muslims, with them avoiding certain discussion topics lest they be taken the wrong way.
It would be nice to open up the 5 year old code and put it on github.
Wow, sounds to me that Pinterest is on the right track.

F#ck the CPM sales "community", focus on the product.
Yeah, fuck the people who pay you.
When I loaded this page, upon the slightest movement of the cursor, I got a popup ("We'd be crazy to let you leave without asking...") that would. not. dismiss.

The behavior is limited to incognito windows, but it's still obnoxious.
Your analogy is incorrect because when it comes to social systems, how people bet actually changes the outcome, at least in the long run. So the dynamics are more like that the team that wins is the one that has the most people bet it would win.

In general, the problem is not the math but our interpretation of the result. All the result says is that if we change nothing, this is the likely outcome. By interpreting the results to mean merely "this is the likely outcome", we are depriving people of the opportunity of getting out of local optima. Deciding to coordinate or deciding to have society maintain its Nash equilibria are both political choices -- not mathematical outcomes.
Buyable pins reported to be an (embarrassing) flop, according to an article on qz.
There is an article saying this romanticized story is a bit too much:

http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/remote-hokkaido-t...
Session is shared across all incognito tabs. Firefox behaves the same way. Even if you close any incognito tabs and then open a new one, it's still on the same session. You need to completely restart the browser (or explicitly clear history) to clear.
It's integration for java.

Simple starter where Vue.js workflow work great with java application.
Why do you want to do that? Isn't there a hard ARM core on the Zynq 7000s ?
It's horse shit on inspection. Of course, so are virtually all economics papers, so let them eat each other alive for all I care.
> This leaves a sample of 552 economists ... between 1975 and 2014

Soon there will be studies about a few dozens people and latter about individuals. I just wish other issues would receive similar attention and dedication.
Yes, sorry, I was referring to the operation with automation engaged. As opposed to a standard cruise control, which can be set to any speed you want. Obviously in manual mode it will let you speed.
Pinterests recommender system algo (picture suggestions) is flawed/broken. It shows you always the same pictures, of the same k-mean group.

And their nag screen to login/signup is as annoying as on Quora. Btw: Has Quora completed their pivot already, they joined YC like a year ago? http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/09/meet-the-oldest-y-combinat...

Glad to see pg doesn't like the nag screen either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5217449 (full context: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Quora-join-the-2014-Y-Combinat... )
What about when someone does statistics to make a decision for themselves which they do not reveal?
Sounds like some VCs really desperate to dump the IPO on the market before everything implodes (hence pushing this submarine article), some butthurt sales monkeys who didn't get their commissions, and oh hey there's Pinterest doing what they've always done, being really careful about building a great product.
Funny thing is that this document - incidentally? - says nothing about US involvement in the war in Libya.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_involvement_in_the_...
Stay on track in 2016 with Littlelogs
I'm very surprised this is the top comment too, where's patio11 and his ridiculously large amount of positive and useful split testing examples when you need him?

Anyway, on to your comment:

> A much better approach is to install significant instrumentation and actually talk to users about what's wrong with your sign up form.

I don't know what this means. Can you elaborate? What exactly is "significant instrumentation"?

> That, or actually build a product that users want instead of chasing after pointless metrics.

Pointless metrics? I'm not sure what metrics you measure but visitor engagement and visitor to trial conversion rates are the lifeblood of a software sales and marketing funnel.

When somebody in marketing considers A/B testing as a means to increasing trial and paying customer conversions, they're operating on the basis that their product already provides value. The A/B tests are a means of establishing the best method for communicating that value. Better communication = more trials. More trials = a larger pool of potential customers to convert to paying customers. It's pretty basic.

> Most of the A/B website optimization industry is an elaborate scam

What?? Had you said a number of people in marketing could be in danger of blindly relying on their tools (e.g. Optimizely) and not applying common sense or checking the maths I would have wholeheartedly agreed. In my personal experience with the various websites I market, and given the hundreds of split testing examples I've read from people I do not feel are in on the "scam", I've got to strongly disagree with this point.
so, basically it looks like debian running on a cortex-a8 sbc...other than the $9 price point, _i_ don't see anything new. am I missing something fundamental here ?
_A Perfect Spy_ has my vote, it's an incredible book.
Yes, and it would be interesting to compare WASM with the native Node plugins performance-wise. Especially looking at how it handles the interaction between JS and plugins/wasm. AFAIK, right now there are penalties associated with moving values in and out of V8 when using native plugins. If WASM can avoid that, native plugins may switch to it.
I am not using AeroSpike nor am I affiliated with them. I just studied their code base (I study codebases as a hobby ). There is a _lot_ of room for improvement there IMO but that's true for the majority of codebases I went through :)
Fellas, that goose must be FILLED with golden eggs!
Ask HN: Emailing laws around the world for startups?
Hello,

as a startup that wants to internationalize, we wonder what laws there are around the world concerning emails for B2B and B2C. Is there an overview somewhere? e.g. were one needs consent (phone, website), double opt in, ...
edit: I am not even more confident that cnvogel is correct instead of me. Check their comment, not this one.

I thought "safe" just meant it wouldn't ever crash or read or write to memory it shouldn't, and things like that, whereas correct means it meets some set of requirements exactly, and, because of this would probably also be safe.

Which, is kind of backwards from what cnvogel said, and I don't have any reason for expecting myself to be more correct, so,

I would suggest that you treat their comment to be more likely to be correct than mine.

But if they are wrong this is what I think the difference is.
Frama-C can be used in "interpreter mode" where it acts like a checking C interpreter. It then catches a superset of the bugs that would be caught by Valgrind / ASan / UBSan. On the other hand it is slower and harder to use than those tools.
So many assumptions in one short sentence.

Why do you think CPM-people pay him? He might as well work in a company that does not rely on marketing/advertising industry. Those do exist.

Even if he was paid by CPM-people - so what? A lot of people work for money, not because they like their employers or share same views.
Static Typing Where Possible, Dynamic Typing When Needed  (2011) [pdf]
Yes, I used that when I worked on sensor fusion algorithms and we had to overcome both random and bias errors in measurements provided by radars. In this case, however, your math is wrong. Radars and compasses don't change the actual position of aircraft or the north, but social predictions really do change future real outcomes (we know that thanks to research in history, social psychology and sociology). The system is dynamic, not static, and has a very strong feedback[1]. Neglecting that feedback makes you miss other stable states; or, in other words: gives you a wrong answer.

Just to show you how tricky that feedback can be, I can tell you that in our tracking algorithms we had to carefully track the error's growth with time, as well as allow for unpredictable change in the model (how the aircraft behaves). But if your system has self-reinforcing bias -- i.e. the feedback is stabilizing (as in my example of the {-1, 1} dynamic system) -- you can neglect either of those things and your correct predictions would lead you to the conclusion that your model is actually simpler than the radar case, when, in fact it is far more complicated.

Our mistakes are rarely arithmetic errors when applying formulas. They are almost always in the hidden (or not) assumptions we make about the model, and in how we interpret the results[2]. In the case of 99.9% of social statistics, the results mean, "this is the likely outcome provided nothing changes, including not using this result to take any action". Interpreting the results any differently would be making assumptions completely unjustified by math.

----

[1]: Trying to correct biases in sensor measurement also has a feedback effect on future measurements, but it is a predictable and simple feedback that we can usually fix (with gradient techniques as we know the derivatives, though drift may still occur) but that is still not at all the kind of feedback we have in social systems.

[2]: Of course, it is often the same thing: how we interpret the result of any mathematical statement depends on the assumptions we've made to arrive at it. In order to apply a proven theorem you must make sure that its assumptions are held in your case. If you've ever used any mechanical provers like proof assistants, you know how unforgiving they are in that regard; you must spend as much care and effort on the assumptions as on the proof.
It definitely seems true, in my experience, that one-on-one tutoring achieves educational outcomes far superior to traditional classroom learning. However, I am wary about the ability of technology to scale this up. One-on-one tutoring is more than just providing a customized curriculum and the expertise to answer any questions the student has.

A huge part of learning effectively is developing the right habits. The startups in the article are not really focusing on that, probably because it's the type of thing that people usually learn indirectly through social interactions (e.g. a child emulating their parent). I also believe much of the value of a tutor lies in the social connection with the student, providing them with someone to model their learning habits after as well as someone to keep them focused and motivated.

I think this social aspect of teaching is very hard to capture with technology, sort of like how it's hard to learn a language without living in a country where everyone speaks it. Technology can help, but I feel it will be more like a 0.2 sigma improvement rather than 2 sigma.
(In 2014) Pinterest reportedly brought in $25 million in revenue,..forecasts of $2.8 billion in revenue and 329 million users by 2018… the figures suggest the company is at the cusp of hockey-stick-like growth.

http://qz.com/581191/why-2016-is-poised-to-be-the-year-that-...