skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about getting the kids to submit a little creative art project, like a drawing, short story, plasticine figure, whatever. It could probably be left up to the child to decide what to make, and you just need to provide them with a theme eg. animals in the jungle or something. Give them 2-3 hours in a classroom to complete the task and then collect up the pieces for assessment.

The art projects could be used in conjunction with the test scores as another data point on which to base your decision. Presumably, it would provide some insight into the creativity / imagination of the kids, which I think is of equal importance to raw academic numbercrunching ability.
good, the feature was pretty annoying. Although can't say I used it that much, once I figured out that once you logged out it would go back to normal.

+ I can't help but think that this thing would be ripe for abuse, think SEO but instead of optimizing your page, they'd just use bots to vote up your site, or vote down your competitor
I once looked into Oregon and was despondent to see that there is not much work there.
http://ǝlƃooƃ.com leads to something that I am sure is not sponsored by Google but looks exactly like Google nonetheless.

[EDIT] http://ooɥɐʎ.com appears to be available if there are any interested parties.

[EDIT] Works just like Google so hell maybe it is sponsored by Google. Works too quickly to be grabbing pages from Google's servers on the back-end.
oh, and didn't really vanish, it just moved to http://www.google.com/experimental/
Should we brainstorm saving the poor bastards? I'll start.

I would pay for content if:

1. It is personalized to my area of interest. It should be narrow enough to avoid unrelated stuff, wide enough to cover particaulr area compeletely such that I never need to go read another source for the same area. It should be de-duped. I hate dups.

2. All references and facts are properly attributed and cited. The moment I see "scientists found that 30% of..." I cancel my subscription without hesitation.

3. Non-factual pieces (opinions) are from well-known experts. At least there should be a credibility trail behind those people.

4. Content is peer reviewed. If there is a stretch somewhere, I want to know about it.

5. Content is short and to the point. I have short attention span and not much time.

6. Conflicts of interest and biases should be apparent.

For example Hardward Business Review is doing a reasonably god job on 2, 3, 6 and somtimes 5.

HN is pretty good with #1 (except dupes which are pretty bad).
Works for evolution.
The author noticed "after about a 3 month hiatus." If subscribers are not reading the magazine that is a pretty bad sign so why should we be surprised about all of the ads. I find it somewhat ironic that after 3 months of not making time to take a good look at the magazine the author is surprised that something has changed.
Worked for the Olympics and Massachusetts.
I don’t have as much time as I used to, to do this, but I try to give the whole magazine a flip at least once, every month.

Blogger needs to take some time, to learn proper comma use, and then rethink this sentence.
I'm guessing it was inflation. There wasn't a food shortage, but everyone's money was becoming worthless. Now that the banks stopped lending, deflation is giving their money value again.
I think you're right, in hindsight I shouldn't have submitted this article
... our observation that a number of the blonde and red-haired female subjects showed brown coloration in the few millimeters of hair closest to the scalp. This suggests two obvious possibilities. One is that chimerism may be involved. However, our data were obtained in the fall, and so we offer an alternative conjecture: that the bright coloration displayed by females may be a seasonal phenomenon, with their hair turning brown in the colder months and then lighter with the return of warm weather...

lol
One Week with Facebook Ads: My Experience
The government can always stockpile food in case of shortages.
I would never pay to read any author who described their writing as content.

Which is pretty much why I never read the paper or magazines anymore. Every time I pick one up the only thing I can think about is the fact that the articles were only written to sell advertising. Newspapers aren't designed to enlighten you, they're designed to sell dildos and tofu.
This is absolutely the best and most important advice you'll get. I was in that situation, I transferred, and it ended up working out swimmingly.

And yes, it doesn't get any easier to meet excellent people out in the real world.
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Looks and feels just like Google. Does anyone know if they sponsored this site?
I'm certainly no expert on TV advertising, but it seems to be a much harder market to break into than the web. The cost of producing ads is much higher, and the ROI is harder to measure. And there are big, established players who have the infrastructure & relationships that Google doesn't yet. Plus, Microsoft has had MSNBC for years, and it doesn't seem to have helped them in TV advertising.
This would probably be the best and most objective method. Even though income plays a large roll you should still be able to to tell out of 1500 a few students who perform better than their income levels would indicate.
You're absolutely right.

Best. Finale. Ever.
The TV Ads interface already lets you select target shows based on audience age and gender information, which is in turn based on data from a partnership with Nielsen. But Desai told me about a partnership that will take this farther. A satellite-TV company called Echostar, working with credit-reporting company Equifax, will cross-reference shows watched (using its own data from set-top boxes) with income and buying habits (using Equifax's data).

I love the eighties: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBd7bHFnO4Y
I think most people are taught to idolize FDR, and that requires boiling actual history down to a less complicated story. Since FDR either lied about his principles, or had no principles to start with, it's hard to view him as a hero. But if FDR is not a hero, and the Great Depression is an example of what happens when the government meddles too aggressively with the economy, that's a big problem for many belief systems.

I do assume however that voters have some sense of their own well being, and if they feel things are getting worse they will more likely vote for change.

Why would you trust voters to elect the right person? Do you really think that the people in office are the best for the job, rather than the best at manipulating others into giving them the job?

That's why democracy works.

Democracy sucks. Name one company that would would be better managed as a democracy than as a shareholder-oligarchy. Can you seriously imagine a company that had a monopoly on taxing all of the wealth produced in the United States, and still managed to operate at a $500 billion annual loss? Be serious.
- ask for input from the previous year's teacher

- students only pick one other person, so picking their entire clique wouldn't fit as an answer. further, as good students tend to find one another, it's a good filter for finding people that should be recommended by the teacher but aren't (or vice-versa).

- if a full essay is too much, just ask them to write what they'd do with their scholarship in a few sentences (prose, poem, any form will do). since you're only looking for 2 kids, you only need a question that will highlight the top candidates. no need to properly rank the entire class.
Very telling - I use a Nokia phone that's around 20 years old. It's not very fancy but it just works. Every time.
You're right, I went a little comma happy there. I fixed the sentence to read a little better.
It seems to basically be a proxy to google sites, rewriting URLs. It could be a guy just implementing it as a joke, but he could also be grabbing passwords. It's PHP, which Google doesn't use at all. DO NOT LOGIN HERE!

A whois lookup reveals it belonging to Jose, who I don't think works at Google:
http://whois.net/whois_new.cgi?d=xn--loo-w3ac94c&tld=com
On second read, my comment seems a bit snarky. No offense intended.
And it supports DTrace and ZFS. nice.
Cool. They could just give their testers instructions to use the cursor as a pointer to where they're looking. Or you could put that in your instructions to them. It's a decent enough proxy for eye movements any ways.
It's probable that they didn't use 48,000 brand new hard drives, but reused whatever they already had in their datacenters. Which would have a mixture of different drive ages, I guess.
If Google can prevent SEO abuse and spam I think it's a great idea and would like to see it come back. But that's a huge "if".
The 'broken windows' theory of crime is tested and seems correct
Innovation in America: A gathering storm?
How about having interested students write an essay?
Because there is no longer any leeway in the system for error. Each flight is turned around and sent out in such minimal time that if it is late for any reason the problem cascades on to the next flight. And the whole system is so well coordinated that there is never any airplane just sitting around to make up for a problem.

American Airlines and all the airline companies wish that you were right. As is, the biggest problem with airlines is not the lack of robustness. As of now, most airline companies toss in generous leeways into their flights to accomodate late flights (now over 10 minutes, which does not seem like much until you realize that this is per every flight). The biggest problem is that the traffic control system is at capacity. Ie. It is too inefficient. To fix the delays, the FAA needs to modernize and increase efficiency in the airline traffic control system.
Rent Books Netflix-style with Online Book Rental
The same key can be used for each session...when the Gmail page is being generated, I am saying this embedded in-line key can be associated TO the user's cookie, so that there is a one-to-one correspondence between this "Javascript cookie/session variable" and the user's actual cookie. There is no problem whatsoever. The only thing to be done is the exact same authentication that Google has to do to determine from which authenticated user chat requests are coming from (or any other AJAX request sent to Gmail).

EDIT: To answer your question of "are they doing some kind of lookup for each AJAX request?" Well of course, since they already have to look up a user's ID, account information, etc. based on the cookie they send.
Coincidentally, our new issue of Wired arrived today and I suggested that they weren't at risk of going under so long as at least 50% of the magazine is ads. At least until people stop buying it because of that.
i wouldn't push the power button if they weren't paying me.
This is not really about perfection - which, after all, is impossible - as it's about creating high quality products, no matter how simple or complex they might be.

If the wheel was invented with today's manufacturing mindset, it wouldn't actually roll in first couple of years ("available in the 2.0 release!") and probably set half the cave on fire when actually doing so ("You did read the EULA, didn't you?").
I signed up for a gmail account through there...basically just sends you to the official site after you register.
Seriously, if you think there are "some legal obstacles, but nothing insurmountable", you'll want to investigate further.

If you sell equity in your company, you REALLY don't want to sell it to non-accredited investors... It's hugely more expensive from a legal POV. Read:

http://www.thestartuplawyer.com/securities/life-is-too-short...

While you can sell equity to up to 35 non-accredited investors, you shouldn't-- here are the reason he throws out:

"(1) Non-Accredited Investors Trigger a Larger Disclosure of Information - If you raise capital from non-accredited investors in a Rule 505 or Rule 506 registration-exempted financing, you must provide a huge amount of information about your startup company. Think IPO-registration huge, thereby leading to larger legal and accounting costs. Such additional costs may not be prudent if your startup company is tight on capital.

(2) Non-Accredited Investors Tend to be More Hostile Than Accredited Investors - Implied by the definition of a non-accredited investor, the investment a non-accredited investor makes to your startup company will mean much more to him or her than an investment an accredited investor makes. A non-accredited investor will be much more emotional. Thus, non-accredited investors are much more likely to sue your company if things don’t go according to plan.

(3) Non-Accredited Investors can Hinder an Acquisition - It may be difficult for your startup company to be acquired after it has completed a registration-exempted financing with non-accredited investors. Non-accredited investors trigger additional rules in the context of an acquisition (e.g., a purchaser’s representative). Sometimes the acquiring entity will require a startup company to perform a buyout the non-accredited investors pre-acquisition."
Is this news? I mean, hasn't Wired /always/ been super ad heavy?

Hey, it has! http://www.suck.com/daily/95/10/06/daily.html

"We studied issue 3.09 (the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger on its cover) and were not surprised to discover that of its 206 pages, 90 were full page ads. (If you include 1/2's, 1/4's, and pull-outs the ratio jumps to a clean 50/50 split.)"

Further analysis of Wired's ad/content ratio was done by the Magazineer in January -- http://magazineer.com/howto/26
Within YC we often brainstorm about the future of journalism, but it is more in the spirit of killing the existing players than saving them. History suggests that is the right way to frame the question. Companies as deeply entrenched in obsolete habits as most current print media companies tend not to survive major shifts like the arrival of the Internet.

So instead of asking "How do you fix the NYT?" I'd ask "How would you kill the NYT?" Notice how much more scope you have for new answers there. If you're trying to fix them, you're implicitly constrained to make something like a newspaper. If you're trying to kill them, all you have to do is make something their advertisers prefer; that could be practically anything.
Sprint Suffers Nationwide SMS Outtage
20:36EST - Still unable to send SMS messages.
Wow, I had no idea. I guess it seemed to me that at least in the past I was reading content that I could find easily. Now it just seems like every other page is an ad and I have to struggle to find the articles.
For some unexplained reason, Rosling sets GDP on a logarithmic scale. This basically normalizes the assumption that wealth is extremely unequal (i.e., follows some sort of exponential curve). Which is not to say that this isn't the natural state of things, perhaps it is, but it's misleading to adjust your graphs so that this is the baseline and then talk about the lack of an "income gap".
Animals Speak Color
I did not suggest saving any particular newspaper, instead I suggested saving the idea of professional journalism.

As a user I may benefit from the efforts of someone whos full-time job is to find good, relevant news, write well and do thoughtful analysis and discussion. Some of the newspapers used to play this role, but their economics is busted. The default assumtion here seems to be that professional journalism will die as well, and I would like to challenge this assumption. If it is to survive, which form would it take? What does it take to make people pay for their news?
Ah, suck.com -- my favorite web 1.0 relic.

Filler was the best webcomic before webcomics were cool.

http://www.suck.com/filler/archive/all.html
Was that video really bad for anyone else? Tons of noise. Here's a better video (until someone finds an even better one :-) ) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8aisIqxFLU
I still haven't figured out how Google Plans to get this working on terrestrial cable. The cable industry already has the Canoe project to get a similar infrastructure in place. They're going to have a hard time getting a cable co like Comcast or TimeWarner to allow them to sell their ad spots, maybe from the content providers themselves but they don't get any localization that way.

Hard row to sow.
21:02 - Finally back up, even though official recon from Sprint said it was up an hour ago.
now it's dead...because in no way was this relevant...even though it was really a continuation of a conversation in a front page thread....nice one HN
Ask HN: Importance of a Confirmation Email
I'm working on the registration form for a web app and am considering various ways to do it. There are essentially two major steps:

1. Customer enters email and chooses a password

2. Customer pays

The email and password combination would let the customer access the site on future visits, assuming they complete the payment.

My original plan was to send their email a confirmation link after the first step and that link would validate the email address and bring them to the payment page. However, it occurred to me that I might be able to skip the confirmation email all together; go straight from step 1 to step 2.

I don't really see any major downsides to doing it this way. Typos could be minimized by having them enter the email twice. Worst case, they could always email support (me) and I'd help them work through their problem. Seems like the small support tradeoff would easily worth the higher completion rates.

Not sure if I'm missing any major considerations... Could a malicious person take advantage of this system?
Maybe you could split "reward" into two parts:

a) some award that will be prestigious by itself (by being labeled as one of the top kids from the school); and

b) financial help available for winners of a) with family income under X.

Isn't it how US system works? Getting high SAT will get you to Harvard (prestige part of the reward), and if your family has income under $60K, your tuition is dropped (financial part of the reward selectively applied to poorer students).
I read something else into that. You can't be half-hearted, only perfection will do. It isn't enough to repaint the wall, a handful of candy wrappers will undo all your good work.

Corollary: litter-precursors (the things that most often get dropped, like cans and cigarette filters) might need to be banned or somehow forced into low-litter forms, their cumulative downside looks like it might be harsh enough to outweigh the property-rights case.
"Within YC we often brainstorm about the future of journalism"

There's probably a good mailing list on this topic. It seems like all the most intelligent discussion on the net takes place on secret mailing lists. The problem is that to find out where this discussion is taking place you'd really have to email a bunch of wonkish j-school types.

(And if anyone knows where people are discussing this, send me a note.)
As they say, opinions are like assholes. Reading that post, it seems clear to me that Scoble barely took the time to proofread it before posting, let alone spending enough time to really understand the problems with the American auto industry.
Oddly enough, I was reading my copy today and was thinking that I much prefer print ads to online ads. I actually enjoy bumping into things I would not normally see. My only gripe are the ads that try to disguise themselves as editorial material and have to have the word "Advertisement" on the top of the page. Online, I ignore ads and the ones I do notice are rarely interesting.
Belarc Advisor-Know your computer inside-out
You like sports a hell of a lot more than I do if you would trade unlimited cash for the joy of watching games.

Also, it's an almanac so you could only look at the results when you needed cash.
I generally try not to look for inconsistencies when watching sci-fi, as it kind of spoils the fun.
Yes, everyone seems to be an auto industry armchair CEO lately. Scoble is barely worth reading the majority of the time, his opinions on the auto-industry are less than useless.
Perhaps an assessment of learning ability rather than achievement would distinguish students who could get the most out of a scholarship.

Perhaps by assessing all students to find the easiest concept the child has not mastered, teaching it to them, and then measuring their ability after being taught, we would be able to measure their ability to use new information effectively.
I've heard of this before, and my first comment was "Why can't I just go to the library?"
In a perfect world that would have been a great feature. But I can't see google preventing abuse.

In the past I worked for this company and we all (200+ of us) gave our product a 5 start rating review at download.com.

This rating system is more open to abuse
"Companies as deeply entrenched in obsolete habits as most current print media companies tend not to survive major shifts like the arrival of the Internet."

Wasn't TV a major shift? And yet they did survive.
As long as there is rewards to innovation there will be innovation. The coming shift left makes me nervous.
I personally take Friday nigh/Saturday off from work, and it's a lifesaver for me.
no, not now, but it used to be.
10 Totally Stupid Online Business Ideas That Made Someone Rich
It should be pretty easy to set up so that instead of it going off at certain hours, it would just be blocked for some time period based on geographic location.
Um, did anyone notice what month it is?

If you had a fixed advertising budget for the year, wouldn't you spend most of it in the November and December issues?

Almost every magazine and newspaper gets really fat at the end of the year.
I wonder how that translates into online communities - both in terms of wrongful behaviour (spiteful and illiterate comments, trolling) and in terms of user experience impacting quality of user generated content (wow lot of user- related buzzwords in the last sentence).

An interesting experiment would be a video/music/file sharing site which specifically prohibits (and removes) copyrighted content and one that doesn't -- and how that affects other interactions (e.g. comments, forums).
The "Beta Culture" in the article may be derived from or justified by the release early and often mindset of open source software. This makes sense for open source and web 2.0 products which are easily updated. The product testing is crowd sourced and reduces development costs. Economically this still works for less flexible products. Apple can release an almost finished product(iphone) and count on it's users to find the bugs and happily download updates without losing too much mind share. A television manufacturer can't release a patch, but the cost of replacing broken televisions must be less than the cost of thorough product testing.

This is annoying to consumers but as long as we put up with it little will change. Consumers 30 years ago were less tech savvy, and consequently less tolerant of having to troubleshoot a new tv. Today we deal with computer crashes all the time so we aren't as offend by a tv that crashes. We have developed a tolerance for faulty technology.
I think a service like this has the potential to be better than a library because of the convenience of having books mailed to you from a self-selected queue, and possibility of better selection. Unfortunately, from a quick glance at the books available, it seems they don’t even match the selection of my local library.

Now, if Amazon was to start a service like this, I think it would be phenomenal. (Perhaps integrated with the kindle?)