skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was an ICT teacher in the UK for 5 years. Our requirement is that we teach units to an accepted common standard.

http://www.teach-ict.com/contributors/Ritchie_King/gcseproje...

Is an example of one marking scheme that I found (on a quick search).

See page 7 and notice that the requirement is that the student "identify" on a scale of 5 marks

- A clear statement of the problem, giving some background detail and identifying user(s)

- Consideration of possible alternative solutions with
adequate justification given for the chosen method

- Quantitative objectives or user requirement

Now if a student just goes out and makes a mobile app that doesn't cover any of the requirements so for the above section I'd have been forced to give a 0.

The UK school system has a number of very deep, systematic problems that are preventing it from delivering a good education in IT.

It's a shame, it's frustrating and it's not going to change any time soon.
Hacks and hackers gather to write the first Data Journalism Handbook
We're getting a little into the realm of the absurd when asking for auditable metrics about expenditure of anything called awesome points, but my subjective experience is that my life, my output, and my impact on the world went way up when I spent less effort on one or two big timesucks that just profoundly did not matter.
I don't know of anyone providing a working engine for $250 at this time - you can find desktop models that run off of coffee cups but don't do real work. The industrial models cost in the tens of thousands. Give the Volo a shot - we hope to have it completed by spring.
Mummies!
Ask HN: Why do big companies tend to only build with Java?
I want to understand one thing at major companies: Why Java?

Is this a company investment thing, they're in bed with IBM?
Is it a mentallity thing?
Is it a compiled language thing?
Is it a security thing?

It's certainly not a speed thing. Every team I have had experience with working with on a Java platform has taken ages to deliver anything. CMSs that I could build rapidly with the likes of PHP/MySQL take months/years to get off the ground. Change is slow.

Believe me, I have zero experience of working with Java, but I need to understand why they do it. Have you experienced rapid development teams using Java?
Designers, ask your client 'why' five times
Admin: Please delete my post. I don't see a link to do so on my mobile.
I had experiences like this too - and I think it's not that the teachers expect 'drone students' as much as they are drone teachers themselves, lacking in either a deep understanding of the subject they teach or any real motivating interest to examine submitted work on its own merits. Your teacher just went for the textbook approach here.
And here's a PowerShell version. (Use PowerShell ISE as PowerShell normal prompt doesn't support unicode).

http://pastie.org/2867807

[edit: updated, careless variable rename, thanks jcromartie]
Okay, that makes more sense. Google did try and play ball for a little while...
The two publications were reviewing different things, if you slightly expand the Engadget quote:

"...the Fire never delivers smooth, seamless performance. While Amazon's own carousel of recently used items is slick and smooth, we had inconsistent results with APKs we sideloaded on here. Amazon's own media players work well, but third party ones that offered better compatibility with file formats universally did not. That said, 2D games like the omnipresent Angry Birds ran without issue, and simple 3D games like Fruit Ninja had no problems either."
The Manhattan Grid extended to every point on Earth
Computers are to specs as wine is to specify gravity. Someone cares, but it probably isn't you.
Related to this, I'm a PhD student from INRIA[1] and as part of my research on social communities I launched at the beginning of the year an experiment called Fellows[2] on Facebook doing more or less the same thing as Katango. Except that Fellows was not an iphone app but a web experiment which aim was validate a new quantification of social cohesion I have introduced (the results were presented in a peer reviewed conference, the final manuscript is on arxiv [3]).

I have been wondering about the difference of media treatment Katango and Fellows received. I tried everything imaginable at the time (pitching large blogs, sending emails, asking friends if they knew someone I could talk to, etc.) and wasn't able to get that much press, whereas when Katango launched they were much more covered.

I'm not complaining, we managed to have ~2500 participants which was enough to validate our model, but I'm still wondering why in one case the story got picked up and in the second case not. Is it because they're a startup and I'm a student ? Is it a question of USA vs. France ? Could it be because I lack the good connections to get introductions to media ?

Sorry for hijacking this thread, but I'd really appreciate insight on what they did right/I did wrong.

Thanks !

1: http://www.inria.fr/en/

2: http://fellows-exp.com/

3: http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.3231
I've had my project graded one mark lower (even thought it was more cool and had more features than projects other people submited), because there was no documentation, and no easy way to install it.

Now I think I should go and give flowers to that teacher :)
Could you link to some more info about this? I'm interested.
indeed, or pypi, or PEAR, and I'm sure ruby has something similar too
Depends on what you're interested in. I was once subscribed (Opera's RSS client, just for the record) to feeds with a high content volume (Ars Technica, space.com), which is basically unmanageable because it leads to thousands of unread messages.

I scrapped those feeds and kept the ones that post new content rarely enough for me to forget about them but care for enough to want to know immediately when this happens.
Profile of some Australian Venture Capital Firms
Many excellent sites publish new stuff very rarely. RSS is the best way to follow those sites.
If javascript being off makes your site not work, or not viewable at least, then that's the very definition of not being accessible (i'm not limiting 'accessible' to only mean 'available to people with disabilities' like you appear to be)

Edit: Graceful degradation should be a tenet of web development. Having no provision for a person who doesn't have javascript enabled seems bizarre to me, and being bullish about the requirement seems even more bizarre...maybe i'm just getting cranky with age or something.
Maybe I didn't get something about this static blog generating trend thing, but what would be wrong about having a 'normal' database-backed blog software that simply renders the pages staticly to a file (as it is an option with Rails caching) ? That would work with some simple inexpensive DB like SQLite, but still leave the system flexible and easy to edit with a backend.
Indeed. ICT teachers have a curriculum to stick to, whether they like it or not. If that curriculum, dictated by everyone from the head of department to the local authority, says "create a crappy powerpoint app" and the student doesn't do that, then he's failed.

I remember the painful discussion I had with my lecturer at college regarding the website module on my AVCE ICT course (college level; 16-18). I had a choice: I could create a website putting everything I knew about semantics and accessibility etc into it, using valid HTML & CSS etc etc etc... or I could pass the course (using Frontpage + frames).

It's a shit system (I've seen it both sides of the fence - student and IT support) but getting teachers to the level of your average HN user just for the sake of 1 in every few hundred students is a waste of their time.
You need specs to handle the churn of incoming and outgoing data, multitask your apps, draw the local part of games, etc etc. Even devices that amount to mere terminals, are not dumb terminals.
Regarding your use of Markdown, I had a similar experience.

I've had Markdown on my WordPress install for many years, but only recently decided to commit to learning the main commands off by heart, and use it whenever possible. Markdown's not perfect, but committing to it has sped up writing a lot.
Best Products Of 2011
A little offtopic: where do you plan to deploy it? I plan do deploy my app to a servlet container.
http://www.idlewords.com/2009/09/using_wordpress_to_generate...
* I have no such qualms believing a version where a 16 year old who thinks he's God's gift to mankind (hey, I was one of those) puts something together that doesn't fit the requirements of the project, submits it despite being repeatedly being steered in a different direction, comes up with unrealistic readings and interpretations of the assignment or context of the class to get them to fit his world view*

I can well believe that could have happened.

But this is inconsistant with the stated goals of most teachers, teaching groups, schools and state education policies. Most of this think that the school system, and teachers, should not be there to produce rote automatons who can only answer the given question. They claim they want to encourage independent thought, and thinking, and creativity.

If a student does well better than their peers, but it doesn't fit exactly what the assignment calls for then they should get an A for demonstrating their talent, and the system should be fixed.
I think a good strategy to insulate yourself from .NET is to slowly move your .NET code into RESTful services and isolate the dependencies there.

The one big downside is that most of the alternatives are designed to work better with Unix based systems. That's usually a much bigger pill to swallow for an all Windows .NET shop so YMMV with pushing that.

I know a shop trying to do Node.JS on IIS so that may be an option worth looking into to see if it works. YMMV here too, because it's really bleeding edge right now.
Have someone else proof read the document first, and have them actually send you what they found so you can fix it (and learn from it). Even if you are writing in your native language, a second set of eyes makes a tremendous difference.
For high traffic sites, RSS is pretty unusable (mostly because the state of the art in clients seems to be fixated on read/unread counts. Feed a Fever looked interesting http://feedafever.com/ but never really seemed to take off) but there are always going to be never-want-to-miss sites.

I have a collection of blogs and sites where I want to read every thing that person says. There are many people that post infrequently, post extremely insightful commentary and yet don't show up in my social media feeds.
Huawei acquires remainder of Symantec shares for $530M
Worse than that, difficult courses have much lower pass rates and scores. Teaching them is risking your standing on the league tables. It also precludes your ability to teach the 4 credit GCSE in ICT which (at my last school) got a 100% pass rate.

If you funnel every kid in your school through a course on which 100% of them get 4 GCSE credits and target measure on the league tables is percentage of students who get 5 GCSEs, then you're going to do it. Remember, funding, promotions and everything else is based on your standing on the league tables.

No. Actually Teaching programming in your computer classes is a recipe for failure.
http://rubygems.org/gems 2005 gems listed at the moment.
Top Christmas Gifts
I typically don't but I have used http://winpdb.org/ in the past.
Firefox 9 beta çıktı Deneyin
That's how movable type, the predecessor to wordpress works. It's written in perl.
haha ironic that it's crashing now eh? That's the one upside of Jekyll for sure. I was hosting the site on 512MB of ram. Just did a resize to handle the HN traffic, hopefully it comes back online soon.

Hakyll looks pretty slick. I'll check it out for sure. Thanks
Hmm let's see.

"Perl Programmers love their language."
Sadly not true enough for many languages. Does PHP programmers love their language like Perl programmers do for example? Somehow I doubt it.

"True Freedom"
Perl is free and open source and most code is too. How does that compare to Java or the microsoft stack?

"Great Community"
There are a lot of great communities surrounding most languages to be sure, but it's a stretch to say that any (every) language has it.

"CPAN"
How would this apply to any language? There's simply nothing near CPAN anywhere. Ruby has gems and Haskell has hackage, but they aren't comparable to CPAN in size or breadth.

"Awesome Third Party Support"
Is a language simply the syntax and the standard library or could the freely available libraries and tools be counted too? In that case Perl stands out as well, there's just so much of it. Can C or Java rival it? Sure, maybe, but most others won't even come close.

"Jobs"
I wouldn't say that Perl has the highest job count out there, but compare it to Scala, Haskell, Go, Rust and many other and it's probably easier to get hired.

I like Perl, it's a fun language to use, but I'm not the biggest Perl advocate in the world. But it does do pretty good in the above points and to say it's a checklist that can be applied to any language is just untrue.

If there are good or bad points that's a whole other topic. I think they are pretty good points, and we must remember that this is an explanation of why they personally are using Perl. Find another language which does better on these points if you can, cause I can't think of any.
The goal of the project is to spark infrastructure independent energy solutions - the stirling engine is flexible enough to run off of any type of heat (gas, wood, solar, etc). Stirlings can be very efficient, but, on top of that you're eliminating the transmission loss. You'd need both, some type of alternator, and some type of heat capacitor (fire box) to get the steady feed your talking about, but the first step is to complete the engine development.
EveryThing You Ever Wanted
I had the same experience on the book vs lecture question. I first read Kochan's Objective-C book, and then started the Big Nerd Ranch iOS programming book. But I never really grokked core concepts, like MVC, that I easily grasped watching Hegerty's lectures.
Google Docs Viewer: http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fozlabs.org%2Fd...
Show HN: "Web App Success" is published today (w/ case study of patio11's BCC)
This is pretty cool. Unfortunately it's coupled with some of the more obnoxious documentation I have seen recently. While the docs aren't very long, I had to read through a third of it to figure out simply what Spark is.

I'm all for being cute, but it shouldn't come at the cost of a basic understanding of what the program actually does and is useful for.
Ask HN: Suggestion on which framework to use
I am planning to write an app which should run on iOS, Android and also on a web browser.
The app needs to use camera as well as GPS.
I also want the app to be available from appstores.
I understand that I need to use HTML5 and other mobile web technologies. IS there some framework that can make writing such an app easier, preferably, having only a single codebase.
ICT in UK schools, or England in particular is a bit of a joke (Especially at GCSE or A level) It was all about Frontpage and Access as well as Flash :/

It would be much better if they taught basic programming. C, Java etc. Or even focussed on web developed in PHP, as well as the front-end side of things HTML/CSS/jQuery (And teach them about semantics and accessibility! not table based rubbish generated in Dreamweaver)

As well as getting people used to using an IDE rather than Dreamweaver. I think if they focused it more towards Comp sci, and less about making slideshows it would encourage alot more people to experience, and maybe create something awesome.

At the time I thought all you need to do to become an IT teacher was be proficient in Office :P
> If God exists then God has powers that make Him imperceptible; if God doesn't exist then He's imperceptible. You can't tell the difference.

This is the omnipotence paradox[1]. I often help friends and relatives understand why my religion (or lack thereof, actually) is `Tooth Fairy Agnosticism' by asking them whether or not God can create a stone that He can't lift.

> Better to live a life of good deeds and actions then worry about what's next.

I agree. This is how I try to live my life, but it's hard to stop worrying when you have severe thanatophobia[2] like I do.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnipotence_paradox

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanatophobia
I'm looking for a ruthless non-technical cofounder - American only.
I'm looking for a ruthless non-technical cofounder - American only.
Basically, I got this idea, and now a beta. I need a ruthless douchebag MBA. (Consider the word douchebag as payback for people calling us "techies")
Jokes aside. I need you to pitch stuff to retailers, cafés, restaurants and etc.
And at the some time do some actual work on your end.
I'm also only looking for people in the US because of https://stripe.com/ - needless to say I'd avoid using Paypal if I can.

I could use In-App purchases, but not ready to give up a 30% cut when we won't be so profitable at the start. Though we are not losing any money (unless paying Apple the 30%) Also funding is not necessary.

I got the backend done and the iOS client.

Gimme a ping.
Good comment!

We need vendors who want to sell their items on our platform. And then accept payment digitally. Pretty much the most I feel like saying now. It's not that I am fearful and my billion dollar idea (hah!) is such a secret that barely I know about it. It's just that I'd like to say more to people who are sick of their jobs as consultant (moi) and want to move into a more product based work. A startup.

Ps. Not looking for product people, designers that only do photo shop or product people with photoshop skills.
Also this post is actually serious, I am looking for a US based sales person so I can use Stripe in my app. And you can do your part... part-time for now.
Ds
New Study Shows Majority Of Americans Against SOPA
Well I was aware of the IIS node.js plug-in. I am really interested in node.js as well.

It may be worth like you say putting it into a service that we could consume from many languages and taking it from there. Our main issue really is our admin as it relies quite heavy ContentPlaceholders as we populate them on runtime but I am more interested right now in trying new technologies
If think Society is changing and we have to change radicaly to not end up in big social troubles (class wars ...).

-------------------------------------------------

(Im talk about a system for Switzerland)

I propose a "basic income" no strings attached (Everybody gets X$ per month and all wages are reduced by X$ is the short version of how it works) with this we replace all the diffrent social systems we have nowdays (money for kids, unemployment, AHV (money for the retired ...).

This will liberate people in the sence that they don't have to hang on to there jobs even if they are badly treated, they wont be social outcasts if they dont have a job.

instead give them insentives to improve there education (and thereby you could then get a job in a high tec economy), to be more entrepreneurial (find out what people really need and trie to provid it).

A more importend example for the people here is app marked development. App marked made it possible to start a project in a small team and make money relativly fast. The insentive to trie something like this is much greater and you can't fall that far.

It may not be the best model in pure economic groth terms but I hope it is a good model for a sustainable healthy society in a world where it is very hard to have full employment (because the economy changes to fast).
If the original hash function is f(x), are there reasons the "second" hash function shouldn't be (f(x)+1)mod n (n being the number of hash slots)? I'm sure that some distribution of x would generate pathological behavior, but my question is whether it breaks the reasoning about the probabilities.

I'm trying to convince myself that a "second" hash function might be a reasonable cost even for modest n (e.g., when, as in perl, you use hashes to hold the attributes of an object, and the number of attributes will rarely exceed 50).
What kind of multimedia project is that? Wouldn't a teacher be more specific about what to implement and what tools to use? That story sounds kind of silly...
One of the main points that caught my eye while reading this was the fact that the author mentioned that Perl programmers love their language.

As a Perl hacker, I couldn't agree more, and that's the main point I guess. Sure, CPAN is awesome (there is even a module for controlling USB rocket launchers - http://search.cpan.org/~pen/Device-USB-MissileLauncher-Rocke...) and everything is open source, but the thing I love most about Perl is the fact that thought is translated into code very quickly and naturally. Something just clicks and feels right.

I suppose that's why despite being fluent in several languages, I always come back to it.
It's really as easy as creating a HIT(? been a while but I think that's what they're called) that says "Beta test this website/app/game" for $0.05. You will probably get a lot of feedback that you didn't expect, even if you don't ask for it.

You can get more sophisticated if you want, but that's all I did. I ended up getting around 4000 seed users for a Facebook app I built in '08 this way.
This would be perfect, but in practice, even in my native language, it isn't easy to ask someone else proof read, it takes time and it's never easy to ask someone else time. But I agreed that is a perfect solution.
W3C privacy workgroup issues first draft of Do Not Track standard
Great post and most of these steps are really helpful.

The only thing I'm not too sure about is step 11, discouraging of IDEs. I do agree with your point that one should not depend on a IDE. However, IDEs can give you autocompletion, easy refactoring, finding references etcetera. Personally, I find some of these features invaluable.
Java: JSP, GWT, SmartGWT, Play!
Ruby: Rails, Sinatra
Clojure: Compojure, sometimes with Noir + Compojure
Common Lisp: portable aserve with Dojo

I would suggest using any non-proprietary framework and language you feel comfortable with. As a consultant, I choose whatever my customer wants, and for my own projects I choose languages and frameworks that I most enjoy using.
Wing IDE Pro gives you an excellent debug environment (the best I have seen)...
The new gmail icons confuse me
LivingSocial Launches Food Delivery Called Room Service
There are two sides to that story. There's quite a bit going on that has been left out. England's school system really doesn't work in a way that teachers can just hand out whatever grade a student "deserves".

The kid was handed a syllabus, a marking scheme and told "if you do this you'll get an A". He threw out the mark scheme and did his own thing.

He then tried to get an A for doing whatever the hell he wanted.

I applaud him for pursuing his own interests and taking charge of his own learning - I really do - but the system doesn't allow for that.

You don't hand in creative writing and expect to get a math credit. You don't hand in physics to your chemistry teacher.

I wish the system in England were different. Maybe I'd still be teaching there if it were, but you're casting a lot of aspersion and judgement on a subject that you don't seem to know much about.
Perl was the first language I loved, and I'll always love it, but I'm sticking with ruby. No more my $self = shift