skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Without the right training, most teachers do not understand math well enough to teach it the way Lampert does.

My high school math teacher majored in math and then got a certificate in teaching. She wasn't a teacher who was told to teach math among other classes. She knew all the advanced stuff (beyond what a high school curriculum required), she was excited about it, she could explain things in various ways, give analogies, was available after class to ask questions and so on. And that is post-collapse Soviet Union full of corruption, poverty and other crap like that. Surely if we can spend trillions of dollars on F-35 we can get us some good math teachers...?

In this country I see a large disconnect between words "Oh kids are so very very important, they are our future, they can't play outside too far because they will be abducted and we care so much for them" and deeds: I see large classrooms, not enough teachers, teacher are underpaid, not interested in math. Funding comes from local property taxes so rich neighborhood get more money, poor ones get less.

Another thing is I remember teachers were respected. Imagine how we react to someone saying "Oh they are doctor. And then everyone nods, right, they are very successful. Or lawyer, or works for Google and so on". Why isn't teaching like that? My mom tells me someone back home thought she was a teacher, because she at her age spoke some English. And she took it as a great complement. In this country you tell someone you thought they were a high-school teacher and they might get offended. Something is very wrong here...

As for making it more exciting -- initially I studies math by repetition and it worked pretty well for me. I think works because kids are amazing at memorizing stuff. Why not first take advantage of that? Starting them out with set theory sounds all cool on paper that is not how humans learn. Multiplication table, basic patterns, even operations are fine to memorize first. Later on it makes most sense to introduce proofs, word problems (I remember doing lots of word problems, our teachers were crazy for them) and so on.
It is not even remotely elitism to say "you don't have much experience doing iOS development, therefore you're not qualified to talk about what is or is not good hardware for doing iOS development on".
> Microsoft introduced an entirely new kind of tool for digital artists.

Not really, you could buy a Wacom Cintiq since about forever. I'm glad they're giving wacom some competition though.
Not really. You still go to the shops and buy things in litres and kilograms, and their entire construction industry is in metric. The only commercial product that isn't in metric, funnily enough, is beer and cider. I guess getting pissed people to change proved harder than everything else.
You're actually starting a conversation on HN about what the purpose of life is?

Good luck...
You say that like it's an insult. And nihilists don't necessarily not have concern for others.
I think OP meant USB type A.
PacMan!
>> Tried a few times to get a sense of how it would be during this thread.

On a real touchscreen laptop or simulating on a non-touchscreen laptop?

I think it makes a real difference to sit down with an open mind and go through some real use cases on a laptop with a working touchscreen (and the software you'd actually use). You'll realize that you're only using when it is appropriate for only a few seconds at a time, if that. And there will probably be huge time gaps (hours, days even) where you might not use it. But in the odd time when you need it, you're often glad that it's there.
So as a programmer, this stupid touch bar thing is a huge downgrade. I use the function keys all the time in my development tools. Now I'm supposed to use some stupid tiny touchscreen with no tactile feedback? And I have to look down at it every time I want to tap something?

This thing solves approximately zero problems I had, but creates a bunch more.
It's there any way to obfuscate my browsing data? As in a program that visits random sites. I've searched but never found something like this.
I teach calculus on the side sometimes for beer money (ie. adjunct), and has made me stronger in my long-running feeling that we teach way too much calculus in the STEM fields.

Most people "in the trenches" writing tools that would make use of the fundamentals in their field (either in the physical sciences or engineering disciplines) tend to agree that linear algebra has disproportionately little representation compared to calculus. To be fair, that is somewhat of a downstream problem from mathematics departments, and speaks more about the possibility of stagnation in the undergraduate science and engineering curricula.

fair caveat though: my PhD is in numerical linear algebra...
"it’s not like I can buy laptops with MacOS (which I’m completely addicted to) from someone else." <- No, you can. Just check Microsoft Surface Pro running macOS ;)
I too work at an open salary company. One great thing that happened was that other people noticed I was being underpaid compared to my actual duties before I did and spoke up for me (I just didn't bother to look at it much) Minorities can keep tabs and see that all is well... Or that adjustments need to be made before it becomes a bigger issue. We have a superstar or two, and everybody knows who they are, and they make more. People are fine with that. One thing that really makes all this work is that we hire not only for technical skill, but especially for low jealousy and defensiveness. This helps from client meetings to code reviews, and of course, to honest discussions about open salaries.
Could not agree with you more. Another thing I've noticed anecdotally is that many of the math teachers in the secondary system in North America do not have a broad understanding of math themselves. Math is given the most rote treatment of all the subjects, and I suppose this is understandable given the abstract nature of math.

But students are never told why they should care about abstractions in the first place, which is unfortunate. Many high schools simply refuse to speak the students' language.

I suspect this will change in this century. IMO, if a high school really wanted to be progressive, they would totally reform their math curriculum to include more exposure to applied math and computer sciences. Young folks should be using math to build their own Instagram or Minecraft clones that they can deploy to their devices that VERY DAY - using the concepts they've been introduced to in mathematics.
I think most journalists would not necessarily agree with the proposition that Twitter has been good for journalism or the public discourse.
One thing bugs me about this article. There is no acknowledgement of the "Civilization" board game that MicroProse licensed for the game. They are very different designs, but I suspect the board game influenced the early tech tree and the challenge of civil disorder from over population.

Civilization is a great game, maybe the best computer strategy game of all time. But I think it's namesake deserves a mention.
Coworker. (jbernhard.xyz)[jbernhard.xyz]
I think it's more accurate to say iOS developers are their focus. Apple just opened an academy in Italy for those developers, and gave them their first taste of programming on the iPad via Swift Playgrounds, a language Apple created for them.

They'll probably have an IDE on the iPad Pro, AKA the future of personal computers according to Cook, before we even see a hardware refresh with Kaby Lake.
> As a heavy Vim user,

As productive as Vim is for some, I think there'd be very few people in Apple asking the question "How can we make Vim more productive", there probably hasn't been for the last 20 years
I wonder if they have that "I'm falling" dream and then wake up.
Nightly Business Report (by CNBC) Blocked by NBC Universal Copyright Notice
http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~zhiyunq/pub/ccs15_root_providers.pdf
While you are correct, the Kabylake processor that the Razer Blade uses is a low power 15W TDP chip. By nature this means that it is still slower than the range of 28W TDP Skylake processors the new 13" MacBook Pro family is receiving in this update. The 28W TDP variants of the Kabylake family is not yet available from Intel.

Sources:
http://ark.intel.com/products/95443/Intel-Core-i5-7200U-Proc...
http://ark.intel.com/products/91164/Intel-Core-i5-6287U-Proc...
>> With my hands on the keyboard and my thumbs close to the touchpad, I don't see the appeal of suddenly raising my hands to the screen, especially for general things like zooming, scrolling. It could make sense to manipulate something like an object directly, but to raise hands just for zooming or scrolling?

I think I figured it out. You're spoiled by the quality of the Apple touchpads. A few minutes with a crappy Windows touchpad and you'll be wishing you could touch the screen.

FWIW, I hate all touchpads. I just hate Apple touchpads the least.
Actually, even the Safari Touch Bar demo showed redundant URL bar and nav keys. Sad.
People over at SRD (SubredditDrama) have shown some fairly convincing evidence that /r/the_donald has some pretty serious vote manipulation going on, which probably has to do with it. And really, honestly it seems fairly obvious once you go on /r/the_donald and realize that everything has around +1800 to +3500 upvotes, but with significantly less comments then it should have (Usually in the 100's or less).

All that said, I though that there was a limit on the number of posts in /r/all that could be from any one subreddit - so I think it's likely that the above along with another factor is the cause.
I've read (once, somewhere, on the internet) that these types of rankings are also distorted by the fact that in the US the top research institutes are usually teaching and part of a University, while they are not teaching in many other parts of the world.
As others have mentioned. I just remapped my function keys for common tasks or launching applications (e.g. f1 = Xcode, f2 = Slack, f3 = Terminal). Using something like Keyboard Maestro (which you use), you can also contextualize the functionality based on certain applications.
NASA Moon Mission Shares Insights into Giant Impacts
Good luck with that. The Boot Camp drivers have all but been abandoned. Maybe they'll do a single update soon that will be the only update for the next 5 years.

Source: disgruntled Early 2013 MacBook Pro user who can't use the built-in microphone from within Boot Camp.
Never drove a car but when I did I hit people.
He was asking me the other day for ideas to progress from static pages and submit to sexy realtime web apps. In other words nearer to what he sees and uses every day, rather than simple sites and submits.

I'm somewhat thinking out loud as I'm just not sure. Maybe a decent front end to sit with PHP is the best answer, but I felt something else like Rails might be more productive and helpful to learning for him than sticking with php.

Last thing I want to do is put him off though!
We shouldn't mix up the max skill level with the average skill level. They are very different issues, and different educational systems may optimize for different things.

For example, maybe if you are a very good mathematician in the US you can get high-paying jobs for intelligence agencies, data analytics, that sort of thing. But if you are a mathematical genius in another country, maybe they don't have the same job opportunities so you have to go into math teaching.

That would cause the US to have very good mathematicians and at the same time terrible math teachers.
The touch bar seems interesting, perhaps what I'd like is a separate product that sits beside my mac and gives the touch bar functionality - something the size of a trackpad would be fantastic imho.
No employer is going to take a hiring decision by looking at your personal website.

You know, I've dealt with many clients who ask for flying text, moving pictures and looping videos in their websites. Don't be that client to yourself. When we work with such clients, we usually start probing with lots of WHYs, and the other "W" questions, something in the lines of

- "Why, according to you, do you believe that is the best way of displaying the information?"

- "Why do you believe that all the 5 points are equally important?"

- "Who are your most ideal users?"

etc, etc, etc. We kept probing till it comes down to the simplest, bare-bone answers, at best -- YES or NO. For instance, "YES, the user will need to provide just the email ID and nothing else."

Now, apply that to your own personal website, get down to the simplest core of your personality/quality/characteristics/qualification. Better yet, think of your target industry and come up with a compelling, different take on it and make it interesting for your prospective employer.

One of the biggest mistakes most "providers" make, is talking about themselves, as that is the easiest. Instead, talk of the recipient, be it the employer, the client or the user. They talk of themselves since they everything about themselves more than anyone else, so they stay in that comfort zone. Go, venture to your prospects, focus on them and not you.

Do that, and they will be the one to come to you and "ask you for more." When they start asking for more, the journey forward is easy - now unfold your story, build it up, surprise them. Go on.

The narcissism part:

Personally, I've had people surprised, smiled, and intrigued at conferences, events with my business card[1, 2] and they usually go to my website[3].

1. Front - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1308/photos/business-car...

2. Back - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1308/photos/business-car...

3. https://brajeshwar.me/
Two responses to my comment, opposite recommendations. I'm inclined to agree with you in general, but the contradicting opinions can't be good for newcomers.
You think, when billionaires think about death, that they're bemoaning the loss of their money? That's a very strange thing to believe, and I'm very sure it's wrong.
While I agree with the article's intent, we're missing the forest for the trees. The reason a billionaire has to do this is because it can't be done with traditional business models.

Twitter is infrastructure. Rapid bursts of semi-trustworthy data for us to consume and consider, at our own peril. That Twitter has to change its core behavior providing that service in order to make revenue is the problem. The value it provides is intangible in current financial models.

When I talk about this stuff, I think the value or commodity of a thing Twitter is such that current financial models cannot describe it properly. It feels as if we need a different type of business model to deal with keeping the business side of these houses in business.

Call it a suffering coin, if you will.
I work at a public university in Michigan as a Java developer. All of our salaries are open to the public. It has actually caused more friction that what I expected. Maybe it is just the people I work with, but once raises were announced people got very upset. It was mostly why is person A paid THAT much, they don't do anything.
> I want to climb every mountain.

Statistically speaking, anti-aging isn't going to be the defining factor in your mortality, if that's what you want to do with your extended lifetime.
Because they come here either as engineers or mathematicians in both academia and industry.
Microsoft is the new Apple
Good point .. now you just need a few hundred of these and could retire ;)
Yes. Nihilist != Narcissist.
> (and I get to apply some really high powered ideas to programming once in a while which grants a satisfaction that lingers)

Mind sharing what some of these ideas are?
Because there are a thousand other things you can do that are worthwhile and there is no anxiety to be perceived as "smart" in the way that math requires. Just party on and network and land yourself in a start up. You can pay someone else to do the math because the real money is in MAKING DECISIONS.
One thing worth asking, how many students in those departments are from US? Or finished their elementary education here?
If someone can figure out how to trick legacy MacBooks into displaying this bar on the screen of a plugged in iPhone/iPad then you can take my money now.

There are so many old iPhone and iPads out there just waiting to be repurposed for something like this.

Heck, I'd even be interested in a reasonably priced (< $150) external touch strip as an accessory for my current MBP.
So the solution for Twitter's problem is to find an idiot willing to pay $12 billion for a medium that many people consider the digital equivalent of an open sewer? An idiot who's willing to spend another few billion dollars to turn that sewer in a hallowed spring for journalism? And Larry Page is supposed to be that idiot? Good luck with that.

Twitter hasn't an old media problem, Twitter's problem is that it has a goal, but no vision. That goal right now is profitability, no matter what. Twitter started out as a micro-blogging platform, but the company seems to be at a loss what it wants to be now or in the future. They have something, but they they don't know what to do with it, causing them to keep treading on the spot. And treading water, especially sewage water, is not a healthy long-term strategy.
When you click on the logo the "slide down" animation feels very web-y. The rest of app is really nice though. Everything feels really slick for a HTML/JS app. The keyboard show animation could a little work, but I know that's not easy to do.
The games weren't "murder," which is by definition the unlawful taking of another's life.

That's the legal definition. Not the only definition.
and then you have no way to compensate someone who has a 6th, incredibly valuable skill, but not the other 5 you wanted.

Or you can start doing super complicated things like "have 5 out of those 10 skills", but are they as valuable?

Yeah, that's a pain. And then another company may value the skill differently, and you then have to just lose your employee to them because they'll pay them more but you won't because of your rigid structure.

There's so many variables, uniformity here won't get you the best teams.
Hello Dbus
You can be supportive and positive... and honest.

Being supportive of shitty performances is dishonest and shitty.

Then again... the "parents" of today cry fits if their kid plays like crap and doesn't get some sort of participation award.
I've found pressing and lifting a kneadable eraser works really well as debris stick to it.
This "digital art graphic card" is starting to sound like "for my Big Data project I need these nonstandard tools and big compute pellets" when all they have is moderate data queries and a batch-processing workflow.
I don't want innovation on my laptop, I want evolution. Make the battery last longer and the processor faster. These "innovations" are solving problems that don't exist, and they just made the product worse for me. All my computers since 2009 have been macs, but my next laptop isn't going to be one.
Well, finally a worthwhile problem for Apple to solve. They're pretty good at solving engineering issues, they've mostly been focussed on making shit thinner though.
I mean who other than regulators. That is, I think that this is the last opportunity before heavy handed regulation that possibly throws out the baby with the bath water.
>> Given that they're using glossy-screened laptops — maybe they care more about looks and hipness than about getting the job done?

Why the hate against glossy screens? The colors pop more and unless you're sitting in a spot that's prone to glare, you're just as productive as anyone else. I've never had an issue with a Macbook's glossy screen affecting my ability to work.
Yes. It is great. Issues are handle very nicely via their github Repo so you dont feel left out while using it. It's currently in Beta but most of the things that I use (python3 ,pip, npm...) work like a charm
I can't see how they would even begin to make that possible. For the next couple of years, the majority of MacBook users will not have a Touch Bar. This means developers will only use it to duplicate functionality that is already accessible in applications. You will not see features that are exclusively found on the Touch Bar.

It is encouraging to read this in Apple's documentation[1]:

"There is no need, and no API, for your app to know whether or not there is a Touch Bar available. Whether your app is running on a machine that supports the Touch Bar or not, your app's onscreen user interface (UI) appears and behaves the same way."

Skip forward 5 years to a time when software developers assume that every Mac user has a Touch Bar. We will get to see just how poorly they make use of the feature. Even as someone without any disabilities, I sincerely hope I am never absolutely required to use the Touch Bar for features that cannot be found elsewhere in an application.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/reference/appkit/nstouchbar
To me the state of math instruction is illustrated by a 3rd grade math book, teacher's edition, with the answer key in it. (3rd grade math answers should be obvious by inspection.)
Man, as I sit here at this news aggregator, which funded another pretty good news aggregator, having come from yet a third news aggregator, none of which are Twitter, it makes me think.... eh, maybe we just let this one die.

I have said before and I'll say again, journalists love twitter because it's a (free) portfolio site for them that hasn't (as yet) messed with their ability to interface with their fans (although they're moving that way).
And then the company runs out of operating capital and you're all looking for jobs somewhere else?
If Musk's Mars colonization plans come to fruition, all that trouble NASA went to sterilize their Mars probes will be for nothing.
I'm not sure if I'm the only one who worried about Apple Logo On Screen lid which is not present in new macbook pro!
I completely agree. I love computer science. I love software development. But those two things are radically different things.

What I'm finding it difficult to find, these days, is actual mature-age accredited uni courses in computer science. Instead, you get a plethora of development courses which, as you say, are akin to engineering, not science.
Absolutely absurd. I bought my 2014 rMBP for $1700 with 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD - the same setup with the new model is $2K. And if I add 16GB RAM to the base model without the OLED strip, it's still $1700 with only 2 ports!
Play Store Support Seems to Be Nearby for More Chromebooks
I'm not sure whether non-US research institutions are less teaching focused overall than their state-side counterparts but there are plenty of other confounding cultural factors. In Russia, for example, the most elite science/engineering university (PhysTech) isn't as well known globally as MIT or Caltech because it is made up of dozens of research institutes that publish under their own name instead of under the umbrella organization. As a result most academics dont know that all of this research is produced by a single (albeit distributed wrt geography and branding) powerhouse.
Apple and MS have a patent cross-licensing agreement, or so I've heard.
I can't access the article, it asks me to log in.
> Going linux on decent hardware isn't biting the bullet one bit.

I've tried before. I've got a couple of laptops at home running Linux, but they didn't stick. I didn't actually move to them. Moving is a kind of commitment, you're saying "Well, this is probably good enough that I can make it work for the next decade or two." And that's unclear.

Moving platforms means changing some everyday tools. Visual Studio on Windows == XCode on OSX, but I'm not really happy with IDEs on Linux. (Visual Studio is really difficult to beat in terms of debugging experience, in my experience).

It's not necessarily worse, though some things are. OSX has some nice creature comforts where things just work and I don't want to waste time tweaking the environment any more than I have to.

So moving to Linux with the intent of staying there for the next decade or more is, indeed, biting the bullet.