skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good article, glad to hear it. I always hated lectures because I'm not an aural learner, I have to read and do to fully understand and internalize. Daytime college lectures always broke up the most productive part of my day into small chunks that I would have otherwise been able to use to go to the library or lab and get into and stay in flow for long periods. All that was left was evenings, after I was already mentally tired.

One caveat though is that at top-ranked schools, the professors use the lectures to introduce material so new, often from their own research, that it hasn't made it into textbooks and other course materials yet, and that an unannotated copy of the lecture outline just wouldn't cut it for understanding it and exam prep. If there's no graduate-student-note-taking service for that course, you have to go.
Sure, which is why they are willing to accept less money.

If the government wants, they can do as companies have done (at least one of past employers did): End pensions going forward, everyone currently employed is grandfathered in, new employees get 401k with a match, new employees have a different salary step system that maxes out higher.

You're not arguing with someone who thinks the system is amazing as it is... it needs changes. But the teachers aren't the villains and they aren't living a life of grandeur.
Google Updates Google Maps for Android to Version 5.2
It's a disappointing talk, simply because he wastes time reciting and explaining pi and e, then glosses over Euler's formula (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulers_formula) which is the only real magic in this identity almost as if it's nothing, with hand waving Taylor series.
There are older examples that predate the popularity of the Internet: Microsoft specifically made earlier versions of Windows rely on DOS only work with Microsoft provided DOS and not DR-DOS.
> It took me a long time to figure out how to make money

Actually, it sounds like he had the knack for it since the beginning.
So this is basically about cherrypicking the best teachers

One would hope so, and that it will not end up being cherrypicking the ones who have most fervently sucked up to the superintendant and board, and firing the most fervent union members.

I wonder, are they going to perform the same triage on the principals and other administrative staff?
I don't think that the paleo crowd is really pushing a high fat and meat diet like you say. Taubes' views could almost be more easily lumped in with those of Atkins followers than of paleo eaters. Different people have different feelings about it but in general paleo eating is more centrally about eliminating the consumption of processed sugars, excessive sodium, gluten, and lactose. Vegetables and fruits make up a significant portion of the diet and eating leaner game meats and fish is usually encouraged over the more fatty factory farm meats. The idea is basically just that things that have relatively recently become cornerstones of our diet, whether due to technological advances or otherwise, might not be so good for us because we didn't evolve with exposure to anything like them. It comes down to making choices like having an orange instead of a bowl of ice cream, some roasted asparagus instead of a buttery dinner roll, or a nice cut of rabbit instead of a 70% lean hamburger with melted cheese. That seems like a fairly reasonable stance on diet to me, regardless of whether or not you buy the evolutionary rationale.
Absolutely agree. I was appalled when I saw the article about not being able to fire teachers and instead putting them into "rubber rooms":

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/disgraced-teacher-enjoys-wel...

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2008/05/04/200...

And then you have really good teachers who wanted to teach for free but wasn't allowed to (they finally, wisely relented) because of some dumb technicality:

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/nov/29/local/la-me-lopez29-...

(p.s. yes, he was my middle school teacher, and he is an AWESOME teacher)

The future of the education system is grim, and only by drastic measures can a difference be made.

A question: I don't quite understand why the teachers seem to think that a layoff is better than a firing? Does it affect their tenure/experience, or something like that?
I'm not arguing against vaccines though. And, btw, I'm not advocating people avoid surgery. But there are many well-documented stats (read any Gawande book) of when surgery is recommended but not the best solution.
I think there's a more intuitive explanation than the Taylor series expansions (whose correctness, after all, is not exactly obvious). It is not hard to show that the product of two complex numbers in polar form is:

(r1, θ1) ⋅ (r2, θ2) = (r1 ⋅ r2, θ1 + θ2)

That is, the radii multiply, but the angles add. If we consider only points on the unit circle, where the radii are all 1, clearly the product of any two such points is a third such point.

Now consider that

e ^ x = lim ((1 + x/N) ^ N)
N -> ∞

This equation defines real exponentiation in terms of integer exponentiation, which in turn is defined in terms of multiplication. To make it familiar, consider that

(1 + I/N) ^ NP

is the formula for compound interest, where I is the interest rate per period, P is the number of periods, and N is the number of compounding intervals per period. Let's say P = 1 so we can ignore P. If the interest rate is 12% annually and you're compounding monthly, then the balance after one year is higher by a factor of

(1 + .12/12) ^ 12 ≈ 1.1268249

But you could compound daily, hourly, by the minute, second, millisecond, ... As the compounding interval gets smaller, the result approaches

e ^ .12 ≈ 1.1274968

Okay, let's put these two things together:

e ^ ix = lim (1 + ix/N) ^ N [let "N -> ∞" be implicit]
= lim (r, arcsin x/Nr) ^ N
where r = √(1 + (ix/N) ^ 2)

As N -> ∞, r -> 1 and arcsin x/N -> x/N, so this reduces to

e ^ ix = lim (1, x/N) ^ N
= (1, lim (x/N) ⋅ N))

Remember, the radii multiply, but the angles add! This is the key step. From here it's easy:

e ^ ix = (1, x)

That's the general result; from there the special case is trivial:

e ^ iπ = (1, π) = cos π + i sin π = -1

EDIT: clarification.
I don't want this to sound like flamebait, but isn't stalking illegal? In which case, why would it be legal for agents, if guilt hasn't been proven?
Just emailed you Nico...it'll be great if you could have a look at the shots I sent you and share some thoughts.
It doesn't follow that great teachers are more cautious.
Then you have GREAT teachers getting crappy rankings from students who don't want to be challenged.

College is different as people are there on their own accord.
That's where you not correct. 4chan really was created because moot wanted a cool email address (moot@4chan.net), and it's based from Futaba Channel, not 2channel.
College the Easy Way
What makes one programmer an order of magnitude faster than another is the ability to intuit an algorithm to solve a novel problem. Where one programmer struggles to wrap their head around a problem and the other immediately sees the solution, that's where you will find such a huge difference in productivity. This intuition comes from experience, but some learn much faster than others.

Mastery of tools, languages, libraries, posture, etc. are significant but not to the same degree.
Nice to see a new release, but there is still no official support for a parallel execution :(

There are some forks with a parallel support, but all of the ones which I have tried are pretty buggy / incomplete.

I have signed up for a Fabric PyCon sprint, hopefully I can help with adding / finishing the parallel support.
As a HCI nerd I find this tech very interesting but I am skeptical about the extraordinary claim that EyeQuant - the technology developed and employed by Whitematter labs in this analysis - can, "predicts within seconds where users will look and what users will see" [1]. Where is the equally extraordinary evidence? Any kind of prediction of human behavior is very hard and subject to all kinds of exceptions. For instance, are the predictions applicable to all people wrt age, gender, culture, etc? What about something as basic as people whose language are Right-to-left (arabic, hebrew)? I haven't found any information in English that offers any scientific explanation how EyeQuant performs its predictions.

[1] http://eyequant.com/
No smoking, no drinking, crap on a regular basis, and sleep 8 hours a day (and enjoy sex) will be much better for your quality of life (and quantity!) than calorie restriction. Look at the stats. Imagine if simply people avoid smoking: average age would go up 10 years immediately across the country.
I am not certain on any of it, but I imagine it was a combination of the student input (we all got to rank them on various things and any complaints were noted) and also what the well-respected teachers who had been there a long time thought of them.

Almost all of the admin were teachers who retired from teaching, so I imagine they took input from the fellow teachers (who were still teaching) very seriously.

Additionally, it was seen as pretty important that the teachers engage the students in non-classroom ways. For instance a new teacher started a formal chess club at the high school and got us to play against other schools, and I would imagine that things like that are considered a huge plus.

It probably also helped that the school was small (880 students) so it wasn't hard to notice quality and for the admin to know every teacher on a personal level.
If public sector unions are a bad deal, why are police and fire department employee unions exempt from being targeted?

Actually police and firefighters are also being targeted. But there's just a lot fewer of them. Remember that there are more teachers in the US than any other profession. For example, see: http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2011/02/police_and_f...

This really isn't about good or bad teachers. The whole myth of the giant population of bad US teachers exists to push the agenda to break up unions.

The reason? Unions weaken the right and strengthen the left. The right has been trying to kill unions for a long time, but it hasn't been until the rise of minority district charter schools where they've been able to make a strong push that bad overpaid teachers are the problem.

The one question I've been asking everyone in my district is to point out the bad teachers. No one will tell me who they are, or how it is decided. I asked do the bad have warning, will they be given time to shapen up and feedback on their issues? Apparently no. These sorts of things make me a tad suspicious.
I remember when Firefox was the lightweight alternative to Mozilla. :\

Perhaps a new phoenix can rise from Firefox's hulk.
Is Facebook Worth $65 billion?
Isn't this basically a tenure thing? AFAIK public unions make firing a First-In-Last-Out operation, which means the senior teacher you hired 10 years ago is there to stay until every single other teacher that came after is gone.

In my completely non-expert opinion, tenure seems to be a multiplier. From a students' standpoint: A good teacher with tenure is a godsend, because they feel comfortable challenging the system to make sure their job (educating the kids) gets done. Conversely, a bad teacher with tenure is a cataclysm, because they don't really want to be there, the kids don't really want them to be there, and the school administration doesn't really want them to be there, but by God, they're staying, because it's easier to collect a paycheck and hate your job than change your situation. To use a metaphor from Kevin Smith's Clerks, tenured crappy teachers are perennially shitting their pants instead of lifting the lid on the toilet seat.
How is this any different than analyzing any other evidence that someone tried to destroy? Using some infrared or whatever filter do determine what a burnt document said? Determining that your fireplace has human remains? Does the acceptance of these techniques indicate we're living in a police state?
Agreed, they aren't.

But if mass firings happen just so the board can fire whomever they want, it is in a teachers best interest to stay on the administrations side, rather than just teach great.

Some of the best teachers are the ones who challenge conventional thinking and bloated process. They piss the administration off (I was lucky enough to have multiple teachers like this in HS). They could have a target on their back right now.
The initial sync didn't seem to take that long on a 802.11n connection using DoubleTwist/AirSync. (around 20G music/videos).

But that's besides the point - the neat thing about wireless sync is that you don't have to wait with the device physically tied up to your PC. In my case I was using it while the sync happened in the background. More over with wireless sync - I buy my MP3s at Amazon on my laptop and they automatically go out to my Android devices without needing any special action on my part.
Iphone and Android Games Sprite
But in this particular case it looks like stopping smoking causes death. Smoked to 120, stopped, died at 122.5.
Just a couple of design things: Black text on that blue background doesn't provide enough contrast for what's supposed to be your main headline. Also, I've come to expect buttons to have hover states, and yours don't.

As for the product itself, I'd like to see a better explanation of why I should pay $10 a month to see some basic stats about my posts' tweets/shares. Facebook Insights, for example, gives all that information to me for free.
Interesting to note that bzr got close to mercurial in the votes in spite of this being bzr version 1. Version 2 is much improved in speeds (comparable to git/hg).
This is the average salary and vacation time for a RI teacher...

Average Salary: $64,130(elementary), $60640(secondary)

Weeks of Vacation per Year: 15

(source: http://tinyurl.com/5dhgl8)

That's pretty good by today's standards. That's a salary of $1,733 PER WEEK that they work. I wouldn't consider a salary like that "accepting less money"
This is awesome. I had a quite fun time allowing my eyes to play over the pages as if I was looking at them to book a flight and took the care to make a summary retrospective note of where my eyes had travelled.

I'm normally completely unaware of where my eyes move on a page. Interestingly, I found that when I switched my view from the normal to the eye-quant diagram, it was immediately apparent that they'd got it harrowingly right. They really do seem to have the play of my attention pretty much down. Almost scary.

This gets me thinking. I don't know what eyequant's business model is, but it occurs to me that they could do an amusing sideline in training web-designers accurately to anticipate where people will look when they see web-pages. I feel that if I did 300 normal/eyequant pairs in sequence, I could gradually become aware both of my eye-movements, and also of those that people would normally make.

I'm reminded of the research that shows that the feedback loops available to doctors who predict disease from x-rays is too slow, so that often their skills deteriorate without them knowing as their career progresses. It was shown that if these doctors are given x-rays from the past to judge where the results are already known, so that they can then be given immediate feedback, their skills quickly recover and then improve. Feedback's obviously vital to learning.

Graphic designers, even if their web-pages are being A/B tested the whole time, just don't get sufficiently speedy and dense feedback to ever gain anything but the most rudimentary skill in anticipating where people's attention will go.

Eyequant seems to have this nailed. Guess that's what you get with Christoph Koch on your team. But it would be pretty awesome if the technology could be used to help make graphic designers (or anyone indeed) to become aware of the forces on their attention.
Farm automation also put draft horses out of work.

My case is brittian in the early 1800s, which had a population of about 40 million people and 4 million draft horses.

A draft horse did the manual labor of about four men, making them worth about 16 million agrarian jobs, and they were also put out of work. Horses, of course, aren't horribly adaptive and don't revolt when you keep them from reproducing, and so over the century they virtually disappeared with the jobs they lost.

Furthermore, if you consider the move in the early 1900s from a six day to a five day work week, that's a lot more human jobs that have never been replaced.
Disney Movie: Story of mensuration
> The one question I've been asking everyone in my district is to point out the bad teachers. No one will tell me who they are, or how it is decided.

Have you asked the kids? They probably know. There were bad teachers in my high school; pretty much everybody knew who they were. One was so senile he routinely forgot what assignments he'd given or what he was saying.
Whither F#?
IPad May Be Magical. Apps Aren’t. Here’s Why.
In images like the pale blue dot image, how does one go about taking a photograph of the earth itself and the area it's in? Is it just an artist's representation? It could be a satellite image but it seems to far in this case (I don't think we've ever had a craft leave the solar system). There are also images of the milky way, which we're inside of, and that doesn't quite make sense to me either.
I think this article is not a great introduction to Stylus, it's a better idea to check out their Github page: http://learnboost.github.com/stylus/

While you can write functions to create abbreviated versions of CSS properties, it's entirely optional.

Also I actually prefer Stylus' mixins and functions to SASS'.
Realistically, people will continue to own multiple computers. Computers have become very cheap, households can usually afford more than one.

For tablets to be successful “post-PC devices” it’s not necessary that people stop buying and using PCs.

Still, it should be possible to get by without a cable. I don’t want to transfer my 40GB media collection wirelessly just yet but the iPad is useful without my media (and can wirelessly sync contacts, calendars, notes, e-mails), there is no reason why I should be forced to connect to iTunes.
That distinction exists out in conceptual space, yes. But I am not sure Last.fm falls on the right side of it.

A startup can only live on "hey that's cool" for so long, when the promise of all these new ways of interacting is itself suggestive enough to capture people's imaginations even if it happens not to be very useful.

But soon we get acclimated, and even bored. And to keep pace with the ever-receding limit of human curiosity there must be some combination of new innovation and enduring usefulness, if not just one or the other.
It's interesting that each major web language seems to have paired off with a different VCS:

- Python + Hg

- Ruby + Git

- PHP + ...SVN?
Every employer look at performance differently. Beyond the ability to code as a software developer, what other personality and characteristics do you display that meet other requirements that make you invaluable beyond your ability to write code. Writing code is one thing. Writing great code is another. Then add onto that the ability to contribute beyond just writing code is something entirely different. When you add all those factors together, raises and how much they increase vary a LOT even with known ranges within a given company much less comparison within an entire industry in any given city.
On BART Trains, the Seats Are Taken (by Bacteria)
What about my Grandma? I wanted to give her an iPad, but the only computer she has is the one she shares with her entire nursing home, and there isn't an Apple store within a thirty minute drive of her house. I get that syncing is faster when connected, but that shouldn't be a requirement for use. Why can't I just turn it on, sign in and be done with it?
Your examples don't make sense because they are not set in Providence. There's no indication that "rubber rooms" are a problem in Providence, either.

The rest (and OP) is just supposition as to motives which remain unknown.
It's odd to trust a drive's controller and firmware, anyway. How do you prove that the firmware isn't buggy or intentionally tampered with?

The solution is to open up the drive, take out the flash, and attach it to your own controller that isn't going to randomly erase stuff.
There are so many features, integrations, interesting things, etc. that you could do with your platform, userbase, and data, it just seems like after the acquisition, all future dev. halted. It is a shame, and I'm now looking for an alternative after years of scrobbling, and being an avid user. Lately I've been using http://hypem.com -- it would be fantastic if they could mine my own personal scrobble data and make recommendations based on it.
I currently like pdsh (http://code.google.com/p/pdsh/) for doing remote sysadmin: it parallelizes very nicely, and I love being able to issue commands like "pdsh -w compute[000-100] yum update package" to manage hundreds of nodes at a time.

That said, I can see use cases for Fabric where you're implementing some complex logic in Python which you'd like to push out to your servers, rather than just doing simple shell commands or pre-pushing your scripts. But I can't tell how well Fabric parallelizes... being Python I'd expect it to be single-threaded :( , but I might be wrong.

Edit:typo
One word: Stand!
This should be the canvas of the future education system: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...
I can see what he's getting at - programming involves building up a mental picture of everything that's going on in your program. Of course most professional programmers probably don't work on a single project for months that's all theirs, they have to work with modules/interfaces developed by other people - when you don't have the luxury of writing all the code yourself (even terrible programmers know what's going on in their own spaghetti), being able to comprehend complex systems in a few hours is a huge advantage. They might still write terrible code if they were never taught good practices, but at least it does show ability/potential.
If quality is unmeasurable, you should optimize for cost.

This will either save the taxpayers money, or it will reduce the size of layoffs (holding cost constant).
Thanks for the feedback. I've been constantly tweaking the black/blue and will obviously need to keep tweaking to find a better fit. And I will definitely add some hover states!

I have definitely struggled with the product's core value prop. Our biggest advantage over insights is that it's near real time, and is provided over time by post. We also allow you to track other blogs that are not your own for comparison. I will go back and make sure that that point is made more of a focus. Thanks again for your feedback!
From the article, he wouldn't have been surprised at even a factor of 10x, he clearly wasn't expecting them to perform as well as him.
Out of curiosity, how much storage have you been able to get on your Android device?
I'm a bit disturbed that students could be accused of cheating, and their academic careers potentially ruined, because of events that could happen purely by chance. For example, let's say I take an exam and get the same two wrong answers as the person sitting next to me. While the probability of this happening is small, it's not zero. With millions of students taking standardized tests, it would be strange if it didn't sometimes happen. Just like some percentage of the time, you're going to toss a coin and get 20 heads in a row.