skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the most part, I think the point of school - elementary through college - is to learn how to learn. Yes, we try to teach students things that will be useful in their careers but I think it's more important to teach students things that are hard. It is the process of learning to internalize difficult concepts that makes you 'college ready'.

If you don't use that knowledge for your profession, then yes you will forget it. However, if you don't use it for your profession, it doesn't mean learning it was useless. I would be more worried if he still sucked at math after preparing for the test for a semester or two.

I have a degree in Chemistry and yes, that knowledge is slowly slipping out of my mind. However, the skills I learned while learning chemistry - logical thinking, ability to memorize and recall, building a mental model of abstract concepts - these stay with me.
Why is Indian govt afraid of its own citizens words?
I just don't believe this. Companies are just not willing to pay for it. I can easily get a 50% increase in pay as a developer. If they really had a hard time hiring designers they would give salaries comparable to developers.

Personally I am giving up on design. I will still be doing design, but for personal enjoyment. My next job will most likely be a full-time development position.
Part of the reason is also that Mike Pall is actually a hyper-advanced cyborg from the future.

In case you're not sure what I'm talking about, read through the LuaJIT source code at some point. It's a thing of beauty - he's handcrafted assembly to make everything run as fast as possible, on all of x86, x64, PowerPC and now ARM.
I can understand doing badly at the math portions, but the reading portions? Presumably he needs to be reading and comprehending what he's reading in his day to day job responsibilities.

Why can I understand the math difficulties? Well, I too forget stuff that I don't use very often. I'd have to go look up the all the trig identities if I needed them. But, I wouldn't take this test blind without any refresher.

The advantage "kids" have when they take these standardized tests is that it's very close to fresh in their minds, or at least relatively fresh. That has to count for something.
I want to +10 this. I get asked for advice/my feedback on lots of local startups and turn them down often because of the inconvenience to me. I'd go to a free lunch though most of the time.
What's the difference? Remainder vs Modulus - Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Show HN: VanityPageMaker - Easiest way to create your own personal brand page
Using passwords as single factor of authentication is complicated, inefficient, insecure; and for corporations, they are also expensive because of all the calls to the helpdesk they generate.

A solution for you is using an OTP (one-time password) as a 2nd factor of authentication. Since your authentication is a lot more secure with an OTP, you probably don't need to use such complex passwords anymore.

For example, you can enable the 2-factor authentication with OTP with Google and Bank Of America. With Google, you can either request an OTP by SMS when you are authenticating and/or provision the Google Authenticator mobile application which will generate OTPs for you. For Bank Of America, you can also get OTPs by SMS. They also provide an OTP card called the SafePass card (http://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/cf/safepass_card_popup....) to generate the OTPs.

"Speaking of usernames, i've run into more than one bank that requires a digit in your username. A digit. In. Your. Username." --> It cost me so much trouble with my BOA online account! I found out I could actually change my username and it made things a lot easier!
Original URL does not work at this moment.

cache:zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die/read/nexus/
Is that better or worse?
Agreed. I'm taking the online Stanford AI-class at the moment, and it's been half my lifetime since I used some of the necessary skills. Even just re-arranging a formula is slow going for me at the moment. But I am improving.
Well, when a piece of software is sluggish and crash prone, I think it's fair to consider it "bad software". Is that really such a controversial position to take?

If Chrome goes down the same path as Firefox, I'll happily trash it as well.

I'd rather be honest about a the quality of a piece of software instead of sitting around and making excuses for it.
Gasoline differs.

Specifically, the regional gasoline blends differ, and incompatibly.

Some papers on this topic:

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/emuehle/Research%20WP/Gasoline...

http://cbey.research.yale.edu/uploads/File/muehlegger_23.pdf
Your Website's Content is Not Set in Stone
I may be in the minority here, but I've received more than a few of these emails (people offering to buy me lunch to discuss an idea) and I always turn them down. Here are my reasons:

1) I typically go to lunch with my friends/coworkers and talk about projects we're working on together, and usually we come up with some deeper insight than we have together in meetings. I'd miss this.

2) My lunch time is my personal time during the day where I unwind from the morning's activities and take a break. If my brain has to "be on" for a deep conversation, I wouldn't get much of a break and might a) get tired, b) get sloppy, c) lose motivation later in the day.

3) Lunch is what, $20 tops? Closer to $10? My time is worth more than $10-20 for an hour's worth of conversation about someone's project. Say I have some interesting idea/insight/solution and we talk about it, and that idea/insight/solution ends up being really important to them. I ended up getting free lunch, they could end up making a bunch of money. The scales are not even.

I'm fully aware that other people (maybe most people?) would be excited about getting free lunch, so maybe I'm an outlier, but I thought I'd drop my two cents in.
It depends on where you live.
Designers in New York make as much as the developer.
Especially if you can actually do a bit of the technical stuff yourself.

Front end designer/programmer hybrids are very highly paid.
Likewise with iOS.

Having a design background can be a more flexible career as you can go work in fashion/media/publishing. It's also a lot easier to pick up contract work with definite endpoints.
Why is this marked down? I literally laughed out loud when I read this. I come to HN for Tech, but a little humor is OK
That is exactly what I was thinking! I don't care if the simple arithmetic isn't necessary in one's profession (if it's 10th grade, I'd guess that it's either Algebra 2 or Trigonometry/Pre-calc), it's still shocking to know that someone who has a B.S. degree doesn't know it.

The test-taker seems to be making excuses.
I'm surprised.
For as long as I can remember, disposing of any battery was only allowed in special places/bins. Batteries never belonged into the trash for me.

And .. quote:

"The act does not cover batteries or battery packs weighing 24 pounds or more; batteries used as the principal power source for cars, boats, trucks, tractors, golf carts, wheelchairs or other vehicles; batteries used to store electricity from solar or wind-driven generators; or batteries that provide backup power an an essential part of an electronic device."

Doesn't this basically make this one giant mess, defeating the good intention? So any normal battery, any rechargeable battery that you loaded from a solar panel, the real messy big ones etc. - are still unrestricted?
Hilarious.
More discouraging Playstation Vita details revealed
Ugh. I had a problem getting onto it randomly this morning. It's a static site served off of S3 so its not a traffic issue, but I probably messed up the domain setup somehow.
I'm the business co-founder at MakeLeaps in Japan. As a way to scratch my own itch for a simple online profile page, I wrote a spec, registered a domain, and project managed the creation of VanityPageMaker.

I considered using http://about.me, but somehow I prefer a simple HTML site that I can control, edit and host myself.

This kind of site is well within the talents of my co-founder Paul, but I opted to hire and manage freelancers so Paul could continue focusing on managing our small technical team building our invoicing platform for businesses in Japan.

Basic Tech Specs: Ruby on Rails + MySQL database + Nginx proxing to Unicorn workers, hosted on Rackspace Cloud Server.

This is very much a version 1.0, but all comments and feedback are appreciated. I'm in the process of writing a blog post on how I designed and built VPM as a non-technical co-founder and without writing a line of code.

For some sample profiles, please check the 3 featured profiles on the main page.
If I remove all mention of chrome from your post, it's still wrong. Millions of people have no problems with Firefox. If you are having problems, it is either an isolated bug or you screwed something up. Either way, it's not an indication of the overall quality of Firefox.
Let 'hacker' stay here, David Blunkett urges America
Tech IPOs start with a strong pop, and then promptly tank
Understanding email routing (i.e. MX-records)
This is once again caused by education inflation. It's easier for the HR department to compare formal education than to really look at the applicant. So Master's degree wins over Bachelor's wins over solid vocational training and society carries the cost.
This is an interesting concept. Once upon a time, there was big money to be made in a similar service for credit cards. You'd register your cards with this company and pay them an annual fee (usually around $20). If your wallet or cards were stolen, you could call their number and they'd call to freeze all your cards. The business was a bit scammy for a few reasons: the way they marketed being a key one; most CC companies won't/can't hold the card holder responsible for fraud anyway because of consumer protection laws, so the service was largely unnecessary. There was a lot of drama in that market at one point. Some light reading can be found here: http://www.google.com/search?q=safecard+services

So back to your service. I think there's real value here. I'm security concious. I use a password manager (1Password) and make full use of its features. I use a strong master password, but I still fear the day my laptop or iPhone are stolen. I worry that they'll find an exploit or some means to get to my password data, at which point I'm screwed. I would like to have the ability to lock down my most sensitive accounts in the event of a security breech.

The primary friction revolves around trust. In order to reset my passwords, you'd need my account info. That means my data would be in yet another centralized location. This is bad practice. My password manager is a necessary evil. Your service would be another necessary evil. I'm not sure how you'll get past that.
Link to the tests? Because really, I don't want to say anything before seeing the test.
Recently my laptop was stolen and I needed to immediately lock down all my online accounts, since I had to assume they were all compromised. It was a very stressful and time consuming task, and I even forgot about a few.

The service you describe is exactly what I've been looking for ever since, but the big problem is establishing trust. Being a for-money service would increase that trust for me.
In NYC, they hire people to do the sorting at the dump site. Or, at least that's what I've been lead to believe. It's unclear how or what to recycle (Living in Brooklyn for the last 13 years).

I've been in Vietnam for the last month, and the guys sort it on the back of the truck, at least in Ho Chi Minh City. Like they literally tear the bags open and sort all of it. Knowing what they pay developers here, I can't imagine what those guys are making.
I always thought it was done this way to avoid attacks such as XSS, SQL injection and so on. Free text fields are hard to validate and the authentication is usually a very sensitive feature! It seems to be the easy way to be safe (from the developer point of view).
Do you have an updated answer to bermanoid's question about the nursing community?
Do you have any examples of hue multinational companies that allow programmers to insert Easter eggs? I can't think of a single business software vendor that has Easter eggs anymore. Even MS has stopped doing it.

I do all my work in big companies and they have all been universally against humorous test data, humorous naming conventions, or an sort of Easter egg.

Cite?
Evidence from the US would suggest that it's better than the other alternative of paying them more. (Equality is too thin a target to realistically hit.) Especially in the form of generous pension promises that can't possibly be kept.
AMD and IBM stock inside trader to begin jail sentence today
Would pay even more for a service that can be used to periodically change my passwords on all sites (not only in emergency).
What math did you learn in high school that you believe is so worthless? My school taught algebra, trig, and calculus. Some of these are useful for everyday life and some are useful for academia.
CentOS 6 Basic Install
Why A Social Media Package Is Crucial For Your Business
There is a cultural angle to this - Indian politicians (and even lots of jingoistic citizens) take insults to their honour/culture waaaay too seriously. That, and they're troglodytes who don't understand the Internet.
Looking into the device they're talking about here: http://www.cymascope.com/

Seems like a pretty cranky group unfortunately. (in the sense of astrology, physics cranks, etc.) :(

I'm thinking they may have just found a roundabout way of visualizing echolocation response rather than visualizing dolphin-dolphin communication as images. Guessing on the bits I've gathered from the various articles linked, it sounds like what they did was something like:

- have a dolphin ping various objects with echolocation and record the response
- play back the response for different dolphins and reward the dolphins with fish if they retrieve the object that matches the recording
- see how good the dolphins are figuring out the mapping from sounds to objects (pretty good)

That's just my guess of what they did; as I said, it's not clear. (If that's actually what they did, that doesn't really indicate language capability, although it's still interesting.) Hopefully they clarify what their methodology was.
From horrible providers, yes. The big three legacy operators in Canada charge 15 or 20 cents per unless you're specifically on a plan that includes a larger allowance.

It's easy to negotiate to get them for free when you have any amount of leverage on the provider, but out of the box you pay.
Mark Suster's advice is directly contrary to this - he says to NEVER ask a busy person to lunch, since that's a large chunk of wasted (and in my experience, if the conversation isn't well, essentially captive) time.

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/10/13/never-ask-a-bu...

Where they crossover, obviously, is emphasizing making a request that considers the other person's schedule and needs when you are asking for something.
"paved with death" indeed. I want to see a U.S. deaths due to terrorist attacks map plot to see how sparse that would be by comparison - 911 excepted.
All of the examples that I tried reached steady state extremely quickly. 2D game of life can often go for quite a while before reaching steady state.

I do not know if this is because the rule used for 3D isn't very good, or if this is a problem with all rules for 3D games like this. It is actually very hard to find good rules that don't just explode or die off or reach steady state quickly.

Searching for "better rules of life" was a project of mine a while back, and I looked at all possible rules for 2D that are of the same format as the standard except using 5x5, and although I did find some that had better stats for not reaching steady state/exploding/etc, none had that "character" of conway's game of life of unpredictability, it really is a remarkable game.
From the submitted article: "A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do."

Oh, well, that's the problem. He is on a public school school board. School boards have been known to have adverse selection for dullness for more than a century. Here is Mark Twain's harsh comment on that: "In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards." -- Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1903) 2:295

Other than that, the author of the submitted article simply describes the school board member as a "success" who makes money. The genius of the American political and economic system is that people who desire money more than they desire deep understanding can often achieve that goal. America is a wealthy country, and by world standards a lot of Americans are more successful than what you would expect if you look at the success of people in developing countries who know more and who work harder.

The submitted article is by a guest author, but it is part of a regular column series in the Washington Post that takes the consistent line that criticisms of the United States school system for inefficiency and waste of resources are misplaced. As an American who has lived overseas, spending the first part of the 1980s in a developing country, I can't agree with that party line. United States schools could do a LOT better, particularly in teaching mathematics in elementary school,

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

and while it may be that many current United States standardized tests in core subjects have poor validity (being designed by state governments more for political than for educational purposes), the answer is NOT to throw away reality checks on how the school system is doing. Rather, the answer is to align reality checks on United States schools more closely with testing programs that identify the most successful countries,

http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf

and to look to the practices of the most successful countries for policy guidance on how to reform United States schools.

http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf

It is still possible for United States school to improve a lot simply by bringing in better management practices,

http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads...

and efforts to improve United States education shouldn't be sidetracked by a single anecdote about the occasional well-off school board member who has limited academic ability.
Ask HN: How do you market your mobile application?
I've released an Advance android News Reader (Pro and free version) and am trying to get the word out, can you share your experience on an effective way to market mobile apps, or if you have any apps, how do you market them? So far I've tried pitching some android Blogs and started a facebook ad campaign.

P.S. The apps are: Fre Full text sparse rss: http://goo.gl/ZnlLK and Sparse RSS Pro
Start-Up Slader Looks to Solve the Math Homework Problem
Read the linked PDF. Schools teach calculation, not mathematics. Some of the calculations occasionally manage to be useful, but if you developed a mathematically mature mind it sure didn't come from your schooling.

If you did not take multiple classes that consisted almost entirely of writing many proofs per week, you never took mathematics. If all you did was problems 6-32 evens due next Tuesday, that's not math.
Keyboard.js
Why business blogging is different from personal blogs
Watch WE
watch WE
The Announcement Bureau of Nigeria NAN was founded on May 10 1976.
keepasss is a better solution; it does the same auto-entry thing, but stages part of your password through the clipboard and part through direct keyboard entry. Works everywhere (even on mac and linux) and is far more usable.
Absolutely. I knew there some something with an opposite angle and a hypotenuse, and it only took me a minute or two. If I had never known it, there's no way I could have done that so quickly.
Nice job. Great topic, well-written (so far), and very nice looking typography and design.
Translation Memory
The Business Sale Report launches interactive map of distressed businesses
I think the difference with large batteries is that battery recycling is already fairly prevalent and covered by existing statutes (core charges, etc). I doubt many people would toss a Prius battery in the trash without thinking.

I still don't think this is a good law, though. I don't expect this to have a material impact on battery recycling.
Possibly I missed it, but is there somewhere we can see the test itself? It seems almost silly to try and discuss the pros and cons of testing, or of this gentleman's position in society, without seeing the exam.
A product I created recently launched to help people do exactly this... fitbolt.com
What I found weird about Lockhart's lament is that my music theory classes were pretty much like the "nightmare" he describes in the intro. I didn't really consider them such a nightmare, so I never read the rest of the essay.
Using Mechanical Turk to write a short story
People frequently choose #1 half way through #2.
Exactly. I'm sorry but the whole article is full of . How is it the Top submission on HN right now...
I believe Microsoft is still a member of the BSA.
i especially like the part where it says. "The only copy of this online seems to be in the ACM archive, which is subscription only."
it's a step in the right direction but why isn't there an API ? seriously
The trick is that they've observed the dolphins doing the same thing. We've just demonstrated that they can coherently transfer nouns. That's a big deal.
Here is a question for everyone who agrees with this editorial:

Suppose that this man is correct - that the material being taught/tested is useless and unnecessary for a successful career. In that case, shouldn't we stop teaching it, remove the material from the curriculum, allow students to graduate a year or two earlier and fire a bunch of useless teachers?

If not, why not?
Grow It: How To Grow Afro-Textured Hair To Maximum Lengths In The Shortest Time
It's Not A Vacation
Every single one of us are going to die at some point. If you were a doctor and your goal is to "find cures for everything" then your eventual success rate over your career would be 0. Do you realize how hard it would be to do that for your entire career if you approached it thinking you could beat cancer?

You don't say in your post if your relatives were practitioners or research doctors, but if you're putting it on a practitioner to think they can beat the (studied) odds every day it is unfair in the least.

We are greatly indebted to the people who choose careers this stressful that benefit everyone else. You don't need to blame them for the current state of medical science. Trust me, they do it to themselves more than enough.
Nerdy industrial designs from the 60's and 70's
I was baffled by Heroku's $20/month fee for SSL until I found out that SSL on EC2 means you have to have a dedicated Elastic Load Balancer for each domain.
Billboards that come to life (Minority Report is here)
Tom Cruise would be proud
How about "latent" knowledge?

I try to quickly learn about every concept I come across to the point that I understand when and why you would want to use it, but not the point that I understand how to implement it. When I encounter a problem that fits the concept, then I can look it up and learn how to do it fully.

I don't know, I feel it has served me well anyway. I like to jump on problems in all kinds of industries, so it is impossible to study everything ahead of time.
Firefox main window heatmap
The End of Social