skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right! I've been involved in a couple of low-speed bumps in car parks, going at 10mph, people not looking where they are going, that kind of thing. It was AWFUL, dreadfully worrying, and the car was a total mess. In one case, my car even ended up with a visible scratch on the driver's-side door paintwork.

If only I'd have been driving on the road, going at 50mph, like that time when the car skidded on something on the road, and after hitting the edge flipped over and landed on its roof in a muddy ditch. Unlike the dangerous dents and scratches that my car park accidents have left my car with, this little minor incident only left the roof a little bit crushed in, and broke one of the wheels off. Also smashed out all the windows. So there wasn't even any need to call the AA, not like that time somebody opened their door into my car at 0mph and left a little nick in the plastic runner bar.

My only regret is that thanks to the nanny state I couldn't legally have gone at 100mph to make it even safer yet!
This is mind numbingly obvious. I'd even say that it doesn't really come to the best conclusion, because going out to lunch takes far more time than lunch at your company if they cater. Skype is the clear winner in efficiency.

Want to have more efficient office hours? Split an hour into three parts and post the times to ohours.org or any of the other such sites. I did this when I had a bit more time a few months ago and loved it.

A side note: one of my favorite social dances is knowing that the other person is going to pay for lunch or coffee but reaching for my wallet anyway. I'm happy and capable to pay for myself - hell I'd buy your meal if It makes you happy. But that moment when you start a lean and reach is the trigger to hear "oh, it is on me!" and it is golden

It is similar to bending forward when with a group of people at lunch to imply everyone should now stand and leave.
Apple's American Jobs Disaster
I wish it was like that in my university and I didn't spent a semester learning an language I will never ever use.
It's easy to fail a test if you go in deciding to fail it, because you have a already-extant political bias against testing.
I get that math can be a valuable skill, but you're suggesting that it is the only valuable skill. That anything that does not make use of high school math is inherently worthless. That is a very strong statement.

Take a look around and I think you'll find many, many incredible things that were done and made without the aid of trig and algebra. Specialization is pretty much the foundation of modern economics after all.
Badgemator: Promote your Chrome app or extension with a popup div
I'd still call that a bug myself. The solution would appear to be that drivers should be able to tell the kernel "I can't let you go into deep sleep right now" when they're active. Say when the USB camera is actually capturing video, when it isn't it should be perfectly fine to let it go into the deep states. A hard drive or something else bulk like that is certainly a different beast altogether. So at least maybe preventing the deep sleep when something in isochronous mode is transmitting data should be fine, (I understand this makes the assumption that USB cameras are sane and drop the isochronous mode when not doing video, I don't know if this is a good assumption).
This is all about what you define a designer as. For me a designer who isn't knee deep in code and data driven rich UX is useless.

Also, I think it's so boring and limiting to keep talking about such deep separations between skillsets.

It's all so simple: Good generalists/polymaths are more useful than one or the other.

Anyone who buckets themselves into an either/or is doomed to a limited career. Anyone who just says fuck it and does it all and keeps trying until they get it right is a far more useful asset.

So it's simple; this is not a golden age of designers, it's a golden age for smart multi-talented cross-skilled people. As it always has been and always will be. No amount of chirruping from one side of the fence or the other will change that. - If you are on a side of the fence then you are already limited.
This article is superficial and conflates several issues.
biased and poorly thought through article
> Mozilla can do nothing about you using Firebug, yet still gets blamed for the slowness.

This is how things go in real-world. I remember reading about how much work went into each new version of Windows because of bugs and clever code in existing software. Otherwise people who upgraded and found their old software not working anymore would have blamed Windows instead of their buggy software.

You can't boast about Firefox being extensible and then blame plugins because they break it. At least, Firefox should be warning about troublesome plugins. The more people have to deal with Firefox being slow and unstable, the more Firefox will be getting a bad rep. Sorry, but you can't fight human nature, you know. You can't change how most users think. If you want to increase market share, your software must be as much dumb-friendly as possible.

On my Linux box, Firefox is crashing lots of times a day without giving me any clues about what could have gone wrong. What am I expected to do? To become a Firefox developer? Switching to another browser is an easier path.

By saying this, I hope I don't seem unappreciative of Firefox developers' efforts.
Official Lego Minecraft set
woops, I talked too fast.
Programming with ADD/ADHD
A Bag of Holding
I would be shocked if the department of education were not tracking outcome at some level. The question is, what should they be tracking? My guess is that they track how scores are correlated with success at the university level. Personally, I think that's a reasonable metric. "Learning how to learn" would imply more success in an environment dedicated to learning.

"How useful is this in the professional world" is a pretty crappy metric for deciding what to teach, because the common set of useful topics is pretty small. We could easily stop public education at junior high or earlier if that's the goal. I've never, not once, needed anything from history class, or biology class, or social studies, or literature class in my professional life. Most people have probably never needed algebra, geometry, or trigonometry. But I'm pretty certain I would be worse off if school stopped at age 10, or if I just repeated the same stuff for 8 years after that.
Right, but my point was of the difference in disparity between the minimum plugin and minimum usage. To use jQuery is closer to creating a plugin than using wordpress is to creating a plugin.
While I agree that this is the wrong approach and your solution is an improvement, I don't think it's much of an improvement. It shares the same flaw in thinking as the fine: you are attacking the problem from too many angles. Every single person has to alter their behavior for it to work.

I think a much easier to implement, less wasteful, and much more likely to work solution is single-source waste disposal and recycling. Charlottesville, VA has this: you throw away everything, and the city outsources sorting and recycling to a single-source waste disposal company. Their job is to recover as much money as possible from recyclables.

And the best part is that to improve the efficiency of single-source recycling, you only need to improve your sorting and recycling technologies. You don't need to improve the accuracy of every human who throws away recyclables, which the history of recycling tells us is highly costly while also highly ineffective.
Reddit AMA: "I was one of the first people Steve Jobs ever fired"
"Dum spiro spero" => "While I breathe, I hope" - for those of us who don't remember their Latin training, myself included.
I voted "No" but you're really asking in the wrong place. I already use a different password on all my accounts and they are only stored in one place, my head.

Your target customer is more the savvy "consumer" computer user, the same sort of person who might subscribe to a service like LifeLock. A person who is aware of the need but not familiar enough with how security works to be confident in doing it themselves.
This I don't understand. Most of the Chinese and Indian politicians have STEM backgrounds. In theory, they are supposed to be very smart and critical thinkers. I find it hard to believe that someone that believes in the theory of evolution and the laws of thermodynamics doesn't have the same regard for freedom of expression or the cost of the human life.
It's very hard to imagine you'll forget it, but it really is true. I used to be able to solve integrals while being too drunk to walk, but nowadays basic trig would require substantial effort for me. Time does that.
> the idea that the types of people that get hung up on UI shortcomings are a close approximation to the types of people we wouldn't want as members, anyway.

I'm sorry but you sound like a ...

"we"? You speak for the community? Which I'm part of.

I'm using HN, I love HN, I just know when to recognize a UI is a bad UI. You want me to write a blog post about what is wrong with this UI point per point? I even considered re-doing it myself and submit it here but I don't have the time now.

I might sound aggressive but I really don't like people taking quick conclusions.
Unfortunately they are winning and academia is being dumbed down so that everyone can obtain a degree.
This is plagiarism, right?
Yes.

"LuaJIT 2.0 intellectual property disclosure and research opportunities" <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58908&#...; is further proof to that.

Rumor has it that Mike Pall is actually a collective pseudonym used by an army of cycle counting language expert cyborgs (from the future).
It seems the author moved it to github. The Google code page has no code and says "You can track the development of PySmell by visiting GitHub". I believe this is the fresher code:

https://github.com/orestis/pysmell/
One of the authors is Erik Meijer, who was key to getting LINQ into Microsoft's C# and VB products. It'd be quite interesting if Microsoft seriously worked on alternative data stores for SQL Server.
Agreed. I still don't understand the jQuery UI download options; despite having used it many a time.
I think you'd find that the number of people killed on US roads would exceed the number of dead from 9/11 in a little over 2 months.

Time for the war on driving / vehicle accidents?
A decade of research into affective forecasting says otherwise. It shows that you'll only be good at predicting what makes you happy if you read studies about biases in affective forecasting. See "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right" http://dunn.psych.ubc.ca/files/2011/04/Journal-of-consumer-p...
On the test-taker's failure:

In order to perform well on a math test you don't always have to really understand the fundamental principles behind what you're doing. Sometimes you can get away with wrote memorization. e.g. You can come up with equations for a lot of things yourself if you understand Gaussian distributions but, if you're being prepped for an exam by teachers who know roughly what's on it, they might just give you equations to memorize for the things that are likely to be asked. You may perform nearly as well as someone with deep understanding of the material, but you are unlikely to remember those equations long after you've taken the test!

It is quite likely that the person who took and failed this test was the sort of math student who was able to get by memorizing what he was told to without really understanding things. If he had written the same test in high-school he likely would have done much better because he would have been prepared for it with memorized methods and equations that he never understood and has long since forgotten.

On teaching methods:

When teachers teach students to pass tests, short-cuts like wrote memorization tend to happen. The useful knowledge learned from this kind of teaching is minimal. Unfortunately, many teachers are unable to teach the deep meaning behind mathematics because they were taught by wrote memorization themselves. When they were assigned to teach math class they probably had to look everything up themselves since, like our test-taker, they never understood the basis behind it and have forgotten most of what they memorized.

It seems that we must overcome the problem of educating teachers before they can overcome the problem of educating students.
https://code.google.com/p/apt-cyg/

"apt-cyg is a command-line installer for Cygwin which cooperates with Cygwin Setup and uses the same repository. The syntax is similar to apt-get. Usage examples:"

"apt-cyg install <package names>" to install packages
"apt-cyg remove <package names>" to remove packages
"apt-cyg update" to update setup.ini
"apt-cyg show" to show installed packages
"apt-cyg find <pattern(s)>" to find packages matching patterns
"apt-cyg describe <pattern(s)>" to describe packages matching patterns
"apt-cyg packageof <commands or files>" to locate parent packages
Benefits Of Solar Panels
Giggle for the day...
I agree that it's interesting. I just don't see that it's language.

Consider this [1] article on language, discussing the properties of language. It seems that what has been discovered fails this in at least two ways. We haven't demonstrated, or even claimed, any sort of grammar; and what's being communicated isn't symbolic, but directly representational.

- - QUOTE - -

Languages are not just sets of symbols. They also contain a grammar, or system of rules, used to manipulate the symbols. While a set of symbols may be used for expression or communication, it is primitive and relatively unexpressive, because there are no clear or regular relationships between the symbols. Because a language also has a grammar, it can manipulate its symbols to express clear and regular relationships between them.

...

Another important property of language is the arbitrariness of the symbols. Any symbol can be mapped onto any concept (or even onto one of the rules of the grammar). For instance, there is nothing about the Spanish word nada itself that forces Spanish speakers to use it to mean nothing. That is the meaning all Spanish speakers have memorized for that sound pattern. But for Croatian speakers nada means hope.

- - END QUOTE - -

[1] http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Language#Properties_of_lang...
Here's a link to readability: http://www.readability.com/articles/5r2ckztm
"A man who answered the phone in Mr. Rai’s office said he did not talk to the press and hung up when a reporter asked for a press contact."

Wow.
There is already a vendorspec file for libraries with dependencies. I don't see why that can't become the standard for all libraries.
The CCD in the camera ought to go bananas, I'd have thought.
Ask HN: Any finance topics you're interesting in learning about?
Background: my co-founder and I are in the process of preparing to launch a business around financial modeling software that we've built. We discussed the idea of writing a book (or a series of articles) that we could give away for free on finance topics (e.g., cash flows, accounting, budgeting, NPV modeling, etc.). This would hopefully allow us to 1) provide a generally useful document to anyone who downloads it and 2) demonstrate the capabilities of our software. I've come up with a list of topics that I plan on writing about, but thought maybe I could get some ideas from HN readers to augment my own.

So, are there any topics that you are interested in reading about / learning about related to finance?

Also (on a separate, but related note): once finished with the book/articles, is it appropriate to submit it to HN? That is, I hope (and expect) that it will be useful to anyone even if they don't use our software, but obviously one of the primary goals would be to help sell software too.

Thanks for your feedback!
What about poor language skills? You made a mistake in nearly every sentence in your comment.

I apologize if English is not your native tongue.
I've often wondered to what extent my own password mnemonic "system" is either sufficiently secure or woefully misguided.

Each of my passwords is made up of the same eight-character non-dictionary word, plus the alphabet-position numbers of the first three characters of the name of the site I've made the password for (A -> 1, B -> 2, that old trick).

So for example, say the common word I was using in my passwords was "pizzadog", then my Hacker News password would be "pizzadog813" (H -> 8, A -> 1, C -> 3)

I admit my goal is convenience, as it's clearly only one step up from using the same password for everything, but with the added numbers making me feel a little better in the event of one of them being compromised. But is there any reason why this approach might be considered a bad idea?
You hit upon two important points, but I'd take the conclusion further:

A) Our current evaluation methods don't tell us whether a student is simply memorizing steps or learning the subject matter.

B) When your primary evaluation critera is to pass a standardized test, the system will optimize to achieve that goal. Since we know that standardized tests don't really evaluate understanding, we have a vicious cycle on our hands.
Your estimate hasn't any foundation either. The question is if we can recover people in the future. The chance of that is basically an unknown. However I'd put it above religion and similar things, which makes it worthwhile.
Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but in the hands of a master it is true genius!
I would prefer a listing of associated accounts in case I forget one. But then again, that's another potential vulnerability...
So, I quit my job and built a startup. Here's Why and How.
Mathematician laments about the state of math education
Macports used to not build this "sandbox", but learned the lesson that relying on Apple as your only source of updates to critical base libraries was fraught with peril: not only do you not get updates you might need ("upgrade to 10.6" is not a reasonable response to someone who just wants to use a project that needs a slightly newer version of libcurl), but sometimes Apple can ship changes that break compatibility without realizing it (as they were not using that part of the library). Once you start dealing with this complexity, the sandbox is actually much /simpler/, as you get well defined results: the only variability are changes in kernel behavior, which tend to be a much less shifty target.
I am willing to bet that none of the subject's degrees has been in a real science or math.
"Rote", not "wrote": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_learning
Uplifting, anyone?

Pump the 'phins full of nootropics and start teaching them useful stuff :)
IE6 is so 5 years ago. Intranet apps that run IE6 are rapidly disappearing, and odds are good that your intranet apps will run best in Firefox 3.6.
If I write an article called "Understanding how websites work" where I just regurgitate the definition of an A record can I be on the frontpage of HN too?
Even better than the lament article is "Mathematics Education." Notices of the American Mathematical Society 37:7 (September, 1990) 844-850.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/0503/0503081v1.pdf

by William Thurston, a Fields medalist.
My understanding is that even for native Italians it's very difficult to understand Dante as it's rather archaic. I'm not sure that being able to read Latin would be of any help.
Note: here is what tokenadult says about using cross-sectional TIMSS scores to make comparisons:

"The methodology of the blog post [comparing aggregate TIMSS scores] you point to repeatedly is laughable."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2773391

Incidentally, the data tokenadult links to suggests that differences in TIMSS scores are due to differences in ethnicity of the student body, not management practices. He deliberately ignores this data but the rest of us should not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...
As to the bank issue, I think they "fixed" that in Belgium. Logging in is still an annoyance, but I atleast feel pretty safe with it.

To log in on the site, you need to do the following steps:

* Load site and type in card number (this is mostly a pain, but if needed you can make your browser remember the number)

* The site provides you with a "challenge code", in the case of my bank an 8 digit number

* You take a little machine provided by your bank, it looks basically like a calculator of sorts

* Slide your card in the machine

* Enter challenge code and your pin in the machine when asked for

* Machine returns a number which you then input on the site

* Click login

This challenge code is different every time, the only (big) downside is always needing the machine when doing online banking. However, I feel that's a small price to pay given that once logged in you can make transactions, something I wouldn't trust much if there was only a password with silly restrictions.

Also note, you have to repeat the challenge->machine->reply action when signing transaction you enter online.
Did you write a paper for this because I would love to read it
How the Cloud Can Make Small Businesses More Competitive
While the author has a point when users reuse their password for many accounts, he ignores the time required to test a password when using bruteforce attacks. The rant on banking passwords with strongly limiting constrains may be (is?) balanced by the time to test each password. The password could be reduced to a few numbers if it is assigned randomly by the bank and can't be changed by the user, and if something like a paying phone call is required to reset the password after three failed attemps. Make the password a serie of logos to click in a specific ordre and displayed randomly, and keyloggers become history.
There are almost certainly people (laborers?) who are successful without having any knowledge taught in school at all.

Modern schools explicitly aren't vocational, they don't even claim to strive to teach skills that can be directly applied to jobs, the point is that it is useful to understand how to learn and think about things well. They also provide exposure and opportunity; there are plenty of jobs that do require these skills (or more accurately, require skills for which learning these skills is a prerequisite), and if we didn't teach them to everyone then the children of laborers would end up as laborers even when they are capable and interested in being rocket scientists.
Xerox link
I made one (Jason and company are good friends of mine). The site works as advertised. http://www.kalzumeus.com/vanity
Owling Time
I was wondering this myself. I think that they were still tiling little metal blocks, according to this picture: http://www.datadeluge.com/2010/09/how-maths-was-typeset-befo...

Which makes it all the more impressive--each page took considerable craft and attention to detail.

For more information on this, you'd have to get a book like this one--I can't find anything more online: http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-of-mathematics-aids-f...
"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."

Wouldn't it be fair to say that is basic human nature, not a result of your schooling? I remember already successfully jumping in and picking up new subjects on my own before I even entered high school, and I imagine much of the HN crowd were too.

Though, I admit I may come with some bias. I grew up on a farm where I was out there at a young age trying to solve real problems alongside my father and grandfather. They valued my insight into the problems as much as their own. If learning how to learn is a skill that is taught, that is where I learned it.
Big Web Blogs