skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always thought that American high schools could outsource grading of probably 95% of assignments to in-school paraprofessionals or work-at-home moms, which would free teachers up for individualized instruction. (Hire cheap gophers to scan papers into a centralized system, your distributed workforce grades them in near-real time, results available in your inbox and online gradebook before the end of the day.)

It is crazy that we have folks with e.g. master's degrees in history marking 90 copies of the same "connect the term with the definition" homework assignment when it could be done by anybody capable of reading. (The cost of having a 40 year old teacher with a master's degree mark that homework assignment is, as a ballpark number, about $150. It could be done by a Midwestern housewife with a master's degree for $20 if you let her work from home, or for $10 if you outsourced it overseas.)

That avoids the larger problem of "Why did we assign that?", of course. (And the unions will, predictably, never go for it.)
I would agree that the lack of support of SSL on custom domains and the size limitations (my main issue is with the upload limits) have kept GAE from really taking off. I have used it for a small non-profit app and I host my personal consulting site on it. However, because of the limitations I'm building my startup on rackspace instead of GAE.

I really love GAE as a development platform, especially as a single developer, but I hope they will work through their roadmap faster.
Why? The difference in skill between programmers is huge, but only a tiny amount of that variance could be predicted by the programmer's major. This is as misguided as discarding everyone who doesn't have a 4.0 GPA or didn't go to a top-10 school.
One gigapixel panoramic photographs
Ok, but does this create a QR code for the original URL, or a QR code that points at Google's shortened URL?
Very cool stuff.

Anyone here doing wearable tech / eTextile stuff? I've just started poking around in it.
Format shifting dead trees: can e-book piracy be ethical?
Same thing with Jim Courier in tennis. He became #1 in the world in tennis by working harder than anyone else. He didn't have half the talent or strokes of some of the other guys, but he just worked his balls off. It's the same story in just about every profession: the guys who work the hardest are the guys who climb to the top. Sure there are exceptions, but this is the general rule. Cheers, Scott
Wow. If he had actually finished producing the book it would quickly become a bestseller once someone discovered its existence. I think the old man would have had a chuckle buying the plain-looking book at some small, non-chain bookstore.
I really doubt this is the case at the age of four. Before puberty, it is almost certainly all social differences.
OK. These are the two books you need when you start out programming for ARM chips:

ARM System-on-Chip Architecture (2nd Edition)
By Steve Furber (the guy who designed the bloody chip!)
http://www.amazon.com/ARM-System-Chip-Architecture-2nd/dp/02...

ARM Architecture Reference Manual (2nd Edition)
By David Seal
http://www.amazon.com/ARM-Architecture-Reference-Manual-2nd/...
The artist is separate from the art.
"If you get an ARM chip that doesn't have floating point..."

Or that there is no dedicated instruction to divide. :)
What could possibly go wrong with implementing a complicated biometric fingerprint scanner based system for our schools?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221068
>>>>Employees teach new recruits to use tools for comparing the performance of one version of a feature with another and how to determine what sort of difference in response is meaningful.>>>>>

I hate when people use statistical significance to determine what is meaningful. People wrongfully think you need 95% confidence in the data to make a decision and move forward with a feature change, etc. For me when I am changing things on my site based on data mining, I will make a decision with a 60% confidence (which can come within 5-10 samples in most cases). Hacking websites is engineering not science! Overall it makes sense to trade a low confidence value for speed of development.
ARM Advanced SIMD (NEON) Intrinsics and Types in LLVM
Well card swipes are obviously unworkable. You could maybe link it to student's mobile phones...

But the real solution is to have decent schools with classes small enough that the teacher doesn't have to take roll call because they know everyone.
Link to actual paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1102378

EDIT: This must be an early version of the paper, or the linked article is substantially overstating its conclusions. (Is there a student on HN who can get free access to the published version?) I don't even see a metric for intelligence, other than a binary high/low.
Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science
Apple's Ipad - The AnandTech Review
That you don't see a crate until lesson 6 must mean Old Man Murry's Crate Review System has to apply to this in some sense.
The one "good" thing about this paper is that they don't even try to defend the arbitrariness of their model. Absolutely not "robust".

EDIT: The copy I looked through was the published one. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2009.06.009
China’s Censorship Machine Takes On the Internet
While I'm on the subject, here's a fun fact: a chocolate-peanut-butter flavoured milkshake from Cold Stone, in their largest size, contains over two thousand calories.

Sounds like a great way for a highly active person to put on weight.
Regarding who submitted it, PNAS works differently from other journals. Weissman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and as such he gets to contribute a paper X times a year. It still gets peer reviewed. The question of how well things are reviewed applies to other journals as well.
According to the independently verifiable health dashboard, the current memcache latency average for today is about 7ms[1]. The average datastore get() time is around 50ms[2]. The average datastore put() time is around 100ms[3].

Are you accusing Google of falsifying this trivially reproducible and abundant data? That would be quite an interesting story. ;)

[1] http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/memcache/2010...

[2] http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/datastore/201...

[3] http://code.google.com/status/appengine/detail/datastore/201...
It seems each user can only create 25 topics. That sucks.
They came with schematics because all expensive electronic equipment back then did. This was back in an era when electronics broke down frequently. Schematics were needed to fix things when they broke. If the owner didn't fix it, then an electronics repairman did.

You don't get schematics with anything today because you throw it out if it breaks rather than pay someone $100/hr (what auto mechanics charge) to fix it for you.

Intellectual property is also a bigger concern today that it was back then. By not giving you the schematics, they force you to do the tedious (but easy) task of reverse engineering their product.
I think this publishing attempt was doomed from the outset. There was no way that the attempt could ever escape notice for long; and any notice made of it would have upset Salinger. At best, Salinger would have felt duped, if contracts etc. had proceeded to the point that publishing could no longer be aborted.
Why mobile safari doesn't cache pages in memory
The UC Essay
If applying to a college is painful, writing the right kind of college essay is even more so. It is no wonder that students shy away from the task of writing a good UC essaybecause there is so much they want to say and so little time to say it.
I'm not sure exactly why, but something about this kind of sits badly. Somehow, I don't like the idea that a person has this infrastructure role.
New Creately Team Plans - Perfect for Project Teams
Firefox extension RefControl, to change the referrer for wsj.com to http://www.google.com , seems to work well.

RefControl:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953
Home remedies for dark circles
Eyes are marked as the most beautiful organ of the body. Beautiful eyes add charm to the beauty, thus it is necessary to care for your eyes.
Statistical significance is also not even a sufficient condition for a difference to be meaningful. In the real world, very few things are truly identical, so you can eventually get a statistically significant difference for just about any comparison, given enough samples. But the differences may be negligibly small.
> "your wife should have a college degree, and you should not"

I don't think college degree == more intelligence, but I'm for the 5 years younger and same cultural background concepts.
I want both. People are getting anxious about the iphone/pad but overall, look at recent history. It's good to have several approaches gong at once. Linux/OSX/Windows is a good example. Go back in time and remove any of those from the game and you get a less good present.

I think Apple is largely less capable then MS of holding a problematic monopoly for long (at least with their current m.o.). That would require being every thing for every person to plug all potential competition holes. That comes with hairy compromises that Apple probably won't want to make.

So far, Apple hasn't done any net damage. They are getting things done and moving things along fast. It will take either a real slow down in their innovation or some serious damage to flip that balance.
Compared to the various carriers, Apple's a peach.
You are right. I posted a question and got three replies. Thnx for the gentle reminder :)
UK digital economy bill rushed through parliamentary session
Ah. I use conkeror (an xulrunner app) and Adblock Plus, and that's it. If you use plain firefox with a lot of extensions, I guess it uses more memory.
I don't think anyone would accuse google of falsifying data, but stats can be misleading. I might have missed it, but I didn't see a standard deviation for those numbers -- if you're doing several reads and they happen to be "above average" then you could see the random appearance of sluggishness.

Just checking now (http://imgur.com/8Jb82) there are some really long requests (800ms!) which might get smoothed out in an average.
Texas? Hehe, London as well, also hail from Texas. :)
Hosting a Blog on Your Main Website or Separate Site?
The advantages of setting up and maintaining a blog has been quick to spread across the diverse internet population. 2008 has witnessed an explosion in Blogs on the internet. The number of blogs has increased manifold and quality blogs continue to command a large proportion of the overall Internet traffic.
Hardware solutions can be quite beautiful in their simplicity. HP's first product was a precision oscillator. To get the necessary precision, they needed a negative feedback mechanism to stabilize their oscillation circuit. They used a lightbulb. As the circuit drew more current, the lightbulb element heated up, causing its resistance to go up and thus acting to reduce the current through the circuit.
Jim Lee paints Wonder Woman on an iPad
Yep, well also...it was a victimless crime. No one was physically harmed.

Or maybe they give leniency for the "dude - you have balls of steel" factor...
Look, if you're running a basically static site that serves a few 100k page views per day, then the app engine is fine and a great choice. Hell, a $20/month linode instance would do just as well. Get two $20 instances and you can handle all the burst traffic you'll ever need.

If on the other hand you're running a web app where you can't cache a decent chunk of your data, and you need to do 4-5 db reads per request, then you have a painfully slow system that your users will bitch about.

To take just one example, we've had to push all our db writes into task queues because we'd consistently hit the 30 simultaneous dynamic requests limit when we had more than 100 users on the site at once. To take another, we couldn't grab more than 2000 db entries in a request without hitting the 30 second http request time limit (which we were using to generate a csv dump of a chunk of a user's data.)

Over the last ~8 months of using the app engine we've found that we're just spending way too much time dealing with it's various limitations (no SSL for third party domains, 3000 file limit, slow ass datastore, no threads, no comet push...) that the benefits of easy deployment + sort-of-automatic-scaling just aren't worth it. So now we're moving over to linode + EC2 over the next few months.

p.s. we've found memcached to be around 10ms latency on average... who knows maybe our app is on a special slow instance? and yes, that's 10x slower than normal memcached.
It depends a lot on each particular project. Panoramio and pubhubsubbub are two of the most well known Google projects built in AppEngine.
This is exactly the sort of example needed for evolutionists to point to to say "see, it can happen in terrestrial time periods". A puny 50k years, and we appear to have multicellular creatures which evolved to not need oxygen. That's way more than mere adapting, that's a fundamental, radical change.
I know what you mean....this is the kind of stuff I want to build at least once before I die. Something that is so good it's in another class and changes the world.
There's also the process of "communicating" papers. In those, a NAS member can essentially vouch for other authors twice a year, and provide outside reviewers of their choice. This track is ending as an option this July, however.
I think he made a bad choice and didn't like his responses either, but from that, on one bug report, to 'lousy maintainer' is pretty harsh.
Using a light bulb as a non-linear element in a circuit dates back at least to Western Electric and its 1915-era Panel switch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel_switch

(By the way, if you're near Seattle, interested in electronics and history, and can spare a Tuesday morning, you might enjoy going to visit the Museum of Communications in Georgetown: http://www.museumofcommunications.org/ . I volunteer there when school's not in session.)
The absurd thing is that one simple, proposed patch (#20) is just a few lines of actual code - far less than all the "blah blah blah" attached to the bug report.
Debian is still considerably more solid. However, improvements and software development has outpaced the Debian release cycle. In order to be "competitive" for what a large number of people want on the desktop side, unstable or testing are the repo's they should be pulling from rather than stable. However, unstable and testing are exactly that, unstable and testing, and it can be pretty frustrating for unfamiliar users to have to deal with kinks that haven't been worked out yet.
I've always had a high opinion about Ron despite never meeting the man. After reading this, it makes you want him as an investor that much more...
Both of your recent submissions of ESR blog entries have linked to the third paragraph of the respective entries, making the first two paragraphs start scrolled off the top of the screen, which is kind of annoying.

When you see a story on ESR's blog and click the "read the rest of this entry" link, that links to paragraph three, and that's what appears in the URL bar. If you scroll up and click the title to the story, you'll get a link that starts at the beginning.
This is also noticeable on all the other Apple products, especially laptops. I really disliked getting a top of the line Thinkpad from my old company and having those cheap Intel/Windows stickers.
i would give you 10 mod points if i could. thankyou so much for letting me plan my life again.
I didn't do any statistical survey of thousands of users, but I am using Debian5 and Ubuntu8.04. The former feels and acts considerably more broken, in my experience. This is in addition to being more pain to install. Just my $0.02.
I think be this is the same reason why farmvilla is so famous on FaceBook.. :) Gardening is indeed satisfying act, even if its virtual!
Ahh, the glories of scientific research, reinforcing useless bias since 1989. This is why I got into this racket.
I'm scott, the developer that was rejected. The other app was 1000 ultimate experiences by lonely planet. After seeing it in the app store i can see how they might use the same gesture.

We asked the reviewer to clarify and they just replied with the same unclear language but specific to our app. They did specifically ask us to remove the "tap and pinch to expand gesture." When we replaced it with just the tap they let it through.

One thing I have to say is after trying the gesture on the device and not just the simulator it's was a little slow but still usable. We've since fixed it so we'll see if it gets through in the future.
Since Ubuntu 8.04, `rm -rf /` does not work. Like, seriously. You have to pass in --no-preserve-root.
When I have something interesting to say. I started work on it on Monday, for certain values of "work".
Now this is what a real interview should be like. I really need to tip my hat to Andrew for probing with some uncomfortable questions and applaud Chris for answering them. Usually you just hear someone speak about what they do; It is not often you get to hear someone speak about who they are and how they got to be that way.
Building a startup while going thru a divorce?
I just quit my jobs 6 months ago to build my startup with another partner. It has been quite successful up to now. But i recently had a big fight with my wife, and now we're going thru a divorce. It is probably the worst thing happening at the worst timing in my life. It is hard enough to build a startup let alone in the midst of divorce. What is even worst is we recently accepted our first angel funding right before all this happened. It just happened so sudden, I'm still trying to cope with it now. I don't even know what is the meaning of all this anymore. Any advice to keep me sane?
LOVED the last ditch email haha...."we may be going down":

"So sometime after 11pm, I wrote Ron and essentially said: “hello, you don’t know me, I’m an executive at a company you’re an investor in, and we need a meeting—in person—with the CEO himself of this Fortune 50 company—this week—and if you can’t make this happen, hey that’s ok, but we may be going down—sorry.” Ron wrote back in literally 2 minutes and said, in what I have learned is Ron’s distinctive email style (immediate, short, all caps), “AM ON IT.”"
Hear, hear. The MightyWords story was awesome. Chris seems so relatable. I wish there was more videos of him speaking and telling stories.

Good job Andrew, this was an awesome interview.
I learned DOS when I was about that age by watching the commands from autoexec.bat flash by when the computer was booting (the guy who built my parents' first computer didn't put @echo off at the beginning, which probably led to my becoming a computer programmer :). I thought I was king of the world when, at 6 years old or whatever, I exited the Direct Access menu system, typed "prompt SpSg", and actually made the computer do something I told it to do (it took me a few reboots ro realize that it was $p$g, not SpSg).
The time for a DB request depends a lot on the particular request. If you're querying by key then it's usually ~30 ms.

Their memcached is only "much" slower than actual memcached if you run your "actual" memcached in the same computer or some rack as your client servers. Google memcached vs external memcached have almost identical performance, it all depends on where are your servers.

If you were running your memcached servers in the same datacenter, but different rack, you will find out that you're only slightly faster or same speed than Google's memcached service.

I want AppEngine to improve its speed as much as you want, trust me, but with current limits is already possible to build a web application. We did it in Panoramio, and others did it too.
(Old discussion, but I'm replying anyway) I got your point from the start, but still all this video/discussion/etc it's just a tool for journalists to play with, and the media to make some money with.
I did code this using the uigesturecontroller, no private Apis involved and it seemed exactly what it was for.

I don't think the pinch gesture specifically was the issue, but instead the "pinch to expand" meaning spreading out a stack of items with a pinch. We asked the reviewer to clarify what exactly constituted a "pinch to expand" but they just replied with the exact same wording, kinda frustrating.
Just to elaborate...I'm thinking back to some of the most memorable moments of my life, and they have come out of situations like this, where for some reason you need to accomplish the impossible in a very short amount of time. That's when you really do something drastic and operate on the edge of your ability, and amazing stuff happens.
I'm a software guy, and I'd just use a bimetallic-strip thermostat with an adjustable spring, whose tension is controlled by the knob.

Off to the patent office...
You have to be a little careful here, as certain versions of IE won't render MHTML assets the second time they area loaded, but again only under certain circumstances.

In Cappuccino, in addition to building in all the known workarounds (serving mhtml files with content type of text/plain, adding cache busting parameters if needed), we actually perform a runtime check of the supported feature before we use it. So, we try to load a single 1px dataURL image, and if that fails we try to load a known 1px MHTML image, and if that fails we fallback to the original image resources.
What if Foursquare launched in 2004? The story of Meetro.
The Loser's Curse: Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the NFL Draft
I am using EC2 to proxy web surfing for iPhone users, so I hope not too many website are blocking all traffic from AWS.
This is not a good example of the two professions. Give the CS person hardware constraints, and he or she would design an equally good system.

+ Both people here are fundamentally asked to solve a hardware problem. Of course the CS person does not know how to design complicated hardware, so of course he or she will just stick in an arduino and write code ...

+ The CS person easily also could have said "it's a toaster" and then would have an almost identical solution to the EE (or vice versa). Keep in mind that EEs are limited because of manufacturing expenses ... again, we seem to be penalizing the CS majors because they would ignore hardware manufacturing costs!

+ Hardware is redesigned every few years to accommodate needs, just as software is.
One more reason I wish PG would implement a vote-down function.
EEs write code too.
Basic DNS: PTR records and why you care
Software "engineering" != CS. I know Greenspun knows that, and I know the CS label is just for the purposes of the joke, but still. Java has already been harmful enough to CS. :-p
The way Debian manages it, only bugfixes are added once something hit's "stable" (current Debian 5). This means that drivers and new versions of applications are typically frozen except for bug patches only. Debian 5 was released a little over a year ago, leading to the software being outdated by standard desktop/consumer use compared to the number of improvements and bugs fixed in the mean time (most applications provide feature+bug releases which are not added to Debian once it hits stable). For servers, this is reliable and actually wonderful to deal with. For desktop/laptop systems, it can be frustrating because the code exists, and it should be nice, easy and non-broken for applications and drivers, but in reality it's not, because the release is behind. Ubuntu's goal is to have a much quicker release cycle to keep this from happening, but in the mean time never get a system that's really 100% stable and usable. Ubuntu also does some weird crazy hacks to get things to appear smooth to the user, when in reality they have pre-programmed guesses you can't override. So if it doesn't work, the only recovery is seasoned Linux experience. Debian, on the other hand, gives a large number of options making the installation not seem as smooth, but is recoverable with quick Google searches or reading of the explanations.