skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Math isn't "too hard". It's about grade inflation. When my parents were in school, a 2.5 grade-point average was around the median, and 3.0 was good enough to get into graduate school.

Math and science courses still give real grades, with Bs and Cs for average work. Liberal arts classes have been inflated at most universities, to the point that getting a C is essentially failure. People get this perception that math is "harder" because of grading skew.

Also, with top employers refusing to look at resumes with GPAs below 3.5 (regardless of university, major, etc.) it makes sense that people would gravitate toward the "easier" majors.
I also think it's quite difficult for an 8th grader (I'll argue few develop a deep aptitude in math unless they start early) to understand why anything beyond basic math is important and worth learning. Further, I think we would be better off teaching the majority of students basic calculus and statistics in lieu of calculus. Get some stats and probability under your belt and you might even develop a clear motivation to learn calculus!
The same ethos provides similar results on the customer service side. For example, letting users go to the website and schedule a 15-minute window of time in which Apple calls them is huge. Letting users go to the website and schedule an appointment to go talk to a real live human is huge. And making them walk all the way through a retail outlet full of your products to get there doesn't hurt, either.

Every other company in their space is still stuck on figuring out how to distribute tech support resources to customers by asking them to wait on hold for an hour. That's an hour worth of time doing absolutely nothing productive that shows up on the 800 number's bill. That's a bunch more call center hardware to maintain in order to manage the queue of people on hold. That's less productivity per operator, because customers who are pissed off about being on hold for an hour are harder to work with, and because dealing with that for 8 hours a day is an excellent way to lose your own motivation. Let alone that a bad support experience is a good way to make sure a customer doesn't become a repeat customer.
The secret is to make high school a lot HARDER.
Not wanting to do a 'when I was young rant' but I learned the calculus at age 15-16 US grade 9-10. Then in our 'senior' high schools we only studied core subjects eg. maths+physics

Now I lecture to physics undergrads who have never been taught calculus. So not only do we have to teach them intro maths techniques but they have never really studied physics - they have been shown fun and interesting demonstrations and given a simple hand-waving 'explanation' - but without being able to follow the maths you can't explain it.

I'm sorry but the answer to fixing the science and engineering problem isn't more fun science games in high school, or pretty computer demos of experiments - it's concentrating on lots of hard boring maths earlier and earlier.
The burden of proof is on the accusers, but "not proven" is a long way off from "clearly false".
> I think patents probably work better in certain areas than they do in ours. Software patents? No. Process patents? No. They just don't make sense.

Only if you ignore the fact that congress is composed of lawyers, who have a large self-interest in preserving the current Byzantine system.
I agree with this. Although I'm young and naive and I rather not pick up a client (because I have that luxury) that wants IE6 support.
PEP8 recommends spaces:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
This is because most of their intranet apps will only work in IE6, and they have the size to demand that their supplies support IE6 too. Corporate IT policy won't allow browsers apart from IE.

And this also seems to be the common case when I've done onsite freelancing gigs in non banking (SMB) UK companies over recent times :(
I think that you are mostly right about halting (guaranteed) stopping rules.

See my other comment, up a few times then down the other branch, the one with the pastebin code.

However the example with the two doctors was not the halting type.

Can you agree to that? Or do you have a defense of non-halting stopping rules, even though they are incapable of reporting some data sets?

I think I figured this out but would be interested in criticism on this point if not. Is there some way of dealing with non-halting that makes it OK?

The book says if there's a stopping rule then inferences must depend only on the resulting sample but that assumes there is a resulting sample -- that the procedure halts.
That's understandable. I agree that tabs would work much better than spaces with a proportional font. However, in the case of Python PEP 8 states that you should use 4 spaces. Not doing so will make it very hard to collaborate with other devs.

It's not that I think that proportional fonts couldn't work (even with python) It's just that I have concern about visually assessing indentation. Maybe it's time I try one and find out.
I disagree; I think the tl;dr is a combination of (1) Math is hard AND (2) Teaching methods and student support optional are optimized for a minor subset of the student population

Point 1 is fixed; for most people, math is hard, and that's that. Regarding the second point, though, I imagine that there is a certain aspect of social engineering that could take place that would increase retention, without changing the curriculum at all.
I'm on Server Fault everyday. Even if you don't ask or answer questions, it is interesting to read all of the content.
My pet theory is that math is not taught well because teachers for the 6-12 group just aren't good at math. They may be good at pedagogy but may lack the deep understanding that may be needed to teach more effectively.

Now can society can divert a bigger proportion of the few people that somehow got it to teach kids?
NetApp and Sophos being used by Syrian state snoopers
The tl;dr I got was different. What I got was a.) that our society has focused too much on the stimulation of our dopamine pathways. b.) Many professors forget that the enthusiasm they posess for a subject is not self evident.

The hardness of STEM was orthogonal to this piece; the focus was on how pointless the seemingly unapplicable dry list of equations and facts were to many students. This made it hard to continue the perceived self flagellation to little gain. They gave an example of a smart kid with an 800 SAT score in math who quit to psychology because his mechanics class was dull in comparison to the more active psych class. They also mention that classes like english give better grades than chemistry and math so people switch cause they feel they are doing better.

Their prescription is more interesting and interactive classes. That is a good idea as long as the essence is not lost to fluff and education does not degenerate to an exercise in marketing I guess.
The evidence suggests it is highly unlikely they are true.

Most rape victims don't tweet about how it's "amazing" to hang out with "cool" and "smart" people after being raped, or throw a party for their rapist.

http://rixstep.com/1/20101001,01.shtml

Nor do they usually invite their rapist to stay at their house 4 days after the rape.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/12/crayfish_parties_and_br...

It's also a rather implausible coincidence that after these events, the rape charge only surfaced after a) Assange failed to call either Anna Ardin or Miss W. back and b) Ardin and W each discovered he was sleeping with the other one.

I think the story itself justifies a very low probability of being true - in my estimation, probably considerably less than 1%.
MyBalsamiq: remote, collaborative UX Design
Lower the price of filing patents. Just send a timestamped email to a certified server, then go to court to attack or defend it and have it thrown-out if invalid.

Beware of populism in desguise. This is class warfare. Don't be too impressed.

Relax -- God is just.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\PLATO.TXT

proverb says, is not included: for I would not have
you ignorant that, in the present evil state of governments,
whatever is saved and comes to good is saved by the power of God,
as we may truly say.

I quite assent, he replied.

Then let me crave your assent also to a further observation.

What are you going to say?

Why, that all those mercenary individuals, whom the many call
Sophists and whom they deem to be their adversaries, do, in fact,
teach nothing but the opinion of the many, that i
It will be is not structured using Namespaces, which can be annoying if you are using them on a day to day basis and want to integrate something like Yaf that doesn't use them.
Twistori - A must see Twitter Widget
I think this is BS. It's not that it's hard, it's that is too hard for what you get for it, in both money and social respect.

Actually even that is not correct.

It's harder compared to other things (Law, MBA, etc.) which can pay more and come with higher social respect, especially in America.
There were some people doing some bad stuff over Tor a while ago, so we banned all the Tor exit nodes they were using. They seem to have given up so I'll try unbanning these IPs.
Small Greenhouse Plans
Verizon to offer data 'Turbo' API to developers, fees to users
Ask HN: Feedback for tool to help you learn your next tech stack
"Where was that closures bookmark??"

"Why did I bookmark this?"

Bookmarks are flat and one dimensional. They don't provide you any information about what question they are answering.

To solve this problem I've been working on a chrome extension called Knovigator and I would love your feedback on it.

Knovigator allows you to take context based notes as you surf and search online, all the while creating a handy reference of the questions and problems you've encountered while learning something, and the solutions you found useful.

It also makes doing multiple searches more manageable.

If you are learning a new subject, or doing research, or are a google-fu expert, then I think this tool can help you.

Please let me know if you are interested in taking a look and I can get in touch with you via email.

Thanks!
All I can tell you is that in the US, very long delays before invoices are paid out are absolutely the norm.

I didn't jump in because I particularly care how Apple pays vendors, but because many people on HN are considering freelancing and bootstrapping, and they should know: big companies are never going to pay them on time. Keep cash in the bank.

Your comment about Apple's balance sheet is pretty silly.
The title of this article is really misleading - it's not that "It's Just So Darn Hard" it's that the teaching of science grinds everything that's interesting about science out of the curriculum. That's the point that everyone in the actual article makes.

>>
But as Mr. Moniz sat in his mechanics class in 2009, he realized he had already had enough. “I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering’s all about the application, which they really didn’t teach too well,” he says. “It was just like, ‘Do these practice problems, then you’re on your own.’ ”
>>

Engineers build things. So engineering education should have a heavy component of building things - that's what's exciting and motivating to engineering students. The theory should be in the service of the practice, and most classes get this completely backwards. So they lose students, and grump that kids don't want to work hard.
> the language implementation

No need to touch the language, it can be done on the fly by the editor.

It's already possible to do such things in Emacs, for instance: haskell-mode can be configured to replace `\` by `λ`, `>=` by `≥`, `.` (the function composition operator) by `∘`, etc…[0] in the visual display of the file (the underlying source keeps the original tokens).

Of course you could add these new characters in the language's definition itself as well, so the editor can perform direct source replacements.

[0] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_mode_for_Emacs#Us... for the list
Make a smart phone app that scans the bard codes from each item to populate the inventory. that way your users aren't faced with the task of having to manually enter each items description, a large barrier preventing usage.
This isn't very true for undergrad.
It’s not nonsensical, and neither is irregardless. People use them for a reason and they’re both incredibly heavily attested usages.

But this argument has already been had before in a million places, including on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853100. Specifically, see my comment about why it’s hard to say that could care less is incorrect: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=854042.
CIA following Twitter, Facebook
Beware of a Chrome extension called "Hacker News Sidebar", it presumably got me IP banned this week. It cross checks every page visited with HN to see if it has a thread and if so, displays the thread.

Here is the extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hhedbplnihmkekhgma...
WebGL: SandToy Particle Experiment
I don't want to be a hater, but how is this a blogpost(and on the front page of HN)? All of this is literally in Hubots readme.
I'm pretty sure you can elect for S Corporation treatment any time (I don't know if it costs more later on, I just know that we did it only within the last few years).
The Best New LinkedIn Feature in 2011 – Alumni Tool – I am lovin’ it
I must advocate reading James Hamilton's paper: On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services.

http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton...
This video was made by Firespotter labs, the same team that developed Nosh, before Oink was released (so no, nothing to do with each other).
Awesome. Extremely soothing. I usually don't let sites play audio but this one makes it worth it.
Nice article, but too bad you didn't bring up patent pledge: www.thepatentpledge.org
Take that to it's logical conclusion, and you should still be supporting IE5 for mac.
Orthography and lexical choice are two different issues. Spelling has to be standardized to facilitate written communication—word choice doesn’t because words inherently have semantic content.
They did invest quite some resources for that:

http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/c-at-google-here-be-dragons.htm...
Front-page with only 40 points after 2 hours. It doesn't seem like it'll stay there for very long, the HN algorithm just gives a lot of weight to early + fast risers.

And yeah, a Slippy sound-bite would have made it another level of awesome :D
"Time spent on the job must be accounted for in 15-minute increments, daily. Fail to do so, and you'll be docked $8.63"

Oh.
Autism Articles: Premature Babies Have Higher Risk Of Autism
I'll surely give it a try at least. Just curious, are there any other "remote collaborative UX" tools recommended by HNers?
Apple left long ago.

Google should have quit a long time ago when the CoC was revealed as nothing more than a corporate-welfare front group.
Vẻ đẹp Hạ Long ngày chớm thu
What's your favorite Google Easter egg?
Ask HN: Help me validate something?
Hey all,

I've been remaking (from scratch) a side project of mine for a few days after work, because I'm not happy with where it's at right now.

I'd like to show it to a few people and get some constructive feedback, mostly regarding the User Workflow. If you've got 5-10 minutes, I would really appreciate someone else's eyes looking at it.

If you are interested, please email me (c at cnnr dot me), just saying you'd like to give it a run through. The only requirement is you have a facebook account (it's only auth method right now is via fb - it won't post to your wall or anything at all & I'm not saving any of the data).

Thank you!
What in the world could BofA do?
Groupon Shares Skyrocket
This comment appears to be orthogonal to the discussion, which is rooted in a comment that says aggressive auto-follow (EAFP) is likely to outperform asking permission (LBYL).

Facebook is not an LBYL company, nor is Google, and Facebook and Google are crushing the social space.

What may be the case is that normal people are in fact delighted by the EAFP approach, and that the opinions of nerds are irrelevant.
Doesn't it concern you that Groupon works best for services that no one needs? I would say that in times of austerity, yoga, helicopter rides, health spas, parachuting, etc. are the first to go.
What bothers me more is that people have been powerless in helping Wikileaks with their struggle. There are people who want to donate to Wikileaks but are unable to do so in an easy manner because of the blockade. It's a really good demonstration of where power lies.
This is a fairly content free article which makes some highly speculative claims and hand waves a lot. Skip.
I'm glad to hear this. I often wonder what skills an MBA might have that someone with a strong engineering background can't learn on the job.
I hated hated hated math through to high school Pre-calculus. Algebra was a terror. I could get the concepts easily enough but I'd always make some mistake in the calculation.

Calc I and II in university were difficult but fun. There was a lot of problem solving and very little tedious calculation.

I switched from a chemistry major not because it was difficult but because it was tedious and uninteresting.

Not the classes. The lab.

And as an 18-year-old I thought the lab was simulating what my future career in chemistry would be like. And so I switched to a liberal arts major.
I got blocked two weeks ago when I was playing with creating a "realtime" view of comments so you didn't have to refresh the page. To test I had it polling one story every five seconds and I think I left it running overnight. (Sorry about that.)

Next day, no HN, so I spent the next week browsing HN on Firefox with a proxy setup through an EC2 instance. Thankfully, my IP changed or the ban is gone.

For what I was doing the HNSearch API wouldn't have helped, but if there was an API like the one at ihackernews.com that's running and live, that'd be great.
Gary Vaynerchuk's Inc 500 Keynote
I'm loving the documentation: http://us3.php.net/manual/en/yaf-loader.clearlocalnamespace....
Simultaneous cat and external keyboard input causing kernel panic
Wikileaks archives are distributed via BitTorrent. Do you mean that they don’t exclusively use BitTorrent?
UX implies usability as well as aesthetics. Any time spent worrying about the aesthetics of code is time not spent solving problems. In terms of usability, off the top of my head, two things that I find useful are:
1) Editors with syntax highlighting. I can't be bothered to worry about what typefaces or encoding it supports.
2) Languages that force a consistent approach to implementing a given task. I'd have to throw out Perl and its Tim Toady ethos.
When this Groupon offering sorts itself out (and it will), it will have a negative effect for Facebook and other IPOs in the pipeline.
How GoDaddy came back from the dead
Good point. Plus there’s something to be said for separating content from presentation, which seems to be a pervasive problem in programming languages, given all the petty arguments about formatting.
I agree. The problem I'm facing now is that I customized a lot of the CSS styles directly, but with the new ongoing updates, it's not going to be easy to merge them through.
So DataTreasury fixed the way check clearing works, apparently pioneering a new digital approach instead of mailing around checks; implemented it; raised money and created 100 jobs; but couldn't get the banks to work with them. The banks then took the idea and implemented it themselves, driving DataTreasury out of business.

Now their investors are getting some money back by licensing the patents to the banks, so they'll (hopefully) be willing to invest in innovative startups that have to work with incumbents again.

Next time a small innovative company comes along, the banks are (hopefully) going to think twice before just deciding that they can easily re-implement their ideas.

This doesn't seem to me like a particularly good example of the patent system gone wrong. To me, this looks like exactly what the patent system is supposed to be: protection for those with innovative concepts, so that they can have the opportunity to commercialize their inventions without incumbents simply cloning their hard work.
Ask HN: Best countries for international grad student to bootstrap a startup
I'm finishing my master's degree in bioinformatics from the UK now and would continue for a PhD in either CS/bioinfo afterwards. During the PhD, I would also like to try to slowly bootstrap an Internet startup idea that I have in mind (not related to bioinformatics). My question is, which country would allow me to do graduate study while working on bootstrapping the start-up at the same time? For the UK, at least, people on student visa are not allowed to work on their own business during the course of their study, which is why I'm thinking of leaving after the master's. I'd considered the US too but the multi-decades timeframe required to complete the grad study there is quite scary.

Also, my current citizenship is Indonesian, so I could encounter visa restrictions for working in many western countries. Regardless, I hope this questions might be of some relevancy to others who're in the same situation as me.

PS. The matter of finding a suitable advisor in that country can be considered to be outside the scope. Thanks!
The big changes Tim Cook is going to make are adding flash to iOS and Blu-Ray to Mac? Are you kidding me? Maybe 3 years ago those would have been big, but both platforms are now getting along just fine without them.
My undergrad took this to the extreme. Our lowest level math class was Calc 1 and to get into the class you had to either take Calc AB in High School or show up to school a couple months early and take it before Freshman year started. I knew people that would fail out of our engineering program and go to another and get a 4.0.

Me personally, I had to unlearn all the bad crap my Physics teacher in High School taught me. It took an entire semester to get back on track but was well worth the hard work.

You can see how much harder Engineering and the Sciences are, from my own experience I thought getting my MBA was a breeze compared to studying engineering. Nearly everyone else struggled and worked their asses off, they had zero preparation for all the math and logic problem you had to work through. The solution is to force EVERY major to take a few REAL math classes and REAL science course so people have a solid foundation.
For long times Chinese doesn't use much punctuation until like 20th century. May be that's why better marks are used instead.
I would invest long term in groupon over my own dead body. $13 BILLION valuation for a company that took in $900 million+ and dumped 90% to founders while heavily in the red? Yeah, seems like a great investment.
New Orleans Saints vs Tampa Bay Buccaneers live stream
New Orleans Saints vs Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Match schedule:
Week 9 NFL Regular season
Date: SUN, NOV 6 2011
TIME :1:00 PM (ET)
Venu: Mercedes-Benz Superdome
watch and enjoy New Orleans Saints vs Tampa Bay Buccaneers live
streaming and also watch NFL full season live streaming online here.
Years ago, I managed a VAX Cluster that was housed in the corner of an IBM mainframe-dominated computer room. The console consisted of a vt220 and an la36 print/terminal.

It used to crack me up to see the mainframe's console. Big iron always had a big presence.

Terminals for the tape drives, terminals for the printers, terminals for the batch jobs, terminals for everything.

Parked at the end of "terminal row," where the operators gathered and spent most of their time, was a "special" console terminal -- the one running Adventure. I'd walk in, they'd look up, then go back to "work."

Amid the drone of the fans, chillers and band printers you'd hear, "I think you have to put down the lantern before you pick up the keys." Tucked away somewhere behind the manuals was a hand drawn map on green-bar paper.
That declaration has an unchecked conversion which generates a compiler warning.

No, their are no lambdas in Java.