skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article seems thin on facts and big on sensations.

Two things strike me as pretty weird sentences in the article.

>Worst-case scenario builders consistently underestimate the statistical probability of separate bad things happening simultaneously

There must have been more than three accidents at nuclear plants in the history of mankind. Yet three "misjudgments" make them consistently wrong?

>Actually, ever major nuclear accident has been worse than worst case, and that's a fact

How can something be worse than worst case? I don't understand what the article tries to claim that "experts" have deemed the worst case. Clearly Fukushima is not worse than worst case as there haven't even been a full meltdown or anything like that yet.

Second, what is "Every major nuclear accident". Have there only been 3 major nuclear accidents? What constitutes major?
Pwn2Own is harmful. Jon Oberheide's article[1] convinced me of that. Bug bounties encourage the disclosure of vulnerabilities as soon as they're discovered; contests like Pwn2own, with specific starting dates, encourage the accumulation of undisclosed vulnerabilities until the contest begins. It unnaturally extends the lifetime of bug, and hurts users by leaving them vulnerable for longer than necessary.

[1] http://jon.oberheide.org/blog/2011/03/07/how-i-almost-won-pw...
Changing the way the multiplication algorithm is taught isn't going to fix anything.

There needs to be a fundamental change in the way mathematics is taught. Right now what most schools teach in math class resembles trivia more than mathematics. There is no appeal to intuition or understanding, because clueless symbol manipulation and memorization of formulas is apparently what really matters. It is not necessary that the student really understands what he is doing. Why is the product of two negative numbers a positive number? "That's just the rule." Why is dividing by a fraction the same as multiplying by the reciprocal? "That's just the rule." These are very simple concepts that can be both logically and intuitively presented to students, yet growing up those were the answers I received. Even high school geometry, which used to be taught decently, has now been replaced by curriculum that does not emphasize proofs or any kind of true understanding/intuition.

Unless students discover the beauty of mathematics independent of math class, or enjoy following arbitrary rules, it is no wonder they develop a dislike for mathematics.

Although the author's writing style is a little bit annoying at parts, this is a good read:
www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
Agreed. I have a very conservative, very anti-union family and there's not one of them who isn't in favor of higher teacher pay as long as it's tied to performance. So I really don't know who would be against it
Huh. I wonder how that would work.
Just like Thursday Lunch in Santa Monica
http://promenade.thursdaylunch.com/
There are vulns that aren't fixed that by themselves don't seem so bad, but in conjunction with others are. And there are examples that aren't fixed today. For example, there's a disclosure of information bug in IE8 that exists, but you need the location of the target file to exploit it. If there's another exploit that lets you drop files outside the sandbox, and another exploit where you can overflow a buffer outside the sandbox on reading a file, you now have three vulns that together get you to run code, but any two of them is not sufficient.

Note, I based this on SA38416, despite the fact that it appears possible/likely that this vulnerability actually doesn't exist as stated, but it was fine for expository purposes.
Yep. A couple I know off the top of my head are iCab and Opera.
Check the winds!

Chernobyl is only 100km from Kiev, but as the winds were blowing in the opposite direction the Ukraine's capital was unscathed and the majority of fallout was over Belarus.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/12/japan-quake-wind-i...
ok, I think we managed to switch http://www.kathack.com over to S3. Thanks for the tip!
Numerous studies show that education majors is the US have among the lowest composite ACT and LSAT scores of any major.

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2006/02/ranking-sc...

There have been various explanation for this phenomenon which started in the 1970s and grew since then. Among the most interesting hypotheses is that traditionally smart women went into teaching as one of the few careers available to women who did not want to become young mothers and housewives. But this century, with more opportunities available to women, smart women become doctors, psychologists, screen writers, etc. Yet teaching is still a career dominated by women, leaving the less qualified students to take the available positions.
According to the BLS, the average full time teacher works slightly less than 40 hours/week (see Table 2). This includes time at the workplace, at home and at another location.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
This title meme needs to go away.
> it doesn't matter if the immigrants themselves are better off?

In a world with about four billion people who would be better off moving to America, no.

> No it isn't.

It is true that we could turn America into India, bursting at the seems with people fed on poor rice and vegetable diets, and with poor access to open space. I happen to think that's a very bad idea. It's also probably unsustainable. Top soils are running down world-wide, including in America.

The US is ecologically over-full. We share this country with animals and plants, and they are suffering. The ideal sustainable population of America is probably down towards 200 million.
It's a general observation of most "professional" employment that the actual working hours exceed the paid hours. It's definitely true of lawyers in large law firms (I have been one) that there are many hours that keep the lawyer busy with work that are not necessarily billable to a client. And, yes, I know both teachers and lawyers (I have pursued both occupations, although my teaching has not been full-time permanent employment in a government-operated school).
I don't know if there is much to deduce from these benchmarks. They are good for bragging rights, that's for sure. But that's about it.

Note also that while the Xoom is a new product, its Tegra 2 processor is relatively old. NVIDIA first demoed it in January 2010. So here they're really comparing apples to oranges.

In any case, good for Apple. The iPad 2 does look like a good product.
Ditto. While I don't doubt this accident will be used by the anti-nuclear groups to further dig us into the pit of coal, oil and gas (seriously, I think the whole green movement might as well be funded by the oil industry for all they've made us rely further on it over the past several decades) while it takes another decade for renewable energy to even become viable for supporting a nation.

I see this as a huge success. Every fail safe in good design has held up and kept a serious leak of radiation from happening. We're currently only seeing neutrons being leaked, which is essentially a 'big fucking deal' level of seriousness compared to a leak of radioactive iodine or something similarly absorbable and storable by the body.

To say the plant suffered a hydrogen-oxygen explosion and didn't release fissile material, I would say is amazing.

I'd just love it if people knew that more people die every year from the radioactivity released from the burning of coal than have ever died due to actual radioactivity from radioactive materials and power plant failures. Factor in the amount of people who die annually simply due to soot produced by coal plants and you can easily factor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and still count it. Factor in the amount of third world miners who die annually and we might as well go nuclear and drop a nuclear bomb annually and it would still be safer for the global public.

I'm serious, it's psycho-bizarre that the dropping of a WMD would actually cause less deaths in a year than the usage of coal.
heh yeah I prefer vulns that never get disclosed except to clients that can pay a lot more.
Actually, those are used somewhat commonly in music. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degree_(music)
Why would a lawyer earn more money than a teacher? Only your ingrained cultural expectations suggest this. Can you strip those out and suggest any objective reasons that lawyers are worth more? Do they train for longer? Is their work more important? Do they need better school grades?
there's more than one buyer out there for vulns
For a long time humans have been using their intelligence to bypass evolution pressures. Nudity isn't necessarily the 'natural' state of being for most humans.
What's a fair way of measuring performance though?
Take a look at the screenshots from Infinity Blade on the iPad 1 vs. the iPad 2. There's a big difference in graphical quality. Most notably, the iPad 2 can handle antialiasing, more detailed geometry, and much more complex lighting. From these numbers, it looks like if the iPad 3 included a double-resolution display but no further GPU speed increases, it would still outperform the iPad 1.
I agree that comparing the GPUs is a little unfair, but the iPad and Xoom were released within a several weeks of each other, so I think it's entirely fair to compare system graphics performance.
Amusing--I don't think the TSA has thought to put neodymium magnets on the banned-in-flight list.

(One of the characters in the article gets literally stuck in an airport.)
Amazon´s bar has ruined the Internet for the rest of businesses. Now if you have to make one click too many or wait a minute there's going to be a blog post about it.

I'm just amazed that if I'm thirsty I touch something and I get instant water and if I'm cold I touch something and quickly it gets warmer. I enjoy things like these every day that only three or four generations ago not even kings had.
The author makes some valid points. However, I'm not convinced that Pwn2Own is overall a bad thing, for 2 reasons:

1. It is far more public than bug bounties. The browsers that get hacked are in the public spotlight, and that can pressure them into doing a better job in the future.

2. The browsers that put the most effort into security - Firefox and Chrome - did well this year. The article and comments seem to imply this might be a coincidence. There is some element of chance here, so it's possible, however, I don't agree that chance is a major factor. Furthermore, if it was as easy to hack browsers as the article implies, you'd expect all the browsers to be hacked - again arguing against randomness being a big factor here.
Ah, right. I made a very stupid mistake in thinking they teach students for ~7 hours/day. I was also biased by my (probably) above-average experiences with teachers.
I had an interesting conversation with Rackspace this week that I found pretty amusing.

My company is putting together a project that will ramp up to around $3 million / yr in hosting costs, give or take, within two years and continuing on for the winning hosting provider indefinitely. It is a bit of a surprise contract so we are in a big hurry to get a third of that capacity up ASAP. We have several options and Rackspace /was/ near the top of the list.

So I am in a meeting with someone from their engineering staff, a sales guy, our lead operations engineer and our top sales guy.

So our sales guy, doing his job, asks their sales guy "Is there anything else you can do for us." (referring to price) "I mean this deal is worth about $3 million/year" and the Rackspace sales guy replies "Well we are a $700 million dollar a year company so no, we do these kinds of deals all of the time."

I was floored...My immediate thought was "Well, I guess you won't be a 703 million dollar a year company."
I don't think the time is right to start declaring safety or unsafety of nuclear energy as the meltdown is reportedly underway at two reactors.

I'm all for nuclear energy, but we must not fool ourselves into thinking that we can prevent everything. There are natural and human forces that can compromise integrity of nuclear facilities which will result in major releases of radioactive material and contamination of large land and sea areas. This is simply inevitable.
Food prices are not perfectly elastic when it comes to the basic staples like wheat, especially in the short term. People need a certain amount of food, and their choices come down to eat if you can afford it, or die. Demand by households doesn't change much with price, but they will pay anything from zero up to everything they have.

The price is therefore depends on the suppliers. Normally, competition between suppliers will bring the price down to near the cost of production. However, if there is a futures market filled with overly confident speculators, who buy the grains at a high price and push it even higher, the cost to all the owners of the stock when delivery is due will be far higher than the cost of production; if most of the market paid this same price, there will be no-one with the volume who can afford to compete and push down prices; the final price is likely to strike a balance between the loss of value from throwing away wheat because some people had to starve as they couldn't afford the price, and the revenue from selling the wheat at the highest price.

In effect, against inelastic demand, a futures market and confident speculators have the same effect as rational price fixing by a cartel.
There's a better merit->pay feedback cycle. A good lawyer will get repeat business. When am I going to take a class again?
What does jira have to do with it? It's just an issue tracker like any other.
There are much more interesting ways to relate numbers to pitches; see the Pythagorean ratios and tuning before equal temperament.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning
"You don't know any teachers"

He said his mother and two sisters are teachers. Am I missing something?
Ok, we switched everything over to S3. Everything should be much faster now.

Looks like we have a ~275MB access.log from before the switch. Over a million requests!

$ wc -l access.log
1115447 access.log
IIRC there were some Americans here too.
I looked up that question.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Aj_AlHhmSE3TfJp...

Best answer, chosen by voters begins with: "I dont know the answer to your question."

The rest are a bunch of random guesses by people who don't really know anything about the topic. That's actually exactly the sort of thread I am disappointed to find when I ask a question like that. I could just ask the nearest person or call my mother and get more or less the same results. Honestly, if I spent 30 seconds brainstorming I would probably come up with at least half of that list of answers. I'd turn to the web for slightly more detail and authority, which isn't in evidence there at all.

That being said, I have been surprised at the number of times I've found relevant answers. It's more often than I expect, even if it's not as often as I'd like, and I do find the quality of Yahoo Answers to be less consistent than Stack Exchange,
I took it to mean he was talking about worst case disaster scenarios in general not just nuclear reactor related. The breaking of the levees in hurricane Katrina and the collapse of the world trade center come to mind. For example in the towers collapse the fire weakened the structural supports even though they were designed to withstand the impact.
I hope they add db migrations soon, the reactor has really breathed life back into the CodeIgniter community. However, I'm still in love with FuelPHP for PHP Frameworks.
Honestly, if this is considered as good-sounding music, then I don't think any combination of tones from the C major scale could be considered bad-sounding.
Things like this show that we need a change of mindset when evaluating the technical capabilities of embedded devices instead of PCs. When a new graphics chip is released, you can't swap it for your old GPU, and it won't show up as a build-to-order option in 3 weeks, either. You have to wait for it to be integrated in to new SoCs.

Trying to excuse the Xoom's obsolete GPU (particularly when the Xoom's biggest selling point is the higher resolution screen) makes no more sense than trying to compare a current product to the announced but not shipping Cortex A15 processor.
Wiktionary defines "nitpick" as "To correct minutiae or find fault in unimportant details." But "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.92....) is not about minutiae or unimportant details; it is about how to approach the task of writing a computer program that does what you want instead of something else, a task that is at the core of the modern economy.
Let's try a thought exercise. If we pay engineers more, we'll get safer buildings. If we pay police officers more, we'll get safer streets. If we pay doctors more, we'll get better care. You see how this works? More pay attracts higher quality individuals, but it's a zero sum game. Those people are coming from some other industry. So if you'll pay teachers more, you'll have a lower quality of service elsewhere. That low-quality teacher just became a doctor and the doctor became a teacher. Not good. I want the best and brightest doing the most critical work, not babysitting children.
Wow what a great article. Time to read the entire series.

LISP macros are what makes me want to learn me some LISP.
s/preform/perform/ ?
I looked at the chart for percent of teachers working on a given day (orange and gray one). The orange alone gives 9.5 hours per day. That alone is more than 40 hours per week.
The content-free nature of this article reminds me why I never visit CNN's web site. It's amazing to think that I trusted them and watched their "news" when I was a kid.
Exactly-- only MobileSafari has the "dynamic-codesigning" entitlement, but full-screen web apps open in WebSheet.app. This is almost certainly an oversight. On the other hand, I doubt App Store apps will get that entitlement anytime soon.
It focuses on the largely insignificant debate over the merits of one syntax structure over another. It's essentially the vi versus emacs of programming.
Buy blue pill - For impotence treatment Buy blue pill
I believe this is often called an SLA or service-level agreement.
It may be a coincidence that Microsoft was dramatically more successful in those old days than it eventually became.
Performance Numbers for Nitro Javascript Engine in IOS 4.3
I'll miss Josh's writing for one. Always enjoyed his articles even if I didn't always agree with him. Hope he surfaces again soon. Keep writing, Josh!
Isomorphic alternate: stop padding school payrolls with overpaid, administrative, non-teaching staff.
Seed corn is tasty, it also has more protein.
The key point is that there are dozens of serious vulnerabilities found in Firefox and Chrome every year. The availability of a vulnerability at an exact time in an exact place is not a good way to compare such broad trends.
I've done more thorough testing and posted the results here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318412

I've re-done the tests for the iPad. Mobile Safari javascript is more than 2x as fast when run in the browser versus fullscreen mode.
I think 'A Month' sounds more Bold and because of this it seems longer than '30 Days'.

This is like how shopping goes, majority of products are priced 1 penny/cent under the round-up figure for example:

£14.99 instead of £15.00 - The lower number '14' making it sound like its less.

Good question by the way too!
If we assume that it's impossible to measure performance (in any job, but also when applied to teaching), then market salary is minimum wage.

We know we have unemployment i.e. there are people available that would take the job.

If you can't tell if a person A does a given task, in this case teaching, better than a random person from unemployed pool, the rational thing to do is to hire a random unemployment person for minimum wage.

That, of course, would be absurd: we all know that there are differences in performance and they can be measured and they are being measured.

As everything fuzzy in life, they are not always being measured perfectly, but that doesn't mean we should throw the baby with the bathwater by declaring that because we can show that sometimes the measurements aren't fair, they can never be fair. That's a fallacy and even article in question is based on assumption that you in fact measure the quality of teachers.
The article's examples of other countries seem a bit cherrypicked. Finland is a wild outlier among western nations.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

Singapore and South Korea do a pretty good job of educating Asian cohorts. But there are actually several Asian cohorts that do quite a bit better - for example, Asian Americans in Texas or Connecticut.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-...

So it looks like the huge amounts of respect and pay given to Singaporean and South Korean teachers aren't really buying a lot in terms of educational output.
The Nude Bomb?

(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081249/ -- safe for work)
Just because it's difficult to find out doesn't mean we shouldn't try. No performance system is perfect but by at least trying to figure it out we'll have a better system than we have now.

I, for one, know which of my prior teachers have been good and which haven't and most of my classmates would agree. Asking former students may be one idea although it's a pretty slow feedback cycle. You wouldn't be able to ask students immediately after the year is over since it would probably be correlated to the grade they received but years down the line people would have a pretty good sense of who the good teachers they had were.

One can also have former teachers monitor more as well as have more frequent observation sessions.

I'm sure there are tons of ideas people have and it's important to choose the best ones but none of this is going to happen until we make it a point to pay for performance.

In a way, it's similar to startups - you don't know what the final product is and you can always improve but it's important to start in order to get the feedback, learn from it, and iterate on the product.
Don't do it. Learning another language is much easier than you think, and will be extremely helpful for your long term career.

node.js + socket.io blows any php comet solution out of the water.
Wonder why email sucks? Blame publishers who force email opt-in
They might not care all that much about the "arable" part, but I don't think the "permanently uninhabitable" part is too intellectual for the average person to grok.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_modeling
Presumably better teachers would be able to actually, well, teach not just babysit. And if they can teach better that will produce better quality talent in the future, right? And then society can be better off. It's tough for those children to become doctors without a good education. And in the long run you'll end up with an entire society of incompetent doctors without good teachers.
If you're going to be strict with grammar, at least do it properly! :P

s/preform/perform/g
I had to deselect each one of these items, what's worse is that I had to scroll down to even see how many they were. How about I opt-in on the email newsletters I want and the ones I don't?

Or better yet, how about giving me the option to opt-out of newsletters instead of assuming that just because I signed up to your service, I'm going to want a morning and evening recap of how your business is doing?