skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was a grad student, we had group finals for calculus (i.e., standards uniform across all professors/TAs). We did not observe any statistically significant difference in grades between professors or (professor, TA) 2-tuples.

We were planning to use grades as a better way to evaluate teaching quality. When it didn't work, the professors (1) decided to go back to student evaluations rather than admit their job didn't matter.

(1) The people in charge of undergrad teaching were faculty not actively doing research, but who did have an interest in teaching well.
How to Improve Brain Health: Physical and Mental Exercise
There were also a couple cases where people (children, I believe) were severely hurt when their Crocs got stuck in escalators. That's really bad publicity.
It's a necessary but not sufficient condition. It meant that when Crocs became a market hit, their suppliers couldn't raise prices on them. It meant they could capture all the value that their popularity created.
Maybe it's this perpetual chastising by the older generations that gradually "teaches" the younger generations. What if the older generations never said this sort of stuff? Would the younger generation never grow out of it? Just wondering. I'm a 23yr old myself.
No radiation. EM waves are not radiation.
About 1/4 of the article was about how they've been madly diversifying because they know that ugly shoes are a fad. They used the cash and scale that the shoes provided to become a diversified manufacturing company.
I'm 12 months into a 2yr T-Mobile contract, so the Touch is looking pretty nice despite the 3G thunder.
"I can get an EEE PC for that price, install windows xp on it and have everything the iPhone has"

I hope you realize that you can have everything the iPhone has that you perceive you want, not everything the iPhone has. I trudge into this thread wearily, since I have been privy to this debate since the 1980s.

But do you think, just maybe, that while you do not care for it, there are others who value the design inherent in an iPod's hardware and software that gives them value compared to Windows XP?
Whew, I missed it at first. I was afraid no one had posted the original link.
"I have always thought that real responsibility is learned "on the job". Delay work, delay responsibility."

Amen to that one. My grandfather invested some money on my behalf when I was born, so when I graduated from college, I burned through $10K of it without a second thought. Then I finally swallowed my pride, got a job working minimum wage, and suddenly gained new appreciation for the value of money. Discovering that buying lunch is essentially equivalent to eating an hour's worth of work will do that.

It's also easy to post on Slashdot "what a whiner!" whenever a story comes up about $OSS_SOFTWARE not fulfilling $BUSINESS_NEED. That's another perspective that disappears quickly when working for a real business. You really do need to be making money to have a viable business (long-term), and no amount of idealism changes that.

If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice, it would be "get a crappy job before you're 22."
Has anyone noticed the people complaining about memory usage don't mention what plugins they're running? At a certain point, I'm not sure what approach can resolve the plugin-has-a-problem-but-firefox-gets-blamed issue.

In firefox 2, I notice I get crashes periodically, but if I disable the firebug plugin at the browser level (as opposed to within firebug), the crashes disappear entirely.
I hope Google Sites takes off and kills this ugly beast.
And the name of that university is ...?
Six Apart Introduces BlogIt For iPhone
Pushing around MobileMe
A social networking website probably has a lot lower barrier to entry than a restaurant does.
Read the parent comments
Interesting premise and anecdotes, but where's the evidence?
Finding a Co-Founder - Technical and Non-Technical Founders
Wikipedia disagrees. Its "electromagnetic wave" article redirects here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_radiation

Cellphones would be useless if they didn't radiate, much like lights, TVs, ovens, etc.
Peter Schiff: "In many ways, it's going to be worse than the Depression."
They rake in revenues because it's a great product at a great price.

My day/night job is as an ER nurse, and pretty much the only shoes I've worn for the past 3 years are Crocs. I walk an average of 5 miles a shift at work, and I'm standing when I'm not walking. I've been used to spending $80-150 a pair of shoes for years. Now, with Crocs being $35 a pair, I buy them 3 pair at a time. And, the anti-bacterial bit is very nice for the nasty splashes at work.
It's pretty straightforward relative to SVN.
hilarious! +1 for you ;)
How one Twitterer may get sued for his blog
Entrepreneur/Twitterer wrote some dirt about Dan Sklaire who, in turn, is threatening to sue for...
We think you Boomers are stupid too.
Google gives me around 2 million hits for "electromagnetic radiation".
Wow - great advice. People underestimate not only those things but their own skills at being able to recognize those qualities in someone in a different industry. I'm a tech person and it is extremely hard for me to evaluate someone from a marketing background to see if they are like me but for marketing (in terms of output/production/drive). It's just not natural. As an entreprenuer, I tend to be the optimist and think, "They are awesome!" b/c I'm enamored of their education/prior-job-experience. Maybe that's just me...
Can you look at the actual post I responded to and explain how communication was enhanced in this case?

If there is a different connotation in this case, I'd argue it makes the post more confusing.
Yeah, I've come to realize that most ad supported social sites are very high risk.

Social networks are not very hard to build but depend on a very large scale of users. On the other hand restaurants are more expensive to start and maintain but can survive off a smaller market. Both are saturated with competition and have low margins.
But the mere fact that you felt the need to include "... They exist." shows how rare they are. If you waited around until you found a "Business Graduate with Hacking skills" that also fit all the other things needed to be an entrepreneur (and that you actually liked) you might never get going...
Some sage advice about the ICFP Contest 2008
I always called < right alligator and > left alligator.
Maybe there is something to it. All of the great civilizations eventually collapsed.
Seconding this; the best dev team portal is a wiki. Preferably MediaWiki, but Trac is all right as well.
How seriously do you take someone who advocates for the dissolution of the Federal Reserve? Pronouncements like this are kind of this guy's schtick.
Wow, they made the site much cleaner as well.
The INTERCAL manual had some of the best. I was surprised to see that -- according to the Jargon file ASCII entry -- several of the INTERCAL pronunciations have slipped into what ESR considers common use, e.g. "mesh" and "splat".
Right but the article is comparing the iPhone to vista and the touch to xp. Basically he is saying that being locked in to a single service provider is an anti feature similar to all the drm in vista so we should all stick with xp (the touch)
16bugs now integrates with Basecamp and Campfire
that's interesting, because their stock is currently at an all-time low:

http://www.uglychart.com/2008/06/10/crocs-inc-crox-at-a-new-...
That quote isn't the whole point of the article. The key is that their main competitive advantage is the material itself.
Well it's not a necessary condition either. Plenty of companies, and indeed plenty of shoe companies, are successful without purchasing their entire supply chain down to the plastic-factory level.
True. But it might be necessary for them to get enough capital and resources to survive after the fad wears off.
The jibbitz piggyback was also quite clever:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/02/magazines/business2/crocs_si...
Its easier to learn programming when you're a kid. Its easier to learn natural languages when you're a kid. How long would it take an adult to learn a second natural language to conversational fluency? Some people can do it in six months or less. Some will never achieve it.
Thoughts on dynamic privacy
I hate the shoes. But my next hockey equipment purchase is going to be made of this croslite stuff for sure.

Non-smelly hockey gear: something people really want!
Brilliant idea. To top it off, let's put it at verypersonalgifts.com
Shouldn't a blogger for Burma have decided where he stands on the Burma/Myanmar nomenclature?
Google Calendar:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlecalendar/tour.html
Test driven turns unit testing into a game where you're trying to improve your code to get more 'points' (passing tests). It's very fun to do in pair programming with one of you improving the code and the other writing tests to catch any problems.
I'd say it depends on what his reasons are how seriously he should be taken.
You have to treat your employees like customers
Eight Years of Wrongness
Comcast has rare good news for P2P: Faster upload speeds
crocs rake in revenue because they are universally accessible and come in any colorway you can think of.
You assume he tests his code manually in the first place ;-)
That confused the hell out of me in first grade. They were trying to get us to understand comparisons, so they told us to pretend the symbols were alligators, and they wanted to eat the most hamburgers. But I only saw them as arrows, so I thought they wanted us to point to the highest number. I got every single one of those problems wrong!
There was only one bug fixed, and it is only relevant to Mac users: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436575
Google gives me around 275,000 hits for 'Bill Gates is Satan' and 130,000 hits for 'Every time you masterbate, a kitten dies' but I can't vouch for the latter.
I still can't find any aesthetic appeal at all in those shoes, and I simply attribute it to a generation gap. But this story is well worth thinking about.
Google's hiring binge continues: Babysitters, massage therapists wanted
Wattage vs Range
First Fantasy Sports Site for Family Play Launches
the article starts at "OK..."
Schiff is an extremely successful and wealthy investor. Considering how everyone's panties get all wet at the mention of Buffet I thought that was all it took to get props.
Sounds like something potentially very profitable, but very sad. After cards are automated, someone would be working on automating their contents.

I can't recall the last time I bought a card for someone. I can, however, recall the last time I made a card for someone.
I don't see "All Gen Yers" in the article.
I think that your causation direction is reversed. Good debugging requires solid understanding of the syntax and behavior first. If you don't have it, then you're just flailing at the tool. I see people do this all the time: using debuggers to try to get information they could get trivially by reading the code, or randomly changing things in the code and retesting instead of carefully watching something in a debugger.
Restaurants have a far higher barrier of entry: interior design, inventory management, supply chain, quality control, staffing, just to name a few headaches. That's not even calling into question your competence (assuming you are the chief operator).
63 comments and you're the first to notice! I've finally found my co-founder.
I think it's probably the premiere Scheme implementation. Arc is built in it (you may have heard only of MzScheme, but that's in the PLT family). I happen to be using it for my startup.

As far as various Schemes go, I'd say it's very popular.
I worked at the Boulder Country Club, where most of the cofounders of Crocs were members. Those shoes blew up at the club; before I knew it, I was receiving all sorts of pairs in different colors as 'bonuses' or gifts from the members.

It not only takes smart business operations as detailed in that article, but a strong community. Crocs birthed in a community full of power and wealth, and that helped a great deal. Hell, Michael Jordan received a few pairs of Crocs when he came to the club for a golf tournament...
One thing that that I don't like about unit testing is it can give you false positives that everything is working correctly.

When you follow the red-green pattern and write the test, have it fail, then write the code to make it pass, I find that my brain is thinking the same when I write the test to when I write the code. So as a simple example if I write a test that says add(2,2).should == 5, it fails since there is no add() method. I then quickly write the add method to allow the test to pass and I am happy that I get a passing test even though the logic is incorrect. Obviously this is an over-simplification, but I have experienced situations that have some resemblance.

I can't say I always agree with the laziness argument. I can't even count the number of times it would take me only a few lines of code to get something done, but writing all the unit tests increases the amount of time to complete the task by a factor of 10. Other times the tests are easily saving me hours in a day. So it depends on exactly what they are testing and how they are doing so.

I am not saying I don't like them all the time, just sometimes :)
It's a feature in some implementations: a progress bar advances while your tests execute, and finally turns red if any test fails, or green if all passed.

The term "green bar" is used, by extension, to refer to the notification that all tests passed, even in colorless console-based frameworks.
CodeKata: "How to become a better developer."
For some people, function is more important than function. They're great shoes, and considering where they're typically worn, does aesthetic appeal matter?

The ugliness actually appeals to some people, too.
Because it was impossible with current fantasy sports products to invite just your family. /sarcasm
The Internet says disaster looms just over the horizon? No way!
The only reason why they're a fashion statement is because they were born into a fashion-aware community. Check out my comment about the Boulder Country Club above.

Other than that, yes they are extremely light and comfortable...
Seriously... The Great Depression doesn't seem all that bad compared to what history says if this is worse...
This was how most of my professors taught debugging, actually. Print statements. Reading the code is great but after a while it really does become hard to see where things go awry--especially in your own code. I think teaching students the basic concepts of debugging, break points, stepping, etc. will 1) clearly illustrate how bad print statement approaches are and 2) become annoying enough that it will make them better planners and code readers.
To me it seems like it's more proof that bad developers will continue to be bad, regardless of the language they're working in.
I, for one, had not heard these myths, which makes me wonder what "masses" the article is aimed at...
Pizza Inversion - A Pattern for Efficient Resource Consumption
This metaphor is stretched to say the least.
Have you listened to/talked to any of the 37signals guys? It's hard to believe you would make such silly arguments if you had.

(I'd respond on the post itself, but there's a lot more noise in those comments.)
Agreed. Some people just aren't as effective at abstract symbol manipulation. I've found that people who can pick up programming languages can pick up other human languages and vice versa.

This doesn't mean that they can't learn programming. It means that they would be much better off focusing on their strengths instead. There's a difference between "can't do it" and "fails course" as you rightly suggest.
15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages
We use it here at work, and the major problem with it, IMHO, is that its search functionality sucks. Its search will pull up matches in multiple versions of a document, and further exacerbating the problem, our company uses Sharepoint for various Daily Activity Reports. So, if you're unlucky enough to have a bunch of people entering your search term in their daily activity report, you'll get tons of useless hits. Of course, you can manually drill down to a narrower site to search from, but this sort of violates the premise (ie, you have to already know what you're searching for.)
IMO this is just someone who's jealous because 37Signals has been successful while retaining a healthy work-life balance.

Too many people these days take pride in their ability and willingness to work ridiculously long hours for extended periods of time.

The only thing that 37Signals is doing is encouraging developers to write code and be healthy doing it, rather than killing themselves and wasting their youth away on technical debt.

The secret to doing what they do is to write code with fewer bugs, not put in extra hours writing in extra bugs because you're too tired to think straight.
Take enough math that you'll be able to understand any problem domain math models you run into.

That said, the real value of maths will be the exposure to abstract thinking: once you've grokked Noetherian rings, no data structure imaginable will hold any terrors for you.

(But remember to keep it as simple as possible (but no simpler)).
Incorrect.

(Yes, I'm a physicist.)
I learned them because I started programming BASIC when I was 5. (I've recovered, thanks for asking.) I had it down pat, and then I was taught the mouth mnemonic in elementary school, and for some reason for weeks after that I had a hard time remembering which was which.
The History Of Oil by Robert Newman ( http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5267640865741878159 ) also mentions the possibility of a US only depression.
Schiff isn't alone in his belief that the federal reserve was a bad idea. The Fed is unpopular enough to make anti-central banking videos like "Money as Debt" popular and well received. Woodrow Wilson (who signed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913) regarded it as one of his poorest decisions after the fact.
Killer poke
OK, I'm getting pretty bored of the Everybody Panic articles. Who keeps voting them up?

I always pick up some books every time someone is giving them away for free. One of my favourites (which I unfortunately left in my old office) is called something like "The Great Depression of the 1990s" (publication date: 1989) and warns us all how terrible the 1990s are going to be.
Non smelly? Have you ever been in a croc store? I went in with a few girls and I had to leave. The overwhelming stench of plastic fumes was making me gag. I felt physically ill just being in their store. I've worked on drilling rigs that smelled less chemically.

Hopefully it's less horrid than your hockey stuff is right now and is a positive trade ;)
Thanks, are you sure? I was looking for a changelog or /something/ about what's new in this RC.
Lack of Facebook Access Makes You Want to Quit? Grow up, Punks
Enough to pop corn?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAd0aWxs7kQ

Nope.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2100...
The professor might also be an overbearing tool bag or the class might not be particularly worth the effort (I've had a few of these). Anecdotal evidence like this is junk.

My dad showed me his report card from Kindergarten once. He barely passed because "Eddie has trouble whistling and skipping in a straight line." When he got in to Dylan, it was all over for his potential as a productive and intelligent human.

Of course, he's a published author and editor of poetry, novels and non-fiction, humor columnist, wilderness advocate, sometimes environmental lobbyist, motivational speaker and researcher/writer/editor for the beautifully designed black-bordered brochures you get at our national parks.

And still loves Dylan (Bob and Thomas). And he's my hero. And he figured out how to whistle and skip in line somewhere along the way.
Yahoo loses key mysql developer
8 Things You Should Include In Your Terms of Service Agreement
> Who keeps voting them up?

People coming in from reddit? Those kinds of stories are tremendously popular there. "Doom! Gloom!" sells, I guess.
Here's how Google Android could really take down iPhone 2.0
I agree -- the logic is inescapable: Complaining about kids brings about the collapse of civilization. :)
{ } have always been chicken lips to me. Everyone I've said that too has understood and although I may have gotten some strange looks, I've never been corrected.
I tried it for a few weeks. I got mildly test infected, but I don't do it anymore.

I found unit tests are most adequate for the parts of my code I'm the most confident about anyway (i.e., the functional parts). Testing side-effects intensive code (e.g., games) can be done and the discipline can improve your design skills and taste. But it can also drag you into boilerplate addiction and architecture astronautics.

But what really keeps me from writing unit tests is that they are a hindrance for the types of changes that scare me the most: those that introduce far-reaching changes to the interfaces between parts of my codebase. Those kinds of changes force you to rewrite your tests anyway. Thus, they add a cost and a mental barrier without offering the desired confidence in the transition (in a way, tests and code 'validate' each other; part of that confidence is lost while you are refactoring your tests).

To summarize: they help where I least need it, and they are a net hindrance where I'd need their help the most.

I don't do pacemakers or financial software, so I'd rather get the occasional bug during development, and use heavy human testing before release.

I said something on these lines a while ago here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284
I absolutely loathe writing them, but that's easily overcome by the sense of relief I get at being able to extensively test my software with a single automated script.

Automated regression testing while I enjoy a coffee at the local cafe? That's a win!
They're also great for kids... pretty much a slip-on(quick) and I don't have to worry about them being destroyed since they're cheap.
British Petrol Consumers to Boycott BP and Esso garages to force price reductions.
Google Checkout : How to Not Write Error Messages
Burning Man Launches Burning Blog
http://blog.burningman.com/
I advocate for the dissolution of the Federal Reserve. The world had very stable interest rates and inflation rates before the institution of fiat monopoly money (monopoly as in the sense of only one legal producer, but the other connotation works as well). If you knew that the interest rate on 10-yr AAA bonds was going to be within +/- 0.5% a year from now, don't you think that would make it easier to do business? Instead, we have a system where next year is +/- ~4.0%.

People point out other drawbacks of the free banking and classical gold standard eras, and I agree that the systems had their problems. However, they were also working with a much smaller and less technological economy. In addition, they were hampered with idiotic anti-banking laws (such as unitary branching), most of which have been repealed today.

I don't think we need a price-setter on the short term credit markets, and I don't think we need legal monopoly money. I don't think the arguments for the market break down in the monetary sphere.

Anti-Fed people might not always state their case well, but that doesn't mean there is not a good case. There are a few Nobel's among the gold bugs.
Whatever. Living with your parents in your 20s is disgusting, sir.
Knowing your audience
Barriers to entry includes more then start-up costs. A restaurant can open up on a busy street and advertise in local newspapers to get a sustainable customer base. The marketing and PR costs for a social network are much much higher. They would need at least 100,000 users to A) provide value as a social network and B) make revenue from PPC ads.