skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can someone who actually knows tell us what kinds of math questions were on the test? It's hard to come to any conclusions without any details, and the article didn't seem to include any pointers to the test itself.

My personal axe to grind is that number theory and basic finance, rather than calculus, should be taught to teenagers.

And in my own US public schooling, I found the teachers completely unable to provide any intuition whatsoever behind calculus. It wasn't until two decades later, when I was studying computational finance for fun, that I actually really understood integration as something other than symbol manipulation. Seriously, this whole "teach to the test" mentality may get kids to answer correctly by rote over the short term, but doesn't help them to learn much in the long run -- at least if they're intuitive learners.
I don't think that's the right conclusion. The correct conclusion is, I think: What you say should add something non-trivial to the conversation. If what you have to say is funny, that's a bonus.
I totally agree. I recently had the password requirements experience with quickbooks and their silly requirements (http://imperialwicket.com/quickbooks-online-password-fails).

Like many have said, I have a 6-10 password bank of relatively complex passwords that I use for services I may need to easily use on alternate computers. For everything else, I use randomly generated values (usually 24 char, including alphanum, special, hyphen, underscore, and white space) which I store in a Keepass db. I keep the Keepass db on a flash drive which I keep with me virtually all the time.

This technique is frustrating at times, but I like knowing that if a password is compromised, it's either something that can quickly and easily be addressed, or it's something that I really don't need to address.
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Go from HN comment pages to original articles with 2 keypresses in Pentadactyl
I think that's the difference between academic education, and vocational training.

I've made this point before, but people often conflate the two, and are unable to separate them in their minds.

What this person is saying is "these things do not train a person to perform these specific sets of tasks". That's vocational training, and there's nothing wrong with that. Academic education, on the other hand, is about learning to think, about history, rhetoric, science, and all sorts of things that aren't directly applicable to a particular job, but provide a necessary foundation for critical thinking and enlightenment, so to speak.

What our system really needs is two streams. An academic stream, for those who choose, and a vocational stream, which is what a large proportion of students and seemingly educators like this guy want.

This way, everyone gets what they want. Students truly interested in learning things not directly related to performing a job will have the benefit of a more supportive learning environment, and students who just want to get a job will also attain the required vocational training.

It's really win-win.
I'm skeptical this happened. The guy is anonymous, the town and state are unnamed, and there are no examples of the test questions.
Ask HN: I have a 19,000 sub email newsletter (think blog). What do I build next?
The newsletter is at http://dlewis.net/nik -- it's a free daily thing, sharing one pretty neat non-fiction story M-F.

I am going to keep writing it and keep growing it, but I have a pretty sizable audience now, and I want to build something to leverage that audience further. I don't have any demographic data about the audience or even any interest data, and am assuming that they enjoy non-fiction because the content is non-fiction.

I'm open to all sorts of ideas as to what I can do. Please make suggestions.
The tl;dr version: Need a technology stack for the web/cloud side of a distributed control platform able to server 2000 connections simultaneously with up to 100bytes bidirectional data/second per connection. Reliability and security are important, but system is highly tolerant of short interruptions (up to 1min) as long as they're not too frequent.

For now am entirely agnostic about everything including server, OS, DB, language, connection... however leaning towards Tornado with Secure Websockets as connection/server.

Presently reading: http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html to try and address some of my more gross areas of ignorance...
Ha! I just found out a colleague of mine did his PhD on a part of this and describes it as 'completely harmless'. :>
I feel like the Xbox 360 is doing to console gaming what XP did to the OS market. Which is only making me more leery about investing in their future consoles. The Xbox 360 will not go away any time soon, but could this also hurt their future console? Will it be able to stay up to date when the next greatest thing comes out?
Just. Wow. Mind boggling amounts of stupidity.

"In the second meeting with the same executives in late November, Mr. Sibal told them that he expected them to use human beings to screen content, not technology, the executive said.

The three executives said Mr. Sibal has told these companies that he expects them to set up a proactive prescreening system, with staffers looking for objectionable content and deleting it before it is posted."
http://www.indect-project.eu/approach-to-ethical-issues
"ex is the version of ed rolled up in vim, which extends the command set of ed. vi, by contrast, handles colon commands by invoking ed externally."

Actually vi and ex came about at the same time. You can see the POSIX standard mentions [1] ex and vi (not vim) together, and you can also refer to [2], under the "First appeared" column.

[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/ex...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_utilities
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You care about your identity and your tweets on Twitter. So, this is a sensitive account. It wasn't clear earlier whether you cared about your perlmonks.org identity so much. So, assuming the worst case scenario, this should have been considered a sensitive account as well.

This means that ideally you should have chosen two different passwords for both these accounts.

For some sites like reddit, HN, etc. one may know very well in advance that they don't care about their identity and they would be happy to create a new account when they lose one. I think these are the only cases where password reuse is justified.
Gosh, this needs an explanation: Pentadactyl is a vim-like environment for Firefox. Other extensions add vim bindings to Firefox. Pentadactyl lets you customize Firefox yourself, the same way you would customize vim.

http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/

Once you have installed Pentadactyl, add these lines to ~/.pentadactylrc and run :rehash to reload Pentadactyl without restarting Firefox
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I think it's a matter of being up-to-date on the material, which he himself sort of admits to. I learned a great deal of things in high school and college that if I were asked to take a test today I'm fairly sure I would fail. The only way I would pass is if I was able to spend some time to prepare.

But that's the thing, what I got out of my education was HOW TO LEARN a subject.

I'm confident that you could pick nearly any subject that I know little about and, with a proper amount of time, I could become somewhat proficient at it. The level of my ability will, of course, depend upon the subject and various factors to do with me as a person.

Standardized tests are a tricky thing, they are needed to determine a student's progress but at the same time they assume that all students are the same. To me that's the problem with education systems in the US, they assume that they can teach all kids the same thing the same way with the same results.

As a father of two children with completely different personalities, attitudes and interests, I can tell you treating kids as emotionless puppets to force-feed information to is a path to failure.
For those wondering: the complete and detailed solution can be found on http://www.craig-wood.com/nick/articles/how-i-solved-the-gch...
Show HN : Class Central - Summary of Stanford's free online courses
Built most of it over the Thanksgiving weekend and here is the result:

www.class-central.com

Built in PHP/MySql using Symfony2, Doctrine and Twitter Bootstrap. Source code can be found here:

https://github.com/dhawalhshah/class-central

The 'extras' folder in the repository contains a dump of the database dump(with all the data you see on the site) and the schema.

I have also created a circle of all the instructors with Google+ accounts:

https://plus.google.com/107809899089663019971/posts/AoJMVCeQw62

Any feedback/suggestions would be appreciated.
I'd like it if the companies asked to do this just pulled out of the country altogether. "Can't deal with the fundamental nature of the internet? No internet, then." It's needlessly vindictive on my part, but we've seen this story play out again and again. That's not how it works!
What are your favorite startup/tech engineering blogs?
I think http://nerds.airbnb.com is pretty good.
Clickable link: http://www.class-central.com
Brief discussion earlier this year with input from antirez defending Redis:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2416566
My bank gives a three times folded, credit-card sized password-card, and mail automatically a new one when you are about 2/3 through it. As it is credit-card sized, it can conveniently be stored in wallet, and thus losing it isn't much of an issue.
Why would this be downvoted? It commented on a defeatist statement that is only accurate for people who don't learn about what creates happiness, thinking it's only things like more money or promotions or buying products.

I basically echoed the principle of "know thyself" in a relevant context.
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Junior in college-prep high school here. The math questions are really easy: basic algebra, geometry, and trig. I can do it in my sleep, and I barely studied for that test and did well.

I agree with you fully, kids need to be taught based on what they want to do. I've wanted to be an entrepreneur for a while now and the only class that interests me in school is journalism (I enjoy writing). The math class is a joke, English is boring, and the rest of the classes are boring.
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Two related stories I thought of while reading this:

1. A Pacemaker Wrecks a Family's Life - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20pacemaker-t.htm...

2. A Tale of Two Hearts - http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_111811_full_show.mp3/v...

The second is an audio program.
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It depends on your contract. In general, by default, you pay a bit for every text (10 cents maybe?). But you have the option of paying a flat rate for unlimited texting, which is generally something like $10/month. Most people I know choose that option.
Does 'Golden Age' imply that it's at a peak right now? I think this will only accelerate. Design-focus is as much of a competitive advantage as having a star-hot technical team.
>It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have [...] 15 credit hours toward a doctorate

This statement is suggestive of where the problem lies. A doctoral thesis is supposed to be an original piece of work. The idea of assigning credit hours towards it is meaningless. We don't honour creative people for the number of hours they put in but for the works they leave behind.
This is how I read it, too.

It sounds like they showed the dolphin a picture, just using an auditory representation rather than graphical. Then the dolphin pointed to the depicted object.

I'm pretty sure that a human baby, without any language skills, could do the same if the depiction were graphical.

It seems to me that they've found out something about the dolphin perceptual system. This is interesting, but I don't see what it has to do with language.
The second advantage is that Firefox is open source and it's easier to feel that it won't be tracking you. Yes, Chromium is open, but Chrome isn't Chromium.

Even if Chromium is open source, development obviously goes where Google wants it. The (IMHO overdone) minimalism in browser chrome (no pun intended) and complete blurring of local history and online Google searches are nice examples. You can't really undo that without forking it.
If I were a doctor, I think I would be more prone to recognize a "NO CODE" bracelet over a tattoo. A tattoo is a decision you made on a single day. Wearing a bracelet is a decision you make every day of your life.

(Of course, you could say that leaving the tattoo in place is a decision you make every day, but it's much easier to remove a bracelet if you change your mind, vs. a tattoo.)
The man is most likely an incompetent bureaucrat, rewarded by a unionized education system that values seniority and paper degrees.
"It’s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment."

I strongly disagree with this part. Before patients become patients, the vast majority of us have no interaction with the health care industry and certainly no significant capability to influence it. Doctors, on the other hand, spend their adult lives working as professionals in the industry. To say that they, as a group, are anything but complicit is wrong.

Consider the "Fuck passwords" article[1] that's on the HN front page now. As a programmer who has dealt with passwords, the sad state of authentication is, in part, my fault. I could make the same excuse, "Well, the users don't want long passwords, and Facebook and G+ are part of the problem, and blah blah. I'm a victim of a larger system" That would be lame.

Like the doctors, I'm one of the professionals in the field, so it's my responsibility.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3313790
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Good, I hope things are getting better. My other half works for Lothian NHS Trust - their board is 17-8 men to women (for a majority female workforce):
http://www.nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk/OurOrganisation/BoardCommi...
Ridiculous - "At the meeting, Mr. Sibal showed attendees a Facebook page that maligned the Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandhi. “This is unacceptable,” he told attendees, the executive said, and he asked them to find a way to monitor what is posted on their sites."

I'm not allowed to criticize my government in a public forum? Pardon my language, but this is fucking ridiculous.
Hmm, yeah I'm not really so sure that the problem with our educational system is that the tests are too hard.
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Our system already has those two streams, has practically forever. People still abuse the college stream as if it were vocational training.
Not an unusual request considering the utter cluelessness and Sycophantic bootlicking of the people involved.
Consider that the perceived slight is to the defacto head of India - Sonia Gandhi (a person with terrifying power but Zero accountability, completely outside the Govt.) this is being held up as the reason to institute an Orwellian nightmare of Censorship. A reasonable response is FU in nice terms.

[EDIT - minor spelling]
While I'm sure it was an annoyance to lose some functionality and have to use plugins I think the move towards a leaner, more efficient version of Firefox is definitely a great move. It'll bring speedier web browsing to the majority of users.
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Worse than that is this test would have been taken by a person (probably male) straight out of high school.

I can't even comprehend what is being asked on most of these questions let alone what it's about, at least if I knew what they were asking I'd be halfway there.
Hey, there is a much fresher version of pysmell:
http://orestis.gr/blog/2009/01/16/pysmell-v073-released/
and it is hosted on code.google rather then git:
http://code.google.com/p/pysmell/
What I want to see is a link to a post in which a male poster has been monstered in entirely personal terms with no supporting evidence.

That is precisely what I am not seeing, despite protestations that this behaviour is common, normal, etc, etc...
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I don't quite see "hashed passwords" relating as much to the security of the provider as it would to that of the customer.
If the fee goes to pay for say a monthly home pickup of hazardous waste, I'm all for this.

Most people don't know about what they're throwing away, and often don't care - they just want it gone. I don't blame them - the right way to get people to do something is to make it easy to do.
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I would put it in another context. It's like giving your developers a room to play games, read books and relax. You are basically attracting them by cool/nice things that aren't really expensive.
I was particularly annoyed that though they mentioned he has degrees, they never said what the degrees are in.
At what point does a privately owned network connected to other privately owned networks become 'the Internet'?

My lack of political understanding coupled with a knowledge of how the 'Internet' actually exists and functions make it seem almost impossible for regulation to have any effect.
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This is the second or third time I've seen a service like this created (getexceptional.com and airbrake.io are two that come to mind quickly).

I can only hope this trend continues and in an open-architecture style. The ability to basically develop a skeleton monitoring UI that I can plug my own software into is fantastic.

My only thought is: why is this local to the machine I put it on? I'd rather have a central repository that I send me data to, like getexceptional. I don't mind having to set-up the process for each server I spin up, but I would prefer it if the information all aggregated to one source that I could browse through.

What I sort of imagine is registering for an Amon account and getting a unique key and identifier. Whenever I install Amon on a machine or want to call it from my code, I use that unique key and give the hardware a unique name and register my software service (pulling the hardware name from some config file automatically). Then, when I log into my central Amon account, I can browse through my exceptions and hardware details by machine name or software service.

Give me the ability to have multiple logging levels and I am in heaven.

Take it one step further: let fall-back be to either a local db or file-system and have a cron-job go through to try to fulfill the upload tasks.

That is definitely something I would pay $25-$50 a month for.
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Most companies do. IE & Safari come with their respective OS, and if you're a Windows shop you're probably going to also install either Chrome or FF. We had been standardized on FF until they expedited their release cycle, which made keeping current too much work (this will change once it updates silently without breaking add-ons), but since we were a Google Apps shop anyway, this doubled our resolve to switch to Chrome. We kept FF around as a fallback in case we ran into situations where Chrome didn't work (Juniper SSLVPN meetings in Windows, for example). We actively try to prevent users from accessing IE (removed shortcuts from desktop & Start menu, etc), btw, except for the couple hundred users who actually need it to run legacy apps we have no control over.

Note: about 80% of our employees with computers don't have internet access at all, with the exception of a proxy rule that allows them to access Google Apps (and a few other select SAAS apps). You can imagine this complicates things a wee bit.
I find that it is specifically the 'net' tab in Firebug that causes the problem. If you have it enabled it will cause your browser memory to balloon since it is keeping track of everything the browser downloaded.
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Lately, I've been experiencing update approval periods of about 2 business days. This is definitely an improvement from what it used to be.
But you don't understand the thinking behind this. He's had a problem with the software and therefore it is bad software. The fact that you and millions more have used said software without similar troubles, quite possibly no troubles at all, is irrelevant. He has a problem, therefore the software sucks as a whole.

This much the same thinking behind the hate on most software these days, most commonly aimed at Flash and Windows.

How long before we see similar thinking towards his beloved Chrome?

Although the down votes on the guy's post is unwarranted.
That's $10 more than you'd have to pay without one.
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they don't want you to directly associate points with dollars. the dissociation allows you to spend points more freely than you would dollars
In most organizations corporate politics and personality play a greater role than ability.

This will change with the continuing revolution in data and the data driven decision making it makes possible. Eventually corporations that reward politics and personality will become weaker and those that reward data driven decision making will become stronger (except in cases where the corporation can depend on government handouts, e.g. Wall Street).
Does the world really need Chrome fanboys selling the religion?

This story has nothing to do with Chrome. Yet like with every single story about Firefox, here's some guy slurring Firefox while praising Chrome.
Quite a few websites I use offer this (usually in addition to a password.)

I won't use it, because it means I will be locked out if my phone or SIM breaks.

This could easily be fixed by having a backup phone number to use if the first one fails, but for some reason they never do that.
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I don't think that statement is suggestive of any problems. Most doctoral programs have course requirements that have to be met along with the original research requirement (the dissertation). He probably means he's taken some of the courses that are at the beginning of his doctoral program.
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If it's true, then it's essentially image-based telepathic communication.
After 20 years of not using basic algebra, geometry, or trig, you'll forget it too.
"Lets see who comes out with the best implementation in the long run."

How does this differ from what in fact happens?

When theory and reality conflict, reality is correct. If tracing JIT didn't work as well as you expected, it is not reality that is wrong.
I imagine the top-shelf Indian programmers are in greater quantities abroad than at home. From my experience, the ones that choose to stay back are already in or on course to manage bigger and better things with the salary to match. The ones working abroad are building up experience and war chest or possibly looking to migrate. But the ones that never make it out probably aren't that great.
No no no, I'm not selling my attention or a review on my blog. That never happens. What happens is companies asking me for advice and asking it for free and expecting me to invest my time. I think I made that pretty clear in the post...