skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Prof Thrun mentioned in the last office hours that there were about 1650 people with "perfect scores" and he seemed a little thunderstruck by that and said he would admit these folks into Stanford if he could, because they are (paraphrasing, from memory)"Stanford quality".

What struck me was how much importance he gave to this metric, which isn't that hard to game on an online offering.

I know a few people (who shall remain nameless) who collaborate and check each others answers and so on before submission, in direct violation of the Stanford policy (and have 100s or close to it), and so probably have received this mail, whereas more "deserving" (note quotes) people who honestly work through the course material may not because they have, say, a 85% or 90% score.

That said, my key takeaway from this is that professors are very impressed by perfect scores irrespective of how you got them. There must be something magical about that row of 100s. Once you set up a grading/ranking system, it is psychologically very hard not to admire people who end up at the top.

I am personally a little dubious that the people with the highest scores would make the best pool of employees, especially given that this is an online course without the programming component, but what do I know?

I wrote Java code for most of the algorithms in AIMA as a side project a few years ago [1], and after I read an online post by Peter Norvig saying a few of his students had tried and failed a few times (to implement the code in Java- Common Lisp code existed and the Python version was in its infancy), I sent him the code and this became the "official" java distribution for AIMA ( though I don't maintain it anymore- the immensely talented Ciaran O'Reilly of the Stanford Research Institute does) and no one ever invited me to Stanford or offered me a cool AI job[2], sob! :-P.

No I am not bitter I tell you, not even the teeniest bit :-p [3]

I wonder how this signalling will play into the upcoming courses? If there are tangential real world benefits to be gained by attempting a "perfect" score, then you can expect a lot more game playing wrt scores and exams.

[1] More about how Peter Norvig shredded my initial code etc here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405277

[2] though eventually, after a lot more work, it did lead to my working on good ML/robotics etc projects from Bangalore, which is a hard thing to do in the Great Outsourcing Wasteland.

[3] I am really not bitter.

I wrote the code for the hell of it, not to get a job. AIMA was my introduction to the fascinating field of AI. It is a great, great book and it has a lot more material than is covered in the course.

I once did want to go to Stanford and learn from the great profs there, but now in a "mountain comes to Mohammed" fashion, Stanford is coming to me. I don't care about the credentialling - I just want to learn. I took the AI online course and enjoyed Peter's and Sebastian's teaching immensely. Fwiw I should have a high 90's score, (I didn't add it all up) but nowhere near a perfect score.
"Don't criticize Zynga because you don't have any actual real-life experience with what it's like! And don't criticize me and my comments with actual real-life experience of my comments! You're just being spoonfed the message that whale-hunting "social" "games" aren't actually good for you!"
It stands for "Signor A*", in order to show it proper respect. I'm glad to see that in this crude age, our astronomers still have class.
Greedy Phone Giants Challenged by New International Roaming SIM Card
Are there any reputable job sites? I have mostly been looking for positions posted on sites such as clearancejobs.com, but I usually apply directly through each company's website.
Including commissioner Chris McNair, whose daughter was one of the four little girls killed in that KKK church bombing.
When I read about the 'Think Different' campaign in the Isaacson book, I was surprised to find out that they had recording a version of the ad with Jobs doing the voiceover instead of Richard Dreyfus.

I looked the ad up right away on YouTube, along with the Dreyfus one, and compared the two. The Jobs one was so much more powerful, but the power likely came from 1) his death and 2) everything that occurred AFTER the campaign and before his death. Apple was clearly better off with the Dreyfus ad at the time, even though the Jobs version seems so much better now.
Alternatively, it points to the economic irrelevance of anything more than a basic education to the majority of the production class.

You don't need to know much to crank a wrench on an assembly line.

Unfortunately, that type of work is slowly but surely migrating elsewhere, leaving a large body of work that DOES require higher education skills. I'd love to see if there was data showing education comparisons through transitions in labor types, say, from farming to manufacturing.
Its an amazing opportunity for brokers and ilk geared for risk to join cracker circles privy to lenddo et.al algo exploits, creating a credit-metric marketplace. Game on.
Teagueduino: Arduino for design and education
Infinite Stupidity
They take pictures and make posters for upcoming shows? Why not trailers? I think because video production of plays is difficult, their time scales are compressed often still tweaking things directly before opening night. You would pretty much have to dedicate 1 or 2 hrs of the entire casts time just for filming enough footage for a 30 second spot. It is interesting but I think difficult. If you can have a small crew, not take much time and get an edit out quickly. You might be able to charge at most maybe 2k for a fully edited trailer. Probably more on the 1k or less scale.

http://www.broadway.com/
Not sure if you read the article, but other than the semantics of the word 'content,' the point of the article was in agreement with your intention.

The point is to put the same effort and passion into your essays, or tweets, or blog posts that you put into work at large.
Here's a real life example of a bouncer being nice and firm.
Like the top rated comment says, it's as if he is a doctor in psychology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWfetF1jCO4
Barcelona vs Al Sadd Live stream Online World Cup for clubs 15-12-2011
I definitely feel like the term isn't used correctly in the context of the article but in any case there is definitely a certain attitude of nastiness on HN that I experience all the time. I always find myself carefully choosing words and being incredibly specific because any amount of vagueness can lead to flags on my comment. Sometimes I just delete everything and say "I agree" or "Congrats!" or "Good work" and I get a few points. Toss in a "but..." and I get flagged. How about reply to my comment and ask my why I said what I said? And actually most of the time I say something I say why I say it and I still get a backlash.

Anyway, it doesn't happen all the time but it's definitely out there.
According to wikipedia[1] the converse of the Shell Theorem is (nearly) true:

Suppose there is a force F between masses M and m, separated by a distance r of the form F = Mmf(r) such that any spherically symmetric body affects external bodies as if its mass were concentrated at its centre. Then what form can the function f take?

The form of f allows Newtonian gravity but not Einsteinian.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem#Converses_and_gen...
> I get the politicians I am willing to pay for.

But why is this true? Why does the politician with the most money almost always win?

Personally I find this a failing in the electorate, not the system. The fact that more votes are almost a guarantee with more advertising dollars spent tells me that the electorate isn't doing their job, they are just voting for whomever they see more.

From the article:

"Six of Jefferson County's former commissioners have been found guilty of corruption for accepting the bribes, along with 15 other officials."

This shows an obvious pattern, but to me that doesn't mean "the government is broken" it means "the electorate is either not paying attention or gullible".
important enough that we should pay a sufficient tax, so that we can give them to people who can't afford to pay.

The solution, then, is to bail out the corrupt and wasteful government?

I'm not seeing any meaningful way in which this differs from bailing out banks or auto manufacturers. I'm assuming that you agree that those gifts to corporate America were immoral. If you agree about the corporate bailouts, how would this governmental bailout differ?
Profitable or potentially profitable?
I don't get it. I thought this was the Windows Phone playbook - release as early as possible (2010), gain something like feature parity in fall 2011 (i.e. the Mango release) and team up with Nokia to make some great hardware (the Lumia). This is what Windows Phone people have been telling me since the beginning of the year. The virtues, logic and shortcomings of this have been evident from the beginning so I don't see how Ballmer can point at anyone but himself.

It's a problem that anyone stretching the definition of "early adopter" already had a phone that did everything a Windows Phone does in 2009. Buying into a phone ecosystem sounds mundane to mildly entertaining to us, but it's a terrifying leap for most of the market - the vast majority of people will buy what their more technically inclined friends and family use. Think of how long it's taken for the iPhone to approach the prevalence of the Blackberry - how bizarre, then, that MS expected WP to bloom while two competent competitors are taking the market by storm. WP7's biggest fault has nothing to do with Andy Lees - it's too late to market.
This isn't a matter of how the country treats it's least fortunate. The issue is biggest county bankruptcy in the history of the country. And the issue that caused that is a level of fraud of massive proportions. The county has $4.1 billion dollars of debt.

Unfortunately services provided by private companies are not a right. You can call access to water a "right" and that's a reasonable claim. Now what does that actually mean. Do I have the right to demand free water from a private company riddled with debt? Do I have the right to demand free water from you personally? Or for you to pay my bill? Or for my bill to be reduced to zero? Or for someone to work at a utility company for free so that the utility company can provide a free service? Does that then mean that the utility company has a right to demand free parts from local supplies companies so that the can provide a free service?

Maybe the utility companies should be nationalized and all citizens can contribute tax dollars to the service. It wouldn't surprise me if that's how it's done in a lot of Eurozone countries? I'm not sure. I don't even really understand how the fraud occured and who is on the hook for the bill. It is however fair to say that it's way more complicated than "how a country treat's it's least fortunate".
DevOps Borat
The US has had a high level of economic activity and innovation for decades. I think that points to a strong education system.

There is no denying that the United States is a largely prosperous, innovative, and peaceful place. This was true of the United States before school attendance was compulsory in any state, when many states made no effort generally to fund schools for all learners, and it is still true today. This is a legacy of founders of the United States who themselves largely learned without a public school system.

http://learninfreedom.org/Founders_free.html

Today, the United States still benefits economically in comparison to other countries because of a more honest and transparent system of governance and business regulation

http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/...

and because of general freedom in United States society.

http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=15

While K-12 schooling continues to be one of the top three state budget line items in many states (it is number one in mine) there will be legitimate concern about whether those hundreds of billions of dollars a year

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

are being spent with the best effect they can. Having lived in another country for six years (and having brought up children there during the second of two three-year stays), and knowing many first-generation immigrants, I don't think it goes beyond the facts to say that the United States has a thing or two it could learn from administration of public schools in other countries, just as those other countries could in several cases learn from United States governance. It's best for all countries all around the world to be open to information first learned in some other country.
And here's a similar event related in the hacker/online context.

http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/08/my-hobby-troll-hugging....

Discussed here on hackernews:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=786874
It's hard to respond to this. It's extremely honest, and leaves only room for the choices you make for yourself.

> I've done a large subset of the "things I'd like to do before I die"

At least you have a concept of the things you like, somehow.
"Nobody stands around the water cooler talking about print ads." Outside ad agencies, does anybody stand around the water cooler talking about TV ads? This reads to me as if Julia Ward Howe were to explain how she turned the tide of the Civil War after First Manassas...
Use viewtext to un-paginate it
http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%...
I found hope and sense of life when I began to understand who Jesus is. When I am in depression I pray to him and this helps me. Wondered why noone was talking about that. This is what Christmas is all about, Christ brining us hope.
Interesting viewpoint. I'd always assumed that YC-specific "stuff" would get automatic preference, or would at least be marginally sticky. Is that not the case?

While this site does permit random people to submit random links, and then allow more random people to comment on the articles, I'd just assumed it was fundamentally a source of marketing for Mr Graham and his activities. After all, it IS part of ycombinator.com...
"ad hominem" is totally going on the HN bingo card :)
The issue with votes is that they don't fix all that much.
People often downvote other people they simply disagree with. In fact, most often do that.

So it does not just shut off the "trolls" as in the "assholes". It also shuts off any unpopular opinion.

That is sad, because unpopular opinions are generally interesting by nature, and sometimes insightful. That is because popular ones are well-known, thus cannot be "interesting".

For example, if you bash a popular company by saying what they do is wrong (whichever it is, Google, Apple, you name it), you will get down voted a lot. No matter how insightful and righteous you were.
Show HN: my weekend+2d project: Web hosting for Dropbox
How to Fail Smarter: The Goldilocks Rule
Wouldn't the increased competition fomented by increased wages take care of this naturally and organically?
Blender has texture display in the viewport.

N-sided polygon support will be there in 2.62
Right next to "Dunning-Kruger", I hope.

Actually, it's always "Dunning-Kruger" with a link to the wikipedia article to make it more authoritative.
This is a false comparison. You neglect that the US has had this time of innovation in a time when its education system was also considered the world's best.

The problem is that people see US's economic power dwindling w/o a pipeline of educational dominance.
This seems more like the success of novelty than a viable longer term, broader implemented model.
It doesn't look like anything to the banned individual apparently, as I just now discovered that my account was banned. Awesome.

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475
This might be a little offtopic, but I would advise against leaving `console.log` calls in production code, even when there are checks to prevent calling it when the console object is undefined. Commenting those lines out would do the trick, since minification can remove them.

Also I went to the [calculator challenge](http://www.trybloc.com/courses/calculator#/1) and noticed this

# add(4, 2) => 8
def add(x, y)
end

Needless to say the comment should read `=> 6`.

Also, since we are all geeks, here's my Clojure version

(defn buzziffy [a b x]
(cond (and (zero? (mod x a)) (zero? (mod x b))) "FizzBuzz"
(zero? (mod x a)) "Fizz"
(zero? (mod x b)) "Buzz"
:else x))

(println (apply str (map #(str (buzziffy 3 5 %) "\n")
(range 1 100))))
Bug Prediction at Google
Verizon Galaxy Nexus available for just $154.99 LetsTalk
Absolutely. Churning the bottom 5% would be an exercise in destruction, low morale, and worsening a bad situation. Get quality in the front door rather than trying to shuffle people out the back.
I believe he actually stated that after the traditional sales channel gets their cut he ends up with about $5. So he is selling it for the same profit he would of seen and just cutting out all the middle men as he did not believe they where actually adding any value.
I'd prefer no trailers at movies, or really make them trail the film for folks that might want to see them.
> Every time I've seen a hellbanned account, I have agreed with the decision.

I'd be curious to get your opinion on my (just discovered) ban: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3354475
Gumroad Lets You Sell Anything You Make
ditto for "coroutine + scheduler as replacement of threads".

Another example using this framework is Simpy (http://simpy.sourceforge.net/), a process based discrete event simulation platform. You program in a way similar to the traditional multi-process/thread manner, but don't have to worry about mutex and locks at all, very sweet and productive!

The only caveat for this framework is that it's hard to fully utilize the power of multi-core systems, since it's single threaded. But if your application is more I/O bound than CPU bound, this framework could potentially give you huge benefit of multi-threading w/o the complexity.
It's easier to talk about modes than distributions. The way I read it, that's what PG is doing here.
Tales of Extreme Coding: Shark Week at BrightTag
Think And Grow Niche
Elections DO matter. A major difference between Birmingham and Atlanta is that Birmingham became the poster city for racism because of the way Bull Conner responded to civil rights protesters in 1963. Atlanta, on the other hand, became known as "The City too Busy to Hate", and ever since the two cities have had drastically different fortunes.
An Xcode project template for statically-linked iOS Frameworks
It seems likely to also organically change teachers' unions for the better, too. Unions filled with better and more motivated teachers will want policies that protect better and more motivated teachers.

As it is now unions filled with bad teachers* will favor policies that protect bad teachers. Vicious cycle.

* Not that most or even many teachers are bad, but the bad ones are probably the most afraid for their jobs, and therefore most active in union politics.
Larry Langford For Life!! http://www.bhamweekly.com/birmingham/article-1190-the-life-a...
It's not about the difficulty of making a replacement account. It's about the loss of profile / reputation / recognition. The longer a user has been contributing, the more painful losing all of that becomes.
I must admit that this is a ad link about China wholesae electronic products
Welcome to our site!
From what I understand, most Verizon stores, Best Buys, and Radio Shacks have had them in inventory since late last week. A few people have even been able to convince stores to sell them.
IMO this puts PHP's syntax on par with other languages. Unfortunately the libraries still suffer from multiple conflicting conventions.
Codecademy (YC S11) is Hiring Engineers to Change Education
About Us

Codecademy is the easiest way to learn to code. Since we launched in August, hundreds of thousands of people have been through our lessons and learned the basics of JavaScript. We're working on bringing programming education to the entire world - we have users in almost every country.

We've been featured on CNN, in the NYT, and elsewhere and we've raised $2.5m from top-tier investors like Union Square Ventures and SV Angel. Most importantly, we're still a really small team and we want awesome engineers to come join us.

We use Ruby/Rails, MongoDB, and node.js, but we're open to people who don't know those things as long as they can pick them up quickly. We're all young, fun, and incredibly dedicated to solving one of the world's biggest problems - every day you'll wake up to thank you notes from people whose lives you've changed by teaching them how to code.

We're not just a fun place to work - we've got lots of fascinating engineering challenges we're working on such as evaluating a large volume of code submissions in a safe and secure way for a wide variety of languages and frameworks and using our rapidly growing dataset of user interactions to improve the learning experience.

We're looking for people in either SF/Valley or NYC.

Apply!

We'd love to hear from you - jobs (at) codecademy (dot) com. Check out our jobs page: http://www.codecademy.com/jobs.
The monolog from "Roadhouse" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojPVOhHhwnk#t=2m
The one thing I always wonder about these stories is if they are true why haven't we in the United States been surpassed? The first time I remember hearing about Finland's education system was 5th grade yet I'm in my early 30s and Finland hasn't moved up much. They still has a much lower GDP per Capita. I can't remember the last time I heard of a major breakthrough coming out of Finland. Other than Nokia I can't think of any other worldwide companies founded in Finland.

I don't mean to bash Finland which is a truly amazing place (no sarcasm, it really is). But at the same time a big problem in education is the scale tends to get clouded. No Child Left Behind's epic failure is a testament to that. Isn't it at least possible that Finish schools also "teach to the test" especially considering they test their students so rarely?

Before we increase class size, abandon charter schools and slow down efforts to integrate more technology into classrooms in favor of higher teacher salaries I'd like to see much more research done in this area.
Callaway diablo tour
Thanks, the future looks bright. Although RAM usage would be higher for pypy the improvement is massive.
here is his vision from 2k6 on zune:

Have you squirted a song yet? That’s the question Microsoft hopes your friends will ask you as you ponder which digital music player to acquire. Although you are more likely to buy an iPod this season — something even Microsoft admits — the software giant from Redmond is running a huge marketing campaign that it hopes will plant some seeds of doubt. After all, iPods don’t squirt songs. And Microsoft’s new player, Zune, does.
This is either really clever or frightening if its used beyond marketing. smart marketing but somewhat unethical. Interesting nonetheless.
How to Look Natural by Wearing Wigs
Interesting. However, I would have thought that planets are far out enough that classical is accurate enough. This sort of thing is why I specified planets as opposed to orbits in general.
I think this has to be the case. My friend has a lower HW and midterm average than me, but he got the letter and I did not.
The best way to be sure you understand something is to teach it.
Aristotle’s Ideal, Killed by Web
A kid I knew in High School just killed himself the other day. No one knows why. It was rather a shock to everyone.
It's not like that. I want people to make a reasoned opinion based on the big picture, not just on what Mike Arrington says. There are plenty of reasons to hate Zynga. The reasons TechCrunch and WSJ feed you are crappy reasons.
You won't be shitbanned, tptacek. Someone with 100 karma who makes a contrary post for a YC company will.