skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Definitely. Even the subtitle is more difficult to follow than necessary because of pointless redundancy. The first few sentences contain many canonical examples of bad writing patterns that get in the way of communication (had had). Nothing grammatically incorrect. Just very simple ideas written in a way that's very difficult to follow.

For anyone else who had trouble parsing the article, here's a TL;DR:

1. Why buy fancy top-of-the-line hardware when something cheap and utilitarian will do just fine?

2. The author's figure is made up. He takes an estimate of total spending and then assumes 70% of it was wasted. Based on unsubstantiated personal anecdote. But there's a page-long rant about cookware written in cringe-worthy style.

My take:

I'm sympathetic with (1). But I also know some people in K-12 IT. They're professionals with some accounting education who know how to perform a reasonable cost-benefit analysis.

Sometimes money gets wasted on expensive toys.

But sometimes it's less expensive to stick with Macs or Windows machines than retrain hundreds of teachers on Chrome OS or whatever. Sometimes there's bundling and the 30% or 70% that never gets used represented a 0% additional cost to the school. And sometimes people are just stupid.
What about the cloud providers' ISPs?
> Considering you retire at ~65

Is that really still true nowadays?
We don't have $10,000 each.
The classic, cliché-for-a-reason recommendation here is Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. It discusses a very tangible, very realizable, ground-up system of education built on the foundation of the computer as a universal, interactive tool that can meet the needs of any learner. It's a very good read, and a very good starting place if you're curious about this sort of stuff, alongside parallel work from people like Alan Kay and his Dynabook. However, there is a lot of inertia behind the education institution, so even something actionable like the path described in Mindstorms still has a massive uphill battle of winning hearts and minds; just because it's a good idea in principle doesn't mean it's going to be a good idea in practice, or that it's worth the cost of investment when the current system is, under some definition, 'working'.

Still, like a lot of stuff coming out of Computer Science in the 60s, Papert et al. are a good place to go for raw inspiration channeled into consumable, actionable ideas.
Is a 1 MB header image too big?
Thanks for posting this. Just ordered myself a copy :)
There are a ton of flaws in this comment, and I don't understand why it's at the top of this chain.

"First, the safe withdrawal method of 4% is actually not safe - the safest method of withdrawal is called variable percentage withdrawal and not only takes into account the principle, but also the results year after year."

This is an argument for taking the annuity. When two options have the same expected value, volatility is a bad thing.

"Because you are taking an asset class that can be converted into shares/bonds which has a higher expected returns than an annuity because it can compound."

The author writes under the pretense that the $5K figure is EQUAL to the risk-adjusted rate of return on a $1M principal. Sure, there are asset classes that have higher expected returns than a guaranteed annuity, but that is because they are RISKIER. Obviously, people value risk differently, which is why in general, you can't say "always take $1M"

"Whereas the $1M cash, if moved to bonds and shares, even if it performed at 5% annually, it will mean on the first year break even, but on the second year it will compound (unless you spend all the money)."

The whole point of the $5K figure is that it is the same amount as the risk-adjusted return on a $1M investment. How the user chooses to spend that $5K monthly sum is up to them and they have the freedom to spend or invest that sum in the same manner regardless of which option he/she takes.

"You could say you invest the monthly savings from the $5,000 but simply put it, $1M in shares has a much higher expected return than $5,000 monthly in perpetuity."

Incorrect for the above reasons.

Assuming that $5K/month annuity is the expected rate of return on a $1M invested in a risk-free asset class (which is the assumption this article is written on) and you have the option to cancel the annuity and retrieve your principal at any time, it's pretty clear that the annuity is the better option because it has NO volatility.
Those skills that you called unpractical are actually valuable in today's service economy, and helped me put food on the table for years as well as pay for higher education.

Then no matter what activity you pick in life, being self-sufficient with regards to presenting and illustrating your ideas or doing some basic marketing is always valuable.

Same with code. Even if you do not plan to be a programmer, having a basic understanding what programming is can help you in interdisciplinary settings.

Written questions and diagrams are a good idea. But tests can be constructed in many ways. For alternative based questions grading with computer can be more productive and less error-prone, freeing the teacher to focus in more important tasks such as preparing lessons.
i don't think i agree. i think they're moving up the chain to plug weaknesses in their model.

1. good customers - infrastructure customers are not good customers. they are fickle and extremely price sensitive, which is tough to do on a super capital intensive business like hosting, even on amazon cloud's insanely high cost.

2. less complex products - i don't understand how there is there anything about amazon's cloud that says "less complex" to you. have you ever used it? it is automating thousands upon thousands of things you have to do by hand, and it breaks sometimes.

3. scale - every single application anyone has had success with is a sitting duck.

i think amazon is the real new microsoft, with all of the anti-trust implications that insinuates. google only delivers information, amazon delivers nearly everything in the physical world (including hosting, the ultimate "physical good" that nobody thinks is.).

good thing jeff bezos owns the washington post.
At a certain point you get diminishing returns for working harder.

Diminishing returns on your health and in actual quality work of done, for sure.

But unfortunately you also tend to get "increasing returns" in terms of appreciation by uninspired middle-level managers, who tend to think: "We know he's a good worker 'coz we can see him workin'!". Which is unfortunately the great majority of them. Who themselves tend to be deeply insecure about their own position and how they're being evaluated, and so forth.

And so the world keeps going, round and round and roun,
Git has `git log --gra.....` actually no nevermind that's far too obscure and useless. Just use `tig`. TUIs are generally more useful than GUIs in my experience anyway.
Not the person you're responding to, but I own an Oculus Rift.
I suffer from pretty severe motion sickness, airplanes, trains are both awful, car rides are a "staring straight ahead no reading" affair unless I take drugs.

Nausea totally depends on the game developer and mode of locomotion. Luckey's Tale, one of the launch games that came free with the Rift that has a camera floating sort of like Banjo-Kazooie surprisingly made me feel really ill. Cockpit games like EVE:Valkyrie were a problem, but then again I feel like if I were in a starship flying around I'd probably feel pretty sick too.

However, things like The Climb where the camera is moving more erratically and the pace is faster I had no problem at all. Pretty much any game that uses the new Oculus Touch controls and relies on full body movement instead of a seated experience really helps as it puts me "into" my body a bit more so my brain doesn't get as confused.
Show HN: Seeker has a new look
Yes, good point. I think perhaps, as many things in life, it's a double edged sword.
The way I see it, the git DAG is fundamentally a graphical data structure, so it makes perfect sense to be able to manipulate it using a graphical interface. The only problem is there aren't really any UIs that take full advantage of git's nature as a DAG yet (at least, AFAIK).

While I've yet to find a git GUI which approaches the same level of functionality the git CLI possesses, I think something like the UI proposed here might be good enough to finally get me to switch.
You could make it a capped tax write off, and that may prevent a large single actor from exporting, but it won't stop many individual people from reselling to a local exporter for some quick case. In other words, it adds a small per-limit cost to the exporter to deal with individual people and aggregate, but doesn't address exporting overall very well.
I disagree. A school without basic technology like computers and tablets? Blimey, you want us to go back to slates and chalk?

Most schools have 3D printers, VR headsets, iPads. We need to teach kids about technology they will be using in 10 - 15 years time when they hit the job market.

We can't send kids out into a career without having used an iPad. Some kids don't have access to tech or the internet at home, now you want to take it away at school? Shame on you.
How did you resolve it? Did you just eat the loss?

In the US, the best recourse would probably be to sue or file a police report for destruction of property. Neither of those are great options, but they might end up being arrested depending on the municipality.
Can we use Apollo with Meteor seamlessly now. Meaning is it production-ready to use? I like Meteor's reactivity so so much.
How is fossil? I've really wanted to use that.
Both should work. Token buckets only have to store two things (count and timestamp) where a timestamp set has to store all N timestamps. I like the simper approach since I don't actually need access to all the timestamps.

If you look at the concurrent request limiter I do indeed keep all the timestamps there in a Redis set. That one was more error prone to write in practice as I often would accidentally hit Redis storage limits.
It's still not as fast as vim-fugitive for example. I know magit does more in nicer ways but the delay when staging, for example, is noticeable and can be annoying over time.
Hi,
Have you given a try to: http://gitup.co/
There not everything you wanted, but maybe...
> You may have noticed that Git warns you a lot. Rebase is dangerous, headless state is dangerous, don’t do push -f, are you sure, think twice, you’re not supposed to do that, stuff like that

Hmmm…

> Remove warnings as Git repo is immutable and cannot lose data

Ok this is a great response!

There's also this wishlist/proposals for git log[0], which are extremely exciting to think about; it's from 2012, so even older than the article…

[0]: https://gist.github.com/datagrok/4221767
Art in the age of ones and zeros: Minecraft Art
IMDB Data in a Graph Database
This. By the time you get good enough at Git to make a reasonable GUI, you don't need/want it anymore.
it's not quite apples/apples, and the law tries to protect minority shareholders from unfair actions by majority holders, but if the major stakeholders can say "it's in the best interest of the company" with a straight face and not just so the major stakeholders can enrich themselves at the expense of others, it's usually passable. in general, you'd ask lawyers a lot of questions about this, and you definitely take into account the risk of a shareholder lawsuit.

so, it's a lot easier to do this kind of thing when there's a downround and the alternative to these terms is the company shutting down - basically, the new folks diluting old folks can say this is ultimately in the best interest of the company because the alternative is a shutdown.

in the context of MS or FB, both companies were on the up and increasing in value, so harder for the big stakeholders to say pushing out another SH was just about "serving the best interest of the company" with a straight face.
Thanks so much. I'm really glad you liked it.
~previous statement was incorrect~
People who work with him say he does both managerial work and scientific.
You're right, he could have continued with his work had he simply avoided ever giving anyone the impression he held any beliefs which varied from THE ORTHODOXY.

But why should that have been required of him?
I would argue that "working hard" and "working long hours" are not the same thing.
You would think so, but you might be surprised. A couple years back I was looking to get a mortgage. I own a profitable company that pays me a comfortable 6-figure salary and has for years, as well as having liquid savings greater than the total value of the house I was buying. Most of the savings are in a holding company though, so it made sense to get a mortgage rather than taking the tax hit of withdrawing the funds. While I did eventually get a mortgage, it was actually quite difficult, because my income was not "guaranteed". One lender even said something along the lines of, "Yes, you have that money saved, but there's no guarantee you won't spend it." And somehow the fact that I owned the company paying my salary made that income less reliable than if I was dependent on a separate employer.

Even though by any logical metric I was far less of a risk than someone living paycheck to paycheck, the situation was outside of their regular mold, so they considered it risky.
Yeah they could build a shopping platform on top of it or something.
> Git has `git log --gra.....`

I have an alias `git lg` which does basically that. The only problem is that once I run that command and have that nice, pretty DAG, I can't manipulate any of those commits directly; I'm stuck manipulating the commit graph indirectly by typing out commands and copy-pasting commit hashes into the terminal. A decent GUI like the one described in this article would fix that.
This conclusion is consistent with a tenuously related finding in a recent HBR article. The study cited in the article sent virtually identical but fictitious resumes to top law firms from fictitious students coming from 2nd tier law schools. Where the resumes differed were subtle cues that referred to students extra-curricular activities and financial status.

Here's the gist: If your personal interests are sailing and polo vs. pickup soccer and country music, you're 13 times more likely to get an interview if you're a male. In other words: 13/80 resumes indicating a high socioeconomic status were called for an interview vs. 1/80 resumes for low socioeconomic statuses.

Personally, I suspect many of us like to think we're meritocratic, but our mind betrays us by favoring people who match our subconscious idea of what talented people look like or sound like on paper or in person. Evaluating people is hard and our minds like to take shortcuts to save energy.

https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-b...
If teachers unions didn't oppose standardized testing with such vigor it would be a simple matter to find a number of similar schools and increase wages for some time then compare outcomes. As far as I can tell preschool teacher salaries are low simply because we have too many preschool teachers, similarly we have too many fast food and retail workers. Yet we don't demand raises at McDonald's for food safety or quality purposes. Why here?
What a great way to build empathy and connection in a sales conversation. These are the type of people I love to meet in EdTech!

I couldn't agree more with the author's assessment. A bit of an extension beyond just training in new tools: we need to help adults in schools understand the value technology can provide in their daily lives before we can expect to see the true potential out of the complex technologies schools are spending billions of dollars on - looking at you blended learning and [fill in other buzzword technologies].

If an adult in a school doesn't appreciate the value that basic everyday tools provide (I'm talking things like calendars and organized email), it's a huge mountain to climb to get them to trust what technology can do to assist their work with kids. It's quite shocking how many great educators fall in this bucket. Then add the labels of 'laggard' and 'luddite' to these people instead of truly understanding them and forget creating any trust and change.

It's a Maslow's thing, honestly, and so much is being spent on things way too far up the pyramid. There's so many low hanging problems to go after first to save great educators time and simultaneously build trust in the power and magic of technology. Right now we're burning all our political (and real) capital on the promises of 'edtech' without truly solving the needs of the people in the seats using them. I fear where it will end up, and the missed opportunity it represents.

Source: I've been working with all types of schools throughout the US, with heavy exposure in NYC.
The same thing that happened to pleasure horseback riding.
I think it's immoral to call other people immoral.
He should set up a VR company
I don't know if that's fraud as much as they just aren't using that business right. Sony is weird, having an entertainment division they keep writing off when their only profitable consumer products division is PlayStation.
I have a hard time believing that giving someone a "hemopneumothorax" with an "electric pencil sharpener" is a legitimate threat. It sounds like a reference to an inside joke, and wasn't even addressed to anyone in particular.
Using apollo with react native has been a great experience. works well with react navigation and graph.cool as well. Only thing I would improve is the subscription features. Feels kind like theres a lot missing in subscription to customize depending on application. Like applyMiddleware and other hooks .
Thanks for the link — very interesting. I had an opposite experience when my wife and I had some issues with the airbnb we were renting for several months.

We used my wife's account since the trip was for her business travel. But I managed all the communication electronically, including when some issues arose. I was also the person who talked with the host in-person when she showed up to fix some of the issues (broken heating, no smoke detectors). As she was leaving, she said: "your wife is much more polite than you". I asked how she would know, and she referenced the online communication. She was surprised to learn that it was in fact me that she had been corresponding with.

I do not minimize the impact of gender on workplace experience, which is certainly more important than my housing-related anecdote. But it would be interesting to see what the differences are in various types of interactions, and where different genders are treated better or worse.
Excellent reading about why you should consider Algo, the ideas behind it, and why commercial VPNs don't do what you hope:

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2016/12/12/meet-algo-the-vpn-th...

Note that Algo is designed by security professionals, is recommended by some you may have heard of FWIW (grugq, Kenn White, more), and is careful about what it claims to do:

* "Does not claim to provide anonymity or censorship avoidance"

* "Does not claim to protect you from the FSB, MSS, DGSE, or FSM"
This is a great UX rethink along actual user needs. It's unusual to see someone with more-than-superficial knowledge of git that also has enough product sense to come up with something like this.

My team has varying levels of git skill, including product owners and testers. I am usually called in to do the git black magic -- and I only know a fraction of what is available on git. My git magic doesn't scale. Further, because we are using our dev environment in a VM, a remote client is harder to work with. Making this web-based would work out very well for us. (And power users can still use the command line tool instead).

I hope this comes to fruition. My team can sure use it.
> It basically says ... and I agree not to talk about this payout"

That's not quite right. When I read the NDA, section 2 is what stuck out to me as an oddity that isn't standard in most settlement agreements. Specifically (emphasis mine):

> I acknowledge that the existence of the payment by Airbnb and this Airbnb Payment Agreement are confidential.

Most settlements make the amount paid a hidden number but doesn't prevent you from discussing that the settlement itself occurred. If Airbnb's NDA simply said that the amount paid wasn't to be discussed, then I'd agree that this would be a non-story. However, that doesn't seem to be the case here. IANAL either, but the language used seems pretty cut and dry in the intent that the incident be kept under wraps.
Re radfan.

I've been looking at radiator efficiency and last time I removed a radiator when decorating considered adding the foil backing to the wall but indications were that the cost of the foil in resources outweighed the benefit over something like a 10 year period, which surprised me.

Radiators have always bothered me since high-school physics in that the rhetoric that radiators are placed under windows to increase convection and circulate hot air never seemed quite to fit for me. It always _seems_ to be sending heat out the window.

In practice - referencing your https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0195/5444/t/45/assets/proc... image - what is supposed to happen is that the cold air is drawn in to the bottom of the radiator, rises over it, passes up and moves across the ceiling, falling as it cools and then being drawn back to the radiator.

Do you have any independent corroboration that radfan improves heating efficiency, or when used increases apparent warmth for the same cost of heating? I see you don't claim efficiency gains on the page but only appear to claim for "better" distribution of the warm air .. warmer air still rises though, right. But in the video you say "warmer home or your money back" which suggests you've proven it makes efficiency gains??

Good idea, would like to see some scientific work on the efficacy though before I'd commit to buy.
But iced tea typically does not contain ice unless you add it. Buy a can of Lipton's Iced Tea - it's still iced tea, with no ice in it. But whatever, this is getting to angels on the head of a pin territory :)

I think you are making an unwarranted assumption about me. I have indeed spent a great deal of time thinking about language; I just have different thoughts, or points of view, about it. I have been very interested in etymology for a long time.

I neither claimed that natural language was capable of being entirely unambiguous, nor that people cannot communicate in the face of ambiguity. In fact, ambiguity in language allows for great artistic expression: humor, poetry, and other word play. So I agree with you on that point.

But holy crap, do we have to make it harder than necessary to communicate, when we aren't deliberately playing with words?

Surely you agree that much of the misery, pain, and suffering in this world of ours is due to avoidable language-related misunderstandings?
Backbone providers provide services to businesses. If one of them was caught monitoring traffic, their reputation would be destroyed.
Now I'm wishing GitUp had this selection tool. Sadly you can only do operations one commit/branch at a time.
gitup looks neat, but unfortunately macOS only.
To me this seems like a dead end business to be in, too many competitors in limited markets (like SF or NY), competition with brick and mortar options (Joe's Deli etc), and enormous cost of acquisition trying to outdo the competition. This seems like a market for one winner and lots of losers. Is investing $120M in such a business a good idea? You have almost zero ability to innovate and produce something better than your competitors, so why even get into this?
This can be done either way, and is really infrastructure dependent. There are pros and cons on both sides. We opted to bake it into the web stack instead of in front so that we get all the benefits of existing infrastructure like log aggregation, exception tracing, HTTP error response formatting and tracking, user-specific gating, auto service scaling, etc.