skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having a masters degree "may" not improve student performance. Unless of course you are teaching math or science at the secondary level and have a degree in those subjects in which case it "does" improve student performance. Without having a close look at the data they used (which is now twenty years old) it's hard to say if they took into account teachers with masters degrees and classroom experience. As teachers are required to continue their education just to remain licensed it makes a lot of sense for teachers to get a masters degree even if it didn't improve their ability to teach. There is very little value in spending money on specialized instructional courses or seminars that count towards relicensing credits when those methodologies won't be used in the classroom in another three to five years or will be rebranded and resold by some other company that is the flavor of the day. A masters degree can also be a path to administration, counselor etc.
Postling announces premium product
couldn't remember the specifics. German - thanks for that and the rest of the details!
I know it's not. My name is unfortunately common enough it's hard for me get it on every website. My prism account is never taken.

Additionally, I think you'll find I'm acutely aware of how non-anonymous my posts are, and have always been relatively tame in my posting history on all sights.

It's not the acting out that will effect the professional careers of the people. It's the fact they have the hobby at all which is an issue professionally, especially in this job market.

Which is going to be hired most places: 29 yr old who has a reasonably good background and hobbies include gaming, reading and music, or a 29 yr old who has a reasonably good background and hobbies include reading and music? For many fields, the second is a more attractive candidate, and not for completely irrational reasons.
Hey PJ - that's me, the service is called ZeroCater.com
Yeah, it was pretty cool to be almost mentioned in Inc.

Feel free to get in touch with me: a@zerocater.com

Thanks!

Arram
Sending text over cheap walkie-talkies using AVR (hardware hack)
So what your saying is:

The negative stigma associated with being a company that thinks poorly of gamers and even more so of wow players is a terrible thing to have when looking for a professional employee.

=)
I would actually enjoy a blogging platform that is designed for hackers. Such a platform would need syntax highlighting, latex, etc.

There is nothing like this among free blogs. The closest thing is github's jekyll, which does not actually have latex support on the server.
Agreed.

The neurological basis for the relationship between what English grammar calls subject and predicate is a really interesting subject, and verb voice is obviously very related.

My background in all this comes from a few classes in Chinese linguistics. Chinese, like many East Asian languages, divides sentences into "topic" and "comment" rather than "subject" and "predicate," so that the topic can be what we would consider the verb's object even without the verb being explicitly marked as passive.

Yet modern Mandarin does have something like the passive with the modifier "bei-" which, when put before a verb, indicates the passive. This has a somewhat literary or ironic tone and is almost always used for negative actions like "he was hit" or "she was criticized." My favorite usage: When the Chinese government blocks website in the name of "social harmony", you say the site "bei-harmony," or "been harmonized."
One of the commenters mentions the `say` command, which is super-useful, but they use it like so: `scp file some-host:~; say 'copy done'`, which will notify you even if the command fails. You should use && so the notification only happens on success, or conditionally say something else.

I use this constantly in deploy, etc, scripts so I can run my compile + rsync + deploy command in a terminal, background it, and go work on something else until the process finishes. I'd say it's generally useful for anything that takes longer than 10 seconds but less than an hour (after an hour you tend to forget what's going on; might as well just email yourself.)

Festival (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/) is something similar for *NIX users.
Thanks, I'll certainly investigate further
The fact that the maintainer of Fedora packages is ready to pass them off does not mean the software in question is neglected/ignored. One of the listed packages is audacity.

It just means one individual doesn't have time to maintain Fedora packages anymore.
"This checkbox alone, with that particular title, helped increase their successful application conversion rate by over 11% – an increase of hundreds more applications a month!"

Sounds like it is off the application page, but if the wording is to be believed this is a net increase.
That's not a terribly felicitous translation, but it is by no means impenetrable. Of course, we can't take that sentence in isolation-- it is the middle sentence of a short paragraph, so you need to read a bit of context, too.

The paragraph also presumes that you are familiar with the opposition (familiar since Kant, at least) between the sensible and the intelligible, and Saussure's division of the sign into a signifier (which is supposed to be sensible) and a signified (which is the intelligible portion of the sign, not the thing referred to.)

Now, if you have that context, and understand the background, the paragraph is perfectly understandable.
Have you ever seen the WoW forums? The amount of flaming, trolling, and hate spewed filth that gets dragged across there is not worth it.

Too many people avoid the forums for good reasons.
What about Porsche, BMW and Mercedes?

Any business is good to be in - provided you're good enough. There's no such thing as easy money.
The New Intelligence Agency: All of Us
Lot of people claim that STM in Clojure is the big reason to use it. To me it's been a lot simpler:

a) I want some macros to use for JVM-based projects

b) I like using Emacs + SLIME (it's the best development environment, period).

Unfortunately the noise of Rails fanboys migrating to it with their usual laundry list of complaints ("no IDE support", "no good web framework") is annoying. I have nothing against Ruby in general (in fact I really like the language) and Rails in specific (I know people who love it), but the whole reduction of programming languages to merely web frameworks is a setback for software engineering. That mindset has now been spreading: not only is it impossible to hear about Ruby without "Rails" mentioned next to it, it's now common to hear "Python/Django" and "Scala/Lift".

Web is just a UI layer, a fairly mundane and boring part of an application. Lisp has very little to show for these sorts of applications, but has a lot to show for more science/engineering intensive ones. You hear all the time about webapps being re-written into PHP and other blub languages, but the community is interpreting it as a setback for the languages (and an argument in favour of using blub from the start) rather than the fact that advanced language features make really little difference for web development.
Just to play devil's advocate (and examine it rationally rather than legally), what exactly is the problem here? Libraries allow multiple people to read the same book. I'm sure you've loaned books to friends. Is it that it's OK for more than one person to read a purchased book, as long as it doesn't happen simultaneously? What if two people read a library book at the same time? Is that stealing? What if this site implemented some DRM that only allowed a book to be read by one person at a time?

This site isn't doing something wrong, merely something illegal.
The dynamic/compiled distinction needs to go away. Combine a simple syntax with very rapid compilation with LLVM, Type Inference, and very advanced emulator-based debugging, and there would be no need to have anything like Smalltalk/Perl/Python/Ruby any more. Instead of dynamic Duck Typing, you'd have Go's version, with auto-magic help from type inference. The emulator-based debugger could subsume many of the capabilities granted by a VM and enable the freewheeling runtime monkey-patching that can be leveraged for the same jaw-dropping ingenious debugging available in many current dynamic langs. This last component would be the hardest to implement.

(Cue the Haskell guys so they can point out how they're most of the way there already.)
I agree that PayPal is acting horribly in this situation, but it is worthwhile to look at the world from their perspective.

From reading many of these stories, it's clear that PayPal wants to cap their risk. For a brick-and-mortar business, their risk is the difference between sales that have been billed and product that has been received by the customer. That might account for a week or two worth of sales volume on a rolling basis, so a business doing $100k a year of PayPal transactions will typically only have $3k-$4k at risk, which is on par with what PayPal will earn by serving such an account over 18-24 months.

For a conference, however, there might be six months of revenue for pre-registration before the actual event takes place. If the event planner then absconds with the money, PayPal could be on the hook for the entire amount, which has long-since been withdrawn and spent. Take that same hypothetical $100k business for a conference, now all $100k of it is at risk, and PayPal only stands to make $2,500 or so off of that.

It's pretty clear that the credit card companies have PayPal by the short-and-curlies, in the sense that PayPal themselves will be on the hook for any chargebacks.

I call this the "wash my Ferrari" problem. If you do a good job, you make $10. If you scratch the paint, you're out $10,000. Not a good risk.

Open question to HN: how could PayPal do a better job of handling the situation?
I think this is a great policy to make women get stalked like crazy.

Obviously thought up by a bunch of lifelong, male, game developers.
Dangerous liaisons at IBM
Quick, what are all the problems with the internet today?!
Yeah, but you're still not acknowledging that they are making forum posting non-anonymous not game playing.

Second part of the question totally varies. I'm in agreement with you that the first is probably more attractive. But, there are millions of game players out there. Hard to think that all of them self-hate.
Not the side you think.

Sokal punked a minor journal that was not particularly well known in the field. His book with Bricmont, attacking "postmodernism", on the other hand, was published by a major publisher, even though large swaths of it had been thoroughly debunked.
Make the organizers purchase insurance? Don't refund the customers, in case the conference doesn't happen?
Yes, as i said they were trying to get the Russians to mediate a peace deal for them. This is why togo said that they were seeking peace through the good offices of Russia.
Upside down: /ɯoɔ˙ɹǝʇɐɔoɹǝz//:dʇʇɥ
That's indeed very impressive. I hope they are recording and putting the videos online.
I call this the "wash my Ferrari" problem. If you do a good job, you make $10. If you scratch the paint, you're out $10,000. Not a good risk.

Excellent description.
For every Warcraft 3 player, a profile¹ is created (that you can't opt out of) which lists every game the player has ever played, including timestamps and game lengths. The forum posters are already linked to these pages, so presumably their RealId will be as well when the new system is implemented. This means that if you post in the forums once (even for a technical support issue), your real name will be associated with your game history.

[1] example: http://classic.battle.net/war3/ladder/w3xp-player-logged-gam...
You say that now. Wait till you're out of work for 6 months.

This company is hurting their user base in an effort to not have to do what every other forum on the internet does: Police the trolls.

I'd thought about buying one of their games this Summer (Starcraft II) to play with some friends, but I'd be hesitant to get the "brand" myself after this change
The repo is available at http://github.com/tarcieri/reia

Is it just too unusable right now?
Let's not, actually.

Let's start with you reading (and demonstrating to me a core competence of) the basic texts of philosophy leading up to deconstruction-- in this case, that would be Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas.

When you have those six down, I'd be happy to explain deconstruction to you.
Perhaps Blizzard will successfully improve the quality of their message boards by suppressing anonymity. Or perhaps participants will start considering the impact to their reputation in every other aspect of life each time they post, and undermine the vitality and uniqueness of this particular community.

The latter would be especially ironic considering that the forums in question pertain to an escapist fantasy game in which people role-play as fictional characters.

Anonymous online forums can be found across the full spectrum of discussion quality - HN and 4chan are at polar extremes - so the real root cause of poor-quality discourse is something other than anonymity.

Instead of raising the stakes of participating in their forums, perhaps Blizzard should identify the internal cultural factors of the community that encourage disruptive and inane posts, and work to remedy them more even-handedly.
Can't you just call the police on the loud people?
I would probably be considered an iPad hater, but have to say that this "article" is complete rubbish. Come on...
PayPal figured out awhile ago they have millions of users and that every customer is easily replaceable.

Anyone that thinks having an account for quite some time or is doing $xxxx in business per month is some kind of safety net is kidding themselves.
What's even better is that these can be customized: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448218
Room for a startup here: guaranteeing/supporting cloud APIs when vendors fail. Or providing a portable/pluggable API for deploying on any cloud service, so you can quickly recover from vendor failure.
Which is why there is no doubt in my mind that Chomsky could read (and appreciate) "Plato's Pharmacy", if he so desired. The fact that he claims that he can't indicates to me that he's being disingenuous, or hasn't bothered to find out which works of Derrida's are relevant to his field.
Yeah, and Barrens chat or the trade channel on a weekend night are pretty awful as well. But are they going to get RealID'd too?

If they were only doing this on the general-discussion areas with no gameplay implications, it would be a lot more reasonable. To think you couldn't post on the forum for your character's own server under the character's name is silly.
Just ⌘-⇧-R in Safari. No need to hunt for printer friendly versions.
I find it funny that Americans that such store in zoning laws.
"Conversion rate drops to 0 when you pop up something in front of the user while they're trying to read"
Charges Announced for Soldier Accused of Leaking Video
Why can't they bind your account to your real life identity, for the purposes of preventing duplicates, but keep it private?
How many languages actually have a passive voice? Wikipedia says that passive voices are common in many languages, but it doesn't give any examples of languages which lack passive voices.

It would be interesting if any languages lacked an active voice. I have my doubts.

And of course, there are plenty of other possible constructions we don't get in English, like the zillions of possibilities presented by Latin. Wikipedia also notes the existence of an "adversative passive" voice in some Asian languages, only used when the action had adverse consequences. Weird.

But really, maybe Microsoft Word grammar check was right all along: unnecessary use of the passive voice is confusing. The example "The sailor was hit by the soldier" really is a little more confusing than its active equivalent in which the soldier hits the sailor. The passive construction may be less confusing in the kinds of situations where it's actually used: ie where the actual hitter is not named "The sailor got hit".
Nuclear physics and non-Euclidean geometry can justify their usefulness through results. The fact that only a few people understand them does not prevent their usefulness.

The usefulness of Continental Philosophy could consist in insight into moral, political, and social problems, but providing insight to a few specialists is not much use in those fields, especially not in democratic societies. Looking back on the history of moral and social change in the United States, I don't see such philosophies playing a major role. The thinkers who have made a difference have written for a general audience and in a much more accessible style. (Karl Marx and Das Kapital would seem to be an exception, but he and his evangelists wrote plenty of accessible interpretations of his ideas. The Communist Manifesto, for example, is a brief, readable, and rousing document.) If Continental Philosophers want to justify their existence, they should point to some benefit that their work enables, instead of just complaining that nobody understands it.
You think that someone who would hold gaming against a candidate really cares how much time you played? When someone does a background check or even just googles you, they aren't looking for reasons to hire you, they're looking for reason NOT to hire you. If they see your 2000 word rant about how a class got nerfed, you think they are going to say "well he's just passionate about his hobby"?

I'm all for people being able to use their Real Names to establish a little credibility, but forcing someone to do so is going to make things worse, not better, because the trolls probably don't have much to lose, while normal, sane people that give forums like this their modicum of value, will be silent.
How to get covered - PR for your startup.
They don't sell all of their stock at the initial price, but sell it later at the higher prices.
It's not like they take a camera and snap a few pictures of it playing Star Trek anyway, every one of the pictures showing the ipad with some image on the screen is 'digitally altered' or any image on any screen in actual marketing data whether its from apple or htc or dell anyone else. This is because taking a picture of the actual screen actually doing something doesn't turn out very good when trying to emphasis the device. Apple wasn't the first to do this and they certainly won't be the last.
I believe getting copy/paste to work across browsers requires a Flash include.
i'll be curious to see how many people use this for testing and how many end up using it for more nefarious purposes like screen scraping or rigging TIME's 100 most influential people poll.
That quotation in full:

JB: "I'd like your permission to post the exchange on my website. Deal?"

E: "absolutely! that would actually be kind of cool. but if you wouldn't mind changing my name in it to 'Eleanor.' I'm not sure why my iPod put it as 'Brenna' but that's not what I go by and I don't like that name."
Are examples of sentences with "basic grammar" available somewhere?
Thanks!
An English speaking country is certainly a good idea (as I am most comfortable with English, not counting my native Bulgarian).
And you are right :), I have friends working in Ireland, so it won't be a problem to come there and stay at their place while working on initiating a company.

I agree with all you said about Silicon Valley. But we are already a nice team here. We have several "hobby" projects (which all failed back then) behind. And now we are going to do it "for real". Of course, we may be moving somewhere else in the future, especially if we come to the need to hire more people. But for now we are just going to live cheap in Bulgaria and work :).
Ask HN: Best Way To Record an iPad Demo?
Hey, I need to record a demo video of an iPad app. I'd like to actually use a real iPad and fingers (not simulator). What's the best way to go about it?
The Soccket ball prototype - a soccer ball with a battery
Oddly, their popup/lightbox (asking me "Did you enjoy this article? Sign up for our newsletter!") that blocked the entire page when I was halfway through reading the article caused me to click the button to convert right off of the page.
There are other reasons why you might not want to use data URLs, but this isn't a valid one.

Which?
Ah right, sounddust's comment framed me into thinking there were no pictures of the iPhone 4 (searchable with the terms 'iPhone 4'), despite previous commenters pointing out they appear after several pages of results. Sorry about that.

But it does mean sounddust's explanation is incorrect, since this isn't a matter of whether 'iPhone 4'-searchable post-WWDC images are indexed. The question is why the images are buried beneath several pages of results.
This is the clumsiest attempt at a debunking that I've seen in a long time. The guy can't even design a webpage that is readable, let alone prove his point.

It's also hilarious to assert that Apple needs to do this to sell the iPad. It sells itself. And not because of some photo of Mr. Spock.
When is Scrum successful?
An interesting question from my Scrum in Depth course last week: When is Scrum successful?
>Open question to HN: how could PayPal do a better job of handling the situation?

By simply being up front about their terms. If they don't care about events then they should set a policy not to support them, it's that simple. Don't lure people in and then make their lives a pain in the ass once you're holding their money. They know better than anyone how they can make events work, if at all.

I agree, PayPal is often over criticized considering the spectacular international fraud resolution and prevention work they do that goes, mostly, unthanked. True, we should remember the alternative is processing the payments ourselves, but if you are going to offer a product, offer a good one or not at all. Especially when so much money is at stake.
That's a very literal alpha:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_%28investment%29
OK. But still, why sell even some of the stock lower than necessary? Or does the excitement created pay off in the longer term?
They chalk up more than $250 million in annual fraud losses as a cost of doing business - there's a network of fraud artists that have cut their teeth on the PayPal network.

Being the innovator, PayPal grew up with these fraudsters, building an in-house database of knowledge about how to handle them as they cropped up one by one.

If you're talking about building a PayPal competitor at this point, you're launching at a point when there isn't going to be as much investor interest in your startup combined with a mature fraud ecosystem prepared to shut it down.

And those are only the problems we know of.
Seems like the most straight-forward fix would be for EventBrite to handle the payments through a traditional credit card processor.

I'd think they would have sufficient volume to drive the transaction costs down.
Porsche was recently pulled into VW, though Porsche nearly succeeded in buying VW earlier. Mercedes and BMW (but especially Mercedes) are more upper middle class than truly luxury.
I have never really understood why passive voice gets a bad rap. Consider these two sentences:

The sailor hit the soldier.

The soldier was hit by the sailor.

If I was writing primarily about the sailor, I'd choose the first. If I was writing primarily about the soldier, I'd choose the second. That way, the person I'm focusing on is mentioned first.

For instance, if I was writing about the soldier's day:

The soldier woke up. He had breakfast. He was hit by a sailor.

seems better to me than:

The solder woke up. He had breakfast. The sailor hit him.

The latter seems to shift the emphasis to the sailor, whereas using passive voice puts the soldier first in every sentence, providing a unifying structure to the paragraph.