skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are plenty of things worth discussing that aren't falsifiable. There's also plenty of actual data related to those unfalsifiable anecdotes.

Individual instances of biased decision-making are impossible to prove, but that doesn't mean we should stop bringing up the possibility. I'm sure you check yourself against common biases when you think they might be relevant. Prejudice is a common bias, and we should keep talking about it.
Not to be that guy, but I've become a lot more comfortable with not knowing what the hell I am doing since I had a kid. Most people are winging it, you just don't get to see their failures.
Amazon sold me the Kindle version for $0.99 but doesn't show a matched narration for $3.50. They want to charge me $9.95 and https://www.amazon.com/gp/audible/matchmaker doesn't bring up an option.
And tomorrow XKCD presents how to increase average session duration on your webpage.
I guess I don't fully understand the scenario being described. She writes that the T.A. tried to explain "again, and again, and again", then after she said "I DON’T UNDERSTAND", he was "eager to help us".

It seemed like the T.A. was already aware she wasn't grasping the concept because he explained it repetitively. I'm just wondering what feedback she was giving up until that point.

Regardless, clear communication from everyone in any learning setting is essential. Saying "I don't know" and "I don't understand" are a huge part of that.
I don't see how that would make up for anything; especially given how dynamic and list-/function-oriented JavaScript, the most common language these days, is.

In a situation like that, I would be willing to assume that those who you thought were experienced were almost as lost in any event as the beginners; and no amount of language familiarity would help them.
Facing a Growing Rat Problem, a Neighborhood Sets Off the Cat Patrol
I know! Holy shit, I did not know that you could boil water purely by means of subjecting it to the motion induced by a blender.

Update: from the sound of things, it's the action of the blades and the friction induced by their interaction with the water[1], rather than the swirling motion of the water itself, which sounded kind of ridiculous.

[1] http://frozendrink.com/vitamix/household.html
Also, do not hesitate to question the teaching material relatively to your needs. Don't cave on "it's trivial duh" look teachers can give you. I spent years trying to grasp linear algebra with a very formal textbook, just bought another book on the subject, everything became easy. I wish I had the brain for the more formal style but if I ditched the first book earlier I'd be finished since long.
The commenter to whom I was responding was suggesting that organizing a boycott is somehow unethical. Clearly that is not the case as a general rule.
If you're not technical enough to type 'learn to program' into Google then I'm not sure how far you'll make it into a CS program. Back in the 80's and early 90's, sure it was a struggle. I remember reading out of date BASIC books trying to figure out how to load my code from floppies, now that was a bit of a headache.

These days you can be be learning to code using any number of slick web sites in about 5 minutes.
From my experience, it isn't subject-specific either. It's a more general thing along the lines of, "It can be terrifying to admit that I don't understand the basics of something where the class and teacher seem to be making rapid progress."

I have been in Chemistry classes where the teacher was solving problems with something like Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures, and I was too petrified to admit that I hadn't understood what a partial pressure was, let alone some law involving it -- i.e., I was a "dumb" guy in a chemistry class.

In my opinion, the one thing that can be done to stop this is stop demonizing people who don't know things and fully internalize the simple truth that everyone starts free of knowledge in this world.
[
{
color: "red",
value: "#f00"
},
{
color: "green",
value: "#0f0"
},
{
color: "blue",
value: "#00f"
},
{
color: "cyan",
value: "#0ff"
},
{
color: "magenta",
value: "#f0f"
},
{
color: "yellow",
value: "#ff0"
},
{
color: "black",
value: "#000"
}
]
Firefox Sync not working
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We're building self-driving cars. Looking for a variety of roles, including software engineers and devops engineers. We're 40 person startup growing quickly, recently acquired by GM but continuing to operate independently.

You: Enjoys working on difficult problems. Comfortable working autonomously.

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Why now? - Cruise is scaling quickly. Post-acquisition, we're able to move even faster than before. Lots of tough challenges in the immediate future.

Main languages: C++, Python
Having worked on "smart" hardware, this can't be done. For the reason of regulation.

Essentially, the law demands that no matter what you do with the software, the product won't malfunction (not just "not explode", it needs to work). Obviously that means no software that isn't made by the same engineering team ... also once the hardware is out that means no changes to the software unless someone does make their fridge explode. Even if they change the temperature 50 times a minute with the door open that can't affect the lifetime of the product. Needless to say, you block this in the software.

Unless courts start putting responsibility for the things people do with their own hardware on those people, this won't be forthcoming.
That itself (rewriting in C++) to make it faster in the browser would be hilarious.
To offer a counter point, why does the girl seem like she needs or wants someone to guide her along in each class?

Asking people to help is one resource, but so is reading the textbook, doing introduction tutorials, looking stuff up online, etc. The author doesn't mention she spent time doing these sorts of activities.

> Not only that, but other people in the room jumped in to help explain

I've definitely seen guys line up to help people in labs.

Maybe the take-away is that CS is traditionally taught in a very individual way and should be more group-oriented.
Well here ya go,

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server/issues/240

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server/issues/202

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/OpenBazaar-Server/issues/164

The server would need to be re-written for native support since it uses UDP, but I think it might be possible using a 3rd party like onioncat.
Gig Economy Jobs Don’t Have to Be Awful
Icarus Verilog Simulator
If everybody raises wages, and consequently prices (that is assumed since that's the only way you could have lost competitive edge after raising wages) - then what's the point of it? Of course, employees would be paid more numerically, but they could not buy more with this. Unless, of course, some production would be moved overseas, where prices are not affected by wage raise. So in essence, these people are betting on more goods manufactured out of the country - no doubt decrying "job loss to foreign countries" at the same time.
You don't use OpenGL etc, you use their proprietary graphics API.
>Programming is something that anybody can do with a very modest investment.

That's highly debatable. A lot of people including my old compsci professor seem to believe it's largely something someone either can learn to understand or can't. I've noticed myself that students seemed to either "get" programming or not, both in a class I took in high school and the compsci class at my first college. This article on the issue is worth reading: http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-fr...
> I would like to create learning software that emphasizes pride in failure over success. That the end is not the goal – continuous effort to try again and fail again, and try again and fail again is.

This reminds me of a study by Claudia M. Mueller and Carol S. Dweck of Columbia University - ‘Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation and Performance’ [1].

They said praise for the effort and not results.

They found that children who were praised for their intelligence, as compared to their effort, became overly focused on results. Following a failure, these same children persisted less, showed less enjoyment, attributed their failure to a lack of ability (which they believed they could not change), and performed poorly in future achievement efforts.

Children praised for effort chose problems that promised increased learning, they had continued interest in mastery by preferring to receive strategy-related information.

[1] PDF: https://psychology.stanford.edu/sites/all/files/Intelligence...
I am saddened by his response. I have noticed that over time, it is becoming a much more negative environment - for beginners especially. I don't understand why the people in charge have chosen that direction. Up until now I did not know it was a conscious decision. I thought it was just a side effect of becoming larger and having too many mods who don't ask questions (only answer them).

Over the past 5 years, I've probably increased my skills 10 fold by actively asking questions on there, its really sad that other people will not have this opportunity: http://stackoverflow.com/users/84131/chris-dutrow
Consumer: Dislikes tipping

Employer: Likes tipping

Employee: Likes tipping
I did. Programming oriented courses were my strongest subjects.
Neat, they use a Teensy microcontroller with an accelerometer breakout board from Adafruit for the hardware.
Sailboat simulation in WebGL (2D Wireframe)
I think the use case has been well cemented into "free use" & "transformative" in the US now, especially post Google Books. In the EU, however, there's nothing to suggest to me that a search engine would be legal. Here's a report about content mining in the EU http://www.scienceeurope.org/uploads/PublicDocumentsAndSpeec...
The counterpoint to the "self-reliant Australian" image is the fact that historically the Australian government has been very protectionist about local markets and trades. There are strong trade unions that have lobbied to keep non-trade-qualified people from doing basic maintenance - hell, it's technically illegal to do your own plumbing: http://www.licensedtrades.com.au/licensed/plumbers

(Edit: As in, it's not just illegal to plumb your entire house. It's illegal to replace a tap.)
16 years ago I started a CS education - while I dropped out after 6 months, one interesting observation was that the first courses used SML. Their reasoning was exactly that - both language and paradigm was new to pretty much everyone, which served as an equalizer.
There's so many assholes on SO, but there are also people who are incredible at explaining stuff.

Unfortunately the assholes are far more promiscuous with downvotes, closing and toxic-responses than the good people are with _any_ response. To make it worse assholes see it as their duty to "police" SO to maintain the quality of the forum and will be laughably smug about justifying their actions.

The sad thing is it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, the person with the most high score, Jon Skeet, is remarkably gentle and kind in all his interactions. It is a pity more folks don't see him as a role model to emulate.
Bill_The_Lizard does this so much I actually remember his name. I assumed it was just because he only had time to make snap decisions since he handling so much content. Now it sounds like this is a conscious decision to push beginners out.
Ask HN: How do you field test your Android app?
I've been wanting to do some live testing of and Android app I've been working on. I was looking to collect logs during trial runs of the app so I could log errors/warnings to a file for later processing. What's a good way to do this?
(a) and (b) and (d) you can certainly control if you're not in an area with ubiquitous license plate readers. Anybody who isn't a rank amateur is going to assume his communications are or will be scrutinized. Hell, even the "good guys" who handle classified information are taught to assume public communications channels are compromised.

(c) you might have a harder time coping with, but people have to suspect you before they'll try to piece together those kinds of records. And even then... Robert Hanson got away with it for decades using dead drops in public places. You need a whole lot of information before you can tell the difference between a day at the beach and a day at the beach where a potential spy passed classified information to someone.

I would bet my last dollar the vast majority of spies are compromised by enemy agents in their own intelligence network. No matter how good you are, if your boss is working for the enemy you're going to get caught. Indeed, Philby himself was outed by a KGB agent who defected to the West.
> why does the girl seem like she needs or wants someone
> to guide her along in each class

Probably for the same reason that people enjoy personal assistance with questions on IRC or discussion forums. Sometimes you literally don't know enough to know what you don't know well enough to know where or how to look it up.
Sorry for being late to this thread.

You can also use some accessibility evaluation tools. I would suggest that you go here, and check the box that says "WCAG 2.0" to get some tools that check accessibility in general:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/

If you fix stuff that these evaluation software show you, I think your blog will be among the very well thought-out websites in terms of accessibility. WAI-ARIA is for times that your application does a lot with Javascript, such as updating a region of text, or when you start using non-semantic elements for stuff they are not meant for (for example using the i tag for an icon, or the span tag as a link, etc).
I wish every developer had one of these. When you think about it, it's crazy that our devices don't have built-in APIs for measuring this stuff. The latencies are all known exactly at the time the various pieces of hardware are designed, but when the system is integrated that information is lost and suddenly there's no way for the software to know exactly when the finger physically touched the screen, or exactly when the pixels start lighting up, or exactly when the speaker will start vibrating.

In most cases it actually takes less time to send a network packet to a server thousands of miles away than it takes to change a single pixel on the local display. Wouldn't it be great if you could measure the display latency as easily as you can run 'ping'?
Absolutely. Quite a few people in my Software Engineering program had obviously never done anything more advanced than use Microsoft Word on their first day.

Heck, while I loved computers, I'd never been dedicated enough to teach myself a programming language. 4 years later I graduated with Highest Honors, and worked for the DOD.
I'm sorry, but I think this just has to do with bad study habits. I may be wildly off base here (I don't know the author's habits) I just have the quotes in the article:

> I just couldn’t understand a word that the teacher was saying

> T.A.’s had to explain over, and over, and over again the simplest concepts

> I wasn’t grasping a thing he was saying

> He tried again, and again, and again to explain basic concepts to me

> I DON’T UNDERSTAND.

As a student, understanding terms and basic concepts is your responsibility. The professor and TA's are there to enhance and solidify the basic concepts, they're not there to explain basic concepts to you over and over again until you get it. That's the job of reading and studying. If you don't do the reading and study the material you need to know before the class it's covered in, then of course you won't understand what the professor is on about and of course you'll fall behind. You're starting from behind and don't have any way to catch up.

I saw this over and over as both a TA, teacher, and classmate. Lecture is not the time to learn terms and concepts for the first time. Lecture is the time to connect newly learned terms and concepts to your existing knowledge and reinforce and enlighten it. If you get to the class on class instantiation and you don't know what a constructor is already then you're going to have a bad time--and you should.

So you must study beforehand and you just have to study it until you know it. I appreciate that it's harder for some than others, and commend the author for aspiring to inspire, but at some point there needs to be some personal responsibility.
The Minimum Wage Is a Bad Tool for Fighting Poverty
Yup! This was the best advice I had ever gotten. There were times I felt like an idiot for not understanding something but at a certain point understanding that no one knows what they're doing is just powerful.
Sorting Algorithms as Artwork
Ask an employee who works in the kitchen
It's more than that. If you have higher margins or more discretionary pricing power than your competitors and they are forced to raise wages (as you are,) by law, you can squeeze them out of business entirely by raising the minimum wage and destroying their margins. You're not likely to make minimum wage at Wal-Mart, but some of their small shop competitors do pay lower wages. In the end it's in Wal-Mart's interest to push for minimum wage hikes for this very reason (which they have in the past.)
If your token is invalidated and regenerated after every request, this mitigates a token leaking (unless the browser extension intercepts your call and uses the token immediately... at which point your user has other problems to worry about!)

https://github.com/lynndylanhurley/devise_token_auth#about-t... has a good example of this. It's nontrivial for either clients or server to implement (the edge cases around overlapping requests require careful thought), but it would likely solve this scenario.
Let's not forget that the first generations of computer scientists likely had no experience with programming at all before college, due to computers being such expensive rarities.
It depends what you mean by "basic questions". There are basic questions which are about general issues. There are also basic questions which are super-specific to one issue of a trivial program and can be solved by literally searching for the error message. [going to SO to grab the one on the front page right now]

- 5th question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36416969/error-with-pip-...

- google: pip install "Operation not permitted"

- first link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33004708/osx-el-capitan-...

- second link: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/209572/how-to-use-...

(downvoted, marked to close as dupe)

Yes. People get downvoted into oblivion by asking questions which they (demonstrably) did not spend a moment researching. The front page of SO contains a steady stream of them anyway. The downvote arrow means (tooltip): "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful".

But! If someone actually posted something that's not googlable and that they actually tried to understand, they do get good answers in my experience. If a good question in closed, you can always report it for review. I'm not saying it never happens - but I helped to reopen a few.
In Toronto we do 15% to 25%. 10% is really low.
Do you not make hot soup with it already ?

We make hot porridge in ours too.

As for the noise - someone is on that http://www.whisperblend.com/
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It might be a bigger problem in fields where there's a bimodal distribution of skill. That is: There's a group that "gets it" and a group that doesn't. In subjects that mostly require acquiring knowledge, that's not likely to happen. Individual students might not know the answer to a specific thing, but they won't be completely lost for the entire lecture. But if a subject requires learning new ways to think, I could totally see this happening.

These are just some preliminary thoughts, so I wouldn't give them a ton of credence. Still, I could totally see different specialties having different distributions of comprehension.
That's for medium high status of those who need to make sure they "have it". A bit like the "I'm CEO bitch" on Zuckerberg's name card: Really high statuses persons have no name cards, and they have no need to ever loose their temper. If something is not to their liking, they will denote it with an even lower tone in their voice. Very competent people around them are listening and will remedy.

Or is this a cultural thing and in US people with real power still loose their temper (and face) like in the movies? I can't believe it... Will Mr Page shout like a kid because G+ did not meet expectations? I hope not...
Teenage Sexting Is Not Child Porn
> So what is being outlawed by minimum wage are "jobs" that cannot feed people, which, I am sure you will agree, are simply not worth existing.

I certainly don't agree with that sentiment. There are a lot of people that are working that don't need to support themselves. Between teenagers, college students (who may only need to pay for books, etc), mentally/physically impaired (that are supported by the state but work because it's good to be productive)... there's a place in society for jobs that pay below what you're saying.
Why not using a GUI/Theme and hire the designer for tweaking only? A web/mobile app needs a 'graphical system' that follows best-practices and modern UI design paradigms (say for example Material Design). I am sure you'll also need controls, layouts, forms, etc. You could simply buy such theme (or use a free one) and once your app is running just go ahead and tweak it graphically with the aid of an experienced UI designer.
Nest intentionally bricks their acquired home automation hubs
In my experience, 30% would be extremely high and not at all common - if you look at full rate and not marginal rate. E.g. I am not 1%, but relatively well-paid employee, and my full federal tax rate has been around 13-15% (marginal, of course, quite higher). If I went to some lengths, I probably could shave off a percent or so off it, but that would require me to stash some money into places where they are not readily accessible, such as IRA or alike instruments. This is just not worth it for me. If I got much more money, to the point that I do not need any of the money for consumption and in fact can not consume them - e.g. if I were a billionaire - I would certainly use these and many other instruments, it would be stupid not to do so. But right now it is just not worth the trouble.
"Nerd rage"?

Try "taxpayer rage".
She should have been using (n)mh.
That's a silly argument, Denmark for instance, doesn't even have a minimum wage, nor Iceland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Norway, or Singapore..and technically neither does Switzerland. I'd hardly call those "libertarian" societies. Then again, I have a hard time taking someone seriously when they equate general labor with literal slavery. If you have mobility of labor through your own free will, you are not a slave. It's disgracefully offensive to those that actually do, to this day, work as slaves. Working for $8.50/hr at McDonald's is not slavery.

As was debated in prior threads, minimum wages are nonsensical from an economic (and welfare) standpoint. Negative income taxes or living wages make a lot more economic sense.
That's what makes it fun!