skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, the new age-balanced funds are not composed of index funds at all. They're composed of a mix of pretty much everything that they swap out every year for something else. So when you're young, you get mostly stocks, when you're old, they buy more bonds. But they have to trade them around all the time to generate fees.

Anything that didn't generate enough fees got kicked out of the program (unless you opted out). Thankfully, I was in one of the safer funds (the only one currently showing a profit) before the crash. I wish I could move it over to Vanguard now, but it's too late. They didn't give us much warning, and they certainly gave us no time to switch, when we either had to opt out or get enrolled in their shiny new fee-generating fund.
The problem is (at least) three-fold.

One: The tail wags the dog. Since No Child Left Behind, schools have had one major metric: test scores. They have now geared everything else towards making test scores improve, from curriculum to teaching how to take a test. So the test drives all.

Two: Tests are not necessarily a great way to assess mastery of material. The fact that teaching test-taking strategies can dramatically improve scores (independent of underlying domain knowledge) is one example of testing's weaknesses.

Three: Tests are not a good way to construct ideal curriculum. They, of necessity, have to be far more limited in scope than what we (should) want to educate people on.
While this is a worthwhile discussion, and I fundamentally agree with the points made by the article, I find it distasteful to see articles which isolate a specific person and publicly tell them how they should live their life. Not too long ago there was another article about how it was tragic that Patrick didn't use his skills for more ambitious projects.

The same points could be made without making the article gravitate around the personal life of Seth Priebatsch. If you are concerned about that person in particular, and would like to host an intervention, you can do so privately via email.
I've experienced this in my professional career too. When I started being a full time technology evangelist I hardly applied to speak at conferences. Rejection was hard and I just assumed I wouldn't be able to get into a large conference.

It turns out the best approach is just to apply to lots of conferences and build your confidence and skills. Out of the many rejections will come some opportunities to improve and build confidence. After a while the confidence and experiences start to show in your work and then people recognize that.

Two years later I get invited to conferences. All because I overcame my hesitation to try.
Lucene / Solr for Academia: PhD Thesis Ideas
I teach mathematics at a community college. Every year the administration sends to my department statistics on how many people pass our classes. We're told to come up with strategies to increase the passing rate.

I haven't had a pay raise in over two years. My strategy for increasing the passing rate is to give points for things a well trained monkey could do. I give points for coming to my office. I give points for things that have nothing to do with mathematics.

By and large society does not really want us to grade on knowledge. People don't want to hear that they, or their kids, don't know something and that they will have to work in order to gain the required knowledge. People want a high GPA not a high level of knowledge.

I'm reminded of the Soviet joke:

As long as you pretend to pay us we will pretend to work.
I'm not buying it..the post lacks any real evidence. I've outsourced plenty and have found some really talented coders. Outsourcing has helped me, a non technical person, make shit happen!

Outsourcing is a great way to build a MVP and prove an idea in my opinion, but to each his own I guess.
The (W)ave phoenix is set to rise
Yes.

That is the difference between e.g. Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft keeps adding features so that it can do what a user wants. Apple designs the unit so that it does what the user wants.
I don't think he's isolating it as an attack on Seth, but as an attack on the media that glorifies Seth's behavior.
ZoneEdit.com (DNS Management) Launched a New Website Today
"This isn’t some BS social media thing that injects dancing pigs into your Facebook newsfeed."

Lol. Great help wanted ad. They should all be like this.
Are those numbers balanced for special needs and other per-student costs? Does it take into account various other cost requirements? If you compare teacher salaries, are they equivalent?

There's a considerable amount of research done on the effects and nature of funding disparities, if you haven't looked into it, I'd recommend it.
Try entering

(eval. '(lambda (x) x) nil)

to the REPL with the following definitions:

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/jmc.lisp
ThinkGeek: Oceanic Airlines Safety Info Shirt
Cryptome and Wikileaks fell out a while back over a pretty big disagreement. You should take anything that either of them say about each other with a pinch of salt. That said, Cryptome do have a very good point here.
Whoever wrote the initial statement from Microsoft was just confused about what the Kinect "hacking" actually was. They thought someone was trying to mess with how the Xbox processes the data, which is locked down, but they were just trying to access the Kinect's raw output stream, which is left open. Microsoft's stance didn't change, they just figured out what was going on. As long as the media isn't interested in the distinctions between hacking, jailbreaking, sideloading, reverse engineering, etc., this sort of confusion will persist.

With Windows Phone, the stance and culture did change, but in the opposite direction to what you're suggesting. Up to 6.5 Windows Mobile was totally open (in the sense that a Windows PC is open), you were free to install whatever you wanted, change the OS settings etc. Consumers hated Windows Mobile and loved the iPhone so with WP7 they moved to a more locked-down iPhone-like model.
This is hands down the best use of root benefits in an Android security app
Ask HN: Did you have "Doubters" in your life?
Did you have people in your life (friends, family, spouses) who openly doubted your entrepreneurial pursuits? How did their behavior change once you were successful?
Tell me when any project finds a new maintainer through this site, and I'll reconsider it. Until then, I see not much value in it.
(accidentally voted down)
Is it an int? An int32? An int64? Is it unsigned? Maybe it's actually a float which just happens to be initialized to a valid integer value. In that case is it a float or a double?

Literals can map to multiple types, and there hasn't yet been discovered a satisfactory way--apart from guessing in cases of ambiguity--to support type inference for literals.
Give him a break, he's only 21. I mean, he wasn't allowed to drink an alcohol a year ago! I bet when your're a bit little older, you already know what it means to have a balanced life.
I see, so they missed a few links. It appears to have been fixed now, though, because I can no longer find that HTML on the page.

I wonder if Google will ever be smart enough to take ranking highly for searches like "scam" or "fraud" into account (without penalizing the people exposing scams and frauds) when computing someone's pagerank?
Doerr lost a lot of points in my book. Maybe all of them (as if he cares about my scorecard).

Unfortunately though I think he has simply voiced what a lot of people, VC or otherwise, secretly think (or not so secretly, when not in mixed company).

If you're a minority or female, expect to be shut down at every avenue. It's not possible for you to succeed, so we will ensure that you don't.
No argument there. I'm just trying to point out that it's not necessarily racism or sexism.
From the perspective of working on file systems, I don't see a viable way to innovate and monetize. I completely see the OP point of view, from his perspective. I disagree with the conclusion though.

It is true that a lot of the big startups aren't innovating in technology. They are innovating in the business model space. But that doesn't mean you can't create some innovative technology to build a startup around it.
It's a problem that solves itself. Assuming the articles premise is true, I'd see it as an opportunity, it means that there are large numbers of chances that the 'old boy network' of VCs would never give a chance because of their background, social status, sex, skin colour or some other obvious externally noticeable criterion.

The way to deal with that is to set up a fund and prove them all wrong by picking out those gems.
Business ideas are dead; chase after market opportunity
Nice, but you'd be much better off with "Good men and women wanted for hazardous journey."

There may be statistically fewer women in tech, but you'll never hear from them with a title like that!
US citizens only?
"In addition to an academic grade, the 950 students at the school will get a separate “life skills” grade for each class that reflects their work habits and other, more subjective, measures like attitude, effort and citizenship."

page 2
Not only is Javascript not an environment that makes client-side auditing easier, it's actually a uniquely hard environment to audit code in:

* Javascript is, as noted in the article, extremely dynamic; what looks like a reasonable key generation routine (as reasonable as you can get in an environment without a secure RNG) could be redefined 1000 lines later to be entirely predictable.

* The bindings in a single page environment are populated from a variety of sources; some of the most important sources are content-controlled, meaning the trusted code base in your crypto library has to play Core Wars with things like DOM attributes.

* There's a "view source" UI, but there's no common UI to easily inspect the current definition of every symbol in the interpreter; you have no way of knowing whether some interaction between the code, the DOM, and the (implicitly trusted) server hamstrung your crypto code.
"Nothing has been produced from that".

Uh-huh. Maybe because watching a movie together is a very poor way to spend time with someone you care about.

Instead, spend even 30 minutes talking about the things you care most about. I guarantee then something "will be produced from that".
"Tunnel vision helps. Being a bit of a shit helps. A thick skin helps. Stamina is crucial, as is a capacity to work so hard that your best friends mock you, your lovers despair and the rest of your acquaintances watch furtively from the sidelines, half in awe and half in contempt" - Felix Dennis, Media Mogul
The fact that teaching test-taking strategies can dramatically improve scores (independent of underlying domain knowledge) is one example of testing's weaknesses.

If you give this training to everyone (note: it doesn't take that much time), everyone receives the dramatic improvement due to test-strategy education, and test scores become comparable again.

Tests [...], of necessity, have to be far more limited in scope than what we (should) want to educate people on.

Please explain. Is the concern simply that tests are only a statistically representative sampling of things the student should know, rather than the actual knowledge?

That's true. Similarly, a map of America isn't actually America. Doesn't mean it isn't useful.
If you are trying to hire someone and you have multiple candidates you may need a differentiator. If someone has a good programming blog that's probably:

a) another way you can assess their programming knowledge
b) a net benefit for your company's PR
c) an indication they will help others learn
Yeah, this is definitely one of the better help wanted ads, but it is a blatant rip-of.

Or Scott has joined y combinator, which would be even more awesome
I've been thinking about doing something like that myself. Looks nice.

(Shame it's gpl rather than bsd/mit)
"If that were true all white male start-up companies would get funded and no females or any other minorities (females are a minority??) would ever get funded."

1. There may not be enough capital to fund every "white male start-up."

2. All "white male start-ups" do not consist of Harvard/Stanford drop-outs with no social life and under 30 years old.

3. "White male" is probably not the sole criteria, but if it is a consideration, then a "White male star-up" may make it further in the process before being considered based on its other merits.

4. The Doerr made no reference to a preponderance of "white male start-ups" nor did it suggest that such a preponderance was the basis for his investment preference.

It don't think it would be surprising to suggest that most people have a better understanding of people from a similar cultural and social background and therefore are more comfortable working with such people.
Why Emacs is great - SLIME repl for developing in-browser javascript
A conversation about WikiLeaks
The headliner is an apocryphal quote from Ernest Shackleton, leader of a doomed but famous Antarctic expedition in 1914.

Nothing about the current state of tech was implied, nor about our desired employee pool. Obviously we welcome one and all.
That could be done with a title such as, "Mass media: stop glorifying entrepreneurs without a life". If you call it "Seth Priebatsch: Get a life" you are framing the discussion in a confrontational, ad hominem manner.
The following sentence is very not true and quite misleading:

> Similarly, you don’t work on great technology at a startup. .. They are about business model discovery...

If that is true, then why do technology startups exist at all? Isn't discovering business model very much connected to discovering new technologies (new, more efficient ways to solve problems)?
In other words, if a technology startup is not planning to invent something, then it not should probably exist in the first place.

It is true there are some Web 2.0 startups which are not about technology at all, but these startups are anyway not looking for great engineers.
Anyone else get weird back button behavior when visiting this site? I clicked "back" but nothing happened. When I looked at my recent history, there were 3-4 entries for the site. Anyone else get this issue?
We'd consider anybody. We have one non-US citizen founder right now.
Feds seize 82 domains accused of selling counterfeit goods
Works on Firefox 4b7.
The problem is the same as this Dilbert cartoon: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/

When metrics/scores/grades matter, they become much less useful. Grades are harder to game than the Dilbert cartoon -- learning the material is still one of the best ways to increase your score. But once grades matter to teachers and schools as well, the opportunities for gaming increase substantially.

If the cure's worse than the disease, we could bring back the curve. I don't think it's gone that far yet, though...
Yep, totally.

While the VCs who hold these views see deviation - from their (prejudiced) template - as a risk - that narrow-mindedness provides an advantage to any investors who are able to assess applicants objectively.
It is pretty easy to mark a project as abandoned. Put it in the description or the README. "This project is abandoned" or "{defunct}" or "{deprecated}" or just "{abandoned}"
Here is an article on Wikipedia about utilized algorithm:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise
1. By ugly, I mean less mathematically elegant. In Ruby, you say "paul.foo" and get foo from Paul. How Paul gets foo for you is up to Paul. Simple.

2. If you want a programming language that maps closely to how CPU's work, Ruby's definitely not for you. Assembly and C are for you.

3. I can't speak for most people. What I can say is that I can think in C and I can think in Ruby, and it doesn't seem difficult for me.
I agree with your comment, but would like to point out that this is almost always the case.

As an example, I used to work at a SaaS company, and we generated more value for our customers than we charged in fees. Well, duh, otherwise they wouldn't be our customers for long.

Same goes for every lasting business model: your cut <= your value generated.
I'm not successful yet, but I haven't caved in either. My family has always been quietly supportive, but my friends have always said things to the effect that, "It'll never work". I'm not interested in proving them wrong, rather I'm interested in proving myself RIGHT.
What are the other instances? Besides Go, I don't recall many languages that fit the bill. There's D, but it's not very new and certainly not a fad language.
All of this crap is just that... crap. "Teaching for the test/compliance" is the big whine today. 15 years ago, the trend was to give everyone an A so their feelings wouldn't be hurt.

Teachers are all bent because kids aren't doing well on standardized tests, so they get pressure to raise the grades. So they address the situation by drilling the kids to pass the test, and it's obvious that the dumb kids are still dumb and the smart kids are still smart.

You have all of these people making big money analyzing these states to death and coming up with lots of brilliant ideas. At the end of the day, it means nothing because some percentage of kids do well, some percentage are drinking in the boy's room and some people in the middle are penalized/rewarded by some variance introduced by the system.
Nissan LEAF Wins European Car of the Year
Being proficient with git. That's on an entirely different level than just knowing how to use it.
The content is why I googled for the Readability bookmarklet instead of just closing the browser tab.
Don't think it's obvious, if you just look at the headline. Is the integrity of the quote more important than looking non-biased against women programmers?
As an entrepreneur, something about this statement bothers me... something about all the value I create getting skimmed off the top and taken away by someone else. Yeah, that's probably it.

If your small, righ-risk start-up earns $300,000 in profit in one year, paying the CEO a $90,000 stipend doesn't seem unreasonably low, does it? Most of those profits are probably best invested into other parts of the company.

Sure, you might still own that value in terms of stock, but that is high-risk stock as opposed to a company like Google, whose stock is much more stable. (And Google's internal investments include nap rooms and such).
Black Friday Battle of the Brands
my 78 year old grandfather recently upgraded his copy of firefox and mysteriously the Yahoo toolbar was installed, and his default search engine and homepage were set to yahoo. firefox should stop being evil.
All through elementary school and middle school, and in many of my high school classes, I bemoaned that I had to do tedious homework that didn't teach me anything (not in every class--mostly math, science that was primarily math, and grammar). I frequently said that homework should be optional, and if I do well on tests/quizzes/projects/papers/whatever, homework shouldn't bring down my grade.

But on the other hand, I think part of the reason that I have such a thorough understanding of calculus is that my Calc AB teacher required us to do large quantities of homework. And I was totally fine with having to turn in weekly problem sets in my Multivariable Calc and ODE courses senior year because I needed the homework to solidify my understanding.

I probably would have done the Multivariable and ODE homework on my own because I actually struggled with those classes, but I probably would have done only a small fraction of my AB homework if it weren't required. I still would have gotten A's on most of my AB tests, but I might not have had quite as solid of a foundation. I think I'm better off because I had to do that homework. So that has made me question how I feel about mandatory homework.

Plus, that there's the issue of students who aren't disciplined enough/don't care enough to do optional homework even if they know that that will lead them to do poorly on tests.

It's possible that a system where homework is optional for people who are doing well could solve the latter problem, but it wouldn't have made me do my AB homework. Plus it might breed even more resentment against the nerds who get to skip the homework just because they know the material.

tl;dr: I've experienced many classes where mandatory homework bored me out of my mind and wasted my time, but at other times it has helped me a lot. Also, some people will do as little as they're required, so if homework is optional, they won't do it even if they just failed a test the day before.
It's a bit odd that the best idea Seth Priebatsch's ever had is to add a game layer to the world. If he were to apply his talents to a real business problem not only would he make substantially more money, he'd change the world. Don't get me wrong, Scvngr is a neat idea, but it's like creating a baking soda volcano for a science fair project when you're capable of demonstrating cold fusion. Hopefully he'll tackle something big after he exits this company.

As an aside; I have no idea what he should do next. I just hope that he can solve a bigger problem in his lifetime than the one he's working on.
But making all of their payments non-refundable and reserving the right to terminate your account for any reason (including posting "defamatory" comments online about them!).

See their Terms of Service at http://dediseedbox.com/clients/knowledgebase.php?action=disp...
Divide and Conquer: How Virtual Partitioning Enables Elasticity
Xeround's latest blog post explains the benefits of virtual partitioning and how their "shared-nothing" architecture allows them to spread partitioned data across numerous servers.
Is Google Buying GroupOn for $2.5 Billon?
Where does the author say that?

He is claiming that the startup life is for people interested in entrepreneurship, not technology. If their attrition rate truly hasn't moved at all, then I don't see how one can say there is a problem retaining any subset of people.
Waste of a great domain name. :/
Seriously? This is link bait.

It is hard enough to pick a winning portfolio of companies. Would anyone really intentionally handicap themselves and not try to pick the best ones? At the expense of their portfolio?

If a green woman walks in with a hockey stick graph, VBM, kicking ass, they will line up to write her a check.
Teacher salaries appear to be considerably lower in St Marys and Charles county than in Baltimore. I'm too lazy to do a county by county comparison for all of Maryland (a state I've never even visited).

http://www.bcps.org/offices/PAYROLL/pdf/scales/TABCO-12-Mont...

http://www2.ccboe.com/employment/Teacher-SalaryScale-1011.pd...

http://divisions.smcps.org/hr/sites/divisions.smcps.org.hr/f...

I've heard many assertions that inner city and other underperforming schools are underfunded. But whenever I go to look them up, and compare them to the rich suburbs, they seem to be wildly overfunded. Baltimore seems to be better funded than the rest of Maryland. Newark and Trenton public schools are funded better than most of NJ, and perform terribly.

But hey, you've got vague allusions to a "considerable amount of research". That's more useful than hard numbers.
So, I guess yes? They have their own Internet called Spirnet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network)? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/siprnet-america-...
"Why join the navy, when you can come be a pirate like us?" - probably one of the best lines I've heard in a while.
Yes, the integrity of the quote is more important than alienating a very few people who don't know history.

Aside: I wouldn't want to work with someone who got wound up about something like this.
Not sure who voted you down, but that's the exact same behavior that they call out in the article. And with exactly as much proof. Comment was spot-on.
I got the quote, appreciated the reference.

Unfortunately for the purposes of this argument, am male. I would say that I'm OK with the quote for artistic purposes, perhaps vary the call to action in other contexts to avoid arousing any problems of bias...

[O__o]