skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
School systems and colleges love these online services because they do most of the legwork (grading and grade management) completely automatically, which allows the instructor to have much larger section sizes (without having to hire grading staff). Pearson, the leading provider of these, likes to market them as better for teaching but everyone in education understands that what they're actually better for is bottom-line cost.

It's an extremely frustrating trend, particularly since on the whole students seem to uniformly despise these services, but education is highly budget-constrained and this is one of the areas where it really shows. It's either online homework or pay more in taxes/tuition.

Edit: while I'm making Pearson sound vaguely evil, I should mention that the cost of these services is usually mostly offset onto the students, as the textbooks come with a one-time-use activation code for the online service that effectively eliminates the used textbook market. Of course in K-12 public school systems, the taxpayers still end up footing the bill.
Sounds like a bad standup.

We're a remote team so it's important for us to communicate in person everyday in a more intimate way than just Slack, which is why we do it. It also helps me get a really loose gauge (audibly) how everyone is doing mentally (aside from one on ones) because I can't be there in person. You can hear/see frustration 1000x faster than you can read it in text.

We set the ground rules early on what would be in our standup:

- No longer that 10 minutes

- If you can't be there just let the team know ahead of time, no penalties for absence

- Specialists only call in once a week

- Talk about what you are working on that day even if it's just "Still debugging image sequencing"

- Ask for one-on-ones with other teammates to deep dive, don't do it at standup

It's really been effective at keeping the team moving in the same direction, because even minor audible/visual communication keeps the ship on course better than text.
This is something the HN urls do poorly, whereas stackoverflow does well.
This might help https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
As I recall, Spore wasn't the biggest hit.
Ok. The only thing I'm proposing doing is reducing the disincentives to joining the private sector. Comparisons to the Soviet Union are nonsensical.
I think it's a question of culture. For as may things as people fault Microsoft for they sure do know how to build good tooling.

But yeah the NDK is a mess and the whole environment around it is incredibly painful. Android Studio improved things but they still have a long way to go.
Wish the post talked real numbers, as "very high throughput and very low latency" means very different things to different people. For example, a 1 millisecond latency is "very low latency" for web related things, but might be a lifetime when comparing it to a top of the line trading application.
Digital advertiser/marketer here. As others have rightly pointed out in some the comments--and as seen appropriately in the title of this blog post!--these really are just the pure basics. Elements to understand extend far beyond this to items such as semantic markup & rich snippets, the crucial role of "outreach" and "viral marketing" (that is, essentially digital PR), "domain authority" as defined by the volume and quality of incoming links to a site, and so much more.

As the topic of SEO is fairly rare on HN, some words I want to share while I got some of your attention: if something gives you pause, don't think to trust a single thing that an SEO consultant or agency out there says to you until you read up on it yourself and/or consult another party. In the end, SEO-pitching digital marketers are pretty much selling snake oil 90% of the time and what you really need is someone on your team with a marketing background who can responsibly manage vendors and force performance working to prove ACTUAL traffic/"brand awareness"/sales growth over an extended period of time (and if they can't show growth, they can intelligently explain to you why.)

I can't count the number of times I've been on calls with "SEOs" just rambling off their traffic reports without any real insight nor any technical knowledge, despite the fact that their agency is charging $100-150/hour for such material. I've seen reports from even large, recognizable digital advertising agencies with many locations worldwide that provided flawed or irrelevant data, a lack of focus on client goals, etc. I could go on and on.
> what is their motive in lying about that?

Not seem like gatekeepers when they're being gatekeepers. I guess it hurts their anti establishment affectations or something.
> Eastern european ISPs are much more "Adventurous" in terms of the low cost network equipment

Well, unlike US ISPs, they try to compete on price and there is a lot of competition. They kind of have to be much more adventurous in terms of cutting down costs of network equipment. But they also compete on quality, so it has to satisfy that too or you are out.
Lake Kivu’s Great Gas Gamble
Music industry's new war is about so much more than copyright
Why would you write such a pointless, combative comment? You don't actually believe you're contributing to a discussion, do you?
I grew up getting dragged along on climbing trips, also competed briefly (my father as most of his friends were mountaineers). It's a great sport and community. Most significantly, that you can climb with a relative stranger and trust them to belay you (even if it's just top rope) is a wonderful thing I think most people never experience (I'm rationalizing in retrospect now) - still I think this is part of the underlying basis which makes the community so much more trusting and friendly. Also the outdoors, physical exertion etc.

Do you have a link for the study?
I tend to agree with development as we largely see will become obsolete or in other words development will/should become really easy. It is primarily because designing backend is very similar to designing a deterministic state machine albeit a large one. And strangely enough, there is much re-invention of that state machine that happens in different projects by different set of people using different frameworks.

And going a step futher - relationship between tables in database should reflect on how an operational/working UI will look like. eg: say blog and comments are two tables and related by foreign key. So in operational front end - it makes sense to see them linked together in say blog page.

Now sprinkle machine learning concepts to it - a relationship between two interlinked tables where 'p' columns are in blog table and 'q' columns in comment table can be represented in 'n' different ways in say 'm' different type of clients(like web mobile etc).

Now is it not possible to link design of whole web app to our voice commands and let some deep learning algorithm figure best schemas, front end, frameworks and even show a demo MVP.
Term taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique meaning a short period where you're working hard. The basic idea of the technique is that you dedicate 25 minutes to strictly working, and then explicitly give yourself a 5 minute break to do whatever. The idea is if you carve out frequent break time you'll be more efficient and focused than if you're trying to sustain 8 hours of solid focus.
For me, the amount of time I've spent troubleshooting/configuring/whatever linux has been directly proportionate to the amount of customization I attempt to do. The vast majority of my work is Docker, Vim, a web browser, and a handful of other CLI utilities.

Sure, I have a handful of shell aliases and the like, but I'm not going in and tweaking kernel-level stuff or messing with system services (for the most part). Use the stock config and only change things if you really, really need to. Just like you would on a server. Applying that same rule to desktop - for me at least - produces exactly the same stability on my desktop that I expect from my servers.
A daily meeting where you force everyone to be in the office, and interrupt their work with irrelevant status updates that have to be too short to communicate anything useful is itself an anti-pattern.

I have never seen them be useful. Not once. And people are addicted to them, always for "management ulterior motives". Once had someone say "we need to make sure people are actually working".

Personally, I would like to make it a requirement of my next job search that if the company does a standup, I'm not taking their offer.
There's always hackerspaces!
If you watch the recent interview with Maher linked in the article, you will hear Assange remarking that it was "great fun" to release the social security and [partial] credit card numbers of private individuals who contributed to the Democratic party. He seems to be a sociopath who is happy to let the Russian government use him to help try to elect Donald Trump. Assange has also recently lashed out with a barrage of antisemitic tweets (many since deleted) against his critics, and shamelessly defamed journalists and academics who have raised questions about the wisdom and relevance of Wikileaks' recent data dumps.

There has been some speculation about who in the Wikileaks organization actually writes the bizarre tweets, but in this interview Assange uses enough of the same phrases, verbatim, to leave little doubt that he writes them personally.
Is this really so popular? I kind of thought these stand-ups are something out of the books on management, that is never used in reality by people who do the actual work.

Seriously, I don't see why my team would need this. We just have an IM-chat, if you want to notify others on the team about the problem we have — here you go. If there is something a bit less open for discussion and involvind a greater number of people — write an email. Besides that, if you are working in the same office at the same time and need a discussion — why not just speak of a problem, when it arises?
If this were any other profession, you would not say "lazy teachers" but rather "efficient teachers."

The whole point of a productivity improvement is to free up time to spend in other ways. Maybe it's a false efficiency, but it's very cynical to assume than any time teachers can free up by being more efficient at grading will be simply wasted. Generally speaking, teachers have a lot of other things they could do.
I feel compelled to post this video whenever Honnold comes up. Here he is free-soloing El Sendero Luminoso:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phl82D57P58

He really is something else.
Brendan Dassey's Conviction Overturned After 'Making a Murderer' Tells His Story
Would it make sense to give libraries a new lease on life and turn them into mini-coworking spaces with micro-finance credit? Apart from how they serve as a conduit for free internet, there could be opportunities to use them to encourage entrepreneurship in those areas that are currently under-represented. Maybe even something worth replicating in other locales.
I could be wrong but I think it's actually lower in the US if you're only making minimum wage. Years ago it qualified you for a subsidized $19.99 plan.

UPDATE It seems to be even less today at $5-10:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/22/technology/access-from-att-d...

It's strange that the article doesn't mention this.
Unless you can provide an official source, this is just speculation.
Presumably the computers had a browser, that's all you need for learning JS programming.
For C++ only know that for DSP jobs it is in 4K/month range can't say what it in general.
Probably because you're going further off topic. I agree it was a little harsh to downvote your mea culpa. We appreciated it.
It's because of stuff like this that I thought facebook free basics in India wasn't such a bad idea. At least the kids there would have been able to get Wikipedia which you can learn most stuff from.
I'm regretting wading into this even as I start typing it, but, what the hell, this story will only be on the front page for a few more minutes before it's flagged off.

I do not understand why I am meant to accept at face value the idea that Julian Assange has a personalized or ideological problem with Hillary Clinton. And yet, the idea that he does is central to almost all of the narrative that I read about his involvement this election. "Of course", stories about leaked DNC mails point out, "Assange is doing this because he has an individualized problem with Clinton."

What problem would that be? Look at HRC's career to date. Where's the overlap?

I refuse to entertain the idea that Proff on #hack in the 1990s had a problem with HillaryCare, or anything else Clinton did as First Lady during WJC's administration.

I do not see a clear intersection between WJC's policies and any of the ideological stances Assange has publicly taken since. But more on that in a bit.

After WJC's administration, HRC became a Senator from New York. Start with the observation that there's no reason for a college student in southeast Australia to have opinions about a Senator from New York. Then read up on HRC's tenure as a Senator, where she was known specifically for not making partisan waves (indeed, this is the problem many Sanders supporters have with her). Does Assange have a problem with Senator Hillary Clinton? Why doesn't he have a problem with Evan Bayh?

HRC ran against Obama. Do any of you get the sense that Assange is aggrieved by the way HRC campaigned against Obama? (I mean, I have a problem with it, but my politics are... not Assange's).

HRC was Obama's Secretary of State. This is the closest I can imagine HRC came to intersecting with Assange's life or ideals in any way. But before you decide that her tenure at State is dispositive of Assange's issues, consider: the other party, which controlled two branches of government during Clinton's tenure, was actively campaigning for the US to have Assange assassinated. Not in a hyperbolic, sputtering way, but rather in a "when Trump is elected, maybe we should get around to that" sort of way.

This article dances around this issue. It seems to accept uncritically the idea that Assange has a real reason to work against HRC. But I don't think he does. That leaves open what seems to me to be the most important question about Wikileaks role in this election: why? Cui bono?

It's not hard to generate other answers to that question.

Maybe someone should address the elephant in the room? It's not like nobody was suggesting that Wikileaks was working on behalf of Putin before this election. Indeed, among natsec/infosec nerds, it's all anybody seems to ever have had to say about Wikileaks. It was funny to me before, in the sense that it's fun to smirk at the way infosec nerds want to believe they're living in a spy novel. I'm not laughing so much about it now.
No, you are actually proposing giving them money,...

We already give them money. I'm simply accepting that this is unlikely to change.

Forced, economically inefficient (hence, why there is no demand in the private market including that fulfilling government contracts)

The labor is not forced you are free to turn it down. We have no way of knowing whether the labor is economically inefficient, due to existing market distortions caused by paying people not to work.

In any case, unless you are claiming that there is no valuable government work to be done at all (are you?), it's a little silly to suggest that my plan to redirect idle labor into providing those government services is inefficient. The labor is either wasted or it's consumed.
Do you actually believe the public school system's goal is to educate children? More like freeing up parents to go to work (and tax), and employing teachers and administrators. It's nearly impossible to fire teachers, thanks to a public sector union who's got their back.

School is like a prison for kids. One form of punishment is detention - more school.

Also, "In the 2000 report, commissioned by the American Association of University Women, surveyors asked students between eighth and 11th grades whether they had ever experienced inappropriate sexual conduct at school. The list of such conduct included lewd comments, exposure to pornography, peeping in the locker room, and sexual touching or grabbing. Around one in 10 students said they had been the victim of one or more such things from a teacher or other school employee, and two-thirds of those reported the incident involved physical contact." - http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

So, asking if something the public school system is doing is student focused betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of its purpose.
I read an article in the financial newspaper today about fake diamonds arriving in Antwerp from India mixed in with real ones in 'diamond melee' packages (lots of small diamonds).

(in Dutch): http://www.tijd.be/ondernemen/retail/Nepdiamanten_sijpelen_o...

I got terribly annoyed reading this article as it constantly conflates 'fake' and 'synthetic', as if they're synonyms. The 'fake' diamonds are actual diamonds, though not natural ones. Clearly a journalist who's echoing the industry propaganda.

Apparently there's an estimated 10,000 diamond making machines churning them out in China. Good!
>I've never heard or read anybody say anything like this before.

that would be strange. A lot of science fiction contains a notion of an alien(s) perceived as a God(s) by native people of the planet being visited.

In case of Jesus we have all the typical stuff - medical nanobots and food replicators, alien species in the "skies" who conquered space and time, and we have pretty clear message (well, we have millions of pages of philosophy written about it, so it is my brief short take on it) - take control over and minimize your violence and develop empathy, and that would speed up (or remove the main obstacles to) the development of your civilization to be able to join the others. Tightly managed, if not abolished, violence and high communication capabilities (direct mind to mind like) are what we think as among the characteristics of developed civilizations. May be it is not the result, may be it is the tool to get there?

Anyway, such attempts to help the development of native civilizations is known to be futile (again, well explored in science fiction) and Jesus obviously was an inexperienced eager to help and frustrated by what he observed observer who went rogue. And thus we have the "Cup of Wrath", the communication with the Mission Command when the Command orders that to minimize consequences of the perpetrated Prime Directive violation the "god scenario" would proceed to completion (which probably didn't include real or full death, yet it was obviously something that one would be happy to avoid - may be something like real death with upload moments before, again going along science fiction lines one can interpret that way the communication with "God" during the crucifixion as well as obvious initial weakness/discomfort with the the new body ("don't touch") when Jesus met Mary after the resurrection (also the 2 angels [dressed] in white busy with some chores right there in the cave after Jesus was resurrected) while some time later he gets used to the body and lets Tomas to inspect it). There is a lot in the story that can be clearly interpreted in the science fiction style, and between God and aliens i bet on aliens :)

Now, here is the really fun part - an idea that we probably do have sample of the Jesus' alien DNA somewhere around (despite the aliens' precautions taken like the hard ultra-violet cleaning of all the biological material in the cave tomb of Jesus) - the "Holy Grail" whatever it is, like say the Dan Brown's child/ancestors of Jesus. Would you like to sequence that DNA? And according to the legends the medical nanobots were still on/with the Holy Grail and still functioning.
The anti Trump and Russian fearmongering is strong these days. Those emails must be a jackpot.
Embedded Systems Weekly #65
Really? Safer? How about writing things in languages that are more mature instead of hoping on the newest bandwagon.
Last night I landed on an inhabitable moon with giant blobs of nickel ore floating above bright red ground. I wandered around, fed some cat-weasels, and nearly got killed by a radiation storm that swept up unexpectedly. All while lounging on the beanbag chair in my living room, with my SO sitting next to me getting some work done and occasionally commenting. I ended up naming the moon "No Man's Meat" because it all looked, well, like meat, and it made us both laugh.

It's a fifty dollar ticket to a hike through a lurid 1970s sci-fi book cover. If that sounds appealing to you, then great. If not? Hey, that's cool too.
They have to be, as a condition of their journal subscriptions. Librarians generally want to extend access as far as possible, but they are terrified of pissing off a publisher and getting a journal taken away from their entire university's community of researchers who need it to do their work.
I agree it is weird, but I would guess he sends basic version of script for free to people, and then tells you what additional features the paid one has. However clearly one could just pay for the script and then post it online for everybody, not sure how he would prevent that.
Ah, but what if instead strangers are looking at YOU?
>They're actively serving the big market, and writing a blog post about how sorry they are that they're ignoring the tiny market.

Funny. Porn is far from being a small market online. And taking on porn related businesses doesn't mean they have to stop serving other types of businesses.
I think you're just describing the topic of conversation, which I guess could be called an object with definition(s), but in the context of conversation I don't think it could be said to have inherent objectivity, since definitions themselves are subject to variations of meaning. "Oh, I thought you meant/told me to...!"

Further to the "something" that happens in conversation, I think of Gilles Deleuze and his concept of sense-making, or cognition. You may be interested in some of his writings along these lines if this page resonates with you at all (just to save you the google, autopoesis means "self-creation"):

https://books.google.com/books?id=rcVvAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=P...
Exactly. If you're doing something like:

if hashing_function(unknown_pass) == hashed_pass:

you're doing it wrong...

Instead, use the compare function built into your crypto library, which should hopefully be hardened against timing attacks.

In most languages, == and === are not safe against timing attacks.
Isn't all this theorycrafting a bit overcomplicated? Compare it to the idea that wikileaks is doing what wikileaks has always done in general, and w/r/t US politics Hillary simply represents the corrupt establishment (her last name is even Clinton). And wikileaks isn't even choosing the hacking targets (presumably).
How did you get that $50/50Mbps deal in Baltimore? Was this part of a bundle for cable television?
Partcl – a tiny command language interpreter
Uh, yeah about that.. I have an aunt on permanent disability. She haggled with AT & T in Austin for months trying to get that service. They make it extremely difficult to actually sign up. I believe she finally just switched to the $300 one time cost Google Fiber plan when they came to town.
If someone won the lottery for $1m and proceeded to dump their entire proceeds back into lottery tickets, you'd rightly think that they were insane. Yet that's exactly what you're doing.

You don't have to liquidate your entire stake. Heck, you could keep a full 100k in Ethereum—if it has a run-up on the scale of Bitcoin, you'd be making millions. But you wouldn't have all your eggs in one basket.

I definitely understand the desire/impulse to make big bets, but as with any gambling operation it's important to consider when you cash out. Right now you're betting $1m on the potential to make $50m, when you could have a guaranteed $900k with the potential to make $5m.