skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think mkramlich was meaning to imply otherwise, because the relevancy of parents' involvement doesn't just apply to technology. Engaged parents who involve their kids in engine rebuilding or animal husbandry or child rearing or anything else that requires years, effort, and guidance to master are most likely are in the top 1% in terms of intellectual development.

Technology and computers wasn't my mom's hobby or profession (she's actually a seamstress -- and I learned the basics of sewing from her) so it wasn't like she was introducing me to her interests; however, when my son gets older (out of diapers), I plan on spending time with him teaching about my major interests and learning new things with him that's he's interested in, independent of what that may be.
There is still a big piece missing -- the methods for translating business rules used by these people into workable software is error-prone, cumbersome, and ad-hoc.
"So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever."

The full acceptance of burnout seems important. ie, rather than cling to old ideas about who you are and what you want, at a certain point it's best to let go of your ambitions and simply embrace life in whatever way you can. I remember one conversation I had on a bus in Thailand some years back:

"What do you do?"
"Oh, I'm a burnout from China. I mean, I was starting a company there, and I sort of imploded. Oh, the business didn't fail, it's still running... I just failed. At being me."

It was the first time in my adult life that I didn't have an impressive story to tell about what I was achieving.

Failure, instead of driving people away (as I'd feared), led to more empathy and deeper relationships. And instead of harming my career, it gave me the freedom to explore my interests without the pressure to achieve, which helped me figure out what I really enjoy. I'm now working crazy hours again, but it's so well aligned with my values and interests that I rarely feel stressed. (And I take better care of myself, because I know what can happen if I don't.)
Can you name some, please? Used flockdraw for some time, but it took 1GB of RAM after short time.
Leveled Garbage Collection
Landing page neuroscience: which flight search engine has the best landing?
what long-lasting implications do you think this kind of policy is going to have on the USA's ability to keep up with the rest of the world?

Excellent implications. The dregs of the teacher pool (and in American public schools, the worst teachers are pathetically, heinously bad) will be sifted out, and the best will be hired back. It will also allow a fresh start for the training of new teachers.
As others have said this is a ploy to allow the school district to get rid of bad union teachers and I think that's a good thing.

It's probably not. They probably have no idea who the bad teachers are. It's most likley an attempt to get rid of the most senior teachers, regardless of ability. And political -- an attempt to kill organizations that tend to be Democratic (this would be equivalent to trying to dismantle fundamentalist churches, as their Republican leaning).

Everyone looks to Finland as this great example of how education should be done, yet it looks nothing like what is being done here. And Finland is 100% teacher's unions. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-higgins/why-do-the-educ...
people in hospital can't sync their iPads?
"is to be overly generous with people like teachers"

That seems to be the talking point nowadays. But, having a lot of family and friends that are teachers, just isn't true from what I know. I'm not sure where you think the abuse is coming in (benefits, pay?)

Most teachers salaries max out quite low compared to what could be made in private industry. And even their benefits aren't that much better than private industry, if at all. I have paid less for health benefits for the past 4 years in various jobs (for companies both small and large) and I always had better benefits than my sister, aunt, g/f, etc.

Schools should absolutely be able to pick teachers that are both good and bad. But a blanket firing shows a complete lack of respect and lack of commitment to fixing a problem.
Ask HN: Review my startup - Jaxified
for what type of product/service?
Oh, touche. Should have addressed that. Thanks!
Thanks for taking a look! I'll be posting a post on Monday on our blog about how it went from a weekend project to 7 months of work, but I'm really excited to show this off. I'm here to answer any questions or concerns you might have.
But why are they using Mercurial and not Git? I want to what are the advantaged for them to choose Hg.
Actually, the EDRM model is only one model, and it is rapidly falling by the wayside. For example, ECA - early case assessment - is becoming a very important part of ediscovery but you can't fit ECA into the EDRM as the EDRM is essentially linear and doesn't allow for loops.
I really think you missed the point of my comment, Jon Pincus.

I enjoyed watching 'mahmud and 'delirium go at it over the merits of Hardy, but my comment wasn't judging him and didn't ask for that debate.
The Internet Interest Bubble
So this is basically about cherrypicking the best teachers, and getting rid of low quality teachers with seniority.

Probably not. Ask them how they'll determine who the best teachers are? They have no metric today, at all. They'll likely simply use inverse seniority. Hire back the cheapest.

This is akin to a company firing people the day before their options vest, just because it saves a lot of money. Maybe good business practice in the short-term, bad in the long-term, as even good teachers will realize that they'll likely be fired if they climb up the salary scale.
But rather than creating a true evaluation system that would be able to create better teachers and identify the strong teachers, they are just doing a blanket firing.

I wonder what they are going to use to rank the fired teachers. Personal preference? Who is cheaper? Less senior employees who don't have as good of pensions?

If they thought this process through and decided to create an evaluation system, I think a lot of people would understand. Just firing everyone to cherry pick who you want based on some criteria that isn't formalized seems... too politicized.
At the moment we're looking at a pay first business model. We will be tailoring results and recommended solutions to your stack.
And the best teachers will start being more cautious, not crossing any "lines" and trying new things, not angering the superintendent by teaching hot issues, etc.

I do not believe one bad apple spoils the whole bunch. Fix the issue, don't put a bandaid on it.
History is a slippery beast. We only understand the past in terms of what we know in the present. To change the future, we have to build it now. If we spend our time trying understand the past before we act, time will have moved on without us.
I absolutely understand the need to choose good teachers over bad teachers. However, how much will the teachers' salary play into the selection process? I would imagine a teacher with 20 years experience gets paid quite more than a teacher with five years experience. Serious question, does salary go into consideration when rehiring or is it solely based on teaching skill?
You should place your bet on http://www.longbets.org/
I found this interesting:

> Yes: Melissa Malone, Kathleen Crain, Niña Pande, Julian Dash

> No: Robert Wise, Brian Lalli, Philip Gould

There's a stereotype that men are more in favor of small government and women are more likely to be elementary school teachers than men. Yet, all 3 of the women on the board voted for the dismissal whereas 3 out of the 4 men voted against.

Doesn't necessarily mean anything, could be random noise, but that caught my eye at the end of the article.
If you are interested to learn chef-solo/vagrant, please see http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2292140 (which I just posted). I'm planning to write an e-book on the topic.
I don't think it's an issue of technology. If they rotated satellites just to track him, I wouldn't have an issue. I think it's an issue of being invasive. They invaded his property to attach the device. The device remained inside his property. Meanwhile, either a low-tech tail, or some high-tech satellite, or security camera wizardry straight out of 24, is non-invasive.
All the scientists aren't really looking for "Alien Life" but rather "Life outside of planet Earth that looks very much like life on Earth".

To simplify we are made of cells and breathe oxygen but I would argue life can exists in other forms than one we know.
They were able to afford tax cuts for people who make over $10 million/year (I'm recalling this from memory from this past summer...).

And IMO there are plenty of programs that should be cut before education.
This is how it worked at my private school in New Hampshire.

Every single teacher, regardless of how long they have been teaching there (some more than 30 years) were hired for a 1-year period and then re-hired (or not) for the next year. Every single one of them had to do the same process.

It seemed like a very good way to never have bad teachers for more than one year. In my 4 years at HS there were only two bad teachers, and the contracts of both were simply not renewed after their first year.
>The Rational Use For Excess Money is Longevity Science

Depending on how you calculate it, something like one quarter of the world's population live on less than 2$ a day.
Many of them die due to a lack of absolute basics, like food, or basic, cheap, medicines.

Surely, the place to put 'excess money' is towards improving the lifespans of the people dying in their 30s, rather than of the people dying in their 70s?

Poverty problems are really hard to solve, and longevity research is good stuff; but you can't make global arguments about where we should put our resources, to improve overall human well-being, and ignore the vast numbers of people barely surviving.
As a fake developer (i.e. PhD student in Computer Science who did very little programming) I used UML, MOFF, and other such tools extensively. I've worked on the GME from ISIS at Vanderbilt and Ptolemy from CHESS at Berkeley. The one point that my thesis advisor - Janos Stipanovitz - made brutally clear whenever we were discussing Model Integrated Computing was that the value is not in building a better IDE that makes programmers more efficient. The value is in building analyzable frameworks that you can use in safety critical systems to show that your system adheres to the safety specification that you have to meet. So, I don't think there are any programmers who would benefit from these tools, but they absolutely do benefit system engineers building fly-by-wire airplanes, nuclear reactors, Mars rovers, etc...

Now, I am starting to work on a web-ap with a designer and I find that State-Charts are a great way for us to spec out the application. We're not trying to generate code from these but my partner is such a visual thinker and learner that State-Charts are a much more appropriate way for us to communicate than a spec written in English.
And 4chan was created as an American version of 2chan.
"Since when did Hacker News become about pandering to software development subfields?"

Since always.

But, that's not the point. This whole conversation is about Microsoft referring people to a site that will help them upgrade their browser...the majority of people seeing the message and following those steps, will be upgrading to a browser that just isn't up to snuff.

The page it links to does not show people how to upgrade their OS. You're the one taking this conversation in an entirely unrelated direction, and bringing OS security into the discussion. I'm complaining because the whole IE countdown thing is a nuisance rather than a help.

And, again, the OS people run is not my concern. The browser with which they use my applications, however, is my concern. Getting people to upgrade their OS is Microsoft's problem, not mine. But, by recommending an old browser for their users that haven't upgraded from XP, they're making their problem into my problem. I'm tired of dealing with Microsoft's problems, and I don't think it's fair that they use their market clout to keep putting their problems on my plate.
+1 for great execution. Nice visuals. Did you do them yourself? If not, a reference would be great.

+1 for needing pricing details upfront. I'll suggest $.10/call or SMS but I might pay up to $.50 for my application. I could be using this within a couple of weeks for a project I'm building.

But... You must have noticed that there's another company using Phonify.com (no e). You're going to get in trouble with trademark infringement if you launch with this. Seriously, it's an easy call, and I wouldn't say that your space in the commerce realm is too far apart to matter. [insert flashing red light] Now maybe the other company won't have a trademark, in which case maybe you could use this, but then you can't trademark it yourself. Given the potential name confusion (I just typed their URL when I wanted yours a minute ago), I'd think hard about this before charging anyone for anything.

Some PHP sample code wouldn't hurt.

There are several Wordpress plugins for signing up for an email mailing list. Adding your service to that would be compelling. Note that the Wordpress people have a strong interpretation of the GPL (that is they assert that all plugins are covered under GPL and must be $free) though. But maybe that doesn't matter if you're charging per call.

Going further down that train of thought, I'm thinking someone might duplicate this functionality for Wordpress and just require the user to have Twilio account (as some folks require an Amazon storage account, or whatever). Twilio signup is a low bar to jump, so I'm thinking this is a reason to keep your fees low.
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/#why-mercurial-over-...

Basically, they wanted a tool that was equally usable on all platforms, which excluded Git on Windows.

They also wanted something written in Python, of course, although they would have sacrificed that in the interest of pragmatism.
"Public unions have not proven themselves in the same way as private unions have. Private unions were (and in some cases still are) a good tool to protect employees against corporate greed run a muck."

Though the article deals with teachers, your quote makes me wonder: If public sector unions are a bad deal, why are police and fire department employee unions exempt from being targeted? Where I live (Texas), these employees have both civil service rules and a union (so they are arguably double-protected) while other public employees--except teachers--have neither and are at-will employed. I have seen no hint that police and fire should have their union representation or civil service requirements eliminated; the exact opposite is stated in places like Wisconsin and Ohio.
If nothing else it's because Mercurial itself is written in Python.
That seems interesting. Do you have any information on what they used to "rank" teachers or decide if they were good or not?
Unfortunatly, teachers are not exempt from the basics of economics. If salary isn't considered, they're doing it wrong. The job of the government is to maximize the educational output with the resources they have available. If that great (or crappy, for that matter) teacher costs too much, and the money is better spent elsewhere, so be it.
Aging kills significantly more people than poverty. Of the 150,000+ people who die every day, 100,000 of those are due to aging or age-related illnesses.
Do the PV calculation of their pension. Most of them are doing better then you think. Rhode Island's pension were guaranteed 3%. http://www.projo.com/news/content/pension_cuts_01-16-09_TOCV...
Android devices are post-pc.
I wouldn't count on it, as there are varying definitions of organic.
Plausible Deniability as a Business Practice
Apparently, if they get laid off rather than fired, time served is the ranking system.

Seriously, though, I've seen schools where teachers are evaluated like college professors - by students. Seems to be at least a partial solution.
I wonder if you would dare say the same on other engineering blueprints.
> That's what we are trying to find out! He was being spied on because he has a foreign sounding name

That's the worst part, fixating on such a useless thing.

Imagine if the US and Canada went to war, I as a Canadian of Irish heritage could easily blend in, meanwhile the French with accents would be targeted. Meanwhile the people who don't fit a stereotype are planting bombs.

It's incredibly unprofessional, amateurish and ignorant for government security agents to use such superficial reasons to think a person is a threat.
Author here. I was compiling on x86-64 which passes arguments in registers, so the fact that other calling conventions pass on the stack is not relevant for the case I posted about.
Past discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2271421
This is a great point. We always focused on safety critical applications when I was in school but security is another area where having a clear and consistent architecture is a hard requirement. This is a great example of an area that would benefit from having an analyzable framework in place.
actually they'll unlock it in the store if you don't own a PC.
If being able to recover files you accidentally delete and not doing backups is more important to you than speed, then you are still free to use a hard drive. I bet the vast majority of people would not make that choice.
I remember when I went to programming competitions ACM, Topcoder and like, we would have to solve 5 to 8 hard problems in like 4-5 hours. After that most homework CS assignments seemed like a joke, yet most students would spend days just to compile something half-working.

Most CS students are not trained to solve problems. They are taught algos, some language basics, but they only have to code 2 or 3 small programs per week.

We had a programming club where we would solve 4-5 problems in one hour, and only like 5 people attended it, out of ALL CS majors of ALL years.

And that's, kids, why it's so damn hard to find good developers.
This is one reason I don't have an iPhone. None of my laptops can run iTunes.

(Yes, I know running Ubuntu makes me an outlier, but still.)
I don't understand the point of the talk. The only way you could follow what he was saying was if you understood the material he was trying to "explain".

I think someone wanting to learn about about the relation between pi, e, i, sine and cosine wouldn't be helped by this talk.
I would guess thats one of the motives behind them seeking a deal to get unlimited music downloads for itunes.

Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-04/apple-said-to-negot...)
Online Business : Forex software security
The common method for securing the exchange of data is to encrypt it. Encryption means that the data transferred over the communication line is encoded in a special way at the sending end, and decoded using the same algorithm in reverse at the receiving end. The data that goes through the communication channel is meaningless to an eavesdropper, even if he does succeed in intercepting the data. Unless the eavesdropper can decode the data, he cannot read it. The encryption strength is dependent upon the length of the encryption key. The key that is used to encrypt/decrypt the data is a very long number. The longer the number, the harder it is, exponentially, to decode the data. Lengths of keys vary between 32, 64, 128, 256 bit and so on.
It's an important issue. We also need to prevent paper from being shreddable and burnable, to avoid the "paper hole".
The union is irrelevant, even with a union the compiler eliminated the branch in another test I ran where both functions had the same prototype. I'm on an iPad at the moment so can't verify, but I'd be willing to bet that exactly the same code would be generated if the two function pointers were passed as separate parameters (ie not in a union)
It's unfortunate that innocent targets of the police will now go free. I'm sure prosecutors everywhere are lamenting the fact that they can't pad their stats by putting innocent people in jail on flimsy evidence, such as the 'guilt' associated with ensuring your hard drive is clean, encrypted, and generally unavailable for police inspection.

No guilt should be associated with affirming your rights to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure.
Because syncing a 32gb personal collection of music, movies and photos wirelessly takes too long?

Funny I think it's only people without any iTunes purchase complaining about this. The ones enjoying the media capabilities of the iPad, capabilities completely missing from Android, have no complains.
The amount of bad data on last.fm and their lack of interest in cleaning it up makes me sad. You can see a small example just by looking at the current top songs: http://www.last.fm/charts/track

Morning Mr Magpie is in position 8 instead of position 4 where it should be, because 8105 people scrobbled Morning Mr. Magpie with a dot. Tip of the iceberg.

Really egregious are the albums with no scrobbles because every track on the album has "(Album Version)" or some such affixed to its name.

Once on a Pandora station they played me a track by a band called Burial, instead of the dubstep artist Burial I had added to the station. So I sent them an email and they thanked me and told me the issue was very important to them and they cleaned their data. Last.fm doesn't bother, even when it causes their top-20 charts to be completely wrong.
Do they give you updates in store as well?
Egads. Do you know how many applications YC gets every batch? The last publicly reported number was something like 400, and that was years ago. I'm sure is dramatically higher than that now. The competition is insanely high, and the vast majority of insanely talented people with killer ideas get rejected.

Also, a "killer idea" isn't what YC looks for. They look for good teams.

I wasn't suggesting that any of the women I suggested should apply to YC would have necessarily gotten in (none of the men I've recommended to YC have, so far). Odds are simply against it, but I think people should do it anyway, if they want to start a company that fits the YC model. My point was that of the people I've encouraged to start businesses, only the men have actually done so. The women always have too many good reasons not to. Their job pays too well, they like the food at Google too much and don't like to cook, they don't want to move away from their friends to live in the valley, they don't want to give up the security they currently enjoy for something uncertain, they don't want to give up their weekends, etc. There's always good reasons to take the safe path...men just seem to be more willing to ignore all those reasons and start a company anyway. Not all men or women fit this description, of course...free will seems to exist, and humans are widely variable. But, it's true enough of the time that I'm absolutely confident YC is not exhibiting a preference for male founders, and that the percentage of accepted female founders is reflective of the percentage of female applicants.
This is true, but I think a "post-pc" device should be able to stand on it's own two legs.

Thanks for pointing this out, I meant to include it in my article.
Make things fun, how simple, but yet so true
See http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/ for the rationale; but keep in mind it's more than two years old so some of the criticisms may not longer apply.